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valefars-ghoul-outback · 3 years

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My LOS headcannons

Colored Pencils, Jean-Pierre

In a QPR with Rubber Band

He was the one who decided to have the Earth Vellumental raise the Overlook Tower. The plan? "Ok, I am your average bigender taking my giant folded turtle dog on a walk. Yep. Totally not sus."

Has ADHD and needs to be reminded at times to take a break from drawing and eat something/sleep

The reticle eye? He can't see shit out of it.

Fluent in French and will be insulted if you make fun of it being too hard.

French is his second language.

Eats lots of weird shit that could possibly kill him if he were a human.

Has photocopied his art just to eat it before.

Ate a ton of crayons when he was little and now talks in them. Oh no.

Also has rainbow teeth, but that wasn't from the crayon incident

Likes teasing Tape about their height because what're they gonna do? Punch him in the face? Yes actually. On several occasions, but it's still funny because they had to get a chair for a few of those times.

Scissors is his older sister

Trans-femme, but it rarely comes up because, again, bigender.

Very eager to show off art. If you so much as mention wanting to see it he lights up.

Has a tooth gap and is pretty self conscious about it.

Mainly goes by Jean

Rubber band, Ruby

QPR with Jean

Has a giant hole in its torso. Jean's the only one who's seen it.

Its body is actually made of the electric paint from Sunshine. It has to be careful dolling out hugs.

Has been able to do that twirl clothes change thing on several occasions. Its secret has yet to be revealed...

Big cuddle bug. Body is perfect for hugs when covered.

May or may not have a hand in its brother, Hole Punch, looking halfway decent on occasion.

Can't walk in heels for shit. Concerned that Punch can wear 2 inch platformer heeled boots and wide bottomed jeans.

Your average nonbinary drama student. Lord help us.

Actually doesn't like performing alone. It always has a bit of stage fright, but have at least one other person on stage and it's fine.

Probably doesn't know that gender exists TBH

Can freeze if it gets too cold. It also hates the cold.

Hole Punch, P-Punch

I wasn't creative when choosing xeir name, I know.

The dude at the party that just sits in the least populated room and pets the dog.

Dating Tape, surprisingly.

Honestly hella shy. Xey got that social anxiety. Only really comfortable around the rest of the LoS. Anyone else and xey become really defensive and standoffish.

Punched xeir own face out when xey were twelve. Because xey did it to xemself, nothing changed other than xem becoming very self conscious and getting an LED mask.

Tape is the only one whose not related to xem who has seen xeir missing face. Advice: Keep the mask on.

X3y l1t3r4lly t4lk l1k3 th15.

You don't hear it that way, it sounds like they talk normally, albeit autotuned, but you just know. It can cause migraines if left unchecked whuch sucks because Autism and infodumping.

Mainly uses xeir tail to punch out objects thicker than xeir claws can handle, and faces.

If you have your face punched out by xem, you might as well be dead. Xey have full control over your body like a puppeteer and if xey aren't in the same room as you, you basically become a disco zombie.

The best way to avoid this fate? Keep xem in a good mood, don't make direct eye contact, and if you see what's under the mask without xem noticing don't say anything about it.

Has an exoskeleton about the consistency of rubber mixed with plastic bottles. Xeir back had a fuck ton of scars on it, but when it got ripped off Scissors gave xem a 'transplant'. It still hurts to touch.

Tape, Frankie

Gangster with a big soft spot.

Dating Punch.

The shortest LOS member that is not a dog and constantly gets teased about it.

When they do cut their hair they do it with a knife. Not to be tough or anything, it just turns into adhesive the second it's not attached to their body and it's easier to clean off a knife than a pair of scissors

Their arms are tape prosthetic at the elbow down to their hand and can be torn off. It hurts like hell, but at least their hands are disembodied.

The prosthetics naturally grow back.

Their tougue is also tape. Their mouth is just a weird tape dispenser that's constantly full

Has probably said, "Ey! I'm transin' my gender 'ere!" At some point.

Can extend the fucking pompadour like an extra stretchy limb and grab things with it. They don't do this often but it has happened.

Only wears a shirt under the jacket if it's really cold out. Otherwise, there's no shirt because it make them dysphoric and the transitioning scars are on full display

Yes I am implying they had sniddies at one point. Shut up.

Likes the look of smoking, but can't stand cigarette smoke or the taste of candy sticks. They constantly have a bag of suckers on them at all times.

Their teeth have always been made of metal. Literal. Fucking. Metal. And they're fucking sharp too.

Mechanic

Scissors, Eddie

Romance Repulsed Aro/Ace

Is a surgeon, and sometimes makes highly unethical experiments because she can. She sewed a eye into a hand and sewed that onto an anaconda and called it her pet.

Her blades are her arms. Her sheathes are also working arms with hands attached.

Eats bugs.

*looks at a literal cryptid* "I'm adopting that."

The tallest of the LOS. She can launch Frankie across the room.

Got the scar on her eye from messing with her blades when she was younger and putting way it too close to her face.

How this happened is up for interpretation as both she and Jean-Pierre are robots

Would probably put a kid in a blender if her moral code wasn't stopping her.

Major Overbite.

Favorite song is ironically The Dismemberment Song. Everyone is concerned about this.

Calls herself Eddie Von Scissorfingers because even her sheathed hands are sharp. She has murder on the mind 24/7 and she wants you to know that.

Really susceptible to frostbite.

Most definitely has those sarcastic coffee mugs and constantly drinks out of them.

Stapler

Sevice dog! Because whoever said that a literal child can run a kingdom without stress is a damn liar.

Very aloof.

Probably a German Shepard/Great Dane Mix.

That's it.

#legion of stationery #colored pencils #Jean-Pierre #Rubber band #Ruby #Hole Punch #Punch #Tape #Frankie #Scissors #Eddie #Stapler #paper mario origami king

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let-it-raines · 5 years

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Not Your (soul)Mate {4/?}

Killian Jones doesn’t like the idea of soulmates. He sees how happy his friends are with theirs, but he still doesn’t like the idea, not when he’s found love and lost it time and time again only to still not know his sign. He has no markings on his skin, no voices in his head, but then one day he meets Emma Swan and everything changes. Because, well, he may not have ink on his skin to tell him who to love, but the very first time that he hears Emma’s voice he knows that she’s the one for him. Then again, that could simply be his desire talking. After all, for every word she speaks, he becomes aroused.

It’s not the worst thing in the world to be incredibly attracted to a beautiful woman, but things aren’t that simple when she doesn’t have any interest in being his soulmate.

He’s screwed. And not in the good way.

Rating: Mature

A/N: As always, thank you to @captainsjedi for her art, her support, and her general kindness throughout all of the time that’s been spent working on this story! You’re the best 💛

Found on AO3: Beginning | Current

Tumblr: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Tag list: @scientificapricot @lifeinahole27 @captswanis4vr @a-faekindagirl @galaxyzxstark @emmas-storybook @searchingwardrobes @spartanguard @ultimiflos @jamif @idristardis @dreameronarooftop15 @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @tiganasummertree @wellhellotragic @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @teamhook @kmomof4 @ekr032-blog-blog @superchocovian @ultraluckycatnd @artistic-writer @cs-forlife @andiirivera @qualitycoffeethings @jonirobinson64 @mariakov81 @xellewoods @thejollyroger-writer @cssns

-/-

“Fuck,” she mutters under her breath before pulling her finger to her lips, trying to sooth the paper cut. She’s literally broken her arm before. How does a paper cut hurt so much worse? That just doesn’t seem right or something. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“For someone who works in an office, you swear like a sailor.”

She holds the middle finger of her free hand up to David while her legs begin to tap underneath her desk to try to make her focus on something else other than this pain. What did she do? Slice her entire finger open on a document about Leroy being drunk and disorderly at the Rabbit Hole last night?

They’ve got to switch to digital files.

And Leroy has to stop getting drunk and then serenading the people who live in the apartment building across from the Rabbit Hole at two in the morning.

And they really have to get another bar in this town, especially with how many tourists that they get in the summer months. Granny’s doesn’t count. She goes there more than anyone else, especially when she meets up with Ariel on their lunch breaks, but it is not a bar atmosphere even if she sells alcohol, most of which is stronger than the stuff at the Rabbit Hole. Granny knows how to pack a punch. Then again, Ruby has to get it from someone.

“Fuck off, David,” she bites, pulling her finger out of her mouth and looking at the miniscule damage that’s been caused there. How in the world does that cause this much pain? It’s probably extra because Leroy haunts the paper or something. She may have lost her mind. “This hurts.”

“Wash it and put a band-aid over it,” he shrugs, looking up at her over her coffee mug. Sometimes she hates that ever since Graham quit (apparently it was too hard to look at her face after they broke up even if he was the one off living with his soulmate) it’s only she and David in this department. Storybrooke is too small a town to need a lot of detectives, and even though most of the time she spends her time doing the work of a patrol officer, at least she gets paid like a detective.

There are perks.

And she loves David, but sometimes it’s too much to spend all day with him.

Today is one of those days.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

“Not a Captain quite yet.”

She rolls her eyes at his cheeky smile at the same time that she rolls her chair back and across the room to the area where they keep their coffee machine and their first aid kit, oddly enough. She’s pretty sure they also keep extra ink in this cabinet as well, but David is always the one who changes out the printer stuff anyways. If their printer doesn’t work, she always heads downstairs and uses the one in the bullpen.

It’s really not because she’s lazy. The printer is evil. Pure evil.

“We have got to switch to a digital filing system,” she tells David as she unpeels the band-aid and wraps it around her finger. “I know we don’t have the money for it, but we should do a fundraiser or something. I’m sure Mary Margaret would love to put on a bake sale.”

“How much money can a bake sale make?”

She shrugs her shoulders and twists her chair around before propping her feet up on Graham’s old desk, her boots banging against the wood. “I don’t know, but my other option was making a calendar with all of the hot male cops in it. Like, sixty percent of Storybrooke would buy that.”

David scoffs and pulls his head back, his face practically in his neck while his brows furrow together, all of those little old man wrinkles coming into play. He’s such an older brother type. If she’d ever had any family, she imagines he would be the type of sibling she’d want. She loves Mary Margaret, but she’d kill her if she had to spend all of her time listening to that never-ending optimism about every little aspect of life.

“Why only the male cops?”

“Because the equality here sucks, and I don’t think Ashley and I can fill up an entire calendar. Plus, you know, women have been objectified for thousands of years. You guys can have a turn. Also, it’s illegal for me to show my nipples in any kind of publication that’s not HBO. You can show yours even though our nipples look the same.”

“You’ve compared my nipples to yours then?”

“Gross,” she moans, tilting her head back in a laugh so that her hair falls over the back of her chair. It’s kind of hot in here, June really living up to its reputation, so while she’s still very unfortunately thinking about the similarity in her nipples (she’s thought the word nipples far too many times in two minutes) to David’s, she pulls her hair up into a ponytail, fluffing it out in the rubber band so that it’s no longer on her neck. “Let’s not have that conversation again. Like, ever.”

“Agreed.”

After messing around for a little while longer, she rolls back to her desk and goes back to her paperwork. She’s behind after missing half of work yesterday to go to the dentist, so she’s still got quite the dent to make in her stack. This town should not have this much paperwork, and she swears half of this stuff should be filed at city hall anyways. One day this town is going to make sense. She loves it, really. It’s the first place that’s ever felt like home for her, but it’s all kinds of weird.

