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bluejayblueskies · 3 years

Text

can i be gentle?

Words: 7.1k

Relationships: Jon & Tim, Tim & Martin

Tags: Canon Divergence, Tim Lives, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Whump, Post-Unknowing, Injury Recovery

Warnings: suicidal thoughts/ideations, blood, injury, hospitals and hospitalization, survivor's guilt, body horror, minor gore, gun and knife violence, mentions of death, mentions of canon-typical worms, implied child abuse, meat, alcohol, swearing, crying, smoking

Ao3 link in source

Tim aches. It’s full-body, radiating through his arms and back and legs, and he wishes more than anything that he could go to sleep, to chase away the pain for at least a little while. It feels like he’s been hit by a bus.

Or been on the receiving end of several kilos of C4 igniting all at once. But that metaphor’s a bit too on-the-nose, in his opinion.

He should be dead. He should be dead.

(Does he wish he were dead? He hadn’t cared, in those few moments of clarity before he pushed the button on the detonator and the colors solidified into black nothingness, whether or not he would wake up when the smoke cleared. It’s hard to tell. He’d attached so much of himself to revenge, before, when it was easier than feeling everything else bubbling up underneath, and now that it’s been ripped away from him, he doesn’t know what emotion should be filling the gap. Probably relief.

He doesn’t feel relieved.)

The nurse is speaking to him. Her lips are moving, but he can’t hear her. His ears ring and ring and ring, and it sounds like spirling, mocking laughter.

They do some tests. Blast-induced hearing loss, the pamphlet they give him proclaims. Prognosis is good. Most patients recover in 6 weeks. Hearing aids can help with high frequencies.

His ears ring and ring and ring, and he’s alive.

He’s alive.

Jon is not.

“It’s because of him, you know.”

Martin startles badly at Tim’s voice. Tim wonders if it had been too loud; the ringing in his ears is incessant, and every word spoken sounds as if it’s coming from a very, very far distance. He moves a bit further into the room that they’ve placed Jon in, his hands shaking where they grip the wheels of the wheelchair they’d given him. Hard to walk when your leg is shattered. And some ribs as well.

Martin says something, Tim thinks, as he’s turning. His eyes are wide and rimmed with red, and he’s looking at Tim expectantly. Tim sighs, then winces as the motion sends tendrils of pain through his ribcage. “I can’t hear you, Martin. Either speak up—way, way up—or just… move your lips more or something. I don’t care.”

“What?” Martin enunciates, and it’s so ridiculous, Tim wants to cry.

He answers anyway.

“Me. Being here. I’m alive because… because of him.”

It was stupid, thinking he could protect Tim from an entire building collapsing on top of them. But his hand had gripped Tim’s wrist and he’d pulled him to the floor and he’d covered Tim’s body with his own, so when the shock wave had hit, Jon had gotten the worst of it.

Tim refuses to feel guilty about it. He does anyway. Because they’d argued, and Jon had stalked him, and Tim had cultivated his anger and fear into a simmering ember deep in his chest, but at the end of the day, Tim wasn’t supposed to survive.

Jon was.

Tim swallows, hating the bitter taste in his mouth, and says, “Do you… do you think he’s going to wake up?”

Martin says something, too softly for Tim to hear. His mouth twists into something small and pained, and he looks at the floor.

It’s answer enough.

Tim doesn’t ask again.

They arrest Elias a few hours later, after Martin’s collected himself enough to bring his plan to completion. Tim’s only regret is that he isn’t able to see the look on Elias’s face as he’s dragged away.

Knowing Tim’s luck, he’d probably have just looked smug.

The name Peter Lukas crosses Martin’s lips, spelled out in exaggerated motions when he visits Tim again. Tim thinks, absurdly, of the hydra. Cut off one head, two grow back.

Lukas probably won’t be better. Knowing their luck, he’ll be much worse. But Tim thinks of the way Melanie had shaken after she’d come out of Elias’s office, of the haunted look in Martin’s eyes when Tim had asked how his plan went, and can’t find it within himself to care.

They release him from the hospital with a hefty prescription of pain meds, small plastic hearing aids tucked in each ear, and a thick folder of discharge papers. Martin’s there when they do; the bags under his eyes are dark and smudged, and he nods mechanically as the nurses talk to him, outlining Tim’s care regime for the next few weeks. His eyes keep flicking to the side, to the corridor that leads to the long-term care section of the hospital. Wordlessly, Tim reaches over and takes Martin’s hand in his, giving it a single squeeze before holding it tightly.

Martin lets out a breath through his nose and squeezes back.

“Do you want me to, er. To take you back to yours?” Martin asks once they’re out, his voice on the softer side of muffled and overlaid with that constant ringing but audible enough now that he doesn’t have to shout.

Tim feels something almost like embarrassment curling in his stomach. “I, uh. I don’t have a place anymore.” Tim drums his fingers on his thighs, looks at the ground, and says, “I canceled my lease. About a week before we left for Great Yarmouth.”

There’s silence between them—or at least, as close to silence as Tim can get right now. Tim thinks Martin says something, a word or two brushing up against the edges of what the hearing aids allow him to hear, but he can’t grasp any of it. So, Tim looks up at Martin, at the pinched, pained expression on his face, and says, “Don’t pretend like you didn’t know.”

“Know what?” Martin says bitterly. “That you never expected to come back? Yeah, I got that part. I even got why, you know? Doesn’t make it better, though. I didn’t want to lose you, Tim.” Martin pauses, then says, so quietly Tim can barely hear it, “I didn’t want to lose anybody.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. But that’s not how this works. We were never going to all survive. Everything is fucked, and it still is, and it always will be.

“I’m sorry,” he says and finds he means it. Then, to clarify: “For hurting you. And… and for Jon.” He doesn’t elaborate on that point. He doesn’t know what he would say even if he tried. “But I’m not sorry for going, and I’m not sorry for pressing that button. If I would have died, I wouldn’t have been sorry for that either.”

“Right,” Martin says slowly. “But you didn’t. And the Circus is gone now, so do you…?”

“Do I still want to kill myself?”

Martin winces.

“Hey, your question, not mine,” Tim says, holding his hands up in a defensive gesture. After a moment, his hands drop back to his lap, and he gives a small shrug. “Don’t know. I knew I would do what I needed to in order to destroy the Circus, and I did. Thought I would die in the process, but I didn’t. I’m still trapped in the world’s shittiest job, and I don’t really…”

Tim shrugs again. “I don’t know,” he repeats. Then, because it feels true: “It was never… it was never the dying bit I was chasing, you know. I didn’t do this because I thought it would be a good way to get killed. I did it for Danny, and that’s it. Plain and simple. So if you’re asking if I want to die, the answer is no. But I can’t guarantee that I won’t make the same decision again if I have to.”

Martin’s quiet for a long moment. Then, calmer than Tim expects, he says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Tim echoes. Then, with a levity that only feels slightly forced: “I suppose it’s back to your place, then. Just be sure to buy me dinner first.”

Martin doesn’t smile at that like he used to, but his face does soften a bit. His voice is lighter when he says, “Oh, I will. Within your dietary restrictions, that is. Which means no alcohol.”

Tim groans. “You’re no fun.”

“Uh huh.”

They begin the commute back to Martin’s flat, and the atmosphere between them grows more lighthearted than it’s been in months. Tim feels something warm and familiar curl in his chest, and he realizes just how much he’s missed this. It’s not quite easy conversation, not like it used to be, but it’s nice all the same.

Tim’s ears ring, and his entire body aches, and he still feels a numbness in his core in the shape of suspicious glances and calliope music and a face he can’t remember, but for the first time in a long, long time, he allows himself to smile.

Tim doesn’t visit Jon often. At first, it’s the guilt, acute and cloying and weighing him down. Then, it’s old hurt and stale anger, resurfacing and driving away any passing thought of Jon that isn’t tinged with bad memories and broken trust. After that, it’s just habit.

It also hurts, if he lets himself admit it. To see Jon lying there, motionless and clad entirely in white, the heart monitor attached to him reading out a constant horizontal line even as his eyes move in small, jerky motions behind his eyelids.

See? a part of him whispers. He’s not human. Maybe he never was. Maybe he was always a monster, and you just never noticed. It wouldn’t be the first time.

A newer part of him, one that gets more prominent by the day, recognizes that even if Jon isn’t human anymore, he never would have chosen this. This stasis, this half-death. Not what came before, either. That part of him remembers the way Jon’s hand had gripped his tightly as they’d opened that trapdoor, and how it had continued to do so even as the worms had begun to bite into their skin. He’d tried to protect Tim then, too, putting himself between Tim and Jane Prentiss. For all the good it did, when the worms began to come from all directions. But Tim remembers the way the terror and pain in Jon’s eyes had been tinged with sadness, with a silent apology as he gripped Tim’s hand hard enough to bruise and they both accepted that this was it.

It hadn’t been, in the end. And now it is, with Jon all-but-dead and Tim still here, wheeling his way into Jon’s hospital room for the first time in weeks.

He’s halfway in before he realizes he’s not alone.

“Oh,” he says. “I… I didn’t know you’d be here.”

Martin lets out a sharp, jagged laugh. “Where else would I be?” he says, and it’s tinged with something bitter and broken that takes Tim a bit off-guard. It’s become almost routine now, for Martin to visit Jon, and usually, he comes back looking drained but otherwise fine. Sometimes, when Tim asks him for status updates on our resident medical mystery, Martin even manages a small smile and responds, still dreaming.

Martin scrubs a hand across his face, and Tim realizes belatedly that he’s crying.

“Martin?” Tim says carefully, moving a bit closer to where Martin’s sitting. “Are you… did something happen?”

“No,” Martin says, his voice catching in a way that indicates that something very much did happen. “It’s fine.”

“Is it…?” Tim pauses, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “Is it about Jon?”

Martin’s laugh this time is more like a whimper. “Nope, he’s- he’s the same as always. Still asleep.”

Tim moves closer but doesn’t say anything. The clock ticks rhythmically in the background, and he waits. Patience has never been his strong suit, but it’s been something that’s been required of him as of late, and he’s getting better at it.

He likes to think he’s getting better at a lot of things.

Martin doesn’t speak again for a few minutes. He stares at his hands where they rest just shy of one of Jon’s, his fingers restless against the sheets, coming up occasionally to fiddle with the thin black ring that rests on the middle finger of his right hand. Then, so quiet Tim almost can’t hear it, he says, “My mother died today.”

Oh.

“I’m sorry,” Tim says. They’re empty words, but they’re better than the good riddance and about time and you’re better off without her sitting on the back of his tongue, begging to be released. He doesn’t think they would be appreciated right now, no matter how true they might be.

“Yeah,” Martin says. He’s still staring at his hands. “They called me a few hours ago. She… she passed away in her sleep. Natural causes. From- from her illness.” He falls silent for a few moments, his fingers twisting in the sheets. Then: “I… I think I should be sad?”

Tim studies Martin’s face—the tear tracks down his cheeks, the unhappy set to his mouth, the way he’s shaking ever so slightly where he sits. His face is one of grief, but Tim doesn’t ask. He waits for Martin to continue, and after a moment, Martin says, “She was the only family I had left. She- she was my mother. I took care of her, I- I did my best to be a- a good son.” He takes in a shaky breath, curls his hands into fists, and says, “I haven’t seen her in months, you know. I- I visited at first, but she… she never wanted to see me. So I just stopped going. I’d call, every Saturday, but it was the same every time. She’s resting. She doesn’t feel up to talking right now. Call later, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Finally, Martin looks at Tim, and the guilt in his eyes is so acute Tim can feel it cut through him to his core. “I should be sad that she’s dead, but… but all I can feel is relief. And that hurts. I- I don’t know… why am I relieved? God, she was right, I- I’m horrible, no wonder she- she never wanted to see me, I- why can’t I- I can’t—”

Martin cuts off with a wet sob, and all at once, Tim understands.

“It’s okay,” he says, and he collects Martin’s hands from the sheets, holds them tightly in his own. “You can feel however you like, it’s- it’s okay.”

He squeezes Martin’s hands, just once, and repeats, “It’s okay.”

He knows Martin won’t believe him. But still, he sits, and Martin cries, and he says, It’s okay.

It’s okay.

The hearing aids are a permanent fixture in his ears now, as most people have full hearing restoration after six weeks apparently doesn’t include him. The tinnitus is still particularly bad some days, but they help with everything else. It’s not perfect, but it’s a small price to pay for living, he supposes.

He’s not sure when, exactly, he decides that he’s glad he’s alive. But he does.

He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear at all, when the Flesh attacks. He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear the wet, sticky sounds of things that shouldn’t be able to move without bones slipping through the vents, shattering the relative peace they’d begun to cultivate. He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear the pops of Basira’s gun, bullets burying themselves in things that barely flinched at the contact. He wishes he hadn’t been able to hear Melanie’s screams of anger, the responding screams of pain from things with too many eyes and teeth and limbs as her knife carved a violent path through them.

There are yellow doors and hands slick with blood and a sudden quiet as the last of the twisted, mangled creatures falls, sliced neatly in two in a way that’s just a bit too clean.

Melanie is breathing heavily, but her hands are steady and her eyes are hard with something raging and violent. When Basira reaches tentatively for her knife, saying, “It’s over now, Melanie. We’re- we’re safe,” Melanie stiffens but doesn’t resist.

“This isn’t right,” Tim says after Melanie comes back to herself in bits and pieces, enough to shudder at the blood coating her arms up to the elbows and mutter something he can’t quite catch before disappearing into the toilet. “None of this is. God, can we ever catch a fucking break?”

“We can deal with it later,” Basira says. She’s calm, but she can’t quite hide the tremor in her voice. Her Al-Amira is splattered with viscera. “Right now, we need to make a call. Get this cleaned up.”

“What,” Tim says bitterly, “so we can continue hiding away in the Archives? You’re the one who said we should start sleeping here. Should have known it wouldn’t be safe. It’s not like it was before.”

He rubs at one of the small circular scars on the back of his left hand, his skin crawling with a phantom itch that makes him vaguely nauseous.

“We stay here,” Basira says, leaving no room for debate. “We make the call, and we stay here.”

Tim makes a low, frustrated noise, and bites out, “Fine. Because Basira always knows best. Whatever.” He unlocks his wheelchair and says shortly, “I’m going outside for some fresh air. The smell of rotting meat is making me sick.”

Basira doesn’t follow him.

Martin does.

They situate themselves just outside the glass doors, and they don’t say anything for a long time. Martin still looks vaguely ill. His face is pale, and his hands are fidgeting at his sides. His fingers are resting on his ring, twisting it back and forth, agitated. His shoes are stained a glistening red.

Finally, Martin tilts his head back so it hits the wall behind him and says to the air above him, “Is it horrible that I wish Jon were here?”

Tim snorts, anger still bubbling under the surface of his skin. “Because we’d have done so much better with our own flavor of spooky bullshit?” He bites out a bitter laugh. “Maybe he could have compelled them to explain exactly why every single monster out there has a personal vendetta against us. Working for an eldritch horror of voyeurism doesn’t give you much in terms of an offense.”

“Stop,” Martin says sharply. “You know what I mean.”

Tim does. He’s just not particularly inclined to wax nostalgic about the power of friendship and comradery when he’s got bits of meat stuck in his hair.

Still, he finds that he means it when he says, “I wish he was too. For what it’s worth. Which isn’t a fucking lot, but it’s what we’ve got.”

“Yeah,” Martin says. His hand brushes against Tim’s, and they fall back into silence.

The police arrive, followed closely by the ECDC. It’s a messy affair, even messier than the last time Tim had been in this situation, and Tim wants nothing more than to get away. Forever.

He doesn’t make any jokes this time. He just nods in the right places, and when they’re finally released and he and Martin return to a flat they haven’t seen in weeks, he can feel weariness cutting through him to the bone.

When he wakes the next day, Martin’s gone. His note, stuck to the door of the fridge, says, At the hospital. Be back around noon.

It’s ten in the morning, and the sunlight is bright as it streams in through the kitchen window.

Tim digs out the bottle of rum that Martin keeps tucked in the back of his cabinet and pours himself a drink.

“Peter Lukas wants me to be his assistant.”

Tim looks up from what’s turning out to be quite an impressive doodle of the little figurine of a frog in a top hat he’d purchased back in research from a charity shop and says, “Absolutely not.”

Martin sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, holds it there for a moment, and then says, “I don’t know if I have a choice in the matter, really. It’s… it’s not safe here anymore.” Quieter: “He said he can help. Off- offer protection.”

Tim audibly scoffs at that. He sets down his pencil and notepad and crosses his arms across his chest. He can already feel a headache coming on. (More than the usual, that is. He’s almost able to tune out the constant ringing in his ears now.

Almost.)

“What’s he going to do, isolate them to death? It’s not like the Lonely’s any better of an offensive force than the Eye. We’re doing just fine without involving him.”

“Are we?” Martin’s voice is hard and a bit choked when he continues, “We’re living down here because it’s not safe to stay outside for too long. We’re still finding bits of- of flesh in- eugh.” Martin shudders and folds inward on himself. Quieter, enough so that Tim has to watch the motion of his lips to make out the words, he says, “Jon’s not waking up.”

Tim feels something inside of him twist. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what’s happening with him.” A touch bitterly—old habits die hard, he supposes—he says, “Maybe he’s just not done going through his monster metamorphosis yet.”

“Tim.”

Tim sighs. It’s a profoundly weary sound. “Yeah, yeah. I… I miss him too, you know.”

He’s surprised to find that it’s not a lie.

“Right.” A small, shaky smile crosses Martin’s face, and he says, “I- I suppose they’re right, then. Distance does make the heart grow fonder.”

“Somehow,” Tim says, “I don’t think whoever coined that phrase had this situation in mind.”

Martin’s smile fades as quickly as it had come, and Tim feels a pang of guilt. “Sorry,” he says, pushing away from the desk and wheeling across the room to where Martin sits. He hesitates, just a moment, before placing his hand on Martin’s where it rests on his knee. “I… I suppose I’ve forgotten how to be lighthearted about all of this.”

Martin nods. It’s a small motion. He’s silent for a long moment; Tim squeezes his hand and says nothing. Finally, Martin looks down at his hands and says, “It’s been four months, Tim. Nothing’s changed.” He pauses again, his mouth pinching around the edges. “I… I visited him today. I begged him to wake up, to- to do anything to indicate that he’s even still there. I don’t know why I expected him to answer. It’s not like anything’s different now. He- he’s never going to wake up, Tim.”

Martin’s voice cracks, and he repeats, wetly, “He’s never going to wake up.”

Then, Martin’s crying, heaving sobs that overtake him completely and have him hunched over, dripping salty tears onto the back of Tim’s hand. “Hey, hey, hey,” Tim says, leaning forward as far as he’s comfortably able to and wrapping Martin in as hard of a hug as he can manage. He rubs his hands in circles across Martin’s shoulderblades, feeling Martin’s shaky breaths against the side of his neck, and says, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

He repeats it, again and again, as Martin cries into his shoulder and says, over and over, words thick with grief, “He’s dead, Tim. He’s dead.”

“It’s okay,” Tim says. Maybe if he says it enough times, he’ll start to believe it.

