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rachelbethhines · 4 years

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Tangled Salt Marathon - Rapunzeltopia

This episode, much like many other plot important episodes of the first two seasons, is decent on it its own, but becomes retroactively worse due to season three’s bad writing and behind the scenes bullshit.

Summary: Matthews reveals himself as another dark spirit and disciple of Zhan Tiri, and traps Eugene, Lance and the others in unbreakable vines similar to the Great Tree's evil magic. He has Rapunzel live the perfect life while he prepares to hand over the mystical powers of the Sundrop to his master. Fortunately, Rapunzel is able to make contact with her brown-haired dream self and attempts to convince her to let go.

Timeline Alert

So what does almost a year ago mean? The Great Tree was six months out, and then in Mirror, Mirror, Lance said that they been fighting for three weeks since. So how long have then been stuck in this shell house? Because You’re Kidding Me was just the next day after Mirror, Mirror. Was Lance’s ‘three weeks’ comment meant to be after Brothers Hooks and Rapunzel: Day One and not Great Tree? Are we 7, 8, 9, or 10 months out from Secret of the Sundrop? Like be clear about your time frame guys if you’re going to use it as a plot point.

I’m going to say we are 9 months along on this trip, just cause that sounds closer to ‘almost a year ago’ without keeping them all trapped in the shell house for months. So Great Tree is 6 months, Brother’s Hook and Rapunzel Day One is 7 months, Mirror, Mirror is going on 8 months, and at the end of this episode they’ll be heading into the 9 month period...I guess. Lets just say they were trapped there for a week or two.

This Episode Only Highlights How Self Centered and Immature Rapunzel Still Is Rather Than Showcase How Much She’s Grown

The point behind this episode is show how much Rapunzel has grown since season one, and how she is accepting of responsibility now, but it actually backfires because she’s not actually being challenged on her selfish desires but on her lack of agency. Which is the wrong lesson that she needs to be learning at this point in her development.

Rapunzel in her subconscious mind doesn’t wish for what’s best for other people but what’s best for herself. People she must interact with on the regular have to be superficially happy even if it completely warps their character. While people she doesn't care about, like Lady Caine, can just be simply banished and ignored regardless if they deserve such an end or not. She doesn’t see people as people with individual thoughts and feelings, but as satellites to herself and her narrow worldview.

Also, ‘I believe everyone deserves a second chance’ my eye! Caine never gets even a first chance in Rapunzel’s own fantasy world. Because Rapunzel is a selfish hypocrite who’s ‘redemptions’ always comes with strings attached.

Here Comes the Dumbest Plot Point In the Show

I’ll talk about this more when we get to season three, but this scene is the beginning of the end for any dignity the show once held.

Also why would ‘I don’t trust anyone’ Cassandra follow a creepy voice calling her name through a doorway inside a magic house that’s tried to kill her twice now?

If you gotta make you character act out of character in order to get your plot rolling than you haven’t a good plot. Think of something else.

What’s the Point of Having Two Names?

They did this both with Sugarbee and Matthews here and it makes zero sense. Why would they need to bother with fake names if the heroes wouldn’t even recognize their real names to begin with? Such revelations add nothing and fails to tell the audience anything new about the characters. It’s also not consistent as it turns out Gothel was a disciple too and she only gets one name, so what gives?

So How Does This All Work Again?

So Zhan Tiri needs ‘a clash of the sundrop and moonstone’ in order to be freed from her prison. Why? I don’t know, but holding Rapunzel prisoner for life actually undermines that plan, and it’s a plan that Zhan Tiri is currently setting up with Cassandra off screen during all of this.

So does Tromus/Matthews just not know that Zhan Tiri is already ‘free’ and has her own plans?

Is Rapunzel’s power being drained what gives Zhan Tiri a foothold in the real world?

Or was Zhan Tiri released back in the Great Tree with the removal of the spear and that’s why she knows to go after Cass?

What was up with the Great Tree and the sealed tree back in Painter’s Block? Did they have any impact on Zhan Tiri’s plans?

Were any of the disciples actually useful at all?

So What Do the Disciples Gain From All This?

Sugarbee, Matthews, and Gothel were all once real people who actually lived so what are their reasons for following Zhan Tiri? What do they gain from going through such complicated plans? Why continue to follow someone after you’ve been dead for centuries and are a ghost now, and were presumably trapped and or killed by Demantius for following her? Real people don’t just hold on to such fanatical devotion without reason.

This Conflict Over Choices Does Not Work Without Varian

Going back to how this episode fails to develop Rapunzel; it wants to have Rapunzel take responsibility for difficult choices, but much like Painters Block, it completely ignores her biggest fuck up thereby undermining why she has trouble with owning up to hard choices.

Rapunzel ruined a child’s life. She may not have meant to but she did, and thus far she has done nothing to make amends for it. She’s not even spared the poor boy a single thought beyond seeing him as the boogeyman in a nightmare once.

You can’t have Rapunzel take responsibility for anything if you won’t hold her accountable for anything.

Varian was meant to appear in this episode, and indeed he should have for the above reason.

But of course Chris had to give us a bullshit excuse for why he cut the most plot important character from the series.