Just as she’s made her way through half of her paperwork, there’s a knock on their open door, and she turns to see Ashley holding a large basket.

“Hey, Ems. This basket was dropped off for you at the front desk.”

“Are you sure?”

Ashley holds up a white card, the word “Swan” written across it in neat, scrawling script. If this were any other town, she’d be convinced that someone was trying to poison her or something, but this really only seems like some kind of creepy gift.

Not a murderous one.

“Well okay then,” she mumbles to herself before getting out of her chair, her legs aching a bit from how she’s had them crossed, and walking to take the basket from Ashley. “Did you see who dropped this off?”

“Mr. French did. It’s from his bakery. I’d recognize those blueberry muffins anywhere. If you don’t eat them, I’d be happy to take them off of your hands.”

She laughs and looks down into the basket. It’s full of bread. Like, a hell of a lot of bread. It’s mostly rolls and baguettes, but she sees the muffins and a few cinnamon rolls in there that she would recognize everywhere. Living with Belle means they always have books, but her dad always sends them baked goods and flowers too. She’s never quite gotten the full story of how Mr. French came to own a flower shop and a bakery, but he’s pretty much got the Valentine’s Day market down.

Smart man. People lost their minds over Valentine’s Day.

“You can have the rolls, but these muffins are all mine. I’m not going to refuse free food.”

“Smart lady. I’ll see you guys later!”

“Bye, Ash,” she says as Ashley walks away and she turns back into the office, placing the food down on her desk and pointedly ignoring the smirk that David’s got painted on his lips right now. She is not acknowledging that, especially since she already knows what he’s going to say. “You want a muffin?” she asks instead, picking a chocolate chip one out and unpeeling the wrapper before popping a bite in her mouth. “They’re really good.”

“I didn’t know you were dating someone,” David teases, reaching over and grabbing a roll. “And that he is very into bread.”

“I’m not dating anyone,” she murmurs under her breath, not caring that her mouth is full. David knows not to tease her about her love life, and here he is doing just that while eating her food. Traitor.

She guesses she did offer it to him, but that’s beside the point.

“Really?” he hums, and before she can stop him, he reaches over and grabs the envelope that she hasn’t opened yet, snatching it away from her grasp as she gets up and tries to take it from him, practically tripping over a filing cabinet and nearly stubbing her toe into David’s desk while he holds the card in the air (sometimes she hates how much taller he is than her) and reads it aloud. “Swan, since you said we couldn’t steal the bread from Belle at dinner, I figured you’d like some delicacies that still stem from the French family.”

It takes her less than a second to realize who sent her the bread basket, and it takes her approximately two seconds to figure out how she’s going to strangle him with a baguette.

Killian Jones.

Killian freaking Jones.

That’s not his middle name, but she feels like it might as well be. Or maybe something a little more crass. What the hell is he doing sending her a bread basket? She gets it. She does. It’s a clever callback to their dinner last week. The dinner that was so clearly a set up from their friends.

It doesn’t matter how many times she asks them to stop interfering with her love life, they never do. And there they were trying to set her up on a date with the one person who she doesn’t want to go on a date with. There they were setting her up with a man she can’t even speak to without getting aroused. She’s had months to let that settle in, and it’s still the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard in her life.

She’s heard a lot of ridiculous things too.

But Killian was nice, if not a little inappropriate sometimes with some of his jokes. She gets that though. She’s not a prude. She’s got a sailor’s mouth and likes to talk about sex and make innuendos as much as the next girl (if that girl is a mix between Ruby and Mary Margaret), so she’s used to it. She finds it funny. She finds him funny if she’s honest with herself, but liking Killian is not something she ever really plans on doing even if he’s hypothetically her soulmate.

(It’s easier to say hypothetically instead of admitting it to herself every single time she thinks about it.)

A part of her is still convinced that something else is going on, but she can’t figure any other explanation out. She’s spent weeks, literal weeks, thinking about it while trying to go to bed at night and is left alone with her thoughts and with the sounds of Belle and Will in Belle’s bedroom. Eventually they have got to move in together because Emma’s not sure how long she can live sharing a wall if Will is going to stay over.

It’s always the quiet ones who make the most noise.

But she gets it. Soulmates aside, they’re still human beings. They didn’t instantly fall in love, and not everything is perfect. They have issues and fights, and honestly, the tiny part of her that has faith in this whole thing is only reassured by that. She doesn’t want perfect. She’s never wanted perfect. Really, she hates the whole concept of perfect.

“You’re perfect, Ems.”

She shakes that thought of Neal away and looks back to David who is still smirking, looking for all the world like the cat who ate the canary, and accepts the fact that even though Killian Jones is not the worst person in the world, that doesn’t mean she has to run and leap into his arms and let him sweep her away with his accent and charm and…bread. She can still go about her business like usual. They’re not friends, and they don’t have to be.

Their text conversation that one night aside.

“Who sent you this food?” David asks again, sitting down in his desk chair and tossing her the card. She lets it fall to the ground, landing just below her desk. “And don’t lie to me. I can apparently ask Belle or her dad.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You’re blushing.”

“I’m not blushing.”

“Look at the red on your cheeks! That’s blush!”

“It’s June. It’s called a sunburn.”

“Blush.”

“I hate you.”

He rips off another piece of bread and takes a bite. “You love me, but alright, I won’t ask who your mystery man is just yet. I know you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

“That,” she chuckles, “is not ever happening.”

It takes until a little past six to get all of her paperwork finished, but she finally does, her hand only cramping the slightest bit. She’s serious about some kind of fundraiser for the department. She needs a computer system that’s better than the one they have now. And, yeah, maybe a bake sale won’t work, but that calendar will. Mary Margaret and Ruby alone will buy the place out.

(Mary Margaret because she’s supporting David; Ruby because she likes hot men.)

They’re most likely not doing a calendar, but she’ll come up with something. Maybe she can go to city hall and see if they can find a little room in the budget. She’s sure there has to be room somewhere. Hell, they haven’t been paying the extra detective’s salary since Graham left. It’s probably all sitting in a bank account somewhere.

Maybe they can get a better coffee machine while they’re at it.

She could go for some coffee right now as she walks past Granny’s on the way to her apartment, nodding her head at some of the families that pass by. It’s summer in Storybrooke, which means family after family is flooding into town to use their beach and stay at the few rental houses that line the dock area. It’s a nice place, she can admit that. It’s part of what drew her here from Boston in the first place. She needed out and away from a large city and wanted somewhere nice and quiet, at least for a little while.

She’s been here for seven years.

And maybe she doesn’t get out to the beach as often as she used to, but she’s usually always working. Plus, it’s crowded all summer long. She has to go early in the mornings to get any peace a quiet there, and mostly it’s too cold for that. This is Maine after all.

She’ll go running there in the morning, really work up a sweat before work, maybe even see the sunrise.

Who is she kidding? She’s not going to get up early enough to see the sunrise.

A little bit after, though.

Ten minutes later she gets to her apartment building, taking the stairs the three floors up with her basket of bread and walking inside to find Belle sitting on the couch drinking a glass of wine and watching an episode of the Bachelor. She has a lot of thoughts on that show, most of them probably pretty insulting, but if she’s drunk enough, she can find it entertaining enough.

Though, she’ll never understand why there’s a show on finding love when everyone already has that predestined partner.

Money. Publicity. Ratings. And the occasional time when someone very literally finds their soulmate on the show.

“Hey,” she tells Belle, dropping her keys onto their tray. There’s her chapstick too.

“Hi,” Belle greets her, twisting around before turning back to look at the television. “This guy just jumped over the fence on here, and they can’t find him.”

“How can they not find him? They live on a compound.”

(So maybe she knows more about the show than she’s willing to admit.)

(Maybe she can be a bit more into it than she’s willing to admit.)

(Maybe she watches with Belle because this is when they get to hang out and when Belle breaks out the good wine.)

“He jumped over the fence to get out of the compound because the girl he loves just broke up with him.”

“No,” she gasps, walking over to the couch and placing the basket on the table before plopping down on the couch and pulling Belle’s fuzzy white blanket over her legs. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do when Belle does finally move out because all of the nice stuff in the living room is hers. “Are you serious? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, apparently he was – ” Belle stops talking while she watches the host chase after the fence jumping guy (she can’t remember his name). “Why do you have a giant gift basket of food from my dad’s bakery?”

Well shit.

“Oh, um,” she mumbles, messing with the tips of her hair, “someone dropped it off for me at the station today.”

She’s very pointedly not looking at Belle who she knows is looking at her. This Bachelor rerun is very exciting. How could she possibly look away? She can’t. It’s against the rules.

“Who?”

“Um, I don’t know,” she sighs as she reaches forward to grab another muffin, stuffing it in her mouth. She really does have to go running in the morning if she’s going to eat all of this. “There was no name. It was an anonymous donor or something. Probably just someone wanting to thank me for helping the town.”

Her eyes cut over to Belle, and she sees her readjusting her seat, sitting up on her knees while a grin slowly starts to form on her face.

Shit.

She’s about to get interrogated.

“Let me call my dad and ask who ordered this. He can tell us that way we know.”

“No, no, no. Let’s not do that.”

“Too late. I’m calling him.”

“Belle.”

“I’m doing it.”

She watches Belle pick up her phone, already dialing her dad, and in a move that she’s not proud of, she practically jumps over to Belle, grabbing her phone out of her hand and snatching it away unlike how she wasn’t able to grab the note out of David’s hand.

“Ha,” she laughs, standing up on the couch and backing away with the phone, “now you can’t.”

“Did you get drunk at work or something?” Belle chuckles, falling back against the couch cushions. “I mean, you can’t keep my phone forever, and also, I can just walk to go see my dad. So I’m thinking you know who sent you the basket, and you should definitely tell me. I’m going to find out no matter what.”

“If I tell you,” she begins cautiously, slowly settling down on the couch and taking a deep breath, “you have to promise to listen to the explanation and not make a big deal out of it. because I promise that it’s not a big deal.”

“You’re blushing. It’s a big deal.”

She rolls her eyes, throwing Belle’s phone back at her. “I hate you.”

“You do not.” She feels like she’s had this exact conversation before. Talk about Deja vu. “Now tell me. No one came into the library today, and I have been starved for entertainment.”

“Have you ever considered reading a book?”

“Ha ha,” she deadpans, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest. “So funny. Now tell me who this is from before I walk to my dad’s.”

There’s suddenly a very interesting piece of lint on her blouse, and she focuses on picking at it while she mumbles, “Killian Jones sent it.”

“You want to say that again?”

She groans and throws her head back, clenching her teeth before looking at Belle. “Killian sent it to me.” Belle’s eyes light up, her lips parting to say something, and Emma holds up a finger before she can finish. “No, we are not dating, and no, we did not hit it off with each other the other night. While you and Will were arguing over your vacation, he made a joke about taking the bread and making a run for it. I told him we weren’t doing that, and for some reason he decided to spend far too much money sending me the largest basket of bread I’ve ever seen.”

“That is the cutest thing I’ve ever heard,” Belle practically squeals, jumping up and down a little on the couch. “Oh my gosh, I have to tell Mary Margaret.”

“I will rip the pages of a chapter out of one of your favorite books if you tell Mary Margaret.”

“Traitor.”

Yep. Definitely a sense of deja vu here.