Eventually, Martin’s body stops shaking and he pulls back, the tear tracks on his cheeks already beginning to dry. His eyes are red-rimmed and glistening, and he looks tired, grief apparent in every line of him.

“I said I’d think about it,” Martin says, in a voice rubbed raw and hoarse. “When Peter called me. I- I said I’d think about it. I- I don’t know why…” He cuts off, makes a small, distressed noise, and says, “What do I even have left? If- if this can help, what- what do I have to lose?”

Tim feels a pang of hurt flash through him, but he suppresses it. He squeezes Martin’s hands, gives him as wide a smile as he can without breaking, and says, “You have me. And I’m not leaving—you’re stuck with me. So don’t think for a second that if you take Peter’s deal, I won’t be there still. I’m like a bad penny, or, I don’t know, a- a fungus or whatever. The point is, you’re not going to get rid of me. Whether or not you decide to work for Lukas—which you shouldn’t, by the way, in case I haven’t made that abundantly clear—you’re not going to be lonely, okay? Not on my watch. I can be very persistent when I put my mind to it.”

Martin looks at Tim, eyes wide, and another small, hiccuping sob escapes him. “You really mean that?”

“Yes, Martin,” Tim says, exasperation and fondness filling him in equal measure. “Christ, just because things got… rough for a bit, it doesn’t mean I stopped caring about you. Honestly, don’t know if I could. You’re a very lovable person, you know. It’s not like being your friend is a hardship.”

Martin laughs a little at that, his voice still thick with tears. “Well, when you put it like that…”

Tim gives him another smile, and this one feels easier. Like it would be harder not to smile. Still, he’s careful with his words when he says, “So, then. What are you going to do? I’ve made my opinion more than known, but…” Tim swallows around the lump in his throat and continues, “It’s your decision.”

“Yeah,” Martin says, barely more than a whisper. “Yeah.”

Peter calls again. And when Martin hesitates for a long moment before giving a quiet yet firm no, the relief that sweeps over Tim is enough to make him feel weightless.

Two months later, as a man who smells of death shuts the door behind him, Jon takes a rattling breath and finally opens his eyes.

“Tim?”

Tim raises the hand that’s not holding a rather large bouquet of white daisies and baby’s breath in a half-wave. “Hi, boss. Been a while.”

The look Jon gives him is half-shocked, half-nervous. “I… I suppose it has. Six months, apparently.”

Tim makes a sound of affirmation before wheeling himself fully into Jon’s hospital room and letting the door swing shut behind him. “You know,” he says, allowing a blanket of levity to fall over him, “when we said you should get more sleep, this isn’t exactly what we meant.”

Jon just stares at him for a moment, face blank and eyes wide. Then, a laugh escapes him, a small hiccup of amusement. “Yes, well. I can’t say that I feel particularly well-rested.”

Tim imagines what it must have been like, to be locked in a dreamscape stasis for six months. He can’t say that the idea sounds particularly relaxing. “Yep, sounds about right. Guess we can cross ‘spooky coma’ off our list of possible cures for sleep deprivation.”

Jon folds inward on himself a bit, hugging one arm to his chest and gripping the other tightly. “Right,” he says, his voice small. He looks away from Tim, focusing on the small window in the corner of the room, and says, “I… I’m sorry, Tim.”

Right. Jon still thinks Tim hates him.

Tim lets out a long, weary sigh and makes his way to Jon’s bed. He practically shoves the flowers into Jon’s hands; Jon takes them, more out of surprise than anything, white petals tickling the bottom of his chin. “It’s been six months, Jon. You’ve been… honestly, a bit dead? No offense. And I’ve been alive. And we both know it was meant to be the other way around.”

Jon opens his mouth, and Tim holds up a hand. “Don’t. I know. I already hear enough about it from my therapist, I don’t need to hear about it from you too. The point is that I’ve… I’ve had time to think. And some of the things you did, I can’t forgive you for. But some of it…”

Tim shrugs. “Martin would always go on about how it wasn’t your fault. About how you were suffering just as much as us. And maybe I didn’t believe it because I was already angry, or maybe I didn’t believe it because all I could think about was finally getting a chance at the revenge I’d chased after for years. But then you were gone, and the Circus was gone, and I just… didn’t have anything left for the anger to hold on to.”

Jon clutches the flowers tightly in his hands, looks down at the petals. “But you were right,” he says quietly. “A- about me.”

Tim casts himself back six months and sifts through a metric ton of bitter remarks and angry assumptions. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Jon lets out a slow, shaky breath. “About me not being human.”

Oh.

“Jon—”

“Do you know what I was dreaming about?” Jon cuts in before Tim can say anything else. “I- I don’t remember, not really, but… but I can guess. I… I Know, somehow, that- that they were the same dreams, over and over and over again.” Jon takes one of the flower petals between his fingers and rubs it back and forth, a nervous gesture. “I started having them soon after I took this job, you know. Naomi Herne was the first one, and I- I didn’t understand why. Every night, she was trapped in the fog, forced into her own grave, and I would try to move, because it- it felt like I should have been able to, but it- it never worked. So I… I stopped trying after a while. I would stand and watch as she relived one of the worst experiences of her life, every night, and I- I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

Jon crushes the petal between his fingers. “She was the first one, but- but there are so many more now. Lionel Elliott and Jordan Kennedy and- and, Christ, Georgie—”

Jon makes a small, unhappy noise. “I don’t know when I realized that they could see me in their dreams too. That in trying to help, I- I’d just made myself another source of terror.”

Jon falls silent for a few moments; the quiet is filled by the familiar tick tick tick of the clock in the corner. Then, so quietly Tim has to focus on his lips to catch the words, he says, “I… I think I made a choice. Before I woke up. I don’t… I don’t know what it means for me, not really, but I know it means that I’m worse than I was before.” He lets out a bitter laugh, devoid of any humor. “So, you were right. I’m just- just even less human now.”

Jon falls silent again, and for a few moments, there’s just tick, tick, tick. Tim rolls the words over in his mind, looks at Jon’s pinched, unhappy expression, and says, “Okay.”

Jon looks at him then, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Okay?”

Tim shrugs and repeats, “Okay. You’re not human. I’m not going to pretend like that thrills me or whatever, but it’s… honestly, it’s a lot less of an issue for me now than it was back then.”

“I- I don’t…” Jon trails off with a frustrated noise. “What?”

Tim sighs. “A lot’s changed, Jon. Things have… well, things have kind of gone to hell. Honestly, we could use a few monsters who are on our side for a change.”

Jon blinks at him in stunned silence for a few moments more before saying, bewildered, “... Right. Uh, I- I suppose I shouldn’t ask how you’ve been, then.”

A wry smile cracks across Tim’s face. “I’ve been just peachy, thanks for asking. Blow up one Circus and suddenly every spooky monster out there wants to kill you. It’s been one big, long, horrible sleepover in the Archives. But hey, at least Elias isn’t there! Now we’ve just got Lukas, and if one or two staff members disappear every once and a while, well—that’s just how it is at the Magnus Institute. Nothing to be concerned about. Sometimes, we still go out for drinks.”

“Tim,” Jon says flatly. The exasperated expression on his face is so familiar—so Jon—that Tim feels a tension he hadn’t known he’d been holding slip away.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tim says, waving a hand absently in Jon’s direction. “Point is, I’m not disappointed or angry or whatever that you’re back in the land of the living.” He pauses, and then, more sincerely: “Martin’s not the only one who’s missed you, okay?”

Jon’s lips part into an O. Then, his mouth twitches up into a smirk, and he says, “Mm, you’re right. Basira did stop by earlier, and then of course Georgie, and I bet even Melanie—”

“Unbelievable. And here I was nice enough to come all the way over here, to bring you flowers.”

“Mm, they are very nice flowers.”

“Damn right they are.”

Jon smiles then, a fragile thing, and says, “Thank you, Tim. I… I’ve missed you too.”

Tim could point out that Jon had been asleep for the majority of the time in question. But he knows that’s not what Jon means. So instead, he offers Jon a smile in return and says, “Be honest: more or less than the Admiral?”

Jon shoots Tim a flat, unimpressed look. “Tim, don’t be ridiculous. Of course less than the Admiral.”

Tim’s been out of the wheelchair for a week when he finally manages to make his way to the roof of the Institute, still learning how to maneuver the crutches he’s moved on to. He swears he can feel every motion of the pins and the rods in his leg—skin covered with even more scars for the collection—as he finally heaves himself through the door and into the cool night air.

The view is just as good as he remembers.

There’s the faint smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and Tim’s entirely unsurprised to see Jon silhouetted against the glow of London, leaning against the wall that rings the roof with his back facing Tim. The cigarette glows a dull red as he raises it to his lips and breathes in.

Jon doesn’t say anything, even as Tim painstakingly makes his way over to where he’s stood. Tim props his crutches against the wall before leaning his weight heavily against it, arms crossed atop the wall in a mirror image of Jon as they both look out onto the city below, humming with life and light.

Finally, after a particularly long drag of his cigarette, Jon says, “I’m going to get Daisy.”

There’s no room for argument in his voice. But that’s never stopped Tim from trying anyways.

“I thought you were done doing stupid shit that’ll get you killed,” Tim says, turning his head to look at Jon. Jon’s staring forward, but Tim gets the distinct impression that Jon isn’t looking out at the city at all.

“It won’t kill me,” Jon says quietly. He moves his hands as he talks, surprisingly competent sign language that he’s begun using tentatively in his conversations with Tim. When Tim had asked him where he’d learned it, Jon had been quiet for a long moment before telling him that he hadn’t.

Well. At least the Eye was being useful for once.

“Yeah, whatever,” Tim says. “Dead or not, you’ll still be gone. You know people who crawl into that coffin don’t come back.”

“I don’t—” Jon cuts off with a frustrated noise. After a moment, he continues, “I have a plan. I- I read a statement, and it said that I would need an anchor. A- a piece of myself to keep here. I can find it when I’m down there, and- and use it to guide me back.”

“Right,” Tim says dryly. “Because our plans have always gone so well.”

“What would you have me do, Tim? I- I can’t just do nothing.”

“Why not?”

Jon affixes him with an expression that’s half-affronted, half-stunned. “Tim.”

“What? Jon, we barely know Daisy. She tried to kill you. No, don’t give me that look.” Tim jabs a finger in Jon’s direction. “You know I’m right.”

“I…” Jon trails off. After a moment, he hugs his arms to himself, his snubbed-out cigarette still smoldering slightly on top of the wall. “I know. But I… I still have to go. I… I’m still going to go.”

Tim exhales slowly and says, “Right. Suppose I should have expected that.”

There’s silence between them for a moment. Then, Jon removes his hands from his arms and signs as he says, quietly, “Why don’t you hate me?”

Tim stares at Jon for a long moment before saying, “What?”

Jon sighs and repeats, the motions of his hands larger and more emphatic, “Why don’t you hate me? Basira and Melanie, they- they keep looking at me like I’m some… thing, and- and maybe I am. No, not… not maybe. I’m not… I’m not human anymore, and I- I know what you said, but what happens when I—?”

Jon cuts off with a small, choked noise, like the air’s been sucked out of him all at once. Weakly, he signs, “I’m so hungry, all the time. What happens when I… when I can’t take it anymore? When I- I become dangerous, a- a monster, will you—?”

Jon’s fingers curl into fists, and he drops his hands to his sides, angling himself away from Tim and staring at an arbitrary point in the distance. “It’s better this way,” he says, loudly enough that Tim can make out the words above the hum of London at night and the ever-present ringing in his ears. “I… I don’t want to go. I don’t want to lose this, to- to lose you and- and Martin. But maybe it’s better than becoming something that will hurt you.”

Jon won’t meet Tim’s eyes. Carefully, Tim reaches across the space between them and takes Jon’s hand in his, uncurling Jon’s fingers gently in an attempt to release some of the tension. Slowly, he says, “You know, I… I shouldn’t be alive right now. Back after the Unknowing, when I woke up in the hospital, I… I didn’t want to be. It was supposed to be whatever it takes, and to me, that was always going to mean my death. Revenge and poetic justice and all of that. I should have died, but I didn’t. And… and you did. And it’s not something I feel guilty about, because we both made the same choice in the end, but that… that doesn’t stop me from feeling, sometimes, like it was my fault somehow.” He lets out a sharp laugh and says, “Well, I was the one to actually blow the place up in the end, but, you know.”

Tim holds Jon’s hand carefully in his like it might break otherwise, the mottled texture of the scar tissue firm against his fingertips. His eyes find the thin white line slashed across Jon’s throat, the stark white bandage poking out from the collar of Jon’s shirt where it covers a fresh scalpel wound in his shoulder, the pale pink spots that pepper Jon’s skin in a mirror image of his own. He can’t see the splash of jagged scars across Jon’s back, a memory of shrapnel and white-hot explosions, but he knows they’re there. “You asked why I don’t hate you?”

When Jon nods mutely, Tim says, “I just… ran out of reasons why I should. I still wanted to, but…” He shrugs and gives Jon a wry, humorless smile. “We’re all just stuck in the same shitty situation. And I guess at some point, I just decided that you hadn’t chosen to be here any more than I did.”

“Oh,” Jon says, barely audible.

Tim takes Jon’s other hand in his, squeezes them firmly, and says, “And I’m sorry. Not for- for how we used to be, because I think the blame for that falls pretty evenly onto both of our shoulders, but… but for everything else. For what’s happened to you. Figured I’ve spent enough time feeling sorry for myself, I might as well extend you the same courtesy.”

Jon’s fingers tighten around Tim’s, and he mumbles something Tim can’t quite catch. Then, he extracts his hands from Tim’s and signs, shakily, “I’m sorry too. For everything. But for what it’s worth, I… I’m glad you’re here. That you’re not dead. I- I know it’s been bad and- and I wish I could fix that, but I… I don’t know if I can.” Jon’s eyes when they meet Tim’s are sad but determined. “But I can fix this. I- I can get Daisy back. I can find my way out.”

Tim looks at the firm set to Jon’s mouth, the furrow of his brow, and says, “Okay. But I’m going to hold you to that. Otherwise, I might have to go in after you.”

Jon looks horrified. “Tim.”

Tim holds his hands up in a placating gesture. “Hey, come back in one piece and we won’t have to worry about it.”

Jon opens his mouth, then closes it again. There’s a long pause before he finally says, decidedly, “I will. I- I promise.”

Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tim wants to say. Instead, he shuffles closer to Jon and leans against the wall again, crossing his arms on top of it and looking out over the city. “Good,” he says softly.

After a moment, Jon shifts to face the city as well. His arm brushes against Tim’s, and Tim lets that point of contact ground him as he looks up and up and up at the stars above, pinpricks of light on a satin black sky.

“Thank you,” Jon says, just loud enough for Tim to hear.

Tim moves his hand to cover Jon’s where it sits on the wall and squeezes once. “Yeah.”

They stand there until sunlight begins to tickle the edges of the horizon. And when Jon gives Tim’s hand one last squeeze, the other holding the lid of the coffin open, and says, “Be back soon,” Tim believes him.

Three days later, Jon climbs out of the coffin with dirt caked underneath his fingernails and a thin, sharp hand clutched in his. “Tim,” he says, and Tim ignores the pain in his leg as he lets his crutches drop to the floor and hugs Jon tightly.

“Looks like I’m staying above ground after all,” Tim jokes, his voice light even as his words come out wet and choked.

Jon’s laugh vibrates against Tim’s chest. “Yeah,” he says, burying his face in the fabric of Tim’s shoulder to hide his smile. “Yeah.”

#tma #the magnus archives #jonathan sims #tim stoker #martin blackwood #creators are revealed now so i can post this!#very exciting #blood cw #body horror cw #injury cw #hospitals cw #suicidal ideations cw #more cw in the body of the post as well #my writing #my fic

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kittenshift-17 · 3 years

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Hi! I've really been craving some snamione fics, and your writing has made me picky 😬 do you have any fic recs or authors you go to when you're wanting something good? (the spicier the better)

Girl, you came to the right place. My Snamione loving heart is all aflutter. MY TIME HAS COME!!

*scampers off to fetch list to all her fave Snamiones in no particular order*

Self Slain Gods on Strange Altars by scumblackentropy What do you want me to say, Granger? That you are mine and I am yours? You are. I am. Let's not fuck around.

Pet Project by Caeria Hermione overhears something she shouldn't concerning Professor Snape and decides that maybe the House-elves aren't the only ones in need of protection.

FALLING FURTHER IN by kaz2 Hermione begins to learn something of the man behind the dark sarcasms of the classroom.

Chasing The Sun by Loten AU, from Order of the Phoenix onwards. Hermione only wanted to learn Healing; she discovers that Professor Snape is a human being after all, and his actions dramatically shape the course of the war as events unfold. Complete.

Pride of Time by Anubis Ankh Hermione quite literally crashes her way back through time by roughly twenty years. There is no going back; the only way is to go forward. And when one unwittingly interferes with time, what one expects may not be what time finds...

Inkspots by mezzosangue When you are a double spy with two masters, no one is a friend. But the war ended last May, and Severus is now his own man. An owl brings a letter of change, but is it a good change? Canon Compliant, disregards Epilogue. Eventual SS/HG romance.

Splintered and Broken by A plus He had watched as the thin wood snapped across her knee with a violence he had not known she possessed. He had been her teacher for seven years and had never seen this girl give up at anything. Voldemort wins, Hermione leaves, Severus waits.

The Tattered Man by Aurette I was once asked to write a Marriage Law Challenge fic by someone who loves a sad tale. This short story is it. Angst, Character Death. Tissues recommended. COMPLETE

Saving your life by lilmisblack When Hermione is captured by Death Eaters, Severus knows there's only one way to save her. 'What are you doing? ' she asked, her voice shaky. 'Saving your life,' he said, just as he started kissing her neck.

A Murder of Crows by Hogwarts 91 14 yrs post-war: Hermione’s teaching at Hogwarts when an un-aged Snape awakens from stasis and returns to the school. Sparks fly when they meet. Can they learn to trust and love in time to defeat an evil plot bent on changing the wizarding world forever?

Advanced Floriography by Viridiantly Snape's first question to Harry about wormwood and asphodel in the Language of Flowers means 'I bitterly regret Lily's death'. Harry never gets the message behind the question, but what if Hermione does, years later? Mostly set in HBP, DH and after. A story of messages with flowers, the wizarding war, and different kinds of love. Slow-burn. Not canon-compliant, but canon-inspired.

Looking for Magic by Hypnobarb Severus Snape and Hermione Granger deal with traumas past and present and find they have more in common than they realize as they prepare for the ultimate confrontation with Voldemort. SSHG pairing. Not HBP compliant. This is a novel length story.

Synergy by Laurielove Hermione is being followed, and she suspects she knows by whom. But when they come face-to-face, how will she react to him and his startling request? SS/HG. M readers only, please. Written for the 2011 LJ SS/HG Exchange.

Post Tenebras, Lux by Loten "After Darkness, Light." A chance meeting ten years after the war may not be just a coincidence, and may prove to have very far-reaching consequences. A story of many things, but primarily of healing. SS/HG; rated M for later chapters. Complete.