I’ve already spoken about how Varian’s cameo in Happiness Is did nothing to actually further develop Rapunzel nor explore her guilt back in that review. In this episode, however, I want to discuss how hollow the comparisons to Gothel is and why there shouldn’t logically have been any competition between the two.

Varian and Gothel provide two completely different conflicts and two completely different points of development for Rapunzel’s arc. Gothel is the instigator of her conflict with Rapunzel. Rapunzel, as the victim, has only one thing to learn, self esteem. She learned it back in the movie, she relearned it back in the season one, and here she’s re-contextualizing it for this episode’s mini-arc.

Meanwhile Rapunzel is the instigator of her conflict with Varian. She’s the one with the power in their relationship and her choices matter. She doesn’t need to learn agency because she already has it. What she needs to learn is responsibility and she can’t do that without confronting Varian and what she did in some manner. So unlike with Gothel there only new ground to cover here rather than rehashing old conflicts.

Chris Sonnenburg has things all backwards. Rapunzel’s agency/self-esteem issues and her need to take responsibility for her actions are not interchangeable conflicts. Addressing one does not automatically address the other, and of the two her conflict with responsibility holds more weight because it’s ongoing. We haven’t seen the resolvement there. It also affects more people than just herself so the stakes are higher there as well. And to top it all off, it fits with the themes of the episode better.

Also, you very much could have had both characters because they both reflect different conflicts and serve different purposes in the narrative. Time management in television is a very big deal yes, but you have little grounds for defense when all you’ve shown is how poorly you’ve managed your time until now.

In short, Chris is full of shit.

No, It Wouldn’t

We’ve already established that there’s no need for Rapunzel to go on her quest in season two. The black rocks are inactive, there’s no ticking clock she has to beat, and her staying at home would have actually prevented the conflicts in season three.

Unless dream Rapunzel is referring to Zhan Tiri being released, but even that is false because Zhan Tiri is already floating around a little blue ghost girl off screen right now. What Rapunzel choses or chooses not to do does not change that.

Lack of external conflict undermines internal conflict.

Just Cause You Make A Meta Joke About Your Heroes Being Dumb For No Reason, Does Not Make Them Any Less Stupid

Jokingly admitting a fault in your writing doesn’t not excuse that fault. If you can’t have a plot without handing the idiot ball to your characters than you haven’t a good plot. Time to go back to drawing board.

Season Three Will Go Back On This Episode’s Message and Prove the Villian Right

I’ve liget seen fans unironically praise the show for it’s message of ‘be content with what you have’. Not only is that a terrible lesson to teach children; it’s actually the exact opposite of what the show is trying to achieve.

“Be satisfied” is suppose to be the wrong motto. Rapunzel is suppose to be fighting against this message. In the episode itself it’s the villian who is saying such things in order to tempt her to stay put.

So how could anyone look at the show as a whole and come away with idea that the one off villain was right along?

Because season three does a complete 180 away from its original messages regarding agency and responsibility. All consequences disappear from the story and the mains are given convenient scapegoats to distract from their decisions. Characters actively regress and are rewarded by the narrative for either not doing anything or for victim blaming others for their actions.

But most damaging of all is the fact that nearly everyone winds up back where they started out at, or aren’t given a proper ending at all. Tangled’s story is just one giant circle and that in of itself contradicts the idea of progress.

Cassandra’s Hurt Hand Is Only Relevant When The Story Wants Rapunzel to Feel Guilty About Something

Oh but we can just throw Cassandra’s burnt hand in here as a substitute Rapunzel’s guilt over Varian. Even though the two incidents should actually complement one another rather than compete for dominance.

Tangled doesn’t trust its audience to remember things. It acts like if it’s off screen or not being focused upon than it’s not happening or isn’t relevant. This undermines any ongoing or overarching conflicts.

Why should we care about Cassandra’s arm if she’s been shown as being fine with it for four episodes by now? Especially since it’ll never come up again after this point? And on the flip side of things, why should the audience not care about the 15 year old who has been sitting in a dungeon for almost a year now due to Rapunzel’s neglect?

We’re not magpies who are quickly distracted by shiny new things. We are capable of retaining information and informing decisions based off of that. Especially if Chris was shooting for the teen audience as he claims he was.

Oh But We Got Time For Godzilla-Pascal

Can’t spare even half a minute for a Varian cameo that would be relevant, but we sure got time to waste on a pointless action sequence that does nothing to further the character in what is meant to be a character development episode.

This Scene Is Out of Character

That’s not how abuse works!

The whole reason why Gothel was able to keep Rapunzel under her thumb for 18 years because Rapunzel always sought her approval. Never at any point, even when finally choosing to break away from her in the movie, did Rapunzel wish to harm the woman. That goes against who she is as a character and it’s not how abuse victims respond to abusers even after cutting things off with them.

If anything, Rapunzel’s treatment of Frederic in Happiness Is is more in line with how a victim goes about mourning the loss of an abusive relationship. Victims grieve for what might have been. Victims mourn the loss of what good times they had with their abusers, because yes, abusers aren’t abusive 100% of the time 24/7. They can’t be or they risk losing their victim quicker.