“You’re the one who’s about to make a big deal out of nothing and who’s only going to make it worse by telling Marg.”

“It’s cute. Killian likes you. He’s obviously trying to impress you.”

“I don’t want to be impressed,” she huffs, scooting down further on the couch and toeing her shoes off before she takes another bite of her muffin, the crumbs falling on her shirt. “I want to go to work and do my job and then come home and watch the History Channel without anyone interrupting me. I don’t need a guy trying to make me smile with baked goods.”

“Oh, hon,” Belle sighs, reaching over and placing her hand over Emma’s, the compassion in her eyes so different than the glint of teasing that was just there, “it’s okay to flirt and have fun every now and then. Killian is a nice guy. He’s not trying to hurt you.”

“Just hurt my waistline.”

“Yeah, maybe that. Look, I can tell this is bothering you, and since I know you, I know it’s probably some deep seeded fear that no one but you knows about that’s going to make you drive yourself crazy. Don’t overthink the gift. That’s all that it is. And I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

“Thank you.”

She doesn’t say more because she doesn’t want to say more. Belle is right. This is about more than Killian being playful and teasing her. It’s about the fact that Neal did the same thing. So did Walsh. Graham did too, really, but she wouldn’t ever categorize him in the same douchebag category as Neal and Walsh. She probably wouldn’t categorize Walsh the same way that she does Neal, and he cheated on her. For months. And she didn’t even really care at the end of that even though she’ll never see the Fourth of July in the same way again. She was already checked out and resigned to herself never finding someone who she could trust.

And Neal…she doesn’t want to think about Neal. She can’t. It hurts too much.

That’s why Killian and his flirting and his bread basket terrify her. He can so easily charm her, is probably already on his way there, and if this whole magnetic thing between them really is their sign, that terrifies her all the more. Because what if he is her soulmate, and what if they still can’t make it work?

What if?

What if they’re the ones who can’t make it work?

But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t know him, not really. She barely knows anything about him, and unless he keeps hounding her with random gifts that are going to make her go up a jean size, it’s not like she’s going to have to see him that much more.

So it’s all just fine.

When her alarm goes off the next morning, she almost turns it off and sleeps in, but something keeps her up and gets her going so that she’s lacing her sneakers and tugging on a sports bra and some leggings as she makes her way down to the beach, starting at the pier closest to her apartment and running until her legs burn and her chest aches while all of her other problems melt away. She runs and runs and runs until…

Well, until she sees Killian himself running toward her, his dark hair flopping up and down with his movements as his brother runs beside him, the two of them seemingly racing each other on the sand. She knows the moment he sees her because he falls behind Liam, his step faltering a bit before he speeds up again and moves toward her with this goofy grin on his face that almost makes her stop in her tracks, her feet sinking through all of the sand.

“Hey, Emma,” Liam yells to her, stopping his jog right in front of her. “I didn’t know you ran this early in the mornings. Elsa never mentioned that.”

“I usually don’t,” she gasps, reaching up to wipe the sweat from her brow and avoiding Killian’s gaze as a wave crashes behind her, sea mist reaching the skin on her ankles. Really, all that does is allow her to see the muscles on his stomach under his shirt, and she’s not sure how that helps. “I had a lot to eat yesterday and am trying not to be majorly bloated. Plus, I missed the beach.”

Killian coughs, and her eyes finally find his and notice the way his jaw is ticking. She almost forgot the effect she has on him, but she can tell that he’s squirming a bit, that he hasn’t spoken.

Why are the seagulls on this beach so damn loud?

“Don’t you just love the beach?” she continues, her lips pressing into a smile while she looks right at Killian. “It’s so beautiful, especially in the mornings before all of the crowds get here. I bet you guys spend a lot of time out on the water with your jobs.”

“Not as much as I’d like,” Liam admits, looking over to his brother. “Killian gets to a little more than me, though. He’s very hands on. Maybe one day we can take you out on one of our new boats that we’re test driving. I’m sure Elsa would love that.”

“I would love that too. We can make it a whole thing with some of our friends. Wouldn’t you love that, Killian?”

“Aye,” he grits, his fists clenching at his sides. “That’d be great.”

Her body tingles at his words, the beginnings of arousal pooling between her thighs, but as they continue to talk, she ignores it and makes sure that she gets more words in than him. It’s more fun than she thought it would be, and it only causes her a little pain. Maybe he doesn’t deserve her to torture him like this, but she did have to endure a lot of teasing from her friends yesterday like they’re all high schoolers. What’s fair is fair after all.

“Alright, lass,” Liam says a few minutes later, beginning to jog in place, “we best be going and let you finish your run.”

“Okay. I’ll text Elsa about that day out on the water, okay?”

“Sounds great.”

Liam begins to jog out of the way, and she thinks that Killian is going to join him, but instead he steps closer to her, his beard briefly scratching her ear as he leans in to whisper, his breath hot against her ear. “Two can play at this game, love.”

#Not Your (soul)Mate #cs fic #cs ff #captain swan fic #captain swan #cssns

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yallreddieforthis · 5 years

Text

My Summer From Hell: A Tale of Friendship

Fandom: It (2017)

Pairing: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier (minor mentions of Richie’s crush on Eddie)

Rating: T (for language)

Words: 2.9k

Movie canon-compliant. Also posted on AO3. This is that summer experience essay Richie warned us about.

“Richie Tozier?”

Richie takes a reluctant break from the sick-ass game of MASH: The Wonder Years Edition he’s playing by himself in his algebra notebook to look up at his teacher, who is waving a blue note and glaring expectantly at him.

Blue note. That means Neil wants to see him. Damn, only five days into the school year! New—actually, not a new record. Richie feels like he and the principal should be on a first-name basis by now; Richie’s in his office a lot. He rarely gets punished because most of the things he does toe the line of punishable offenses magnificently—he usually just gets told to stop doing whatever it is he’s doing and then gets sent back to class. If he was down there getting detention every other day, he’d understand what the problem was. But alas, Neil shot down the suggestion of being called Neil right away. So they can only be on a first-name basis in Richie’s head. Too bad.

The Math and Science building is as far away from the Administration building as you can get without leaving Derry Junior High, and Richie takes his time during the walk to Neil’s office, stopping outside the computer lab until Eddie catches sight of him through the window. He makes a gesture that causes Eddie to give him a surreptitious middle finger, hidden from his teacher by the monitor, but his cheeks also bloom cherry red, so Richie counts it as a win because it’s the cutest goddamn thing he’s seen all day. It feels like every other day now Richie’s being hit in the face with how adorable Eddie really is. He’s torn between wanting to pinch his cheeks and kiss him on the mouth, and frankly he’s mostly still straddling the fence on that issue only because he doesn’t want to deal with the answer.

In contrast to having a pretty good idea deep down what direction things are headed in regarding his general feelings about Eddie, Richie has not the slightest clue why he’s being called to the principal’s office the Friday after school started. None of the things he’s done should have been discovered yet. It makes no sense.

Bill is in the computer lab too, and Richie can’t see him from where he’s sitting, so he heads over to the staircase at the end of the hall. Pausing to make sure no teachers are lurking around to give him shit for it, he sits down at the top of the railing and slides down. Actually, he slides about a fourth of the way down before falling off and sort of rolling the rest of the way, but no one saw that so it still counts as a success.

He walks past the yard to watch Stan and Ben running the mile in P.E. Stan is fucking booking it, and Richie dawdles long enough to figure out that he’s a lap ahead of everyone else. Running away from Bowers for a few years will do that to ya. Well, at least it will if you’re Stan. Richie still can’t run an 8 minute mile, so his P.E. grade has stagnated at a B-.

Richie stops in the middle of the hallway in the Language Arts Building, glancing into Mr. Tremblay’s French 1 class. Bev was planning on taking that this year, and she’d be in there if she hadn’t moved to Portland. Sometimes—and Richie hates thinking about this because there’s no use in dwelling on it—but sometimes he really wants to kick himself for not getting to know her sooner. She’s the best bro he’s ever had that’s a girl, and it just really sucks ass that they only got to hang out for like one summer.

Before he even realizes it, he’s walking into the front office. Bertha glances up at Richie through her horn-rimmed reading glasses.

“Mr. Tozier! What’d you do this time?” she asks brightly. Ah, Bertha. She and Richie have a rapport. Richie might go so far as to say she even likes him, at least a little. He’s made her laugh at least seven times, and once in sixth grade she told him he had a real gift after he showed her his best Rick Moranis impression. She doesn't bullshit him, and he doesn’t bullshit her. Well, not very much at least.

“I have no idea,” he tells her honestly, resting his elbows on her desk, which is decorated with a rubber band ball, a Hoberman sphere, several pictures of her nieces and nephews, and the biggest Hershey’s Kiss Richie has ever seen in his entire life. Seriously, it’s almost as big as his goddamn face. Apparently, she got it on a trip to New York, and she’s had it at least as long as Richie has known her. He has never wanted to eat a thing so badly in his entire life, regardless of how old it is. It’s a fucking Hershey’s Kiss. Do those things even go bad? Either way, it’s Richie’s number one goal to take a big fucking bite out of that thing before he culminates at the end of the year. He’s a thousand percent sure it will taste like sweet victory.

“Neil?” Bertha calls over her shoulder. “Did you send for Richie Tozier?”

Neil’s voice floats back through the open door behind Bertha. “Oh, yes. Thanks, send him on back.”

Neil’s desk always starts the year looking pristine, and by the last day of school it is filled with stacks of pure chaos. Richie admires him for trying again at the beginning of each year. It’s like how his mom buys him a binder for each class and book covers and sets up an organizational system for his homework and notes despite knowing that it won’t last a month. It’s nice of her to try, but Richie is pretty sure they both go into it with the understanding that it’s kind of a hail Mary situation.

So right now Neil’s just got like three pictures of his wife, a snowglobe with GREETINGS FROM ST. PAUL written on the base, and a manageable-looking stack of papers in file folders. Godspeed, sir.

“Mr. Tozier,” Neil says by way of greeting, “please have a seat.”

“How was your summer, Ne—Principal McCormack?” Richie asks, plopping down into the chair directly opposite Neil.

Neil’s eyebrows raise. “Not as interesting as yours, based on what I heard from Ms. Pfarrer this afternoon,” he says, reaching into his desk and pulling out two pieces of lined paper stapled together. “Care to explain?”

He places it directly in front of Richie. Richie peers at it. The top right corner reads: Richie Tozier, English 8A, Period 4, September 3, 1989. It wasn’t stapled when he handed it in, he’d just sort of folded the corners over together and hoped for the best, but Ms. Pfarrer must have gone ahead and stapled it for him.

“That would be yesterday’s English homework.”

“Correct,” says Neil. “I want you to read this entire essay out loud to me, and then I’m going to ask you some questions. Okay?”

Richie’s not sure if the questions are about the contents of the essay, or if Neil just can’t read his handwriting. Then again, that sounds like a Ms. Pfarrer problem; he’s not sure why she’d bring it to the principal if she just couldn’t read it. Normally she just hands it back to him and tells him to rewrite it when that happens, or at least that’s what she did last year. If his teachers have suddenly decided to send him to the principal every time he turns in an illegible assignment, it’s going to be a very long year.

But whatever.