For the Potions Master's Amusement by snape.submiss Now Complete! Severus Snape is not a kind man, but Hermione Granger is past caring. She wants his approval and will do anything to get it. How far will she go? Even she has no concept of the depths to which she will fall in her quest.

Latent Loveliness by Ladyreason Bellatrix gets in one last curse before her defeat which causes Hermione to fall into a deep sleep... She'll only awaken to one man's kiss. And boy, will she awaken. eventual SSHG pairing

Babble On by Aurette One person's nervous tic, is another's nervous joy.

Liminal by Cybrokat Severus Snape keeps running into a student playing piano. Why does he stop to listen, and how does she respond when she is asked to invite him when she plays? And what about Voldemort? Here there be fluff, romance, drama, and angst.

Sins of the Father by Emmaficready 9 Months after the end of the war, a destitute Severus Snape, practically living rough, gets news that will change his life forever. Severus Snape Lives! / POST DH / EWE WARNINGS: Abuse, Neglect, Character Death, Rape, Sensitive/taboo topics.

The Marriage Law by teshara 020 rewrite and update! When Hermione Granger and Severus Snape are thrown together by the ill-conceived Marriage Law, no one doubts they'll make a good undercover team for the Order. No one suspects that they'll find mutual respect, love, and a plot to destroy the world. A story in 3 parts.

A wizard s trial by snapeophil Hermione is out after curfew when she witnesses something that will change her relationship to her DADA professor forever.

The Prisoner and the Occlumens by duskywolfdaemon Hermione's plans to spend her seventh year on the run with her friends are shattered when Severus Snape shows up with a proposal she cannot refuse. *AU 7th year with Hermione attending Hogwarts. Eventual SSHG. M for reasons. ***COMPLETE***

Unintentional Inveiglement by onecelestialbeing Takes places during the summer after OoTP, the Golden Trio is forced to stay in hiding at Grimmauld Place. Hermione (who is of age!) begins gravitating towards Snape without knowing why, and he attempts keeping her at arms length, but will be able to remain doing so? AU

Innocent Shadows by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse "You'll sort everything. Gods, Hermione, you fought five Death Eaters to a standstill *and* defended and saved Snape."/ "Professor Snape."/ Harry rolled his eyes. "Yes. That." He waved his hand at the bed. "So this? Piece of cake." /Marriage Law /ss/hg HEA...always *grin*

Turned Over by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse Severus Snape inherited Hermione Granger at three o'clock on a rain-soaked Saturday morning in March. SS/HG HEA...Always :) COMPLETE

The Irony by awakethelion Hermione Granger gets stuck in her Animagus form and is put in the care of the only one strong enough to control her - Severus Snape. The over-achieving know-it-all Gryffindor, is, in the eyes of Hogwarts student body, home taking care of her ill parents, while in reality she is now living life posing as Professor Snape's familiar. J.K. Rowling owns all the characters.

Camerado by MillieJoan Hermione seeks knowledge from a reluctant Snape in order to help the War effort. What she receives is more than either of them expected. Set beginning in Hermione's sixth year, continuing into a slightly AU post-DH era.

Unto Their Own by CRMediaGal The Light has fallen, Darkness abounds, and Hermione Granger is struggling to survive in a far more sinister Wizarding world. When she is sentenced into Snape's charge, Hermione begins to wonder if everything is truly as it seems. For better or worse, their worlds are about to collide, perhaps even unite them against a common enemy. AU, Post-Hogwarts, Rated M.

Vixen by SLovingLecter After her parent's deaths Hermione is bound and trapped in her Animagus form, first for her own safety, then to ensure the safety of others during the war. Who is she bound to? Severus Snape, of course.

Another Dream by dragoon811 Due to his injuries, Severus is unable to resume his old life. He's determined to be lonely and miserable, but the yearly Order Christmas party becomes a bright spot, thanks to Hermione Granger. Complete.

Entangled by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse No doubt, she'd been showing off obscure spells she found in the archives, again. Apparently, she did that whilst drunk. Hermione never yet had any memory of it. / SS/HG HEA...Always :)

Time Immemorial by FawkesyLady Hermione loses it after the Battle of Hogwarts. Unfortunately, she still had that time turner and she uses it, sending her back in time, a mystery for the denizens of Hogwarts, circa 1976. OC's are important. Please note, chapters 21-26 could be considered crossovers with JRR Tolkien's Return of the King. In for long haul, y'all. Nominee for Marauder's Medal 2018, Best WIP.

The Offer of Just One More by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse The feeling in her chest twisted. Tightened. Ronald Weasley didn't want children. SS/HG HEA...Always :) This one's a slow burn.

Time's Hammer by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse She was about to break the time stream. Not just break it, but take a bloody hammer to it. SS/HG HEA...Always :)

Clash of the Conjurers by llorolalluvia In a world where the mere flap of a butterfly's wing can cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe, can one simple glance save a man's life? When Hermione and her professor are forced together against their will, can they overcome their differences, find order amidst the chaos, and save the Wizarding World? not Cannon compliant. Rated M for sexuality and violence. DUBCON!

Turned Over by IShouldBeWritingSomethingElse Severus Snape inherited Hermione Granger at three o'clock on a rain-soaked Saturday morning in March. SS/HG HEA...Always :) COMPLETE

One Step Forward, Two Decades Back by corvusdraconis AU/AO: [HG/SS] What-if Story. Hermione Granger gets erased due to a badly phrased, vague, and bitter wish. She is Hermione Granger no more. Now, thanks to Ron, she is Hermione Ankaa Black, sister of Sirius & Regulus Black, & member of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Now what is she going to do? Multiple pairings in later chapters, and JP starts out as a rampaging jerk.

Absinthe by Aurette A dark deed on a dark night sends two lives spinning out of control. To forge a future, both must confront their pasts. AU, EWE, SS/HG, HEA

The Love You Take by Subversa Hermione is cursed by the Death Eaters, and Dumbledore believes Professor Snape is the only one who can help her and keep her safe. Hermione is 18 years old in this story, but she is still a student.

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jostenneil · 3 years

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how do you feel about people shipping toxic ships?

i think this depends on a few things. primarily, that fandom tends to conflate the terms abusive and toxic with each other. . . a lot. toxicity is inherent to abuse, but the reverse of that isn’t necessarily true. you can have a toxic relationship with someone without it being abusive, esp since, to me at least, abuse specifically arises from a person taking advantage of a power dynamic within what should normally be a mutually supportive relationship to deliberately hurt the other person. an example of an abusive relationship to me would be (from the grisha trilogy) alina and the darkling, who uses alina’s trust and sympathy towards him to manipulate, isolate, and threaten her to the point that it emotionally debilitates her and threatens her other relationships with people. there’s a clear power dynamic being manipulated there to the advantage of one person and to the harm of the other

a toxic relationship to me can involve intentional behavior but it can also involve a lot of unintentional behavior, esp that driven by trauma or a non-ideal upbringing, and then i also think a lot of toxic relationships are simply. . . between people you would never expect to get along to begin with. a lot of enemies to lovers ships have their initial basis in toxicity bc the people involved are enemies. they’re not supposed to actually like each other (or value each other’s lives) in the beginning, and usually if you write such a dynamic well, then certain political events and revelations eventually help those stances evolve to where the toxicity is addressed and overcome (and the same process can apply to rivals to lovers situations as well, albeit along softer parameters usually since politics aren’t necessarily involved). i personally like to see toxicity explored if writers give it direction. toxicity is off-putting if it’s static bc then it serves no other purpose than to scream in big neon letters “omg these ppl are sooo toxic it’s so sexy blah blah blah” and that’s incredibly boring to me. what well explored toxicity does is analyze how the people involved are impacted by that toxicity. whether being toxic invokes remorse, isolation, misery, etc. that’s what interests me

sometimes, it goes the ideal way, wherein characters realize their toxicity only hurts themselves and they express a genuine desire to change and grow. sasuke (from naruto) is a fairly obv example of that phenomenon to me, in that, yes, he’s absolutely right to be distrustful of the villages’ ulterior motives and to want justice for his family’s massacre, but driving away the people he loves and who love him doesn’t ultimately help him in attaining that goal or vision. post canon naruto is an absolute mess, but i think most people would agree on the general premise that in an ideal world, sasuke opening himself back up to naruto, sakura, and kakashi could have helped him enact change bc he would have a support system behind him, and he wouldn’t have to further isolate himself or render himself so prone to manipulation via trauma if he was able to rely on people he genuinely cared about

other times, toxicity can go the tragic route. the characters may be aware of their faults but fail to figure out how to fix them, or they may not be aware of those faults at all and continue to indulge in them until their ultimate downfall. as miserable as that sounds, i think there’s a value in narratives like that, too. it teaches you a lesson, and it can also garner sympathy from you as a reader in some circumstances bc you may realize that some toxic behaviors of a given character were inadvertent and they didn’t have the resources or environment that would make them conducive to change. that’s like the epitome of wuthering heights to me. most of the characters are absolutely terrible to each other, but there’s something to learn from that, and with heathcliff esp, you see that a lot of his toxicity stems from trauma and abuse that he didn’t really have the emotional resources to ever recover from, so you can’t entirely render him into a villain bc it’s a flat reading

toxicity can also exhibit a blend of the two above scenarios. wuthering heights also feels like a good example of that to me. heathcliff and catherine’s ends are tragic, but hareton and cathy junior’s ends are far more hopeful in comparison. some people don’t learn, but others do, and it’s a good insight into the nature of human dichotomy as well as cycles of toxicity and abuse within context of class and race relations

so ultimately, i think i personally find a lot of worth in exploration of toxic relationships bc it can really get to the heart of analysis of the human psyche and how real world relationships are often non ideal. but that being said, how i feel about the phenomenon as it goes in fandom is. . . tricky. i’ll be straight and say i don’t think most people are sensible enough to really get to the root of what makes toxic relationships interesting and are instead content to rely on toxic stasis bc it’s easily marketable and readily appealing. you don’t have to deal with the real questions contending with toxicity demands of you if you don’t care, and that’s unfortunately a mindset that pervades fandom at large

#asks #mine:media analysis #narratives #sorry this is so long omg. i just have a lot of thoughts #i also didn’t rly get into the race or imperial contexts this can exist within #but generally i think it’s a very fine line to toe #like as an example i used to really ship zutara as a kid #but i think a lot of fandom interpretation of the ship severely underscores katara’s trauma or her right to feel justified bc of it #she and zuko aren’t just toxic to be toxic. he’s literally part of a colonial project that lead to the near genocide of her people #so to see how their relationship is reduced to these like. scenarios where katara becomes fire lady and they live hea is bizarre tbh #like how do people think a water bender ruling over a nation of people who wanted her people dead and/or enslaved was going to work 😶#toxic dynamics that deal with this kind of relationship between a person who was colonized and a colonizer as such require a Lot of work #work that most media featuring these kind of relationships simply isn’t willing to go the extra mile to do lol

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catrasredemption-moved · 4 years

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catradora+shadow weaver's broken mask

“Why did you go back for it?”

“I don’t know.... it felt right?”

Adora looked at Catra, then down at the mask sitting on the bed between them. “What... What do you want to do with it?” Adora asked after a moment. Catra hid her face in her hands, making an aggravated noise.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’s still fucking with my head and she’s dead.”

“I’m sure she’d be happy to hear that,” Adora muttered darkly. They were still unpacking a lot of the damage Shadow Weaver had done to them. They weren’t sure they’d actually be over it.

“I’m so proud of you.” Catra scoffed into her hands. “What the fuck was that? She waits until she knows she’s going to die to say that. Manipulative bitch.”

“It’s probably the first nice thing she ever said to anyone without expecting something in return.” Adora shook her head. “I wonder if she always covered her face.”

Catra looked up from her hands, eyes fixing on the mask again. “I’d cover my face too if I looked like that horror show.”

Adora bit down a laugh. “She had the lower half of her face covered when she was teaching at Mystacor, too. I don’t get it.”

“I do.” Catra reached up to brush her fingers through her short locks of hair. “It’s easier to function when you have something to hide behind.”

Adora opened her mouth to argue - then stopped. Catra’s missing headpiece was a bit of a touchy subject, just because of how closely its lose was connected with Horde Prime and his abuse. She never knew how to bring it up.

“You didn’t hide,” she said instead. Catra laughed humorlessly.

“Yes, I did. Constantly.” She hesitated, eyes flicking around before focusing on Adora. “Can I... tell you something?”

“Always.”

Catra nodded, playing with her hair. “Sometimes I’m glad Horde Prime took it. It’s so stupid, but that mask was a part of me for so long, part of the person I don’t want to be. It was something comfortable, though. Like it... I dunno. Wearing it always made me feel better. Stronger. Sometimes I miss feeling secure with it, but... I don’t know if I ever would have been able to change otherwise. It’s dumb, I know-”

“It’s not,” Adora said quietly. “We never had anything that belonged to us when we were living in the Fright Zone, so we had to keep whatever we could get. Your mask, my jacket, that poetry book Rogelio found I have no idea where-”

“I completely forgot about that.” Catra giggled. Adora felt a rush of victory; getting Catra to laugh was always a win.

“If you feel like the mask became too much of who you were as a person you didn’t want to be, then... leaving it makes sense. Leaving that part of you behind is probably the best thing you can do.”

Catra met her gaze, giving her a small smile. “When did you get so wise?”

“I have some good influences.”

“You and Sparkles have a lot of philosophical conversations?”

Adora rolled her eyes, hitting Catra with a pillow. She grinned, grabbing it and throwing it back in Adora’s face. Glimmer appeared in the room, covering her eyes, before Adora could retaliate.

“I’m here, please be decent.”

“Why don’t you just knock if you’re worried about walking in on something?”

“Also, you walked in on us kissing once. I have absolutely heard you and Bow doing more-”

“Okay moving on!” Glimmer squealed, waving her hands wildly. “This is what I get for coming to see if you want to visit Bow’s dads with us...”

Her voice drifted off when she saw the mask on the bed. “Am... I interrupting something?”

“Not really.” Adora followed her gaze. “We’re just...”

Moping. Over Shadow Weaver. Again.” Catra gathered up the pieces of the mask and jumped off the bed, heading for the bed.

“Where’re you going?”

“I’m getting rid of this stupid thing, and then we’re going to see Bow’s dads because I definitely stole like five books last time I was there.”

“You stole - wait up!”

Adora hurried after her, Glimmer close on their heels.

No one had touched Shadow Weaver’s garden since their return to Bright Moon. They weren’t really sure what to do with it. The garden itself was in stasis, from what they could tell, perhaps waiting for a caretaker that would never come back.

Catra hesitated on the threshold of the garden before taking a deep breath and walking in. There was a small shovel beside one of the flower beds; she grabbed it, knelt down, and began digging. If this place wanted to act like a tomb, then it wouldn’t mind if part of Shadow Weaver was buried here.

Glimmer stayed back while Adora walked in. This was something they needed to do together - the two lost girls who had been terrorized by Shadow Weaver their entire lives, even after her death. They would be dealing with the ramifications of her actions for the rest of their lives.

This was their moment of closure, no matter how small it might be.

Adora leaned on Catra, watching her work. She took the mask when the hole was big enough, and arranged the pieces to lay them in. “Rest in pieces, hag,” Catra muttered before filling the hole again.

“Do you think we’re ever going to be okay?”

It was the first time either of them had said something like that out loud. The first time they acknowledged the real damage. “I don’t know,” Catra admitted. “But she’s not going to keep me from being happy anymore. I’m not giving her that satisfaction.”

Adora smiled gently, getting up on her tiptoes to kiss Catra’s temple. “Same.”

Shadow Weaver wasn’t there anymore. She couldn’t keep them apart or turn them against each other. She was gone. They were still there.

And she couldn’t stop them from living.

#catradora #she ra fic #jesus fucking christ this got long #I'm so sorry #Sam Writes #askbox fic #Mystery Person #Sam Answers

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lligkv · 3 years

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what the world will look like when it’s over

Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the first Adam Curtis documentary I’ve seen. I gather it’s not the most successful demonstration of his method; it sounds like Hypernormalization or The Century of the Self are tighter in their construction, less effortful (count how many times Curtis says something like “But then it started to run out of control” in this one), and perhaps less frustrating in their narration. In the early episodes of this documentary in particular, it feels like Curtis is constantly presenting what’s being covered as the turn, the decisive shift in his narrative—the emergence of the American counterculture, the revolution of the “unit of One” led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing to help her break the stalemate with the other revolutionaries in China into which Zedong had fallen in the 1960s, George Boole’s development of Boolean logic to describe human thought. And the whole thing feels longer and baggier than it needs to be. The early episodes devote much time to interesting individual narratives, like that of the Trinidadian British activist or sorts named Michael Freitas (or Michael X) or a trans woman named Julie in 1960s Britain; they also sprawl in a way that makes the overall argument a bit hard to divine. It’s not until the fourth episode that the shape of Curtis’s narrative becomes clear—that our age is the product of a struggle between a new, broadly liberal-democratic and capitalist image of individualism, a dying era of collectivist struggle, and older, more vicious systems of power, derived from the control of capital and expressed through the middle classes’ suspicion and viciousness toward the subaltern and toward each other, even as they remain subject to the power of oligarchs and billionaires.

Curtis also seems to play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. When he presents Médecins Sans Frontières’s founder Bernard Kouchner as an avatar of a theory of the “one world” of liberal democracy—the idea that we’re basically one world of individuals, enjoying certain human rights regardless of political orientations or ideologies, and that Western nations are duty-bound by virtue of their prosperity to intervene when other nations violate people’s rights—it seems a distortion of what Kouchner actually says in the footage Curtis includes: “We don’t care on leftist or rightist countries [sic]; there is no leftist and rightist suffering, and there is no possibility to split the world in[to] ‘good’ people or ‘bad’ people, ‘good’ dead and ‘bad’ dead.” Which isn’t to say Kouchner didn’t believe in liberal-democratic ideas—he may well have—but what he’s shown as saying has to do with the consideration of suffering as suffering regardless of a person’s identity or allegiance, which is a different matter.

This is just one of several moments when I stopped to wonder how secure I actually was in Curtis’s hands. But ultimately, I find the emotional history he lays out resonant. The age we’re living through now, in the 2020s, is indeed the product of certain fantasies of individualism and of a post-end-of-history, neoliberal “one world”—with no ideologies but capitalism and putative democracy—meeting age-old systems of power, acquisition, and control, and age-old features of the human mind and heart: resentment, prejudice, betrayal, jealousy, the need to be prosperous, the need to be free.

And Curtis’s work appeals to me for the same reason the writer Pankaj Mishra’s work does. He historicizes our underhistoricized time. What’s more, he does so in a way that’s especially rare to see in any mainstream media venue. Usually, when you want to understand the connections between, say, colonial-era empires and post-war welfare states, or if you want to understand what happened to turn Western societies as they were post-war to Western societies as they are post-financialization, you have to seek the information out on your own. It’s valuable to have someone in a place like the BBC willing to put the pieces of these narratives together. And willing to remind us of the events that are so incredibly easy to forget even in one’s own lifetime. Abu Ghraib, for instance, which pops up in part 6 of the documentary. That shit happened while I was alive. How often do I remember it? How many American sins get drowned out in the new ones that emerge every day of every month of every year? Or in the stasis that sets in when what was once novel, like the War on Terror or the invasion into our privacy represented by the Patriot Act, fades into regular life?