My Summer From Hell: A Tale of Friendship

If you had asked me at the end of last year what the worst thing about my summer would probably be, I would have bet a hundred bucks it was going to be the trip I took down to Augusta to see my grandma two weeks ago, which sucked. All we did was watch Matlock all week and she made me get a really shi bad haircut, just like last year. It’s going to take me months to grow it out. But compared to what went down in July and the beginning of August, eating soup at Grandma Dottie’s house was NOTHING.

You know how kids just disappear off the face of the earth all the time here in Derry? If you didn’t, that’s a fun fact from me to you that I learned from my new friend Ben (he’s in your 5th period class). Well, while we were looking for my other friend Bill’s missing brother, we found out where they all went.

Underneath our feet, down in the sewers, there lives a killer clown. That’s right, you heard it here first. Like John Wayne Gacy, but 100000x worse because it’s for sure not human. Sometimes It’s a clown, sometimes not. Depends. On what? I have no idea. It was usually a clown when I saw it but one time it started turning into maybe a werewolf. It can turn into anything it wants and it eats kids.

Anyway, It almost killed all of us on the fourth of July. We Bill decided to go try and fight It at the creepy ass house on Neibolt street, and that was an absolute shit show disaster. Ask Ben to show you the sick scar on his stomach if you don’t believe me. Eddie fell through a giant hole in the floor and broke his arm. I got mad at Bill for bringing us all there and he punched me in the face, and then I didn’t talk to him for a month.

Then It dragged Beverly Marsh into its nasty sewer lair and we all went down the grossest well in Derry to get her back. Henry Bowers followed us because he just has to ruin everything, even things that are already the worst. There’s this giant cistern that has a huge pile of broken toys and crap and the clown lives in there. There were hundreds of dead kids floating in the air.

It’s a long story but I beat the shit crap out of It with a baseball bat and we fought it back. We swore to each other that we’d all come to fight It again if it returns. Anyway, the moral of this summer is that you can achieve anything if you work together and also that there is no way Henry Bowers could have caused an explosion during the 1800’s. I want to see him go to jail for taking a dump in my backpack for sure, and I guess for killing Belch, Vic and his dad too, but I know for a fact that he didn’t kill Georgie Denbrough or Betty Ripsom or Ed Corcoran. This town is just cursed.

Richie looks up brightly at Neil when he finishes reading. Neil takes a deep breath and rubs his temples with his fingers.

“I’m not sure you understood what the assignment was, Richie,” he says. “This is an inventive—and deeply disturbing—story, but this was supposed to be about what you actually did over the summer, not—”

“Yeah,” says Richie. “It is. I mean, I didn’t think Ms. Pfarrer was going to actually read them all. But—”

“This was a nonfiction assignment though.”

Neil’s being real slow on the uptake. Maybe his brain is still on summer break.

“Yeah,” says Richie, nodding. “As in, this is what actually happened to me. Here’s where we swore we’d come back and fight again when we’re old. If It comes back.” Richie holds out his left hand so Neil can see the freshly healed scar.

“Ouch,” Neil winces. “How did you get that?”

Richie rolls his eyes. “I cut it on glass. On purpose. Go get the others—they’ll tell you. Eddie Kaspbrak, Stanley Uris, Bill Den—”

“Please stop with the games,” says Neil. “Just—I’ve had a long week. We all have. Ms. Pfarrer wanted me to look into sending you to the school psychologist. I know you like to, you know, do what you do, but this is taking it too far.”

“Why would I lie to you about this?” Richie asks. He puts both elbows on the desk and leans forward. “Seriously. Why?”

“Attention-seeking behavior is common after the kind of trauma we’ve all experienced over the past year,” Neil says. Super patient, like he’s quoting a textbook and speaking to a preschooler. “I know what happened with Henry was a surprise to—”

“Wait, wait wait,” Richie interrupts. “You think I wrote this to get attention?”

Neil sighs and throws up his hands. “I can’t think of any other reason. If there is one, I’d love for you to give me some insight.”

Honestly? How fucking dare he. It strikes Richie in that moment how goddamn unfair this is. They had to do this with everyone—from explaining those nasty bites on Stan’s face to Eddie being grounded for the rest of the summer, to knowing exactly why there were so many more bodies in the sewer than missing kids from this past year and no one believing them…

“How about this for insight? ” Richie says. “I’ve been through too much trauma this year to come up with another bullshit story that all you adults will eat up. None of you care what actually happened; you just want me to tell you something that means you don’t have to do anything about it. Well, you’re gonna have to come up with your own lie to tell yourself. I’m not doing it for you.”

Neil is gaping. But Richie keeps going.

“I thought it was Bowers before this summer and honestly, I wish I’d been right. And it’s not like I’m sorry that he’s getting all this shit pinned on him even though he didn’t do it. My life is a million times easier without him around—he can get strung up by his ballsack for all I care.”

“Richie, there’s a mountain of evidence against—”

“I don’t give a shit about evidence,” says Richie. “I know what I saw. I know what happened. I know, and Bill knows, and Stan knows, and Bev… What do you care though? You’ll probably be dead anyway by the time It comes back.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of threat?” Principal McCormack asks. His face has gone hard and stony like Richie’s never seen before; like Richie has crossed a real line this time. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows there’s going to be nasty consequences for this, but he can’t find it in himself to give a shit.

“You wouldn’t believe me even if it was,” Richie mutters. “Just… Fuck it. Send me to the school shrink or whatever. Give me detention; flunk my essay. None of this shit matters anyway.”

“You can bet you’re getting all three of those things,” says Principal McCormack with a mirthless chuckle. “And I’m not sure what’s gotten into you this year, but I feel like—”

“Do I sound like the grownups in Charlie Brown when I talk?” Richie demands. “Seriously, am I making like, actual words to you? Or are you just hearing wah wah wah when I—”

“I’m calling your parents,” Principal McCormack says over him. “Is something going on at home?”

Richie feels blood pounding through his veins. Like it could melt his skin. He looks Principal McCormack dead in the eye, reaches for his essay and tears it to shreds, standing slowly.

“In the end,” he says, his voice shaking and frustrated tears threatening to overpower him, “it’s not going to make any difference if you don’t believe me. We’ll come back, all of us. Me and Eddie. Ben, Beverly, Mike. Bill. Stan. What you think doesn’t change that.”

And as suddenly as it came, the anger evaporates. Just...poof. Gone. It clears, and there’s fucking gobsmacked Principal McCormack sitting there like a lump, staring at Richie. Maybe he heard the individual words, but one thing Richie know for sure: he still doesn’t get it. And he never will. And not just him; Ms. Pfarrer. Even Bertha, whether she thinks Richie is gifted or not. And his parents…

There’s a sick loneliness that kind of creeps in to fill up where his anger was, colder than a January wind. Every time his dad comforted him as a kid, when he’d check under the bed and in the closet for monsters, was a lie. When his mom told him he’d be safe sleeping in their bed. That nothing was coming to get him. That they’d never let him get hurt. Lies, all of it. And it’s not like the adults in his life are lying to him on accident. The truth is right there in front of their stupid fucking faces and they just refuse to look at it.

The chill settles into a stony sort of resolution. Richie has stared the truth in the face and didn’t flinch. Even getting suspended is fucking nothing compared to… Whatever. He’s getting detention anyway. Might as well make it memorable. He turns on his heel and walks out of the office.

“If you’re still alive in 2016,” Richie calls over his shoulder, “I’ll hit you up at your nursing home and let you know I was right all along.”

#It (2017)#richie tozier #Stephen King's IT

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unsettlingshortstories · 3 years

Text

Man From the South

Roald Dahl (1948)

It was getting on toward six o'clock so I thought I'd buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deck chair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

I went to the bar and got the beer and carried it outside and wandered down the garden toward the pool.

It was a fine garden with lawns and beds of azaleas and tall coconut palms, and the wind was blowing strongly through the tops of the palm trees making the leaves hiss and crackle as though they were on fire. I could see the clusters of big brown nuts handing down underneath the leaves.

There were plenty of deck chairs around the swimming pool and there were white tables and huge brightly colored umbrellas and sunburned men and women sitting around in bathing suits. In the pool itself there were three or four girls and about a dozen boys, all splashing about and making a lot of noise and throwing a large rubber ball at one another.

I stood watching them. The girls were English girls from the hotel. The boys I didn't know about, but they sounded American and I thought they were probably naval cadets who'd come ashore from the U.S. naval training vessel which had arrived in the harbor that morning.

I went over and sat down under a yellow umbrella where there were four empty seats, and I poured my beer and settled back comfortably with a cigarette.

It was very pleasant sitting there in the sunshine with beer and a cigarette. It was pleasant to sit and watch the bathers splashing about in the green water.

The American sailors were getting on nicely with the English girls. They'd reached the stage where they were diving under the water and tipping them up by their legs.

Just then I noticed a small, oldish man walking briskly around the edge of the pool. He was immaculately dressed in a white suit and he walked very quickly with little bouncing strides, pushing himself high up onto his toes with each step. He had on a large creamy Panama hat, and he came bouncing along the side of the pool, looking at the people and the chairs.

He stopped beside me and smiled, showing two rows of very small, uneven teeth, slightly tarnished. I smiled back.

"Excuse pleess, but may I sit here?"

"Certainly," I said. "Go ahead."

He bobbed around to the back of the chair and inspected it for safety, then he sat down and crossed his legs. His white buckskin shows had little holes punched all over them for ventilation.

"A fine evening," he said. "They are all evenings fine here in Jamaica." I couldn't tell if the accent were Italian or Spanish, but I felt fairly sure he was some sort of a South American. And old too, when you saw him close. Probably around sixty-eight or seventy.

"Yes," I said. "It is wonderful here, isn't it."

"And who, might I ask are all dese? Dese is no hotel people." He was pointing at the bathers in the pool.

"I think they're American sailors," I told him. "They're Americans who are learning to be sailors."

"Of course dey are Americans. Who else in de world is going to make as much noise as dat? You are not American, no?"

"No," I said. "I am not."

Suddenly one of the American cadets was standing in front of us. He was dripping wet from the pool and one of the English girls was standing there with him.

"Are these chairs taken?" he said.

"No," I answered.

"Mind if I sit down?"

"Go ahead."

"Thanks," he said. He had a towel in his hand and when he sat down he unrolled it and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He offered the cigarettes to the girl and she refused; then he offered them to me and I took one. The little man said, "Tank you, no, but I tink I have a cigar." He pulled out a crocodile case and got himself a cigar, then he produced a knife which had a small scissors in it and he snipped the end off the cigar.

"Here, let me give you a light." The American boy held up his lighter.

"Dat will not work in dis wind."

"Sure, it'll work. It always works."

The little man removed his unlighted cigar from his mouth, cocked his head on one side and looked at the boy.

"All-ways?" he said softly.

"Sure, it never fails. Not with me anyway."

The little man's head was still cocked over on one side and he was still watching the boy. "Well, well. So you say dis famous lighter it never fails. Iss dat you say?"

"Sure," the boy said. "That's right." He was about nineteen or twenty with a long freckled face and a rather sharp birdlike nose. His chest was not very sunburned and there were freckles there too, and a few wisps of pale-reddish hair. He was holding the lighter in his right hand, ready to flip the wheel. "It never fails," he said, smiling now because he was purposely exaggerating his little boast. "I promise you it never fails."

"One momint, pleess." The hand that held the cigar came up high, palm outward, as though it were stopping traffic. "Now juss one momint." He had a curiously soft, toneless voice and he kept looking at the boy all the time.

"Shall we not perhaps make a little bet on dat?" He smiled at the boy. "Shall we not make a little bet on whether your lighter lights?"

"Sure, I'll bet," the boy said. "Why not?"

"You like to bet?"

"Sure, I'll always bet."

The man paused and examined his cigar, and I must say I didn't much like the way he was behaving. It seemed he was already trying to make something out of this, and to embarrass the boy, and at the same time I had the feeling he was relishing a private little secret all his own.

He looked up again at the boy and said slowly, "I like to bet, too. Why we don't have a good bet on dis ting? A good big bet?

"Now wait a minute," the boy said. "I can't do that. But I'll bet you a dollar, or whatever it is over here-some shillings, I guess."

The little man waved his hand again. "Listen to me. Now we have some fun. We make a bet. Den we go up to my room here in de hotel where iss no wind and I bet you you cannot light dis famous lighter of yours ten times running without missing once."

"I'll bet I can," the boy said.

"All right. Good. We make a bet, yes?"

"Sure. I'll bet you a buck."

"No, no. I make you very good bet. I am rich man and I am sporting man also. Listen to me. Outside de hotel iss my car. Iss very fine car. American car from your country. Cadillac-"

"Hey, now. Wait a minute." The boy leaned back in his deck chair and he laughed. "I can't put up that sort of property. This is crazy."

"Not crazy at all. You strike lighter successfully ten times running and Cadillac is yours. You like to have dis Cadillac, yes?"

"Sure, I'd like to have a Cadillac." The boy was still grinning.

"All right. Fine. We make a bet and I put up my Cadillac."

"And what do I put up?"

"The little man carefully removed the red band from his still unlighted cigar. "I never ask you, my friend, to bet something you cannot afford. You understand?"

"Then what do I bet?"

"I make it very easy for you, yes?"

"Okay. You make it easy."

"Some small ting you can afford to give away, and if you did happen to lose it you would not feel too bad. Right?"

"Such as what?"

"Such as, perhaps, de little finger of your left hand."

"My what! The boy stopped grinning.

"Yes. Why not? You win, you take de car. You looss, I take de finger."

"I don't get it. How d'you mean, you take the finger?"

"I chop it off."

"Jumping jeepers! That's a crazy bet. I think I'll just make it a dollar."

The man leaned back, spread out his hands palms upward and gave a tiny contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. "Well, well, well," he said. "I do not understand. You say it lights but you will not bet. Den we forget it, yes?"

The boy sat quite still, staring at the bathers in the pool. Then he remembered suddenly he hadn't lighted his cigarette. He put it between his lips, cupped his hands around the lighter and flipped the wheel. The wick lighted and burned with a small, steady, yellow flame and the way he held his hands the wind didn't get to it at all.

"Could I have a light, too?" I said.

"Gee, I'm sorry. I forgot you didn't have one."

I held out my hand for the lighter, but he stood up and came over to do it for me.

"Thank you," I said, and he returned to his seat.

"You having a good time?" I asked.

"Fine," he answered. "It's pretty nice here."

There was a silence then, and I could see that the little man has succeeded in disturbing the boy with his absurd proposal. He was sitting there very still, and it was obvious that a small tension was beginning to build up inside him. Then he started shifting about in his seat, and rubbing his chest, and stroking the back of his neck, and finally he placed both hands on his knees and began tapping his fingers against his knee-caps. Soon he was tapping with one of his feet as well.

"Now just let me check up on this bet of yours," he said at last. "You say we go up to your room and if I make this lighter light ten times running I win a Cadillac. If it misses just once then I forfeit the little finger of my left hand. Is that right?"

"Certainly. Dat is de bet. But I tink you are afraid."

"What do we do if I lose? Do I have to hold my finger out while you chop it off?"

"Oh, no! Dat would be no good. And you might be tempted to refuse to hold it out. What I should do I should tie one of your hands to de table before we started and I should stand dere with a knife ready to go chop de momint your lighter missed."

"What year is the Cadillac?" the boy asked.

"Excuse. I not understand."

"What year-how old is the Cadillac?"

"Ah! How old? Yes. It is last year. Quite now car. But I see you are not betting man. Americans never are."

The boy paused for just a moment and he glanced first at the English girl, then at me. "Yes," he said sharply. "I'll bet you."

"Good!" The little man clapped his hands together quietly, once. "Fine," he said. "We do it now. And you, sir," he turned to me, "you would perhaps be good enough to, what you call it, to-to referee." He had pale, almost colorless eyes with tiny bright black pupils.

"Well," I said. "I think it's a crazy bet. I don't think I like it very much."

"Nor do I," said the English girl. It was the first time she'd spoken. "I think it's a stupid, ridiculous bet."

"Are you serious about cutting off this boy's finger if he loses?" I said.

"Certainly I am. Also about cutting off this boy's finger if he loses?" I said.

"Certainly I am. Also about giving him Cadillac if he win. Come now. We go to my room."

He stood up. "You like to put on some clothes first?" he said.

"No," the boy answered. "I'll come like this." Then he turned to me. "I'd consider it a favor if you'd come along and referee."

"All right," I said. "I'll come along, but I don't like the bet."

"You come too," he said to the girl. "You come and watch.

The little man led the way back through the garden to the hotel. He was animated now, and excited, and that seemed to make him bounce up higher than ever on his toes as he walked along.

"I live in annex," he said. "You like to see car first? Iss just here."

He took us to where we could see the front driveway of the hotel and he stopped and pointed to a sleek pale-green Cadillac parked close by.

"Dere she iss. De green one. You like?"

"Say, that's a nice car," the boy said.

"All right. Now we go up and see if you can win her."

We followed him into the annex and up one flight of stairs. He unlocked his door and we all trooped into what was a large pleasant double bedroom. There was a woman's dressing gown lying across the bottom of one of the beds.

"First," he said, "we'ave a little Martini."

The drinks were on a small table in the far corner, all ready to be mixed, and there was a shaker and ice and plenty of glasses. He began to make the Martini, but meanwhile he'd rung the bell and now there was a knock on the door and a colored maid came in.

"Ah!" he said, putting down the bottle of gin, taking a wallet from his pocket and pulling out a pound note. "You will do something for me now, pleess." He gave the maid the pound.

"You keep dat," he said. "And now we are going to play a little game in here and I want you to go off and find for me two-no three tings. I want some nails; I want a hammer, and I want a chopping knife, a butcher's chipping knife which you can borrow from de kitchen. You can get, yes?"

"A chopping knife!" The maid opened her eyes wide and clasped her hands in front of her. "You mean a real chopping knife?"

"Yes, yes, of course. Come on now, pleess. You can find dose tings surely for me."

"Yes, sir, I'll try, sir. Surely I'll try to get them." And she went.

The little man handed round the Martinis. We stood there and sipped them, the boy with the long freckled face and the pointed nose, bare-bodied except for a pair of faded brown bathing shorts; the English girl, a large-boned, fair-haired girl wearing a pale blue bathing suit, who watched the boy over the top of her glass all the time; the little man with the colorless eyes standing there in his immaculate white suit drinking his Martini and looking at the girl in her pale blue bathing dress. I didn't know what to make of it all. The man seemed serious about the bet and he seemed serious about the business of cutting off the finger. But hell, what if the boy lost? Then we'd have to rush him to the hospital in the Cadillac that he hadn't won. That would be a fine thing. Now wouldn't that be a really find thing? It would be a damn silly unnecessary thing so far as I could see.

"Don't you think this is rather a silly bet?" I said.

"I think it's a fine bet," the boy answered. He had already downed one large Martini.

"I think it's a stupid, ridiculous bet," the girl said. "What'll happen if you lose?"

"It won't matter. Come to think of it, I can't remember ever in my life having had any use for the little finger on my left hand. Here he is." The boy took hold of the finger. "Here he is and he hasn't ever done a thing for me yet. So why shouldn't I bet him. I think it's a fine bet."

The little man smiled and picked up the shaker and refilled our glasses.

"Before we begin," he said, "I will present to de-to de referee de key of de car." He produced a car key from his pocket and gave it to me. "De papers," he said, "de owning papers and insurance are in de pocket of de car."

Then the colored maid came in again. In one hand she carried a small chopper, the kind used by butchers for chopping meat bones, and in the other a hammer and a bag of nails.

"Good! You get dem all. Tank you, tank you. Now you can go." He waited until the maid had closed the door, then he put the implements on one of the beds and said, "Now we prepare ourselves, yes?" And to the boy "Help me, pleess, with dis table. We carry it out a little."

It was the usual kind of hotel writing desk, just a plain rectangular table about four feet by three with a blotting pad, ink, pens and paper. They carried it out into the room away from the wall, and removed the writing things.

"And now," he said, "a chair." He picked up a chair and placed it beside the table. He was very brisk and very animated, like a person organizing games at a children's party. "And now de nails. I must put in de nails." He fetched the nails and he began to hammer them into the top of the table.

We stood there, the boy, the girl, and I, holding Martinis in out hands, watching the little man at work. We watched him hammer two nails into the table, about six inches apart. He didn't hammer them right home; he allowed a small part of each one to stick up. Then he tested them for firmness with his fingers.

Anyone would think the son of a bitch had done this before, I told myself. He never hesitates. Table, nails, hammer, kitchen chopper. He knows exactly what he needs and how to arrange it.

"And now," he said, "all we want is some string." He found some string. "All right, at last we are ready. Will you pleess to sit here at de table," he said to the boy.

The boy put his glass away and sat down.

"Now place de left hand between dese two nails. De nails are only so I can tie your hand in place. All right, good. Now I tie your hand secure to de table-so,"

He wound the string around the boy's wrist, then several times around the wide part of the hand, then he fastened it tight to the nails. He made a good job of it and when he'd finished there wasn't any question about the boy being able to draw his hand away. But he could move his fingers.

"Now pleess, clench de fist, all except for de little finger. You must leave de little finger sticking out, lying on de table."

"Ex-cellent! Ex-cellent! Now we are ready. Wid your right hand you manipulate de lighter. But one momint, pleess."

He skipped over to the bed and picked up the chopper. He came back and stood beside the table with the chopper in his hand.

"We are all ready?" he said. "Mister referee, you must say to begin."

The English girl was standing there in her pale blue bathing costume right behind the boy's chair. She was just standing there, not saying anything. The boy was sitting quite still, holding the lighter in his right hand, looking at the chopper. The little man was looking at me.

"Are you ready?" I asked the boy.

"I'm ready."

"And you?" to the little man.

"Quite ready," he said and he lifted the chopper up in the air and held it there about two feet above the boy's finger, ready to chop. The boy watched it, but he didn't flinch and his mouth didn't move at all. He merely raised his eyebrows and frowned.

"All right," I said. "Go ahead."

The boy said, "Will you please count aloud the number of times I light it."

"Yes," I said. "I'll do that."

With his thumb he raised the top of the lighter, and again with the thumb he gave the wheel a sharp flick. The flint sparked and the wick caught fire and burned with a small yellow flame.

"One!" I called.

He didn't blow the flame out; he closed the top of the lighter on it and he waited for perhaps five seconds before opening it again.

He flicked the wheel very strongly and once more there was a small flame burning on the wick.

"Two!"

No one else said anything. The boy kept his eyes on the lighter. The little man held the chipper up in the air and he too was watching the lighter.

"Three!"

"Four!"

"Five!"

"Six!"