I was jotting down copious notes while watching the doc, as is my wont. The questions and thoughts that came up, in no particular order:

How do the elites of a given era impose their preferred ideologies? How are the structures of power we grow up with constructed, and how do those go on to shape our behavior?

Control, as it’s practiced by societies in the 21st century, often comes down to the recognition of patterns in human behavior—and their manipulation.

The loss of power, like that which was suffered after the collapse of Britain’s empire or in the slow hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing industry in the 20th century, leads to anger and melancholy that people can’t be expected to abandon. Does doing what you’re supposed to do bring you the happiness you were promised—or anything even resembling that happiness? When we’re living in a historical moment in which the answer is no, as is often the case today, we’ll need to watch out. It’s a sign people are being manipulated and abused.

Over time, the tech industry has come to understand that you can manage people en masse by collecting their data and manipulating the messages they receive in social media activity feeds and advertising—and you can make them feel like sovereign individuals at the same time through the very same means. In light of all this, will there ever be a revolution that actually changes the structure of power we’re currently stuck in? Is there a chance to alter this extreme individualism. on the part of people who are surrounded by political systems so enervated, by the supra-governmental system that is global finance capital—which politicians can’t control, and must appease and palliate—that they can’t respond to phenomena like climate change or meaningfully punish atrocities like wars prosecuted on false pretenses? Or are we stuck where we are, in a world that’s corrupt and exhausted? In nations whose governments depend on technologies of surveillance and myths of consumerist abundance or nationalist glory to maintain power, in the absence of any real vision for the future?

It all leads to some interesting takeaways. For one, the way culture reacts to politics and vice versa. As I was watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I was reminded of a conversation folks on the Discord server for the Relentless Picnic podcast had had recently about the strange things Richard Dawkins posts on his Twitter account. And it led me to think: when religious “caring conservatism” was in the White House, Richard Dawkins and his New Atheism, this brash repudiation of religion and its pieties, grew as a counterweight. When Obama and his technocratic regime were in power, with social media bringing on a wave of progressivism in popular culture and algorithms presenting us a fantasy of endless choice—much of which was a thin veneer over the same old shit: banks getting bailed out, forever wars going on, productivity rising while wages stagnated—we also got Jordan Peterson-types who claimed to speak to a human need for narrative, even in this point of stability we had seemed to reach, this recovery of sanity after the chaos that was the Iraq War and the financial crisis; who claimed we needed ideas and myths to animate and drive our lives, because they sensed there was something hollow and mendacious driving all this consumer choice, for all it seemed a symbol of our freedom and progress.

Of course, both Peterson and Dawkins are provocateurs, not intellectuals; I don’t mean to dignify the movements they led much, since in both the appearance of intellectual rigor or moral clarity often covered the indulgence of the worst instincts: immaturity, obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, contempt for women and trans people. The New Atheists had a point, and could be absolute assholes about it; they ultimately could be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as any religious people. As for Jordan Peterson, his actual work, in the way of so many grand theorists, uses the appearance of profundity to cover something ultimately pretty banal. And he’s most known for grandstanding in the public sphere—refusing to use people’s pronouns, the usual conservative shit. But these movements do seem to reflect a countercultural response no less than 1960s counterculture reflects a reaction to the staid culture of 1950s America and the sins it covered up.

Which leads me to the question: what was the culture’s response to Trump’s administration? Maybe QAnon and Russiagate, as conspiracies—that is, actual narratives people inhabit to explain the world’s evils, and not just a vague need for them that they satisfied with Jordan Peterson’s light form of Stoicism or his theories of Light and Dark or whatever the fuck. And in that way, perhaps, once a countercultural movement—namely nationalism and Trumpian populism—actually seemed to have overthrown a regime, of Obama-era liberal technocratic management, culture and politics came to mirror each other, rather than standing in opposition to each other. Both became equally conspiratorial and unhinged; in fact, they merged. All the ruling myths and conspiracies mutate in kind these days: Trump’s garbage about draining the swamp, a cover for Trump and his family enriching themselves and Stephen Miller’s like getting to fashion the state they wanted, becomes QAnon’s garbage about rings of child trafficking and pedophilia and Trump, of all people, being their savior—all while actual trafficking and abuse perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk goes unpunished, Epstein’s death swallowed up by the state without a sound—becomes the liberal pundit class’s screaming about Russia: connections between Trump and Putin that were always conjectural to me, because no one who pled them seemed to feel much need to substantiate them.

Here again I feel like what were once centrifugal forces in our culture—between mainstream and the independent media, for example; between people in power and their critics, either in the media or at society’s margins—have collapsed into a single morass. We’re all in hell and there’s no way out.

In all this, what does Biden’s administration represent? Little more than an interregnum, to my mind. How disappointing to see not even a gesture toward forgiving student debt or raising the minimum wage in these first 100 days of his presidency. There’s been some progress in climate legislation, and progress in putting Stephen Miller’s deportation machine to a halt (though they’re also reopening several emergency shelters to accommodate more minors already being held past the mandated limits for keeping them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement). But there’s also been such triangulation on policy by the administration and its supporters and such complacency on the part of the media covering the administration, refusing to call them out on or even cover this. And how can the average voter respond but with resignation?

Ever since I read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus near the start of lockdown, absorbing the picture of the world pre-World War II that’s presented in that book, I’ve thought we’re in the same sort of moment that Mann’s protagonist Zeitblom was in. There’s a crisis that’s passing over this whole planet like a wave or a seismic event, and no human intervention can interrupt it. We can only wait for it to pass—holding on to whatever’s to hand, waiting to see what the world will look like when it’s over.

#adam curtis #documentaries #thomas mann #jordan peterson #richard dawkins #pankaj mishra #the relentless picnic #conspiracy

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fandom-necromancer · 3 years

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A little Distraction Part 7

This was prompted by the amazing AO3 user a fool! Enjoy!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Ship: Reed900 | AU: Reverse AU [Read full on AO3] [Part2] [Part3] [Part4] [Part5] [Part6]

‚I’m off to work!‘, Nines called from the door and Gavin shut the dishwasher to join him in the hallway. ‘Be careful’, Gavin just said, as he always did. Richard smiled at him and nodded. ‘I’ll try my best.’ Visibly unable to refrain from it, he dove in for a kiss, hesitating just the tiniest moment to allow Gavin to duck away. It hadn’t been necessary for weeks now, but apparently old habits died hard. The android grinned into the short peck and half-heartedly pushed him towards the door. ‘Come on, Fowler will kill you if you are late once again.’ ‘And whose fault is that?’, Nines chuckled, but quickly left for the car. ‘See you in the evening!’ ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’

Gavin watched how Nines drove out of the garage and onto the street, waving him once again before driving off. A routine much like waking up, cuddling, eating breakfast and then waiting until Nines came back. As the car disappeared, Gavin stepped back inside and closed the door. Waiting until Nines came back. It wasn’t like Gavin was trapped in the house, he could have gone outside and investigated the city a bit. Maybe go to the riverfront and see Cyberlife tower being slowly reclaimed by Jericho. Or he could meet with other androids at the several centres set up just for that very reason. Or he could continue watching their current series. He knew when they continued with it in the evening, he would have someone far more interesting at his side, causing him to miss half of it anyways.

But somehow all of that felt dull compared to when Nines was there. All he could really do was wait. And he was growing sick of it now that he had accompanied to being safe and a person. Thinking about what he could possibly do today, he walked through the house. Surprisingly, it was at the table in the living room that his eyes were caught by something: A tablet. It was left behind with a half-emptied glass of water and Nines had likely forgotten to put it away. Curiously Gavin sat down and unlocked the small device. A police case was still open, and Gavin immediately tried to find a date somewhere. If this was something recent it was likely confidential and he shouldn’t know of it, right? But he couldn’t find any, so he assumed it had to be an old one if Nines left it easily accessible on their dinner table. If Gavin had to find something negative about Nines it would have been that he really seemed to love his rules, following them to the last word if needed. He wouldn’t let confidential data accessible to some random- Well, he wasn’t some random android anymore, was he? Maybe Nines trusted him enough already to be sure such information would be safe with him. He really shouldn’t look at the file.

But…

Gavin didn’t have anything else to do and he was extremely curious about what exactly Nines did at work. They spoke about it sometimes, but mostly to just blow off steam about co-workers or relax after a long day. Nines rarely talked about the details. And if anything, Gavin could keep it a secret if he needed to. And really it was Nines’ fault to leave it there. If he would be angry about it in the evening, Gavin decided to focus on that aspect.

He grabbed the tablet and stood up to throw himself on the sofa. This would be an interesting read. It was a case about a murdered husband. He was killed by poultry shears being stabbed into his heart in the bedroom, no DNA-traces or fingerprints except for the husband himself and his wife. The scissors themselves were noted as having no fingerprints at all. Suspects were the wife herself, and a few friends, none of them could be pinned down due to lack of evidence and interrogations brought up no new leads. Gavin was a little disappointed as that was about all he could get from the written reports. Apparently, this had been a dropped case. Maybe that’s why Richard had left it on the table. Maybe he was revisiting old cases.

Gavin sighed and put the tablet aside to unload the dishwasher but couldn’t help but think about it while taking out the plates, pans and silverware. Somehow his thoughts were stuck to the unsatisfying case left unsolved and went over the information again and again.

So much so, that once he was finished, he returned to the sofa and took the tablet once again. He interfaced with it, searching for more raw data in the file. He was surprised to find they actually saved the reconstructed imagery from the countless photos and had made the effort to convert it into a form androids could access in their zen garden. Gavin grinned as he waited for the data transfer. Even if it was an old cold case, playing detective a little was certainly more entertaining than watching old buddy cop shows on TV.

‘Gavin, I’m home!’, Richard called as he closed the door behind him and untied his shoes. He had expected Gavin to come to greet him, but as he had kicked them off his feet and stood up, he was still alone in the hallway. Frowning, he went to investigate. He found Gavin in the living room, laying on the sofa motionless except for a yellow LED circling slowly, sometimes speeding up a bit. Nines crouched down to gently shake the android a bit. ‘Gavin? Can you hear me? Are you alright?’

The GV opened his eyes and sat up in a purely robotic motion. Immediately Nines stepped back, knowing he had startled him out of stasis. ‘Gavin?’ The android looked at him and seemed to relax. ‘N-n-n-nines. Yoooou s-s-surprised me, that’s all.’ HE shook his head, frowned and stood up blinking irritated. ‘I-I-Is it evening already?’ Nines huffed in amusement. ‘Just came back from work. Are you sure you are alright?’ ‘Yes. Yes, I am. Just didn’t thought to get lost this much.’ Richard cocked his head inquisitive. ‘What had you so hooked?’, he asked, starting to walk over to the kitchen as Gavin took a step in that direction.

He was already starting to prepare dinner and the android just leaned against the counter seemingly still in thoughts. ‘You left behind your tablet, Nines’, he started. ‘I was curious, so I had a look at the open case. And before you get angry, it was your fault leaving it in the open!’ Richard laughed. ‘Hey, don’t worry. As far as I know you are not the one to kill that guy, right? It was the Jensen case, right?’ Gavin nodded. ‘Yeah, I checked it in the morning and couldn’t help but get into it. I didn’t have much else to do once you were gone. It’s probably not important, but I think I know who it was.’

Richard nearly dropped the pan he was holding, put it down on the counter and turned towards Gavin, staring at him very intently. To say Gavin was a little creeped out by that wouldn’t be an understatement. ‘Why do you think it wasn’t important?’, he asked. ‘I-I-I don’t know. Thought it was an oooold case?’ Nines nodded and leaned back, blowing air through his teeth. ‘Alright. Shoot. Who was it?’ ‘The wife’s sister.’ ‘What?’, Nines asked, apparently not expecting that answer. ‘Why?’

Gavin sighed and hopped on the counter. ‘Okay, so first you would think the wife, right? She wasn’t too bothered in the interview and let’s be honest, being killed in the bedroom it kinda is the cliché. But I looked at the reconstructed material and I found a different pair of poultry shears in the knife block. So unless she went to the lengths of specifically getting a new pair just to murder someone, I thought it unlikely she was the killer. I mean if it was some sort of personal argument it would have been a heat-of-the-moment decision. Unless the wife was somehow kept at his side by force and had time to plan, she would have taken whatever there was at hand.’ ‘And you are basing that on what?’, Richard asked, still listening intently. ‘Personal experience?’, Gavin shrugged. ‘I was the victim of domestic abuse if you so will, even if I didn’t care about it as a machine. Had there been a longer issue in the relationship one of them could have divorced. There were no children involved after all. Therefore I would have bet on a quick decision, not planned. So I sorted out the wife for now.’ ‘And why the sister?’

‘I went through the interviews’, Gavin answered. ‘The wife openly told you her husband was cheating on her with the neighbour. That’s why she wasn’t too bothered, the hate was still fresh as she learned it only a few days prior to the killing. I looked into who else could have killed him. The husband’s friends didn’t strike me as the type to kill him for whatever reason especially since they had grown rather distant over the years after moving away as most of them stated.’ He watched as Nines nodded and fidgeted with the pan. ‘That’s all I got from the file, too’, he sighed. ‘So why the sister?’ ‘She is family and has a good relationship with the wife. I guessed they would have talked about the fact that her husband cheated on her. And she had history with the police for beating up school-bullies and whoever looked at her sister wrong really.’ ‘How do you know that?’

Gavin grinned. ‘I might have asked Hank to see if a certain person had a criminal record. And I might have lied that the reason was that I was concerned because that person was around our house.’ ‘And Hank allowed that?’ ‘I c-c-can be veeeery co-co-convincing’, the android smiled and Richard laughed. ‘Fooling Hank? That’s a new one.’ ‘Well, it brought me the information I needed. Solved your cold case. Or at least found you more evidence for what it’s worth.’

Nines smirked and looked at Gavin with a proud expression the android couldn’t really place. ‘What?’, he asked finally as the silence went on for too long. ‘Well, Gavin, that wasn’t a cold case. I’m currently working on that and I was stuck in a dead end. I mean I knew she had a sister, but so far there wasn’t enough evidence to question her, besides that her sisters husband was murdered.’ ‘Wait, it wasn’t?’, Gavin asked in surprise.’ ‘Nope.’ He went to the fridge to get some butter for the pan. ‘And you figured that out just because you were bored? In one day?’ ‘I’m sitting here on my own until you come back from work’, Gavin nodded with a shrug. ‘No offense, I’m grateful to have a safe place to stay. But I am bored, and that case file was a welcome challenge.’

‘I mean, I could bring you some files home if you’d like. Not that it’s legal, but I could sneak something past surely.’ ‘You don’t have to’, Gavin immediately assured him. ‘But you clearly have talent for that kind of work. I could speak to Fowler and-‘ ‘That truly isn’t necessary, you don’t have to-‘ ‘You could work with me, I can try to convince Fowler.’

Gavin watched the overly excited human start cooking and think out loud. His first instinct was to decline, but the more the thought about it… he clearly wasn’t qualified to work as a detective but staying with Nines and helping him in the workplace didn’t sound too bad. And he would have something to do finally. A new purpose maybe. He had rounded up with his past life after being brought to his new one and getting accommodated to it. Wasn’t this the logical next step? Finding something for himself and really starting his new life? And what better was there than to start it with Richard?

‘Oh, I will ask him next morning if you could start as a police adviser or hell an intern if he wants to be an ass. I think that should work out perfectly.’ He turned around the first time to look at Gavin. ‘I mean if you want it that is.’ Gavin thought about it but the more he did the more he could see himself getting used to that thought. ‘I think I would like to try that.’

#detroit become human #dbh #Reed900 #RK900 #Gavin Reed #the next story will be up tomorrow I want to take my time with it and not rush it!

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pack-the-pack · 4 years

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•Let’s talk about Greyrocking•

So was discussing this ship idea with my head Omega and I ended up coming up with this idea. And it’s a bit similar to some of the ideas I’ve seen floating around for dropping, but it’s a bit different.

Warnings for: Mentions of toxic relationships and behaviours, child abuse, mentions of, psychological, se**** and physical abuse. Pregnancy, Ab****ion, stillbi*** and death. Omegaverse pseudo-biology, developmental difficulties and disorders.

What is Gray rocking? Gray rocking is a real term and strategy reffered to in psychology. It’s essentially a tactic used to counter manipulative and toxic people and people that have NPD or ASPD who may be harming or inconveniencing you in any way shape or form. It focuses on making every interaction you have with the person incredibly dull and nonreactive, this way you appear to be boring and uninteresting to the person trying to get a rise out of you, and avoid giving away any reaction and information that she or he can manipulate you wish later on.

So what’s the difference? Well, Gray Rocking is a conscious effort and it mostly protects you from psychological harm. It’s something someone has to decide to do. They have conscience that the person they are presenting themselves as, is not who they really are the rest of the time. Greyrocking on the other hand is an involuntary action, and the person performing it has no knowledge or consciousness of it.

Greyrocking is a survival tactic. Most often seen in Omegas, but also occuring in Alphas and in rare cases Betas, the pre-presenting body of a to-be Alpha, Beta or Omega will simply shut down and delay any signs of presentation and development to the dynamics they biologically present as. What does that mean? That means that:

They present no change of scent, a ridiculously faint scent or even no scent at all, even after they’ve surpassed the age in which such a change should be apparent.

For Alphas they may not get taller, with stronger facial features, body hair and an increased ease in gaining muscle mass like other Alphas. They also don’t really develop sexually as they should, even to the point of not seeming like they have a knot at all.

For Omegas, their hips don’t really widen, they may have trouble maintaining a healthier weight, not being able to hold onto fat as efficiently. Their breasts have no development whatsoever (males don’t have proper breasts, but even they have a little bit of extra fat around that area), and they also seem to have trouble getting progressively taller as time passes.

Betas will have difficulty with discerning subtle scent changes. Only the extremes. They also have problems with growth and muscle/fat building and development of essential baby-making parts of their bodies just like Omegas and Alphas.

Appear to have little or no sexual interest for their peers. Even in the face of a heat or rut. Which is remarkably odd (at least in my verse).

Independent of their dynamics, they all end up looking infantile and sometimes sickly in appearance. Bodies that seem to not be able to keep up with their peers, not presenting as any of the three dynamics and remaining in stasis on a pre-presenting form.

Now why does that happen? This happens because it’s of the understanding of their unconscious mind that presenting as whatever dynamics they’re biologically fated to present as, will result in more harm - psychological and most often physical - than if they were to not present whatsoever.

Children and teens that experience extremely toxic exchanges with their primary caregivers and general family, who experience or see others frequently being physically or sexually abused, and who may have been targeted often on the assumption that they will present as a determined dynamics are often the ones who will be greyrocking.

Greyrocking is the form young people have found to protect themselves where otherwise they would not have the physical or environmental advantages to do so without it. You’re not as big, not as strong, not as smart, not as rich, not as manipulative, not as convincing as your agressor. You have no money, no connections, no way of contacting authorities, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. What do you do? You hide within yourself. You lessen your own presence. You make yourself invisible, uninteresting. Make your body into something that’s not as appealing as a target. At least until you’re in a safe enough environment where this is no longer needed.