"Seven!" Obviously it was one of those lighters that worked. The fling gave a big spark and the wick was the right length. I watched the thumb snapping the top down onto the flame. Then a pause. Then the thumb raising the top once more. This was an all-thumb operation. The thumb did everything. I took a breath, ready to say eight. The thumb flicked the wheel. The flint sparked. The little flame appeared.

"Eight!" I said, and as I said it the door opened. We all turned and we saw a woman standing in the doorway, a small, black-haired woman, rather old, who stood there for about two seconds then rushed forward shouting, "Carlos! Carlos!" She grabbed his wrist, took the chopper from him, threw it on the bed, took hold of the little man by the lapels of his white suit and began shaking him very vigorously, talking to him fast and loud and fiercely all the time in some Spanish-sounding language. She shook him so fast you couldn't see him any more. He became a faint, misty, quickly moving outline, like the spokes of a turning wheel.

Then she slowed down and the little man came into view again and she hauled him across the room and pushed him backward onto one of the beds. He sat on the edge of it blinking his eyes and testing his head to see if it would still turn on his neck.

"I am so sorry," the woman said. "I am so terribly sorry that this should happen." She spoke almost perfect English.

"It is too bad," she went on. "I suppose it is really my fault. For ten minutes I leave him alone to go and have my hair washed and I come back and he is at it again." She looked sorry and deeply concerned.

The boy was untying his hand from the table. The English girl and I stood there and said nothing.

"He is a menace," the woman said. "Down where we live at home he has taken altogether forty-seven fingers from different people, and he has lost eleven cars. In the end they threatened to have him put away somewhere. That's why I brought him up here."

"We were only having a little bet," mumbled the little man from the bed.

"I suppose he bet you a car," the woman said.

"Yes," the boy answered. "A Cadillac."

"He has no car. It's mine. And that makes it worse," she said, "that he should bet you when he has nothing to bet with. I am ashamed and very sorry about it all." She seemed an awfully nice woman.

"Well," I said, "then here's the key of your car." I put it on the table.

"We were only having a little bet," mumbled the little man.

"He hasn't anything left to bet with," the woman said. "He hasn't a thing in the world. Not a thing. As a matter of fact I myself won it all from him a long while ago. It took time, a lot of time, and it was hard work, but I won it all in the end." She looked up at the boy and she smiled, a slow sad smile, and she came over and put out a hand to take the key from the table.

I can see it now, that hand of hers; it had only one finger on it, and a thumb.

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ponytailsandpaperbacks · 7 years

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2016: A Reflection via an Escape

2016 kicked my butt. It punched me in the gut from the very beginning (Losing Alan Rickman is a pain I will never get over), picked me back up and shook me like a ragdoll. Now, I'm pretty strong. I do not go down easily. At the end of round one, I was still standing, albeit a little shakily. I mad it through the end of my junior year and thought from then on it would be easy cruising. Ha. Summer was hard. A lot of heart sickness and feeling lonely, but nothing I couldn't handle. I spent half the summer grasping at what was slipping away. Things were changing quicker than they ever had, and everything I thought was strength had melted into weakness. Things fell apart and I'm still not entirely sure how. I see now that this was for the better. My solid ground wasn't gone, it was just changing. One of my favorite literary devices is The Escape. It is the very literal form of taking a step back and examining your life. It usually goes about like this: The main character is in a huge mess and every step they take seems to tangle it up even more. Suddenly something (a side emergency they don't have time to deal with but have to anyways, or an opportunity they can't miss, or maybe even something as simple as an obligation they scheduled forever ago that caught up with them at the most inopportune moment) comes up and they have to leave the center of the action to go on an entertaining but (seemingly) narratively pointless journey right in the middle of the action. Did I make up this trope? Probably. The big purpose of this trope is usually REFLECTION. The main character is very literally removed from the center of the conflict and can perceive things more clearly than they can in the middle of it all. This is what sparks the resolution, as the protagonist comes to realize what they really need to do. Examples: Elizabeth's trip to the countryside - Pride and Prejudice , Dumbledore's office- Every Harry Potter Book Ever. I think about this trope that I might be imagining every time I go out of town. I pull a cliché mid 2000s music video moment and stare out the car window as the rain rolls down the glass. I think. I reflect. I work out all the knots in my life. I think over all the jagged bits that threaten my world until they are rubbed dull and jagged. No, it doesn't always fix things, but it makes things generally easier to deal with, and helps me face my problems instead of mentally blocking them out. I did this on my trip to Colorado in July, and I did it again when I spent Christmas break at my Grandparents house a few hours away. In Colorado, I learned that: I'm okay. I'm loved. Life is full of revolving doors. Maybe not an even ratio of closing : opening, but it fluctuates enough to make up for the times when closing is ahead. There are some things that can never be taken away from me. There are some things I'm not meant to keep. I don't always have to be in control. Sometimes it's alright to loosen my grip. I am incredibly lucky to have the family I have. I have more confidence than I think I do. Burgers are especially fantastic when the bun is a cronut.

Getting away is therapeutic. It is too difficult to do a puzzle when you are one of the pieces.

I don't remember all that much about the rest of summer 2016, except crying a lot in my mom's car. Also Wing Stop. There were a few tears at Wing Stop if I remember correctly. More than anything, I was crying because I was exhausted in a way I had never been any more. I remember one phrase kept threatening to break out of my mouth, and it about a month after school started I finally couldn't help it anymore, and I said it out loud to my math class. "I just feel stretched so unbearably thin that anything else and I would bust like a rubber band. Give it a few months and I'd be getting home at 10 to eat dinner and start my homework (every night for about three weeks), and I started to notice just how many tears there already were. I desperately tried to fill in the places pulled so taught with superglue and Saturday mornings.

Coming back to school was weird. I'm a senior. Now that I've had a semester to get used to it, it's- Nope. Still super weird. Everything is a last, and there's so much pressure to make it all count. On top of that, there is the uncertainty of the future, the headache of a forever growing To Do List, and endless worries. Some worries are not that serious, admittedly. It probably won’t matter in 20 years who I go to prom with or how successful I am in band this year. Some are a little more serious, like where I'm going to spend the next four years or whether or not I get my IB Diploma. As someone who thinks that worrying is actually pretty proactive, I would beg to differ that just because they might not matter later shouldn’t mean that they don’t matter now. If I spend my whole life thinking towards the future, how can I find be happiness in the present? However stressful this year is, I would be remiss if I didn't recognize that this year had more joy than almost any other. Remembering this year is remembering a year of hugs. Hugs from teachers sharing in my success, hugs from someone very important to me as we looked back over how much we've been through together the past 6 years since we met. Hugs from my role model. Hugs from the family members that I became so much closer to this year. Hugs from people whose affection surprised me. This year I hugged people I hadn't seen in a few days like we were meeting again after years at war.

And then, a different kind of adventure. October 2016 was easily the hardest month of my life, it’s only competition being the month that Began with my grandfather getting sick a few days before my first day of Junior High. My family went through a lot in October. We lost someone we never even got the chance to know. We'll never get to tell them a story or listen to one of theirs. We'll never know what his laugh sounds like. It is so hard. It's harder for others in my family than me. We had 15 days. It wasn't anything close to enough, but it was all we got, and I'm trying so hard to be grateful that we got as much as we did. We lost a dog in October, too. That was gut wrenching. It felt like after everything else, we were being kicked while we were down. October was heartbreaking. It was so unfathomably hard, and even now I'm tearing up typing this. I didn't handle it well. That is, I didn't handle it at all. I just kept going. I held my sister as we watched a baby die and 3 hours later I had my instrument and was getting on the bus to a football game. I put my head down and worked. The good news is that I got a lot of college applications in that month. The bad news is that while I did a lot of work, I didn't work through anything I was feeling. I didn't talk to anyone about it, I didn't think about anything. The next month or so went by in a blur. Christmas break came and I survived the first semester of senior year. Again, I packed my bags and escaped. Finally, it hit me. I sat in the twin bed at my grandparents house, hearing my sister talk about everything through the door the night before Christmas eve, and I lost it. I started hyperventilating. Without really knowing why or how, I was suddenly sobbing and couldn't stop. It hit me. The next day, everyone in the family would be over at the house. It would be fun and loud and everything I love about the holidays. It also wasn't going to be how it was supposed to be this year. There was supposed to be a baby. The youngest cousin is about to be 9, and I remember when she was a baby, someone was always holding her while everyone else mooned over her, playing with her feet and fingers. It was supposed to be like this again this year. And instead of there being this gaping hole in the family, it was just going to be like every other year. That somehow made it worse to think that he wasn't around long enough to have carved out a niche. At first, I panicked. I was supposed to be okay. I thought I was fine. I've always been the strong one, and suddenly I'm falling apart out of the blue? Then, I was relieved. I was relieved because I realized how many emotions I had kept bottled up, all so I could keep pretending that I was okay. I realized that I'm a jerk to myself. I hold myself to impossible double standards. To everyone else, I preach that emotions are natural and nothing to be ashamed of, but personally I put so much pressure on myself to be strong that I don't allow myself the weakness of being sad or scared. With this relief came healing and talking. I talked to my sister. I talked to my aunt. December was my emotional detox. I worked on some other things too. I talked to my grandfather for hours. He's the most amazing person I have. Every college I'm considering, it's always "that would just be so wonderful if you went there". It only matters to him that I'm happy. He is the only one who has told me that I go to college because that is what is going to make me happy, not because it is what someone else wants for me. He also helped me get some perspective, telling me that whatever I decide, I'm not marrying a school. My commitment to whatever college I chose is a semester long, and If I hate it I can always come home at the end of the semester and try again somewhere else. So 2016, know this: I refuse to let what I lost define this wonderful, transforming period of my life. For the rest of my life, I vow to look back on you, 2016, and see instead what you have given me. You gave us fifteen days with a tiny baby boy and in those fifteen days he brought us all closer together and defined our future as one we spend together as a family. You gave me perspective. You gave me big decisions and risks worth taking. In you, I found both triumph and failure like I never had before. My birthday gift this year was the recognition that I have the most amazing support system, and that I am so blessed to be loved by so many people. I spent most of you worried, stressed and sad, however, I also had some of my best moments so far during you. I went to a punk rock concert for nerds with my dad and best friend and had more fun than I ever have before. I accomplished things I really didn't think I could. (Cough, Chem IA, Cough). I went on a couple dates. I had a sleepover with my cousin and sister. I hung out with a few people I hadn't hung out with in years. I road around In shopping carts with some of my best friends in a dress and fancy heels. I became so much more confident in my own skin, even if my skin hates me sometimes. I road rollercoasters (as well as road in some of my friends cars which felt like being on a roller coaster- not always in the good way). I had fun and said screw it. I slow danced. So thank you. Thank you 2016 for proving to me what I already knew, but needed reminding. I am strong. I can do anything I set my mind to, and I am special. I can't say that I'm sad to see you go, but I can appreciate what you leave me with.

2017, I have so much hope, and at the end of the day, isn't that all that matters?

#this is the most honest thing I've ever written #2016 #reflection #what I've learned

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belphegor1982 · 4 years

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This is not an easy chapter. ngl, it was A Lot to write.