As expected greyrocking is incredibly unhealthy on the long run. It stunts growth, it affects the development of scent glands, and once your body is sure that you’re safe it will try picking everything you missed up at once. And believe me, as someone who had their development artificially delayed due to medical reasons, it ain’t a fun process. The Omega/Alpha/Beta will experience extreme sourness, pain, itchiness and skin tearing (stretch marks) due to their bones and muscles picking up on all the slack way too fast. In the case of Omegas and Alphas, their first Heat/Rut is nowhere near the same as other people’s. It’s much more similar to overheats and over-ruts. They howl in pain and agony and to those who hear it, it can only be described as an animal being tortured.

Permanent damage may also occur. Either to their gonads (most common in Alphas and Omegas) or their scent glands, aka the development of Abofaction/Rosebud syndrome. They also will probably be shorter than avarage to their sex and dynamics. Although Omegas greyrocking normally don’t have the ability to ovulate, sometimes a very small percentage of them do, (psychologists think that this is due to the body assessing that they are not at risk for sexual abuse, so they don’t stop their ovaries from functioning normally). They still don’t have heats, but they can get pregnant just the same in this rare cases, problem is, the rest of their body is not equipped to carry that pregnancy if it happens, so you can only imagine the permanent damage to the Omega (and possibly the baby too) if that were to happen during greyrocking. If the pregnancy is carried out instead of expontaneous/indulced abortion taking place, depending on the severity of it, it may actually be fatal to either mother, baby or both.

The most recommended thing to do when someone identifies a tween/teen greyrocking is to get authorities involved as soon as it’s safe do so, as well as the immediate provision of a structured support system that in composed of a carrying and loving family/friend unit and constant psychological and medical survaillance and care. If identified earlier the effects of greyrocking can be reversed and little to no permanent damage is caused to the individuals in treatment. And even if there is permanent drawbacks, individuals that go through with psychiatric and medical treatments to mitigate the aftermath from it can live relatively normal, fulfilling and happy lives.

Also just a side note: Greyrocking is not a response to ALPHA abuse. It’s a response to ABUSE. Any dynamics can abuse any other in a myriad of ways. Alphas can experience greyrocking caused by Omegas and Betas, Betas can experience greyrocking caused by Omegas and Omegas can experience greyrocking as a result of abuse from other Omegas. This is not a mechanism against ALPHAS it’s a mechanism against harm and abuse.

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queenjunoking · 3 years

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Wolf Taming Pt 50

CW: Noncon - Pain - Abuse - Torture

Briar

I spent the next few hours watching Z. Rayne was undoubtedly upset with my methods, but I felt it was more important to have a method that worked than something entertaining that didn’t. I have given their slaves a list of things to do, I couldn’t go any further without it being done. I needed something to unsettle Z and to throw her off her game entirely.

I knew exactly what I needed. The slaves were bringing it out of it’s stasis. Hopefully they could get it to function.

Z did very little during the wait. She quickly realized the position she was in and seemed to want to conserve her energy. She had no idea I was part of this yet. I could only assume how confused she was; Rayne wouldn’t have thought to put her in this position and Flora hadn’t shown interest in getting her hands dirty. She rarely wanted to be directly involved in anything she could make someone else do.

I watched the occasional movements as she tested her bondage. The only sense I left her was her hearing right now, the mask and attached gag took everything else away from her. She shifted every few minutes, obviously uncomfortable. That was the point of course, Z was strong mentally but her body was weak. Her legs started to shake from the strain fairly quickly, but she had no choice but to endure it.

Part of me couldn’t help but fantasize a little about using Z’s own methods against her. I couldn’t help but smile a little when I thought about putting her through a full sensory overload experience like she liked to do to her own victims.

But those were unfortunately the kind of methods Z could withstand.

No, I knew what Z couldn’t withstand. I needed to take a two prong approach to break her. I had days until Sasha would be taken back from Eos, I could waste a day making sure Z was as exhausted as I could reasonably make her.

To break someone you have to make them unable to cope or reject the reality of their situation. I needed her to be as exhausted as possible so she had no choice but to pay attention to what was going to happen to her.

The second prong was more important and needed to be as sharp as possible. The first attack simply broke her armor, the second one needed to decimate her. Unfortunately for someone like Z, she could do that to herself better than most people could. With her senses cut off she had nothing to do but feel her body ache and think.

Think about why she was doing this. Think about how she got here. About how it could go wrong. About how she couldn’t tell how much time was passing. How much time was left. If she had made a mistake.

Little thoughts of paranoia that naturally sprung in her mind. I knew they were there. I saw the amount of security she had on her bedroom door. The look in her eyes when she had tried to taser me in her den.

Z was extremely dangerous. She was great at putting on a neutral face and showing apathy to anyone she was breaking. But deep down Z was scared of a lot of things. Fears culminated in the dark.

I sat down in Flora’s chair and kept looking at Z. Her legs shaking even more from the strain as the stress position drained what little stamina she had. I almost felt bad. But ultimately I was doing this for her. The Society was no place for someone like Z and once she lost her membership she would never have to worry about all the stress it brought her.

No more worrying about who had tried to kidnap her. No more paranoia about someone coming after her again. No more indulging in her dangerous urges. No need to worry about the Society anymore. She can live a nice, calm and lovely life with me.

I just needed to get her to crack first.

My thoughts were eventually disrupted by the door opening. A maid walked in and curtsied, waiting to be addressed. Given the scars that covered her body, she had long ago learned that she shouldn’t disrupt Rayne or Flora.

“Have you done the job yet?” I asked, peeling my eyes away from Z.

“We’ve gotten her functioning, Miss Briar.” She stood up straight, but looked at the ground. “Unfortunately…” I watched her swallow hard as she prepared to deliver bad news. I had no doubts Flora enjoyed shooting the messenger so I understood her hesitation.

“Did something go wrong?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well… t-the slave you requested has been locked in stasis for over a year. She’s primarily been used as a mannequin and has no been capable of moving or talking during that time.”

“I take it that it hasn’t been able to adjust yet then?”

“No. Well yes. Um….” I watched her struggle for words.

“Take a deep breath and just tell me what is happening.” I tried to be as gentle as possible. Getting angry wouldn’t help anyone.

“The slave has… physically adjusted well enough. After a few hours of working with her she can walk and respond to commands. But…”

“But?” I asked as she paused again.

“The slave reacts and talks. When prompted. Physically she’s fine, but I’m not sure she’s mentally there anymore in any meaningful capacity. She needs directions or she’ll stand there and stare off into space.”

That did throw a few kinks into my plan, but nothing I couldn’t have expected. You don’t really expect a slave that went through the kind of breaking it did, followed by a year of being unable to move to be mentally around anymore. But I just needed her to do a few small things.

I looked at Z one more time before I reluctantly left the room. As much as I didn’t want to leave, I needed to sharpen the prong or else this was pointless.

Everything hurt.

I woke up in darkness, my arms wrenched upwards behind me and my legs chained in place to the floor.

I was forced into an awkward squatting position. The bar my arms were attached too didn’t allow me to lower myself into a less stressful position. The chains on my legs forced them to stay in place so I couldn’t stretch. I was stuck at the height that placed the most strain on my muscles.

Any attempts at moving sent waves of pain through my body. Adjusting pulled at my arms. If I squirmed I felt the wounds left from Rayne’s whip. During particularly bad spasms I could feel some of the cuts bleeding again. The gag in my mouth silenced any involuntary sounds that came from the pain. Fortunately it in of itself wasn’t big enough to cause pain at first, but as time went by I felt my jaw getting sore.

This wasn’t something Rayne would do, she was far too impatient to just leave me tied up like this. I doubt Flora wanted to be the one to try and break me. I was supposed to be a gift to her, I didn’t see Flora being the one to try and break her own gift.

They must have hired a new breaker to come in while I was unconscious. Unfortunately I had no idea how much time had passed while I was out. It could have been minutes or hours for all I knew.

That problem very quickly became the focal point of the darkness I was in. I had nothing I could focus on beyond the pain. There were no sounds to distract me. No sight to let me see time passing. Minutes felt like hours as I was trapped inside of my mind and surrounded by pain.

I could feel my legs burning and shaking as I remembered why I was doing this. I was doing this to get Sasha back. I had no idea what Eos was doing to her. She could be hurting her. Breaking her into something she shouldn’t be. She said she wanted to turn Sasha into a pony, but what if she turned her into something worse? What if she made her a cow? Or a decoration.

The thoughts made me angry. My body shook with anger as well as from the strain of the position I was locked in. Eventually being trapped in the same position this long was getting to me. I wanted to move. I hated being stuck in one place.

To my own embarrassment I trashed in my bondage, trying to pull something loose. Bending a piece of metal. Breaking a chain. Something. Anything.

But nothing gave. I was just even more exhausted than I was before. All I could think about was the many slaves I had broken and how they had done the same thing. The difference was that I had been trying to help them. This was just being done to hurt me without any real purpose.

Eventually I just let my head hang. My struggles had open up more of the whip wounds. The only reason I was still on my feet was because I had no choice. My lack of leg strength meant that my arms were being wrenched upwards as they were forced to hold up my body.

I wasn’t sure what else to do. Was this going to be my next few days? I had seen the strongest slaves last weeks before they finally broke. I was stronger than any of them. I could last through a few days of pain.

I wasn’t sure how long I had been hanging there before I heard the door slide open. Even if I could see, I didn’t have the energy to look up. All I heard was the sound of high heels reverberating around the room. Whoever it was walked in front of me and placed a box on the floor before they knelt down in front of me. It was either a first aid kit or torture instruments. Possibly both depending on how they were used.

I thought I was prepared for what was coming.

But then she spoke.

“Hello, Miss Zoey. I have been asked to treat your wounds. I will do so as quickly as I can.”

My blood ran cold as I recognized the voice. One I would always recognize. Someone I never thought I’d hear again.

It was Bridget.

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vaguelyrotten · 3 years

Text

Like a Lily in a Flood

Title: Like a Lily in a Flood Artist: @myulalie Beta: @another-random-stranger Pairings: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood, mentions of Jimon and Reyhill Word Count: 70k Warnings: Mild Gore, Beheading, Nearly being eaten alive and burned at the stake, Discrimination, Sickness Summary: Alec returns home to find his town plagued by a mysterious illness. Unable to find a cure, he ventures into the woods to seek help from an unlikely source. We must not look at goblin men... This fic was created for the Shadowhunters Mini Bang 2021: Presented by the @malecdiscordserver

Chapter 6

Alec had chosen to approach on foot. He wasn’t sure how the people in this unknown town would react to a stranger but slow, steady, and with great care seemed to be the ideal way to go. He’d draw less attention on foot and could easily blend in with a crowd if needed. Observe first, his father’s voice repeated in his head. Observe your target and then come up with a plan of attack.

The town was far too quiet as he approached. This time of day, children should be running home for dinner and shops should be closing. Alec frowned, his senses instantly on high alert.

Something was wrong here. It was very, very, very wrong.

The silence had him reaching for the knife that he’d slipped into his belt as he slowly made his way through the apparently deserted town. He kept to the edge, slowly moving against the row of shops in the center of town and keeping his back against the wall. There was nothing here. No sign of people, no sign of life.

It was like the entire town mysteriously...vanished.

A creak from his right startled him and he sent up a silent prayer that he’d managed not to make a sound in his surprise. It had only been a door, swinging open on abused hinges as it caught the wind that had been blowing gently through the street. It was odd that it hadn’t been locked — appearing to be the entrance to someone’s home — but thus far everything about this town had been odd.

He pushed the door open and poked his head inside. “Hello?” He called quietly, straining his eyes to focus in the darkened room. “Is anyone home?”

No response came, but Alec hadn’t really been expecting one. He stepped inside and let the door click quietly behind him. “Hello?” He tried again, this time a little bit louder, as he took his first tentative steps into the foyer. “Your door was open...are you alright?”

Still no response. Alec stepped into the sitting room and tugged a curtain open, giving himself a little more light as he investigated further. He really should go back and get Magnus. Who knew what dangers were lurking in a strangely deserted town?

Just a quick look at the first floor for any sign of what happened. After that, he’d go get Magnus.

The sitting room was dusty and empty. There was no sign of an apparent struggle though it did look like the house had been picked over by thieves. Artwork was missing from the walls where the discoloration in the wallpaper showed where paintings had once been hanging. A few books were tossed carelessly to the floor like someone had been moving them aside to look for far more valuable trinkets.

Finding nothing else of interest, Alec continued to move through the first floor of the house, room by room, until he reached the kitchen. There was a horrid stench coming from behind the door and he pulled his shirt up over his nose to try and block some of the strongest odors. Afraid to find out what he would find behind the heavy oaken door, he pushed.

The smell hit him first, nearly making him gag and bringing tears to his eyes. It wasn’t a corpse, by some small miracle, but a long-forgotten meal that had been abandoned halfway through the cooking process. There were side-dishes on the table that no longer resembled anything close to edible and the carcass of some sort of bird, perhaps a goose, that appeared to have been picked clean by mice and other small scavengers.

So whoever had lived in this house hadn’t planned to disappear without a trace. Why go to all the trouble to prepare a meal if you weren’t going to eat it? He coughed, trying to keep the smell out of the back of his throat and made his way further into the room. In a darkened corner of the room was a small table and…

Alec felt ice cross his heart.

There was someone at the table.

“Hello? Are you okay?” He asked, knowing that with the state (and smell) of the rest of the room, there was no way that whoever it was was okay. There was a very good chance that the body at the table was nothing more than a corpse.

The figure was hunched over the table, her head resting on her hand and her eyes closed as if she’d just briefly taken a seat to rest in the middle of cooking dinner. Unlike the food, the woman — the housekeeper or the cook, most likely — seemed to be frozen in time. She wasn’t decaying or mummified. Her skin looked pristine if not a little grey…

Oh.

Oh no.

He bent down to get a closer look. Her skin wasn’t just grey… it was stone. “Fuck,” he muttered, gently brushing the back of the woman’s hand with shaking fingers to confirm his suspicions.

He needed to get Magnus. He needed to get Magnus now.

He dashed back through the house and out the front door, no longer worried about disturbing someone or getting caught. The strange quietness of the town, the state that house had been in… the illness that had taken over Idris had hit here too...and it seemed it hadn’t left a single person unaffected.

He hadn’t even known there was a town on this side of the woods, let alone one affected by the illness that had been plaguing his town over the last few months. It was a very real look at what the future of Idris was if they didn’t find a cure.

And soon.

“Magnus!” He shouted, once he was close enough to see the purple ribbons hanging from the trees that signified the outer edge of the half-goblin’s wards. “Magnus!”

“Alexander?” Magnus asked, turning with wide eyes as Alec skidded to a stop next to the crackling blue fire that had been started. “What’s wrong? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he huffed, bending to put his hands on his knees as he fought to catch his breath. “But — you need to come quick. The town —“

“Alec, calm down. I told you, I can’t go to town. What’s the matter?”

“Magnus, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s no one there. It’s nearly a ghost town. I found a house where the door was left open. Inside was a disaster...almost like it had been looted? But that’s not the point. The kitchen was a nightmare. There was rotten and decaying food like someone had left in the middle of cooking the meal, and Angel did it reek but there was a woman sitting at the table and her skin was stone. I think the illness has taken over the entire town...like it’s doing to Idris.” He panted, trying to get the words out in between gasping breaths. Angel, why was he so tired?

Magnus blinked, his eyes growing even wider at Alec’s statement. “The entire town?”

Alec nodded, standing and grabbing the half-goblin’s hand to lead him back in the direction he’d come. “I saw no one outside of the one woman in the house I’d poked around in. This time of day the shops should have been closing up, kids should have been outside playing...there was nothing but silence. I thought it was odd so I wanted to take a closer look before I came and found you. I never expected to find that.”

“This town is by the river too…” Magnus replied, letting Alec quickly pull him back towards the brick houses. “In fact, it’s probably their main source of water...this close to the spring, whatever was poisoning the water would have been stronger and more potent. Who knows how long they would have been stuck like this…”

“The good news is that they aren’t dead. Like the people back in Idris, they’re… in stasis almost. However, it paints a grim picture if we can’t figure out what’s going on and stop it...and then find a cure.”

Magnus didn’t reply. Instead, following Alec into the house on the main street, hesitating only briefly in the doorway before stepping inside. He wandered through the maze of rooms as the rancid smell from the kitchen grew closer and closer. “Come on, this way.”

Once inside, Magnus flicked his wrist and two glowing balls of light emerged from his fingers and hovered in front of us.”It’ll give us more light — especially as the sun is now setting.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “You certainly weren’t kidding about the smell.”

“Who knows how long this stuff has been rotting,” Alec replied, steering them around the large table to the small one in the back corner of the room. “Come on, she’s over here.” He knelt down so he could get a better look at the woman’s peaceful face as Magnus cast his diagnostic spells.

“Well,” The half-goblin said after a few moments, withdrawing the familiar blue aura of his magic and glancing around the room. “It definitely is the same as whatever is tainting the river. Is she the only one or have you found others?”

Alec shook his head. “I haven’t gone farther than the first floor and I came to get you as soon as I found her. We can take a quick peek upstairs to see if there’s anyone there...but I’m guessing we would certainly find others who have fallen ill if we opened the door of any house in this town. It’s… empty.”

Magnus didn’t wait for Alec to lead the way, following the twisting hallways back to the foyer and the staircase at the front of the house. He took the stairs two at a time and jogged down the hallway to the larger room at the end, skidding to a stop right before the door. If, by some miracle, there was an alive and conscious human in what he was assuming was the master bedroom, then letting himself into the room, especially after essentially breaking into the house, could be incredibly dangerous.

Here he was, once again, possibly risking his life for this sweet human boy that stumbled into the forest looking for hope.

Magnus really wanted to give him hope. Hope and happiness and love...oh, the things Alexander was doing to him. He didn’t know the effect he was having on the four hundred year-old half-goblin. One day, when this was all said and done, Magnus would really like to show him.

Alec stepped up beside him, twisting the knob and letting the door swing open with a creak. The room was dark, but Magnus’ magic orbs of light were still following them so they took a step inside. Once they were close enough, Magnus could clearly see that there were two figures lying prone on the bed.

“I’m guessing we found the owners of the house,” Alec muttered under his breath, stepping close enough to illuminate the sleeping figures. Much like the woman downstairs, their skin was hard and ashen. They were both lying on top of the quilt fully dressed in their Sunday best like they had just sat down for a few minutes before they succumbed to the illness.

With the exception of the rancid food that had been left out, it was nearly like this entire house, and, Magnus was willing to guess, the entire town had been frozen in time. He waved his fingers, a steady stream of blue spilling from his fingers once more, and let his magic take a closer look.

Like with the woman downstairs, he felt the same wrongness that he’d felt first in the river and then in his quick diagnosis of Alec the night before. Whatever was in the river was too diluted to really get a good grasp on what exactly the poison was but what he felt in Alec had been a seed — young, dangerous, and eager to take root. What Magnus found in these people was more like an ancient tree whose taproots extended so deep into the earth it would take a force of nature to end it.