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Summary: 1937: Two years after the events of Ahm Shere, the O’Connells are “required” by the British Government to bring the Diamond taken there from Egypt to England. In Cairo, while Evelyn deals with the negotiations and Rick waits for doom to strike again, Jonathan bumps into an old friend of his from university, Tom Ferguson. Things start to go awry when the Diamond is stolen from the Museum and old loyalties are tested… (story on AO3; on FFnet)

(Chapters on Tumblr: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19)

Chapter 20: Aftermaths (on AO3 here; on FFnet here)

What struck Rick was the hush. It wasn’t exactly silence; more like cotton in his ears, muffling out the incoming sounds.

He had known, the second he had seen Jonathan slide down the wall, the second Alex had screamed, what was going to happen. He was too intimately familiar with the signs of encroaching death to ignore them: the sinister pallor, the laboured breathing, the inevitability of it all… and the helplessness of the living. When a distraught Evelyn had turned to him, calling for help, finding none, there had been no comfort he could give her. Life had slipped out of Jonathan too fast for anyone to do anything.

Against him, Alex made a keening noise and started to sob, quietly at first, then violently, his small frame racked with shudders. Rick cradled him in his arms and gently rocked him back and forth. Evelyn stared at her brother’s body, her eyes almost as empty as Jonathan’s had been before Rick had closed them.

Izzy ran out of the cabin just as Atifa scrambled up the ladder. Both jaws dropped open at the same time.

Nobody said anything. The thick silence seemed to swallow the words before they made their way out. Rick was almost grateful.

Apart from Alex weeping in his arms, the only movement he could feel and the only sound that reached his ears was the breeze, slowly growing warmer as the sun rose over Egypt. The moment seemed to stretch out, like a rubber band. And like a rubber band, Rick knew, you could only stretch that kind of moment for so long before it snapped.

A small part of him wanted to fall back, retreat to the nearest secure spot, and lick his wounds – all kinds of wounds – in peace. A big part of him, the part that was pure frazzled exhaustion, wanted the world to stop so he could sleep for a week. But the heart of him, the very core, looked at his unresponsive wife and the sobbing child in his arms, and said, They need you right now, and they need you strong.

He never actually wanted to take charge. Somehow, though, that’s where he usually seemed to end up in the worst kinds of circumstances.

You just got promoted…

Rick let out a shuddering sigh, and freed an arm from Alex to put it around Evy.

“Evelyn. Honey.”

She let him turn her ever so slightly, her eyes still drawn to the body as though to a magnet.

“I’ll take care of him. Okay? I’ll stay with him.” He stroked her back, very gently, dropping his voice down to a murmur. “But I need you to take Alex. He can’t stay here.”

Their son’s name rekindled something in Evy’s eyes. She reached out, and Rick, once he had gently detached Alex’s hands, tight around his neck, poured the boy into her arms.

It was an achingly familiar move, perfected when Alex had been a toddler and prone to falling asleep on his parents’ lap after swearing up and down he wasn’t sleepy. He had done that a lot for about a year and a half. They had come home once, after a conference in London, to see Jonathan fast asleep on the sofa with a two-year-old Alex sprawled over him like a starfish. Both babysitter and child had been equally hard to wake up.

The memory made Rick’s chest ache. He bit down on the pain and shoved it aside, to be dealt with later.

And he knew there would be a later. No matter how numb he currently was.

He caught Izzy’s eyes over Evy’s shoulder. The pilot understood instantly.

“C’mon, Evelyn,” he said, gentler than Rick had ever heard him. He took Evy’s arm to support her as she rose, still holding Alex, and slowly escorted her inside the cabin. When they were gone, Rick tried, in vain, to swallow the lump in his throat. He turned back to Atifa, who stood by the rail, so still and silent it was easy to forget she was there.

“Do you have a, uh…” Damn, but that sentence was difficult. “Something we could use as a kinda shroud?”

Atifa nodded.

“Wait here,” she said in a low voice.

His eyes followed her down the ladder and into the ruined camp. He liked Atifa. She was stern, only a little less intense than Ardeth was on a bad day, but she was a strong, no-nonsense woman, and a good ally.

She came back with what looked like white linen sheets. Rick rose to his feet slowly, feeling every single muscle, tendon, and bone, and took it off her hands as she climbed over the rail.

“Thank you. Where –?”

“The white men’s tents and bedding. We have taken care of our dead since the sun rose.”

Rick hadn’t missed the battle damage as he ran out of the pyramid. It had only taken a second to recognise the signs. But he’d been so focused on getting out that he hadn’t let it sink in.

“I’m sorry about your men,” he said through whatever still obstructed his throat. “How many?”

Atifa looked just as hollow and worn as he felt.

“Thirty-two. Nine men, eight women, and fifteen Westerners who chose to fight the Army of Anubis with us. They all gave their lives so we could live.” She looked down at Jonathan, then back at him. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“He’s family, actually.”

Too late, Rick caught the present tense.

They were a family of three, now. Four, with Ardeth. He would have to get used to it.

God, he hated it already.

Atifa’s eyes softened slightly. Without another word, she spread the sheet on the deck, smoothing out the wrinkles, and moved to Jonathan’s side.

For just a half-second, Jonathan appeared to be sleeping. Rick had seen him sleep that way, back in that basement they had been locked up in, sitting against a wall with his chin resting on his chest. The illusion was gone in an instant. No matter how the cliché went, a dead man’s body could not be mistaken for a live one. The difference was tiny, but staggering.

Rick picked up his brother-in-law’s corpse, cradling his head as gently as he had cradled Alex’s, and deposited him on the makeshift shroud. Before Atifa could close it, however, he stayed her hand.

When people died, the living often asked questions. It was part of what being alive meant. ‘Why’ and ‘how’ were generally the most frequent ones.

In this particular case, ‘why’ was moot – Jonathan hadn’t given his life, like the Medjai who had died weapons in hand, defending each other. It had been taken from him as they ran to safety, to family, to freedom. No, asking ‘why’ would be pointless. Rick was more interested in ‘how’. And, incidentally, in ‘who’.

He slowly turned the body on its side.

The blood stain wasn’t that large, he noted with a strange detachment. Most of the bleeding had been internal. The origin was a small round hole between the shoulder blades, a little off to the right of the spine. The bullet hadn’t gone through. Maybe it would only have done minor damage if the effort of running hadn’t made it move around and nick an artery. Or maybe the wound would have been fatal anyway and he would have bled out, only slowly. There was no way to tell.

Rick gingerly laid the body back down on the sheet. That was the ‘how’ taken care of. Now for the ‘who’.

Fury gradually eroded the numbness, as slow and inexorable as the wind moving the sand dunes.

“The men who were behind us,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “Where are they?”

Atifa looked into his eyes, and understood perfectly.

“They are our prisoners,” she said firmly, “and they will not be touched.”

“I won’t need to touch him.” Whether Baine had fired the gun that had killed Jonathan or not, he was damn well responsible. And even though Rick would like nothing more than to pound him to a paste right now, a bullet to the head – or in the back – had a certain poetic irony to it. He’d been itching to deck the guy for days; now he just wanted to kill him.

But Atifa shook her head.

“The battle is over. They lost and they accepted their defeat. The honourable thing—”

“Honourable!?” he almost shouted. “The damn pyramid was falling apart around us, and instead of thinking of his own men that guy chose to shoot us as we ran. Where’s the honour in that?”

“O’Connell!” she snapped.

Through the haze of anger came a pinprick of annoyance. Why did everybody seem to call each other by their first names except him?

“You’re not thinking clearly.”

“Oh,” he growled, “I really am –”

“No you’re not,” she countered hotly, in Arabic this time. “Because if you were, you wouldn’t be thinking of darkening your soul with pointless vengeance while your brother’s corpse is still warm and your family is weeping just behind that door.”

As usual, she was just as intense, but less formal when she spoke Arabic. The language switch gave her words a weight and an impact they would have lacked in English. But maybe that was because his Arabic – a language he had spoken daily from thirteen to twenty years old – was just a little rusty.

He didn’t bother to correct her about the difference between brother and brother-in-law. After all this time, and everything they had been through together, Jonathan might as well have been blood.

This time he did remember to use the past tense.

“We set up camp a couple of hours’ ride to the south-east,” Atifa continued in the same language, more quietly. “Your wife and the pilot know the way. That’s where we’ve been sending the prisoners and the fallen. They deserve their families around them, and their families need to say goodbye. You and yours will be welcome there.”

Rick was still seething; his hands tightened into fists almost of their own accord, still itching to punch Baine into the ground. But he nodded wordlessly.

They worked in silence after that. When they were done, the body was neatly wrapped in white linen and easier to look at, somehow.

Rather looks like something you’d find in a sarcophagus, doesn’t it, old boy? a familiar voice piped up in Rick’s head. Beneath the layers of grief and anger he felt a small spark of laughter. Jonathan probably would make that joke if he could.

Rick bid Atifa goodbye and found Izzy at the helm, unusually sombre.

“O’Connell.”

“Hey, Izzy. Thanks for coming to the rescue.”

The pilot snorted. “Like I had any choice. Your kid picked the lock on my door and then your wife just blasted it with a shotgun. Hell of a family you got.”

“Yeah. Well, it just got smaller.”

Izzy opened his mouth and closed it wordlessly. Rick ran a hand over his face, too tired for sarcasm.

“…So, where to?” Izzy asked eventually in a would-be casual voice, making a show of fiddling with buttons and firing up the boiler.

“Apparently you know the way to the Medjai camp?”

“Yep. A whole load of tents pitched near a little oasis and lots and lots of scary people in black. Kids, too, if you can believe it.”

“’That far?”

“Nah, about twenty minutes as Dee flies. Even with the damage your boy did to my dirigible we should be there in half an hour.”

Rick blinked. “Dee?”

“I gave my lady a name, O’Connell – got a problem with that?”

In other circumstances, Rick would have enjoyed ribbing Izzy. They had the kind of back-and-forth that could last for hours, back in the day; pretty entertaining, as pastimes went. Right now, though… Right now he had rarely wanted his wife and son in his arms more badly. If only to make sure they were still alive.

He replied with a vague gesture and made for the sleeping quarters, where Izzy had put up Evy and Alex.

Izzy had a big mouth and a tendency to put his foot in it, but he was smarter than people often gave him credit for. He threw a look at Rick over his shoulder and muttered, “Hey, O’Connell? Sorry about Carnahan.”

Rick tapped his shoulder in thanks and walked away.

The night had been hell. He had a feeling the day would be worse.

.⅋.

The night had been long. Ardeth had a feeling the day would be longer still.

He barely had time to see to his wounds once they came back to the camp. As High Commander, he had to oversee the aftermath of the battle just as he had the preparations. This meant making sure tents were pitched up for the wounded, seeing that families received their dead in private, and directing the flow of information about who lived, who needed treatment and what kind, and who would never come back. Fortunately, after a while he was able to delegate and let things run their course. After giving a few last orders, he left to look for his family.

He found Imeni in their tent, in the Eleventh Tribe section. To his absolute relief, she appeared unhurt. Sabni was asleep on her lap, and she sang softly as she braided Maira’s long dark hair, her hands almost the same colour in the dim light.

When Ardeth entered the tent, he only just had time to get down on one knee before his daughter, braiding forgotten, ploughed into him. Despite his injuries, and despite the exhaustion of almost an entire night of fighting, he took her into his arms and held her close.

Maira was eight; Sabni was three. Unlike her brother, his eldest had clear and vivid recollections of the last time the Medjai had gone out in force to fight Anubis’ Army.

He met Imeni’s eyes over the small dark head. They were shining.