He opened his mouth to reply but the heavy front door downstairs swung open with a forceful thump, causing them both to jump. Magnus held his breath, trying to push the fear and negativity out of his mind until they had more information. There was nothing but silence for a few tense moments before the sound of boots echoed on the floorboards downstairs.

Alec held up a finger, taking a few cautious steps closer to the bedroom door and peaking through the crack that he’d left. “This place has been mostly picked over already. I don’t know why he’s got us coming back. I doubt we’re gonna find any more gold and gems in a place like this.”

“It’s not just about gold and gems, you moron.” A second voice answered, though it was muffled by the door and the distance between them. “Anything that could be useful to his campaign...weapons, old family heirlooms that might be magical, land deeds, military intelligence...we’ve found all sorts of shit in these trashy little towns.”

“Yeah but we’ve already been here twice this month. If we were gonna find any of that stuff, we would have done so by now. This is just a waste of our time.”

“Quit your whining, Victor. It’s not like you have anything better to do anyway...and it’s better to be safe than sorry. I, for one, don’t want to be on the other side of Valentine’s temper. Go check the cellar again.I’m going to take a poke around upstairs.”

They heard the thump thump thump of a man trudging his way upstairs and Magnus glanced at Alec with real fear in his eyes. He had his magic, of course. He could defend himself if need be, but they still didn’t know who these men were or how they were armed...not to mention, Magnus was still a half-breed monster in a very human town where he was not supposed to be.

Alec glanced between the door and the window before pulling Magnus to the other side of the room and pushing open the glass. A quick glance outside had Alec hissing as he watched another small group of men stroll down the street, pushing in doors or peeking in windows. This situation had just gotten very dangerous very quickly and they didn’t have time to dwell on it.

They needed to get out.

Now.

Beside the window was a drainpipe and Alec reached around and gave it a good shake as the boots on the stairs came closer and closer. “I assume you can climb considering I first met you while you were halfway up a tree,” Alec asked, already shoving the half-goblin in the direction of the window. Magnus merely nodded, bracing himself on Alec’s shoulder as he climbed on the windowsill and reached for the drainpipe. “Good, then go up. Stay low on the rooftops.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to buy us a little extra time and then I’m going to follow you,” Alec replied, already glancing around the room for what he could use to put his plan into motion. Magnus hesitated and Alec tried to give him a reassuring smile. “Go, Magnus. I’ll be fine, I promise. Like I said, I’ll be right behind you. I wouldn’t lie about that.” He left Magnus to his climb and disappeared back into the room.

The stepswere louder now, echoing in the hallway instead of on the stairs, pausing every once in a while to open the doors that Alec and Magnus had walked right past earlier. He’d noticed a wooden dresser across from the bed when they walked in and he was planning on using that to help stall the men. He knew that he barely had a minute before the bedroom door would open and he would be caught. He needed to act quickly.

Biting back a grunt of effort, he managed to get the dresser to slide a few inches, but he needed it to move at least a few feet. The man in the hallway paused, the sound of the wood grinding against wood having caught his attention, and Alec knew that his time was up. It was now or never. He leaned all of his weight against the dresser and pushed.

The dresser slid across the floor, protesting every bit of the way, but thankfully it didn’t have to go far. When it was finally in place in front of the door, Alec paused for only half a second to make sure it was truly where it needed to be before bolting towards the window.

The man in the hallway had finally realized that he wasn’t alone and had bolted to the end of the hallway. The bedroom door rattled as he tried to push it open, stopped entirely by the dresser that Alec had just pushed in its way. The man shouted — screaming at whoever was in the room to open the door and for his partner who had gone to the cellar — as Alec reached out the window for the drainpipe and began to climb.

The roof wasn’t far; it was only a two story house with an attic, but the drainpipe was smooth with very few foot- or handholds. Alec had never been the best climber in his family — that had been his sister who somehow always to find a way to be exactly where she was never meant to be — but he did have the benefit of pretty decent upper body strength thanks, mostly, to the archery training he’d had when he was younger and had kept up with after he had moved to Alicante.

Magnus was laying on his stomach at the top, having listened to Alec’s order to stay low. The half-goblin grabbed the back of Alec’s jacket and helped pull him the rest of the way up. He lay panting on the terracotta tiles, listening to the shouts of the two men still in the house. They’d give up, eventually, and would call for back-up. Once that happened, Magnus’ magic or not, they would be outnumbered.

They still needed to get out of here.

Out of this town; out of the woods. They needed to put some distance between themselves and Valentine’s men.

Valentine, he recalled, shuddering at the name. He’d have to dwell more on that when they were out of danger. That was a problem for much later in their evening.

“Come on,” he replied tiredly, pushing himself to his feet but remaining in a crouch. “We need to get moving. The dresser in front of the door trick will only work so long before the men get smart. We need to be long gone by the time that happens.” He hadn’t really planned farther than ‘get out of the room and onto the roof’ nor had he been paying too much attention to what was above him when he’d first entered the town but he was praying that the architecture of this town was similar to what it was in Idris.

Close, slanted roofs to help hide them as they moved from housetop to housetop, chimneys to hide them if they suspected they were about to be seen, and a few well placed balconies to help them get down far more gracefully than they’d gotten up...that was what Alec was hoping to see.

He crawled to the edge of the roof, paying particular attention to any tiles that looked loose so that they didn’t draw the attention of the other men that he’d seen below, and let out a sigh of relief when the next roof over appeared to be no more than six feet from where they were currently sitting. Six feet...that was laughably doable almost.

“How do you feel about jumping?” He asked, even though Magnus’ response didn’t really matter. They had one way off of this roof without going back in through the house and that was getting across to the other’s roof.

“I don’t terribly mind the jumping, it’s the falling that I don’t think too highly of.” Magnus replied, glancing down at the cobblestones below with wide eyes.

“You’ve got magic if you fall at least,” Alec replied, taking a few steps to the left where the tiles on the other side looked a bit more secure. “I just have to rely on the fact that I’ve done this a time or two before. One rooftop is just like all the others.” Except the last time he’d done this he’d been twelve and mostly fearless; and he and Jace had been running from a woman in the market because Jace had stolen a pomegranate from her stall. Alec had been innocent but if Jace ran, Alec didn’t want to be left taking the fall for his brother’s messes. Miraculously, they had managed not to kill themselves even though it had taken them an extra half an hour to get home that way. Unfortunately, the woman had beat them to their house and his mother had been waiting for them when they got home.

“Are you telling me that your particularly cautious self has taken an alternate route through the city just for the hell of it? I find that hard to believe.”

Alec laughed softly and took two steps back to give himself a bit of a running start, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Something like that — maybe if you catch me, I’ll even tell you the tale.” He took two long steps and leaped, landing gracefully on the other side of the gap. Magnus gaped, looking between the two rooftops. Alec stood with a smirk, raising an eyebrow in jest.

Magnus finally seemed to get over his nerves and joined the game as he took a running leap and landed not quite as gracefully on the other side, sending a tile crashing to the ground. Alec grabbed his arm to keep him from meeting the same fate, and they both listened as one of the men looting the town raised the alarm. “Well, come on then. We best be getting a move on if we hope to outrun them. Catch me if you can.”

From that point on, it was a game. Alec nearly forgot that they were trying to outrun Valentine’s men, get to their horses, and get the hell out of dodge before they got caught. Magnus’ movements got more fluid when he stopped worrying about being not-so-human caught in a very human town and when he forgot that one misstep could send him hurtling to the ground below.

It was fun.

Alec slid to a stop at the end of the last roof, having long since stopped worrying about giving their position away. Once the first tile had fallen, all attempts at stealth had gone out the window. The slanted roofs, the chimneys, everything had gone according to plan. Except this. He’d been counting on another drainpipe or a balcony or a tiered roof...something at the edge of the very last house to help them get down. He hadn’t been counting on there being nothing.

Magnus glanced behind them as the men got closer to the location and looked back at the trees surrounding the town. “Do you trust me?” He asked, his golden eyes brighter than normal in the setting sun and his hand already outstretched towards the treeline.

“Of course I do,” Alec replied, wondering to himself what kind of question was that? Of course, he trusted Magnus...just as much as he’d trust Jace or Izzy.

The half-goblin grinned and twisted his hand, a steady stream of magic leaving his fingers and disappearing into the woods. The nearest tree creaked, it’s branches twisting and growing rapidly until they were mere inches from the edge of the roof. “Let’s go.” Magnus stepped onto the branch and walked down it as quickly as he could manage without losing balance. Alec heard the men turn onto the nearest street and followed suit.

Once into the woods, they were in Magnus’ playground now. This might not be Edom Forest, but Magnus’ magic was made of the very heart and soul of the forest. From every flower and tree to every bird and bee, they all carried the same spark. Magnus could pull on that now to keep them out of the situation they currently found themselves in.

They jumped off of the tree once they were safely in the forest and darted to where the horses were waiting. There was a shout from behind them as the first of the men reached the trees. Alec nearly threw himself onto Flame’s back, and he watched as Magnus did the same to Elias. Once they had both safely mounted, they took off deeper into the woods. The half-goblin thrust his hand out behind them and Alec twisted in his saddle to watch as thorny vines emerged from the ground to twist themselves around the feet of their pursuers.

“Do you have a plan?” He shouted, trying to make himself heard over the sound of the horses crashing through the undergrowth.

“Not really! I figure if we can get away from the river and put some distance between us and them, that’s a pretty good place to start. We’ll have to set up camp in the dark, but it’s better than the alternative.” Magnus replied, glancing back in the direction that they’d come from to make sure the vines were doing their job and slowing the men down.

The rest of their ride was silent. Alec followed Magnus’ lead, trusting that half-goblin’s sense of direction since he himself had never been in this part of the forest. Magnus brought Elias to a slow walk as a dark shape loomed ahead of them. “It’s an old hunting cabin,” He replied, sending out a wave of blue at the house and letting his magic investigate without either of them risking detection. “Abandoned too, by the looks of it,” he added with a frown, trying to translate exactly what his magic was telling him.

Alec brought Flame to a stop and slid out of the saddle to get a closer look. The door opened with a groan of protest and he strained his eyes against the darkness of the room. It was simple — a bed, a table, some chairs, and a fireplace — but it would be a good place to stay for the night as long as Magnus thought they were safe.

“Did we lose Valentine’s men?” He asked, stepping back outside to find that Magnus had untacked Flame and had tied the gelding on a long lead around the side of the house. He carried Alec’s saddle into the house so it wouldn’t be exposed to the elements and dropped it gently by the front door.

“Between the vines and the horses, they’d need a miracle to catch up with us. We’ll be safe here for the night. We’ll leave at first light to make up for having to go so far out of our way.” He collapsed into one of the chairs and blinked wearily.

Alec frowned, crossing the room and tipping Magnus’ face up. “Are you alright? You look…”

“I’m fine, Alexander, or I will be, but I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help with dinner and the wards tonight,” Magnus replied with a sigh. He folded his arms across the table and rested his head on them. “My power is strongest in Edom. I’m afraid I used too much magic too quickly. I just need to rest.”

“Rest, Magnus. I think we can manage without magic tonight. Why don’t you lie down? I’ll see if I can find some game and we’ll cook dinner tonight the human way.” Magnus didn’t appear to be moving anytime soon, so Alec reached down and scooped him up. The half-goblin let out a squeak of annoyance, but his eyes were already closing as he cuddled up to Alec’s chest. “The bed has seen better days, but I’m sure it’ll be more comfortable than falling asleep at the table.” Alec explained softly as he deposited Magus on the old bed. “Rest. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Magnus mumbled incoherently and rolled onto his side, already losing himself to the realm of sleep. Alec watched him for a moment, wishing that there was more he could do to help Magnus recover his magic. The half-goblin opened one eye and wearily rummaged around in his pocket. “Here,” he muttered, holding out a handful of the purple ribbons. “Just… put these up. It’s not a lot, but it’s better than nothing.”

Alec took the offered ribbons and placed them in his own pocket. When he turned his attention back to Magnus, the half-goblin had already fallen asleep. Alec bent down and placed a gentle kiss on Magnus’ forehead before he realized what he was doing. “Sleep, Magnus. Let me take care of us tonight.”

He grabbed his bow from where he’d placed it by the front door and disappeared into the night.

Two hours later, he’d managed to hang Magnus’ ribbons around the edge of the property and had managed to catch three rabbits for their dinner. Magnus had woken from his nap at some point, though he hadn’t moved from the bed. He had pushed himself into the corner and had his knees against his chest and his arms wrapped around them. “You came back,” He whispered in shock as he bolted from the bed and pulled Alec into a tight hug.

“Of course I came back; I told you that I would. I just needed to catch our dinner first.” He replied, confusion written in every line of his face. “Did you really think that I wouldn’t come back?”

Magnus tensed at the question, burying his face in Alec’s chest. “Most people would,” he replied softly, his voice muffled. “I’m only as good as my magic. Right now I’m no good to anyone like this. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had.”

“Magnus, look at me,” Alec said, pulling away just enough so that he could tilt Magnus’ face up towards him. Wide golden eyes stared back at him and Alec noticed that the half-goblin’s face was red and puffy. He’d cried while Alec had been gone, truly terrified that Alec would leave him in his weakened state. “I will never leave you, alright? We’re in this together...and even after we find a cure for this thing, I intend to stay. I love you, Magnus Bane.”

Magnus blinked, trying to process Alec’s words. “I...love you too, Alexander.”

Alec smiled and pulled Magnus into a passionate kiss. When they parted, Alec forced his attention elsewhere, knowing that if he didn’t, he’d lose himself in Magnus once more. “Not that I wouldn’t like to continue, but I’m starving. We should eat before it gets too late, and you should probably rest some more afterwards. I’ll keep watch tonight.”

“If you want to get them skinned and gutted, I’ll get a fire started,” Magnus replied, pulling on the jacket that Alec had draped over the chair when he’d first entered. “I do know how to start a fire without magic, Alec.” He replied, noticing the baffled expression on Alec’s face. “I’m not entirely useless without my magic — you don’t get to be as old as I am without learning a thing or two. I’ll go collect some firewood.”

Once they’d eaten and cleaned up, Alec steered Magnus back towards the bed. “Come on, we’ve got an early start and you still need to rest. I’ll keep watch tonight,” he stated gently, guiding the half-goblin back into a sleeping position. Magnus’ eyes were already half-closed as his head hit the pillow. Alec smiled and stepped back, intending to spend the night at the kitchen table repairing his arrows.

“Alec?” Magnus muttered even though his eyes remained close. “Stay?”

“I’m not going anywhere, Magnus. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

“No,” The half-goblin whispered, opening his eyes just enough to glance up at Alec. “I mean stay here next to me?”

Alec found himself moving before he even had a chance to think it through. The bed creaked and dipped under him as he climbed in next to Magnus. He leaned against the headboard as the half-goblin cuddled close, a relieved smile on his face. “Sleep, Magnus. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

#shmb2021 #malec #magnus bane #alec lightwood #fanfic #like a lily in a flood

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gcblinprince · 3 years

Text

&. ― danny ramirez : he/him : cismale : marvel — a darkness is coming for us all . let’s hope harold osborn is ready for what is to come . to the eyes of the the world they are known as harry , whose allegiance is pledged to the spider-gang (begrudgingly) . rumor has it that harry is 23 and are known to be loyal , but let’s not forget they can be pretty hot headed . //

I will be taking most of his background/history from the ps4 Spider-Man game, with personality elements from other canons!

Background ;;

Harry was born to Norman and Emily Osborn and had a relatively happy childhood until his mother died. He absolutely adored her and stuck close to her as soon as he was old enough to do so, and losing her was not only incredibly hard for him but left him incredibly lonely

With Norman being such a busy distant, borderline abusive father, Harry largely grew alone until he began at school. Fortunately he became close friends with Peter Parker when he was younger and eventually the rest of the future Spidey Gang. They remained friends through their childhood and teen years

Both his friends and their families - namely Peter’s aunt - helped Harry feel that gap that had been left by his father’s negligence, giving him the love and care and support he needed

Unfortunately, Harry inherited the same genetic illness that took his mother’s life - Oshtoran Syndrome. The complications began in his teen years, but Harry did his best to hide them from his friends to save them from the pain he’d felt watching his mother be claimed by the same illness when he was a child

He used easy excuses like being busy with school, college, and eventually his Oscorp work, or claiming hangovers from partying to avoid suspicion when he was unwell

During his work with Oscorp he was determined to carry on his mother’s work, hoping to become an environmental attorney. He used his time, resources, and intelligence to try and better the city via Oscorp

Eventually his condition became critical and Harry couldn’t continue on without deteriorating rapidly as his mother had. Norman suggested they attempt an experimental treatment to which Harry agreed and, planting the cover story that Harry would be managing Oscorp’s European operations, he was put into a type of stasis to undergo the treatment. None of his friends knew at this point that he was sick, or where he was really going.

After deriving a treatment from Devil’s Breath failed, his treatment was to bond with a version of the Spider-Venom made specifically to fuse with his cells and DNA and - somehow, it worked. Harry now has spider powers!

He’s not sure how to feel about them or what he’s supposed to do with them. He’s been out of stasis for a while and has been back in the open for about a year now, so your character will have seen him around. Only a few people know he was sick and even fewer know about his abilities so please don’t assume it was common knowledge!

Interesting To Know ;;

Harry loves pizza and will choose pizza from some dingy corner place over some fancy dinner anytime. Seriously. Bribe him with pizza.

He is way more comfortable in a friend’s living room with his friend watching tv than at home in his big empty apartment alone - but that or his office is usually where you will find him

He’s a sucker for cheesy movies sue him

Harry adores his friends, he is extremely loyal to them and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for them. But if anyone betrays that they will have a very hard time earning his trust again, and he has been known to lash out or snap when his trust is betrayed

He has a very strange and distorted opinion of his father. Norman’s treatment of him when he was young was less than ideal, and he’s grown up under extreme pressure to measure up to his father’s expectations of him as the Osborn Heir, and he knows Norman wasn’t a good man or a good father. But Norman also went to extreme lengths to try and save him and he has shown love for Harry, and did so for his mother, so Harry has trouble reconciling these two images of Norman in his head. I definitely imagine that when he was younger and his mother was still alive, some of Norman’s tactics to help cure them bordered on child experimentation and abuse, always under the guise of trying to save his mother, and then trying to save him. It’s a tricky thing to try and discuss with him as his confusion and struggle with the subject will probably make him lash out in anger and confusion, so tread carefully.

#dh.intro #illness tw

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dr3amofagame · 3 years

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Hello, idk if you’ll see this, nor do you have to take this request. But I’ve been thinking, and thought up: Dream joined the egg, but not because it offered him world domination or a happy family or any of that; no it offered to treat him kindly, to be affectionate, to be a friend, basically offering him human decency. (With an add on of everyone believing it was for some big reason, but the actual reason gets revealed somehow) if that made any sense. (Idk if this counts as an au or not)

[ask: if dream showed up to the red banquet, that would be very sexy of the writers to make him join the eggpire instead of the pro-omlette]

hehe egg!dream has so much potential ,, this is a ficlet i’ve been working on for a while (writer’s block my detested) but i finally finished it up !! it’s a bit unpolished but oh well - they cant all be winners lmao

tw: body horror, blood, injuries, implied torture/abuse, starvation, possession, dark/disturbing imagery, dark content, pandora’s vault/prison arc

Dream gets corrupted by the Egg, because of course he does.

Sapnap trudges through the vine-filled hallway, his face bundled firmly with a holy-water soaked bandana to keep out the worst of the spores. It’s a shoddy defense, but he doesn’t plan to stay long; he’s only been sent on reconnaissance, to see what public enemy number one is planning and get out as quickly as he can. As much as the entire server wants Dream dead, trying to defeat the man the first time was enough of a feat, never mind with the power of a giant demon egg on his side - to try and fight him now would be practically impossible.

The floor squishes underneath his boots, and his lips curl in disgust; the vines are thick and moist and feel ugly and rotten to the core. He can’t imagine anyone being anything but repulsed by the things, but he guesses it makes sense for Dream to be drawn here - corruption attracts corruption, it seems. It only figures that Dream would be desperate enough for power to let himself get possessed by the living - if you could really call it living - embodiment of decay and deterioration itself. The feeling of the floor giving way underneath his footsteps has another wave of revulsion crawling up his throat, though he’s not sure if it’s directed towards the Egg or his former friend or both.

He reaches the end of the hallway, an itching, pulsing feeling of wrong filling the air in the room just beyond the haphazard archway carved into the stone. With careful hands, Sapnap draws the bandana further up his face, making sure that it is tied securely behind his head - just beyond this wall lies the belly of the beast, the heart of the rot slowly but surely spreading its influence over the entire server. Something hums in the air; whispering, otherworldly sounds pierce through his armor and settle beneath his skin; he pushes on. He knows better than to listen, to try and make sense of the words within the noise - from what he’s heard, by the time you understand what it is saying, it’s too late.

He steps inside; the room feels, for the lack of a better word, red. He’s better suited for the place than most, being a Netherborn and therefore more used to the oppressive heat and heaviness of the air, but there’s something undeniably wrong about how this place feels, something entirely Other having made its home in the room. Every inch of the place feels hostile, angry, hungry, recognizing him as someone foreign and wanting nothing more than his destruction. Unlike the Red Forests, which teemed with life - piglins and hoglins and giant fungus - this room is little more than a twisted mimicry, sucking the air dry, leaving little more than husks behind.

His hand immediately goes to his sword, drawing it with a dull, metallic scrape. The room is eerily silent save for the Egg’s hissing whispers, and he frowns; he’d expected an attack, but the room is still, quiet; a mockery of peace that only makes the uneasy feeling in his gut grow further. He trudges forward, watching against the puddles of lava and smoking magma scattered over the floor, but nothing stirs.

There’s a growing pressure against his skull with each step into the room, and his hand tightens on his communicator; they’d set up a stasis chamber, just in case things went south, his way out of this place only a few button presses away. Still, nothing moves; no Bad or Ant popping out of nowhere, weapons in hand, no Dream driving an axe between his shoulder blades as he’s done so many times before in their spars. There’s only the sound of his footsteps against the rotting growths on the floor and his own heartbeat thudding in his ears and the Egg’s warbling voice, beneath it all - beckoning, almost kind.

He swallows, throat dry, and moves forward.

His feet carry him to the back corner of the room, to the rotting, pulsing core of the wrongness plaguing the entire server. Even through his bandana, the air feels foreign, nearly choking him, and he strains his eyes against the glare of the lava to look up at the vines’ rancid heart, the Egg. Up close, it’s almost underwhelming, only about three times his height, hardly coming halfway up to the ceiling of the room. What it doesn’t have in size, however, it makes up in sheer presence; the hissing whispers in his head grow louder, crawling under his skin and between his bones, and he curses under his breath as he prepares to call for his way back. Dream isn’t here; the mission is a bust.

“Sapnap?”

He freezes.

It takes a moment to realize that the voice wasn’t in his head, as raspy and unsettling as it was, and his eyes traced the edges of the Egg to a dull colored shape at its side, completely overlooked in his initial sweep of the room. He watches, a dull horror rising in his chest, as the shape moves, twists around on itself in an entirely unnatural way like a marionette pulled by its strings. A pale dot rises from where it had been hidden against the bright red of the Egg; it’s a face, Dream’s face, covered in clawing vines, stark against the bone-white of his sun-starved skin, vomit racing up his throat at the sight of the vines having made their homes in jagged wounds all over his face and neck and disappearing into the torn scraps of his prison uniform, each one spilling crimson in the form of writhing vines and thorns instead of blood.

“Sapnap,” Dream says again, his mouth moving with the words but something entirely other having made its home in the air of his lungs, a shivering rasp to his voice that lifts and falls with the same desperate hunger that saturates every tainted inch of the room. His neck tips to the side, shifted over by a twisting vine tangled within his hair and wrapping a crown of blood-red thorns over his forehead, tendrils drooping over his face and framing the gaunt edges. “You came.”

“Dream-” the anger comes back, familiar, at the other’s words - the same red-hot rage that had boiled within him in that first and only prison visit (you took so long) but it dissipates as fast as it comes. Dream - if this remnant, this shade, this corrupted, mangled half that seems more corruption than human can even be called the name of one he had once considered his best friend, his brother - stumbles closer, held up by the vines that twist over his shaking legs, one having the pale, ragged edge of a bone clearly having ripped through skin - and Sapnap does throw up, this time, dragging the bandana from his face and heaving bile all over the floor.

“What happened-” he cries, flames licking up his arms in defense when his friend-turned-monster-turned-this steps closer on a wreck of a leg that should not be able to bear weight, stumbles back to a roaring in his ears-

He is mine he came broken came shattered and I gave him everything I gave him his heart’s desire I am his savior his grace he asked for warmth and he asked for comfort and he asked for nothing but for someone to take his pain and he is mine he is mine he is mine

He freezes, hand tightening over his communicator; Dream stares at him with the one dull-green eye not covered by the vines splayed over his too-pale face, mouth moving but no sound coming out. The roaring, angry sound in Sapnap’s ears grows louder, follows the shape of Dream’s lips come join your friend come with me I will give him to you you have failed him once but not again not again he is mine but you can be mine also and you will be together together together

“-pnap! Sapnap!” Puffy’s words crackle over the communicator, harsh and loud and snapping him out of his thoughts, “Pull the switch, Sam! No, he’s not responding- pull the switch-”

The world dips, and he heaves in a shattered breath, lungs finally full as he breathes in clear air for the first time in what feels like an eternity, hacking coughs pulled from his throat as he tears the bandana off in one sputtering gasp for breath.

“Sap- Sapnap,” Sam pitches his voice low, comforting, a hand rubbing up and down his back, but all Sapnap can see is the skeleton of a man held together by red thread, the life leached from his skin and leaving nothing left, he asked for nothing but for someone to take the pain and he is mine he is mine he is mine-

“Sapnap,” Puffy’s voice is tinny with concern, “What happened? You stopped responding and the time passed so we pulled the switch on the stasis chamber- are you alright? Did he attack you?”

“I-” -you have failed him once but not again not again you will be together- “I need a moment.”

He scrambles away, feet carrying him away from Church Prime, away from the Holy Land, away away away until he’s standing on the Community House roof, staring at his hands at this home, destroyed, this home, rebuilt, this home, empty and wrong and a shadow of house for a shadow of a man, a shadow of a friend found, a friend lost- and sobs.

What had he done?

#tw body horror #tw blood #tw torture #tw abuse #tw starvation #tw possession #tw dark imagery #tw disturbing imagery #tw dark content #prison arc #pandora's vault #queue <3 #long post #my writing :D #my asks !!

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degenerate-perturbation · 3 years

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Chapters: 26/38 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, Dragon Age II Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Female Amell/Female Surana Characters: Female Amell, Female Surana, Anders, Velanna, Nathaniel Howe, Oghren (Dragon Age), Justice (Dragon Age), Sigrun (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras, Isabela (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age), Pride Demon(s) (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self-Harm, Blood Magic, Prostitution, Drowning, Wilderness Survival, Mind Control, Human Experimentation, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better Series: Part 2 of void and light, blood and spirit Summary: Amell and Surana are out of the Circle, and are now free to build a life together. But when the prison doors fly open, what do you have in common with the one shackled next to you, save for the chains that bound you both?

Calder was dead.

She hadn't meant to kill him, but it was still her fault. She'd taken away his ability to feel pain or fear. She'd thought it kind.

Loriel put the body in stasis, so it would not rot, and sat down by it. The floor was sticky. Blood new and old stained her robes. She'd hoped to have years. He'd lasted hardly a month.

Idly she wondered whether he would still be her thrall, if she raised him. Probably not. Blood magic affected the mind through the body; it couldn't touch the spirit. But it didn't matter. She didn't need his spirit.

(Probably. Maybe.)

She needed to talk to her collaborator. By now the summoning spell came easily.

Veritas stretched catlike through the rip in the Fade. "Hello, little mageling. Have you updates for me? Did you try the experiment I suggested?"

"Yes," she said flatly. "It killed him."

Veritas tilted its head, curiously. "Oh? What did it?"

"I haven't yet ascertained the exact cause.” Her fingers curled into fists and released over and over again. “I didn't think...I didn't realize it would kill him."

Calder hadn't either. He hadn't felt the pain. Her own fault, for failing to appreciate the necessity of pain. How many times would she have to learn the same lesson? She should have known better.

"Shall we discuss the likeliest possibilities?" Veritas offered.

"Oh, you mean you don't know?" Loriel said sarcastically. "You are an utterly useless demon of knowledge."

"As you've so cleverly noted in the past, my dear Loriel Surana, I do not know everything," sniffed Veritas. "If I did, I would have even less use for you than I do now. I have never taken a mortal body and know comparatively little of such things."

It was true that Veritas had shown remarkably little interest in escaping its bindings or trying to possess her. Perhaps that was part of the reason she kept summoning it. The one time she had asked why it showed so little interest in the mortal world, Veritas had said, I prefer to watch.

"Be that as it may," she seethed, "You've killed my only subject. They are not easy to come by."

"Lie. You killed him. As for coming by subjects-they could be easier to come by if you stopped be so precious about where they come from."

"I’m past that. I don't care where they come from," Loriel said. "I care about keeping the loyalty of my Seneschal. If I were some apostate crouched in a filthy cave, I could do as you say, but I am the Arlessa of Amaranthine and Commander of the Grey."

"Hm. You are that. I wonder why?"

"I have to be. For any of this to matter."

"Lie," Veritas noted.

"Enough. We have work to do,” she snapped. “This situation must be salvaged. I have the body in stasis, but my magic and the taint interact strangely, and it likely will not last."

They talked a while more about what further use Calder’s body might be, before it was too far gone. The next few days went to those experiments. Not useless, but not what she needed.

She did end up raising his shade, out of guilt and grim curiosity. There wasn’t much left of it. Weeks under such crushing mental pressure had left his spirit confused, enraged, and in pain. It didn’t even look human anymore.

It tried to kill her. She dismissed it before it ever got close, but as it was ripped from this world she thought she saw hints of magma in its facsimile of skin.

For several heart-hammering minutes she believed that she had created a Rage demon.

Veritas confirmed that she might have, or at least, the beginnings of one. But more likely before the seed of psychic nucleation could form a demon, the shade would diminish to a wisp and eventually dissolve into the emerald waters.

Most likely.

tck

After that she seriously considered stopping. Would she have done that to Calder’s body if she had known what it would do to his soul? She had thought she had accepted the evil in herself, made her peace with it, but in the abyss of her heart there seemed always to be another unseen chasm, and each time she teetered on the edge she could not help but cling to it.

How could she possibly bear to do that again?

But...could she bear to have done that, and known it to have accomplished nothing? Could she bear to find another way, and know that she needn’t have?

Yes. Yes, she could bear it. Veritas would never let her pretend to be too weak for that. But though she could bear a world where she had done needless evil, that did not guarantee it was this world. It did not mean she was free.

She scrubbed her hands until they were red and stinging and almost clean, and went to go receive Brigit’s report.

No new deaths. No new Callings. No sign of the Architect.

“Oh, and Brigit,” Loriel said, almost on impulse, just as the Seneschal prepared to bow and go. “One further question. The sheriff of Amaranthine. What sort of man is he?”

Brigit had taken her Commander’s direction to dress more finely. She wore a high-necked woolen gown beneath a vest dashed through with silverite. Sapphires glittered at her ears. Her back was ramrod straight and she looked every inch a queen. But there remained the trace of hesitation when she answered: “I believe that he believes himself to be a righteous man.”

“And you do not agree with his self-assessment.”

“He is merciful. But he is not just.” Brigit’s lips pressed together. “I have had reports of certain crimes under his jurisdiction going unpunished, or punished far too lightly. Those committed against women, children, elves…I have thought about replacing him, but he is popular in Amaranthine. Mercy, however unearned, often is.”

“No need to replace him. No need to cause an upset.” The barest of pauses. “But perhaps we might consider having more prisoners sent to the Vigil for processing.”

Brigit listened carefully, and spoke slowly: “You wish to offer them the Joining?”

“Everyone deserves a second chance.” Smooth, perfectly reasonable. “Don’t you agree?”

The Seneschal took her meaning.

“But of course, I do not insist,” Loriel said quickly. "You know how much I value your opinion.”

Faint color came to the Seneschal’s cheeks. She could have said no. She could have taken the out. Loriel gave her every chance.

“I agree with you completely, ser,” the Seneschal said instead, and she knew what she was doing, she had to have known. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

Loriel did not thank her. Only nodded, and that was her cue to go.

She leaned back and closed her eyes.

If she was going to do this, she could not afford to let her pride keep getting in the way. She needed to talk to the expert. She needed to go see Avernus.

tck

She sent a short, impersonal note to Avernus that she would be arriving that week. She gave no further details. Even if she had been stupid enough to write down anything sensitive, every time she sat down to compose anything, after nearly a full year of silence, her mind went blank.

The ride to Soldier’s Peak was long and full of uneasy dread, but when she arrived, Avernus acted like nothing had happened. He shuffled around his tower, checking on bubbling reagents and pulsating petri dishes of living flesh, asking terse questions without waiting for answers. She couldn’t tell if he genuinely had not noticed the absence of her letters or if this was an act for her benefit—and if it was an act, if it was a kind one or scornful one.

Even if it were scorn, it wouldn’t matter. There could be no room for pride.

“I’ve begun to use human subjects,” she said bluntly.

She expected him to gloat, but he only snorted, “About time,” and carried on as though it was nothing, about some experiment with artificial flesh.

“Actually,” she interrupted, “that is what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh? So this isn’t merely a social visit?” As though they’d ever had social visits. “Well, then, I will say this much—I am certainly glad of it. In truth I did not think you would change your mind so soon, but I am glad you have. Now we might move forward.”

His approval pleased her, and her pleasure in that approval disgusted her.

Avernus knew in detail answers to questions she hadn’t even thought to ask. How to keep a subject alive, with minimal suffering. How to prevent a subject’s spirit from becoming...that thing she had made. She burned with shame to think that she hadn’t asked him before. So much could have been avoided. Already her pride had wrought so much waste.

The only thing she did not mention was Veritas. She knew what he would say if he knew, and did not want to hear it. Avernus was still sour about his encounter with the demon possessing Sophia Dryden, and would curse her occasionally, anytime he found another thing wrong with the quality of the Fade.

“By the way,” he said, “that black crystal of yours. I looked through my library. I cannot confirm it, but it may be depleted lyrium. You can copy my notes if you wish.”

“Oh. Thank you. I will.” She’d never even heard of such a thing before. When she had shown the crystal to Veritas, the demon had hissed and flinched and demanded she take it away immediately. It had been so enraged, all thousand of its eyes bent upon the thing in hatred; it was one of the few times Loriel had felt frightened of it.

Somehow, despite it all, they settled into an old rhythm, of stark and easy mutual curiosity and intellectual challenge. The extended period of no contact meant that there was much to discuss; his lab space was no longer even recognizable, and Avernus could talk about his ongoing experiments for hours.

There was only one bench he hadn’t spoken of.

“That is old work,” he said. “I figured out the formula years ago. There are some perfections to be made, of course, but there are greater challenges.”

“But what does it do?”

He raised a nearly nonexistent eyebrow. “Do you not know? This is the same tincture you stole from me, when you first barged into my fortress.”

“My fortress,” Loriel corrected. “My deepest apologies for the intrusion. I hadn’t realized you were so enjoying being trapped in your tower and tormented by demons.”

“I far prefer to be trapped in my tower and tormented by my superior officer.” The man’s grin was truly skull-like. She was thankful he rarely showed it. “So, you mean to tell me you never made use of it?”

“No. I hardly even remember taking it,” she said. Lie, she heard Veritas breathe in her ear. “It was only a passing curiosity. Though I suppose might still have it somewhere.” As though she did not know exactly in which drawer she had stowed it.

“Hmph. Your passing curiosity cost me four months of work. I had to reconstitute it from scratch. Mind you, the new one was better...so I suppose I should thank you.” Avernus hmphed in amusement and returned to his workbench. “I could tell you hadn’t drunk it yourself, but I thought perhaps you had passed it onto one of your less talented compatriots. That woman of yours, perhaps. Where has that one gotten to, anyway? I have not seen her here of late.”

At first Loriel could only stare in disbelief. By some miracle, in all these years, Avernus had not once, not a single time, ever inquired about her.

Loriel laughed, a thin dry sound, and couldn’t stop.

She knew that there was some reason that she liked him. No wonder he hadn’t written over the past year. What was a year to him? He probably had no idea she’d even been angry. That she had spent any time at all worrying about what he thought of her suddenly struck her as the height of absurdity.

“And just what is so funny?” the old blood mage said dryly. Dryly, of course dryly. Anything so old would be so dry. Would she live long enough to dry out like him?

The thought of enduring so many years sobered her instantly. “Nothing. Nothing. My apologies.” She shook her head. “So, what does this tincture do?”

“Yes, yes, don’t be so impatient. It allows a Grey Warden direct access to the taint in his blood, and draw power from it.”

“From the taint? Like blood magic, but with darkspawn blood?”

“Ah, but only a mage might learn blood magic. With my brew, any Grey Warden, even a mundane could have gained this power. Limitedly, of course, limitedly...there is simply no substitute for a lifetime of training, but a strong-willed Grey Warden born without a hint of Fade about him might have eventually bested a mage of mediocre Circle training. A Grey Warden is so intimately connected to the taint in his blood, you know...Many of my subjects mentioned how profoudnly it changed them to truly gain mastery over that part of themselves.” Then he shrugged. “But the side effects could be quite unpleasant. Took me ages to work out a formula that wouldn’t kill the subject sooner or later. Worth it, perhaps, but perhaps not. Certainly interesting for a Warden mage...there is nothing quite like it. The precision of blood magic, without the cost.” The old mage shrugged. “Mind—the vial you have must have long expired. It is likely poison now. Here is your chance, if you still want it.”

She glanced askance at the bubbling still. “No thank you,” she said primly. “I am not in the habit of experimenting on myself.”

“That is precisely your problem,” Avernus snorted. “But suit yourself.”

Lie, lie, lie, rang Veritas’s sing-song in her head. Of course she had not forgotten the vial. Every once in a while, organizing her cupboards, she would come across it, black and still bubbling, alive, after all these years. She would pick it up, and hold it, and feel its unnatural warmth in her hand. She had done so just last month.