“Allah be praised,” he breathed, softly in order to not wake his son. “I feared –”

“I know. So did I. The fighting was so fierce.” She gave him a smile, her teeth very white in her dark face. “But I heard that the Commander was on his feet, and I had a feeling you would eventually come here.”

“There’s no Commander in this tent. Only a husband and a father.” Ardeth carefully sat down, Maira still clutched to him, and kissed the crown of his wife’s head. “Are you hurt?”

“A nick to the back of the calf, on the right leg. I already treated it. I’ll just avoid walking today and limp a little for the next few weeks.” Her long, almond-shaped eyes meandered over what she could see of his body. “What about you?”

Ardeth shook his head. “A few scratches here and there. A small price to pay to keep the Army of Anubis at bay. Especially when we lost so many warriors. Even Maher’s men were attacked, right at the foot of the Pyramid.”

Imeni’s eyes widened.

“Really?”

“Yes. His message said he lost about a dozen people. Plus some of the Westerners who surrendered when they took the camp. Maher insisted the survivors be treated better than those who were still coming out from the Pyramid.”

“What happened to the Pyramid of Ahm Shere, Dad?” came Maira’s voice from against his chest, somewhat muffled by his robes. Ardeth gently ran a hand into her hair, now almost completely loose. It was dark and quiet inside the tent; the soft weight of his daughter against him and the warm shoulder of his wife against his own felt comfortable and familiar. For the umpteenth time since sunrise, he sent a prayer to Allah in gratitude.

“Bad people went inside to release the Army of Anubis, good people went inside to stop them. I’m guessing they must have been successful.” Maira absently played with the hem of his shirt, and he was glad he had taken the time to put on clothes that were not bloody and tattered. “When the Army disappeared, the Pyramid started collapsing, but some of the people had time to come out before it was destroyed.”

“What about Alex and his mother?” she asked. “And his dad and uncle? Did they come out?”

“I hope so, sweetheart. I haven’t heard from them yet.” Ardeth met his wife’s eyes again, and saw his own vague worry reflected there.

He was debating what to say and not say when Nuya, a young man who often worked as his aide, lifted the flap at the entrance of the tent and called softly, “Commander? Westerners are coming.”

“What kind of Westerners?” Ardeth asked cautiously. Nuya smiled.

“Ours. The balloon is landing between the Eighth and Ninth Tribe sections.”

Ardeth couldn’t help a grin, relieved. The world just would not be the same without Evelyn’s passion for knowledge, Rick’s calm strength, Jonathan’s wry humour, or Alex’s childlike enthusiasm. It might be quieter, and – as some people muttered sometimes – safer, but it would be colder, and definitely not as entertaining.

Imeni kissed his head near his ear. “Go, and give them my love,” she said, smiling. “And tell them that tea would be nice if they have the time.”

Ardeth gently pried Maira’s hands from around his torso and kissed her forehead, promising he would be back soon. Then he followed Nuya into the blinding mid-morning sun, forcing his face back into a serious expression.

When he saw the dirigible, though, and spotted the O’Connells walking down the gangway, the grin sneaked back on his face despite himself.

“My friends,” he began in English, delighted, “you—”

His voice trailed off.

Something was wrong.

Something was very wrong.

Alex was clinging to his mother, hiccuping from time to time, his face blotchy. A few stray tears rolled on his cheeks he didn’t bother to wipe. Evelyn looked like brittle steel, pale and hollow-eyed. O’Connell walked behind her, shoulders slumped. His face, usually so expressive, was set in stone, with deep, hard lines.

Ardeth searched in vain for the fourth member of the little family until denial made way for a leaden resignation that would shortly, he knew, turn into sorrow.

“What happened?” he asked in a low voice when he reached them.

“Not now,” O’Connell replied, sounding – and looking – nothing short of exhausted. He still corrected himself. “I mean – I’m glad you’re okay, Ardeth, I really am. Just… Oh, man.” He ran a hand across his grimy face. His whole body was battered and dusty, and he appeared to be feeling every single bruise. “Do you have a tent or something, somewhere private? Evy doesn’t – she needs to stay with her brother a while, y’know? And Alex needs to be somewhere else. Somewhere safe, where he can rest.”

There was something heartbreaking about his subdued, halting voice. It also drove the point home, though the words themselves were never spoken.

Ardeth nodded, suddenly unspeakably weary. “If it’s all right with you and Evelyn, I think Imeni would be glad to look after him. She always says he’s very well-behaved.”

There was a flash of something on O’Connell’s face that might have been a smile in other circumstances.

“Your wife is a very kind woman.” He turned to Evelyn and Alex; after a few seconds’ quiet conversation, he said, “Yeah, that’d be good. Thank you.”

Thus Ardeth left Evelyn and O’Connell standing by the dirigible with the promise that he would be back shortly, and Alex followed him to his family’s tent.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly after a while, “about your uncle.”

Alex hiccuped and ran his sleeve across his eyes. Fresh tears immediately replaced the ones he’d wiped.

“He shouldn’t be d—dead,” he said in a strangled voice, eyes riveted to the ground. “It’s not… it’s not f—fair.”

“I know.”

“He got out. He and Dad g—got out, and he was fine, and then he… There was blood on the… He shouldn’t b—be dead.”

Ardeth tightened his hand around the boy’s, and wished there was something he could say.

Alex had fallen silent except for snuffles and hiccups by the time they reached the tent. Sabni was awake, and played with wooden cups while his mother braided Maira’s hair. Imeni looked up from her work when they entered, first in curiosity, then in alarm.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as Ardeth made Alex sit on the cushions next to her. The boy barely reacted.

He sighed. “Jonathan’s dead.”

“Tal-lāh1,” she breathed. She’d been fond of the Englishman. He had made her laugh. He had made Ardeth laugh, too, come to think of it – and he had also saved his life. Not many people could attest to both.

Of all the friends he would have to bury tomorrow, Jonathan Carnahan had to be the most unlikely. He was rarely serious, sometimes a little ridiculous, and much too fond of earthly riches; but he was also the kind of man who loved his family so much he repeatedly followed them into the worst situations no matter how scared he was.

“What happened?” Imeni asked in Arabic, reaching to Alex, tentatively at first, then cradling him like she had cradled Sabni. Alex clung to her, eyes closed, gulping.

“I don’t know yet.” His eyes went over to Maira, standing protectively near her little brother, who was staring at Alex with wide eyes. “Do you mind looking after him for a little while? His parents and I need to take care of the body.”

“Of course.” Imeni’s dark eyes were bright, but this time sadness, not joy, made them gleam. She looked down at Alex in her arms. “Yā ḥabībī2,” she murmured. “Don’t be ashamed to cry, bunayy3, let it all go. Tears are the grief leaving your soul…”

Her soft words, half Arabic and half English, accompanied Ardeth until he left the soothing darkness of the tent and walked back into the harsh light of day.

.⅋.

Evy seemed to be clinging to her stiff upper lip like a lifeline. She stood silent and unmoving on the sidelines as Rick and Ardeth picked up Jonathan’s body and carried it into an unoccupied tent not too far from the dirigible.

She still hadn’t cried. It was starting to worry Rick a little.

While they walked, he explained to Ardeth, in a few terse words, what had happened: Hamilton and the seal, Baine and his orders to kill, getting separated, losing Ferguson, and stopping Hamilton by making the giant gong fall on him – then running and ducking bullets, reaching safety, and finding out that they had run out of miracles after all. It had only taken one bullet. One. They had dodged all the rest.

Ardeth listened, attentive, grave. He looked almost exactly like he had when Rick had seen him after that battle two years ago, sombre and weary, but there was a crease between his eyebrows and a grim downturn to his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

When they were finished, having draped a blanket on the body for good measure, they stood outside the tent for a moment, watching the camp. People passed by, cried, laughed, held each other, or just walked in silence. The camp was hardly quiet around them, but still Rick felt like all the sounds weren’t reaching his brain correctly. There was no getting rid of that damn hush.

Ardeth looked at him sideways.

“I am glad you’re alive, too, O’Connell,” he said quietly. Rick gave a nod of acknowledgement, then something halfway between a sigh and a snort.

“After all this time,” he said in the same tone, “you can call me ‘Rick’, you know. There’s only two people who –” Damn. He had slipped up again. He cleared his throat, and finished, just a little roughly, “I mean, the only other person who does is Evy.”

Ardeth’s eyes softened just a little.

“Then I will.”

“Thank you.”

And Ardeth left to attend to his duties, leaving Rick to his own.

The tent wasn’t large, but it was high enough to stand in. Inside, the brutal light was dimmed, the shadows softened, but Evy’s face was hard when she sat down on the frayed carpet, a couple of yards from the unmoving form under the blanket.

Rick sat beside his wife, wrapped his arms around her, and waited.

After a while, she said, in a clipped, almost foreign voice, “We could never recover our parents’ bodies, did you know that? After the crash.”

Rick held her closer and kissed her temple. “No, I didn’t.”

“They found parts of the plane floating in the Mediterranean sea, of course, and enough evidence that nobody had survived before sending us the letter. I went to absolute pieces when we got it. Jonathan had to make tea and sit on the floor with me until I could breathe properly. I don’t think he remembers now, though, he looked like a sleepwalker at the time.”

It was warm inside the tent, hot, even. Yet he could feel Evy on the brink of trembling. Shivers were moving up and down her back like ripples on a lake in a light breeze.

“My parents never got a proper grave but at least they had each other. Now, he… We’re going to have to bury him here, far from home, and he’s going to be so lonely…”

The rest of her sentence was lost as she finally yielded to her grief and let the tears fall. She curled into Rick’s chest and sobbed and sobbed while Rick held her tightly, wanting so badly to shelter her from everything and keenly aware that he couldn’t.

Rick spent some of the longest hours of his life in this tent, alternating between a silent vigil and quiet, broken conversations that gradually got less fractured as the sun rose and fell outside. Sleep got very tempting around two in the afternoon, but he rubbed his eyes and stayed stubbornly awake. There was no way in hell he would leave Evy alone with her ghosts and the corpse of her brother.

Toward the end of the afternoon, as Evy drifted in and out of sleep, Rick heard footsteps in the sand on the other side of the canvas. A hand drew the flap, and Ardeth poked his head inside, a very odd look on his face.

“What’s up?” Rick asked, suspicious. Evy stirred against him and turned to Ardeth with the same unspoken question, tousled-haired and puffy-eyed.

Ardeth seemed to hesitate. Then he spoke.

“You told me Tom Ferguson was dead.”

Rick rubbed his eyes and tried to gather his memories. The poor bastard had almost vanished from his mind the moment they had come running out of the pyramid.

“I said he must be. He and Jonathan got trapped on either side of a wall and he got jumped by pygmy mummies. Jonathan was pretty damn sure he was dead. Why?”

“Because…” Ardeth frowned, and continued, his voice as steady as it always was, “Because we finally gathered all the surviving agents. Among them, we found Hamilton; he’s alive, but completely unresponsive. I don’t think he can even hear us.”

Rick’s eyebrow shot up. “How’d he get out of the pyramid, then?”

“Ferguson carried him out.”

“What?”

.⅋.

1(تالله): “By God”

2(‏يَا حَبِيبِي‎‎): “Oh my darling”

3(بُنَيّ): “little son” (endearment)

…trust me?

#Fairy Tales and Hokum #fanfiction #my stuff #the mummy films

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