She ended up staying longer at Soldier’s Peak than strictly necessary. There was, as ever, much to do, but for the first time in a long time she was not eager to do it.

tck

“How much powdered deathroot for a draught of neutralization?”

“One of a thousandth of fifteen grams.”

Loriel measured it out, and did not speak again for many long minutes, when she asked: “What is the temperature at which silverite melts?”

“Six-thousand and seventeen degrees.”

She checked the expensive thermometer, ordered for a kingly sum direct from Orzammar, and raised the temperature in the furnace. It would be some time before it would be ready. She would take the opportunity to organize her notes from Avernus.

Veritas prowled. The summoning spell Loriel had been using lately allowed for it.

“Where was Angletierre?” she asked idly, coming across a name she did not recognize.

“It is an old name for Ferelden, in Old Orlesian.” Loriel hummed vaguely and kept reading, until Veritas lost its patience.

“Was there a purpose to you summoning me? Or do you intend to sit in silence ignoring me except when you desire answers to your petty questions?”

“The summoning spell takes nearly five minutes,” Loriel said indifferently, turning a page. “It doesn’t make sense to dismiss and recall you each time I have something to ask. You have free movement about this space; use it if you like.”

“You are incredibly rude, to invite a guest into your home and then ignore him all day long.” When she did not respond, it prodded her: “So, how has your pet blood mage been?”

“Same as ever. Naturally.” She set the stack of books and notes that she had brought upon the oaken desk. “I believe I am comfortable moving forward now, with the next set of experiments."

“And when can I expect to meet him? I think he and I would get along.”

“Never. Not happening.”

“Why, Loriel Surana. It almost sounds as though you are ashamed of me. Don’t you want to take me home to meet the rest of the family?”

“Shut up,” she said vaguely, without much venom. “Go and find him in the Fade, if you are so curious.”

“That’s the problem with you blood mages. You hardly touch the Fade.”

“Then you will have to live with disappointment.”

Veritas’s lion tail swished back and forth. “It’s mostly the mages with an unusual propensity for my kind that I can find most easily. Spirit mages, you call them.”

“Mhm.” Loriel stayed focused on organizing the notes.

“She’s doing just fine without you, you know.”

She was at first so puzzled by the non sequitur that she had no idea how to respond. “Pardon?”

The demon’s eyes blinked and shivered all over its body, as its words slowly registered.

“You should see her from my end,” said Veritas, relishing every word. “Lit up like a beacon. Impossible to miss. Shall I tell you where she is?”

The spell broke. “No, thank you.”

“She’s in Dairsmuid right now. Surrounded by family and friends, free and whole at last.”

“Good. That was quite the point.”

Silence for a time. “You could have been so happy together.”

“We already weren’t.”

She got through several sheafs before the demon spoke again, “Does it bother you, that you are utterly alone?”

“I am no more alone than anybody else.”

“How interesting. You appear to really believe that.”

“Am I wrong?” She snorted. “We’re all alone inside our heads, at the end of the day.”

“And yet you pour your heart out to a demon, one you regard as not-even-a-person, so desperate are you not to be so alone.”

“I am pouring nothing.” She rolled the scroll up with a snap and turned to give the demon her full attention. “Veritas. Precisely what is the point of this little game?”

Veritas smiled broadly. “Simply making conversation.”

“Not one I am interested in having," she snapped. "I do not live in the past. You cannot draw me there with taunts.”

Veritas chuckled, so deep that the stone itself seemed to shake. “Ridiculous mageling. As though you are anything but a mountainous heap of Past, covered by the thinnest crust of Present.”

She rolled her eyes. “Clever. But if you wish to perturb me then I suggest you try a different approach. I do not think of her. I do not think of that time in my life at all.”

It tilted its head. “How interesting! That was the truth. You really don’t think of her.” It settled, and at first Loriel thought it was the end of it. “But she thinks of you. And such thoughts they are, shouted out into the Fade for anyone to hear. Aren’t you curious what they are?”

“I have no intention in indulging myself,” she said, which was not, strictly speaking, the answer to its question.

Veritas huffed. “You are intolerably boring.”

“I am truly sorry that I cannot be of more amusement. But there is nothing true in this world that I would flinch to know. I am not afraid of you.”

Suddenly the demon sprang up. She felt rather than saw it move.

“You should be afraid. And you should be sorry.” She could feel its hot breath on the back of her neck. “If you did not amuse me, I would not give you so many truths for free.”

Slowly, slowly, she turned around. It knew as well as she did that if it touched her, it would be bound. Loriel had embedded the glyph in her skin. She made a point to smile. “For free? As though I rely on your generosity?”

“You can no more force me to serve you than drink the Fade.”

“Try me," she hissed. "I like you, Veritas, and I like your company. You keep me honest.” She thought—intended—the spell of repulsive force. The demon skidded away from her, into the corner, growling. “But this latest game of yours is tiresome and nothing requires me to tolerate it. I summoned you in the first place because I was not on speaking terms with my collaborator, and that is no longer the case.”

“Indeed? You have no further need of me?” The demon’s thousand eyes gleamed. “Is that why you summoned me hours ago, just to keep you company?”

“I said I liked your company. Not that I needed it.”

“Hmm. That is so. It seems that there is precious little that you need. And even less you want." Again the demon settled. "You fascinate me, Loriel Surana. You are rude, but you are interesting.”

“I will take that as a compliment.”

A period of renewed silence, interrupted only by the scratching of her quill.

“Did you know,” said the demon of truth, “that your mother has been waiting in the courtyard to see you for over a fortnight?”

The spilled ink ruined several sheafs of parchment, and the stain never did come out of the woodgrain.

#dragon age #dragon femslash #please read my wizard lesbian fanfiction

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walviemort · 4 years

Text

hidden blessing (1/?)

Summary: Killian thought the only thing he was left with after Milah's death was a broken heart and a thirst for vengeance. It's not until he gets to Storybrooke, after so many years spent in stasis, that he discovers something else: he's carrying her child. How does this new, tiny blessing change his path? (Canon-divergent from 2x12.)

rated T | AO3 | 2.7k

A/N: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, @sherlockianwhovian!!!! Here it is: that random idea I sent to you a few months ago and we had a crazy conversation about. I’ve been picking at it here and there ever since and today seemed like a good day to start posting. I hope you have a beautiful day, darling, even with all the craziness in the world! (General note: this will mostly follow canon, but may jump around a bit. And will be updated whenever I get to it, lol.)

With the heaviest of hearts, Killian watched as the body of his darling lover—and part of his soul—dropped to the depths of the sea. A significant part of him wanted to join her, but he knew that’d be a disservice to her memory.

So instead, he led his crew to Neverland to bide their time until he could find a way to destroy his crocodile. Aside from a handful of ventures into the Enchanted Forest and other realms, they spent close to a century in the ageless realm.

When they finally left Neverland for good, it was only a couple of weeks until he was again put in stasis by the Dark Curse. Once time unfroze, he got anxious as the months ticked by and they couldn’t leave, but Cora assured him—“Time still hasn’t started to move here, not really; we’re just not frozen in place. You’ll still have your pretty face once the curse breaks.”

And when it did, everything seemed to run faster. Was it really only a matter of days from the time the curse broke, to meeting Swan, to their adventure (and her subsequent betrayal) on the beanstalk, to fighting at Lake Nostos, to landing in Storybrooke? No wonder he was nauseous once they’d docked in the sleepy town.

He figured a night of rest would send that away, but it lingered in the following days, even while enacting Cora’s plan and finally, finally starting to seek his revenge. Though the rounds of abuse suffered at the hands of the Dark One and his librarian lover certainly didn’t help.

He got the last laugh, though, with his pistol. Watching the Crocodile’s panic at the realization his love didn’t know him filled him with glee—even if he was in pain a minute later after being thrown by the heavy metal coach.

So it wasn’t much surprise when, hours later as he woke in the infirmary, everything hurt, including his stomach.

“Good morning, Hook,” a man said a bit later. “I’m the doctor looking after you; name’s Whale. You took quite a hit there.”

The blonde man looked as haggard as he felt; Killian recognized a hangover when he saw one. But he only eyed the man warily and let him continue.

“Nothing too serious happened, and you’re lucky. Ribs heal, but we’ll have to be careful not to do anything to hurt the baby.”

Killian blinked. Baby? What? He wasn’t expecting. “Beg your pardon, mate?” he asked, voice a bit rough with disuse. “What baby?”

Whale seemed surprised. “Your baby; the one you’re pregnant with right now. You didn’t know?”

Cold fear washed over Killian; he couldn’t be, could he? “Is this some kind of joke?” he bit out angrily.

“It’s not; we checked your blood before giving you any pain medication. You know you’re capable of carrying children, right?”

“Aye,” he confirmed; all men in his family had a womb, so he knew it was possible. “But I haven’t lain with anyone in at least a century.” Not since his last night with Milah—though, as he recalled vividly, the situation was right for him to conceive.

The doctor thought about it for a moment, then asked, “If it’s been that long, then how are you still here as a healthy young man?”

“I’ve been in Neverland; time doesn’t move there,” he explained. “As well as a handful of other situations that left me in stasis.”

“Well, that’s it, then,” the doctor said. “If your body wasn’t aging, neither was the fetus. But now that you’re here, that kid is finally getting the chance to grow.”

The man continued to drone on about the biology behind everything, but the only thing Killian could focus on anymore was the fact that he was pregnant—with Milah’s child. A child she’d never know. Yet another thing the Crocodile had taken from them.

Anger threatened to wash over him again, but then a quick wave of nausea brought him back down and found him instead staring at his midsection. He tried to place his hand on it, but found it was cuffed to the side of the bed. So instead, he put his bare stump over it, a rush of paternal feelings rising within.

He wasn’t sure how his blood had confirmed it, but once he’d heard the words, something just clicked and he knew it to be true. He was going to be a father. And suddenly, he didn’t want anything else.

“Hook, did you hear any of that?”

Killian blinked and looked back up at the doctor. “Afraid not.”

Whale sighed. “Okay, I’ll say the important parts again: we want to do an exam to make sure everything is okay with your baby, given the number of hits you’ve taken over the last few days. Does that sound alright?”

“I suppose so, yes.” If anything, he was curious about this realm’s medicine and how it worked. But if it enabled him to ensure the well being of his child, then he’d do it without hesitation; he’d likely done enough to risk their health.

“Alright; I’m headed into surgery, but someone from the OB-GYN will be around later. Rest up until then.”

He didn’t know what those letters meant, but nodded his assent and the doctor left. Which meant he was alone—but not really, apparently.

He glanced back down at his still-flat stomach. At first, he was filled with shame at not knowing that new life was growing within him; goodness, the things he’d done in the past decades. Hell, the past month. He’d have to curb that immediately, assuming he hadn’t done any damage already.

Gods, he couldn’t live with himself if he had. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. Though he was sure the babe couldn’t hear him, it helped to say it out loud. “If I had known, I would have been so much more careful. But from now on, I promise to do whatever I can to keep you safe. Always.”

His mind grew fuzzy not long after and he drifted off; it was no surprise that he dreamed of holding a small child in his arms. They had bright blue eyes and curly hair that seemed to change color on a whim, from black to red to blonde. They were darling and precious and he couldn’t wait to meet them.

Until something pulled him from his dreams, and he was suddenly aware of another presence in the room. He blinked, winced at the various maladies all over his body, and was finally able to focus; Emma was sitting on the edge of his bed.

Emma; he’d forgotten about her for a bit there. (Understandably.) She looked pissed, which didn’t surprise him, but just as fierce as ever. Something stirred somewhere else—thankfully not his stomach, for once—and the attraction to her that he didn’t fully understand came back. He was torn between wanting to bed her and fight her. (Maybe both?)

She set the tone immediately, though. “Where's Cora?” she asked sternly.

He tried to sit up, preferring to have a confrontation at the same eye level, but first the cuff stopped him, and then his sore ribs did. “Damn, that hurts,” he hissed.

Emma stood and hovered over him. “Told you. You cracked a few ribs. Where's Cora?”

She was all business, but she was no match for his well-honed deflection skills—or flirtatious front. “You look good, I must say, all "Where's Cora?" in a commanding voice. Chills,” he added salaciously. It was fun to get a rise from her.

She just raised her eyebrow, unamused. “You have all sorts of sore places I can make you hurt.” without warning, she lunged forward, aiming for his ribs; instinctively, he brought up his left arm to protect both them and his baby. She didn’t connect, but clearly wasn’t afraid of using physical torture methods; in that instant, he knew—he wasn’t about to tell her, or anyone else, about the baby just yet; not if they could use it against him.

She pulled back and he relaxed, but the ache was renewed. Sighing, he told her, “I've no idea where Cora is. She has her own agenda.” And it was true; he hadn’t seen the witch since she placed the cloaking spell on his ship. “Let's talk about something I am interested in: my hook.” He felt slightly naked without his prosthesis. “May I have it back? Or is there another...attachment you'd prefer,” he tossed back, eyes glancing down his body. If he couldn’t physically defend himself, he could at least annoy her until she left. (Though he wouldn’t complain if she took him up on the offer.)

Emma rolled her eyes, of course. “You're awfully chipper for a guy who just failed to kill his enemy, then got hit by a car.”

“Well, my ribs may be broken, but everything else is still intact, which is more than can be said for all the other bad days I've had,” he said, gesturing with his stump. “Plus I did some quality damage to my foe.”

“You hurt Belle.”

“I hurt his heart. Belle is just where he keeps it. He killed my love. I know the feeling.” Even further reason to keep his child far away from anyone who could hurt them.

Emma gave him a wry, insincere grin, and bent over him to come closer. “Keep smiling, buddy. He's on his feet, immortal, has magic, and you hurt his girl. If I had to pick dead guy of the year, I'd pick you.” And without another word, she turned and left.

He sighed and gently placed his stump back over his stomach; he hadn’t wanted to do that in front of Emma, lest it give her any ideas—male pregnancy was rare, but not unheard of, and he didn’t know how much she knew of the magical realms yet. But the encounter proved one thing: the number of people he could trust in this town was small, possibly nonexistent.

And only reinforced that his child wouldn’t truly be safe until Rumplestiltskin was out of the picture completely.

Gods, he’d only known about the babe for a matter of hours and already had recentered his life around him or her. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, of course, but still—it took him by surprise.

He dozed off again for an unknown period of time until a soft knocking woke him. “Oh, sorry; didn’t know you were asleep,” a timid-looking man said. He had white hair and glasses and was of short stature, looking altogether unthreatening—but the machinery he pushed on a small cart was completely foreign to Killian. “I’m Doc, the obstetrician.”

“The what?” was all Killian could say.

“I’m here to check on the baby.”

“Oh!” Killian exclaimed, and tried again to sit up, only to fail again.

“Here; let me.” The doctor rushed to the side of Killian’s bed and pressed something, making the top half of the bed lift as if by magic.

“How did you do that?” Killian asked, trying to peer over the rail without causing further injury.

“It’s all mechanical; I can show you later. But first: can you tell me when you think you conceived?”

“Um, about 130 years ago, if my arithmetic is correct.”

The doctor dropped his pen as soon as he’d picked it up. “Beg your pardon?”

Killian explained again his history with Neverland, and Doc was well aware of the magical happenings since then, having been equally cursed. Killian also told him what he knew about his ability to carry children, though it wasn’t much, seeing as his father refused to and his brother never got the chance. “All I know is the woman has to be on top,” he summarized.

“Got it,” Doc answered, though clearly embarrassed a bit. “Well, given that this is as new to me as it is to you, I’m going to have to do some poking around in some...personal places. Is that alright?”

“Don’t have much choice, do I?”

“No, sorry; but I’ll be gentle.”

The doctor was true to his word, carefully examining Killian’s stomach and private areas and proclaiming that everything appeared to look good.

But then he picked up a wand-like device that appeared to be attached to the machine he’d brought with him, and started fiddling with the contraption. “What’s that?” Killian had to ask.

The doctor was blushing; this couldn’t be good. “Well, uh,” he stammered, clearly not sure how to explain it; Killian subconsciously wrapped his arm around his stomach a bit tighter. “It’s a machine that lets us see inside the womb; there are a couple different kinds here, but this one is a little more...invasive.”

The fact that such a device existed was incredible to Killian, but he quickly put two and two together. “Does that...thing...go inside me?”

“I’m afraid it does.”

“Bloody hell. Is it necessary?”

“Given what you’ve gone through, and that we’re not really sure how far along you are, it is.”

Killian sighed dramatically, but he could tell it was important. “Go ahead.”

While he knew worse lay ahead, he sincerely hoped to not have to go through anything so awkward as that examination. “Just look at the screen,” Doc said, trying to keep him calm; but the space on the machine only showed nondescript black and gray blurs at first. The feeling of the device within him was not pleasant, either, but finally, Doc proclaimed “Ah! There it is! Hear that?”

The oddest noise filled the room from the machine; Killian had no description for it. “What is that?”

“That’s your baby’s heartbeat, and look—there it is on the screen.”

It didn’t look like much, but Killian had to admit—there was something vaguely humanoid about the blob-like images on the screen.

“That’s the head, and the spine, and there’s the legs.”

Killian had to tilt his head to make sense of it, but it started to take shape. “Does it not have arms?”

Doc chuckled. “It does; we just can’t see them right now. Based on that image, I’d put you at about 11 weeks along.”

“You can tell from that? And what does that even mean?” He’d never heard of measuring pregnancy like that; he knew it took a certain number of months, but most people just estimated. The fact that they could narrow it down so much was astonishing—and made him realize how little he knew about what was to come.

Thankfully, Doc explained everything as he removed the device and cleaned up, and they were able to estimate a due date; he also recommended coming in regularly for appointments to track the progress of the child’s growth, which Killian wasn’t sure would be necessary, but he agreed in order to placate the doctor.

The machine made some more weird noises and spat something out, which Doc took and handed to Killian. “Here; you can keep that.” It was the picture from the screen; goodness, this realm was proving to be a technological marvel. He wanted to take it but, again—handcuffs. “Oh, I’ll put it on the table then,” Doc said, and started to, but Killian couldn’t risk anyone seeing it.

“No, don’t—if you know where my coat ended up, can you put it in there? I...I don’t want anyone knowing just yet.”

“I understand,” Doc answered with a small smile. “It’s in the closet over here.”

As he put it away, Killian added, “I can trust your discretion, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Doc finished gathering his things and headed towards the door. “Oh, and Captain—one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Congratulations.”

Killian tried, but couldn’t hide his smile. “Thank you.”

He was going to be a father—a father to a child that was, by some miracle, the product of he and the woman he’d loved above all else. He didn’t consider himself a lucky man, but thanked the gods that they’d seen fit to bless him just this once.

And he fell asleep once more, knowing that—for the first time in so many years—he had something worth living for other than his revenge.

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thanks for reading! and be sure to send some birthday love to Leanne! tagging a few others: @cocohook38 @ashley-knightingale @jennjenn615 @wyntereyez @superadam54

#killian jones ff #mpreg #cs ff #happy birthday #sherlockianwhovian #my ff #hidden blessing

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