I initially was ok with flashbacks to Gothel on occasion because no victim ever makes a completely clean break from their abuser. Even ‘moving on’ isn’t some triumphant singular action when you stand tall while you knock your opponent down in a wish fulfilment fantasy.

No. ‘Moving on’ is slow. It’s understated. It’s routine. It’s about being able to do the dishes without getting triggered. It’s sitting at lunch with friends and being happy and calm without the fear of returning home hanging over your head. It’s not skipping out on work because your anxiety is through the roof over just meeting with your boss. It’s not devolving into a yelling match over something minor because you internalize your abusers behavior.

Abuse victims don’t celebrate violence as strength. We celebrate being an unmovable mountain of clam fortitude. Being in control even as the world rages at us, because we’re self assured.

The fact that this scene exists, while Happiness Is shows Rapunzel behaving the opposite way to the father who abused her the same as Gothel did, only proves that a man shouldn’t have been in charge of this show. Certainly not without a woman by his side giving equal input.

Stop Using Destiny as a Shorthand for Everything!

Destiny isn’t a catch all word that can mean whatever you want it to. Words have definitions for a reason. Destiny isn’t a goal nor does it equate to agency and responsibility; kind of the opposite in fact.

Well That Was Redundant

All we did was rehash Rapunzel’s season one arc in under half in hour. Nothing new was learned. It’s like writers don’t know how to resolve any conflict that isn’t a repeat of the first movie. Meanwhile actual unique conflicts are just sitting off to the side being ignored. All because the show’s creator doesn’t want to hold his precious self insert accountable for anything.

Bye Bye Smart Cass, Hello Dumb Cass

So from this point onward the Cass we’ve known for nearly two seasons is gone. She’s just been replaced by the dumbest bitch on the planet. Because the writers don’t understand how manipulation and trauma actually works. Nor do they comprehend the importance of giving characters actual goals.

Conclusion

Season three is what retroactively spoils this episode. Cass’s dumb decision here, Zhan Tiri’s lack of a coherent plan, the uselessness of the disciples, and even the lack of Varian could have been glossed over had they writers given us a satisfying pay offs for any of the main conflicts. But they didn’t and so here we are.

Also a small update, but after this review and starting next week, the Salt Marathon will go from bi weekly updates to only one a week. This is a combination of real life work getting in the way and the growing length of the reviews. This means we’ll hopefully be done come March, which would mark the show’s anniversary. I got some plans to celebrate if that works out.

#tangled #anti-tangled #anti rapunzel #rapunzel's tangled adventure #tangled the series #varian

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eddiemxnsons · 4 years

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OUTSIDE — Edward ‘Hillbilly’ Jones

REQUESTED BY: @ourmiraclealigner —

hi! i really loved your take on the last request and was wondering if you could write something else when you get the chance? where the reader is really struggling with everything she’s seeing on peleliu and hillbilly tries cheer her up? maybe she gets hurt and doesn’t call for help?

TRIGGER WARNING: Blood, mental illness, suicide ideation

TAGLIST: @noneofurbusinez

SHE TOLD HERSELF that the floods of crimson fear were merely awry brain chemicals, her amygdala pinged, and then attempted to analyse the situation as an bystander; pondering how a military officer — not a human — would take action. They certainly wouldn’t be cramped ass to ankles in a mud-sodden foxhole, questioning every man lost and if there was an absent step in each incident, a step that would have yanked their golden souls away from Death’s irate tendrils. Where had she gone wrong? She had lost so many men — friends — in this ardent bitterness festering on the Pacific island.

The darkened island was an empire of misery and fear for Y/N; memories of death tucked in with the foliage, playing a macabre game of hide and seek behind trunks with murmurs of young men’s hysterical implores to a savior that wasn't there. A ripple in reality was at her fingertips as she discarded a mournful, muddied foxhole for an equivalent agony beneath the rich canopy of kaleidoscope trees, rifle haphazardly swung on a strap between her shoulder blades. The moon beamed like a flashlight clenched in a steady hand as the stars brushed the curved branches, her weary eyes fixated on the corpses abuzz with hungry flies. And upon the forest floor so woven with ancient tree roots, was subtle streams of crimson, no longer a softened light from nature's bouquet above. And the overwrought young girl in her had emerged with the ghosts behind the trees, the boogeymen of a child’s unconscious mind.

And she momentarily surrendered her obligation of nightly patrol to the small girl misplaced amidst the decaying corpses of men. A fleeting feeling rumbled in her core as if the rumpled yet headstrong woman that stalled in the rain had vanished, a young girl with braids at the facets of her freckled face, and a simper of gold in her absence. Perhaps the war was all a dream. She’d awake in her bed, murmuring of the story her conscious had trudged her soul through. Her soul that wouldn’t be dilated red with the blood of her men. Yet, imagining this itself was a fantasy and was sanity laying in madness.

She’d continuing traipsing her normal patrol with a burdensome soul, a ledger stark red with blood that wasn’t as easy to scour away like blood upon skin. A mental imprint of the young men that cursed her existence from whatever beyond existed. Ones that could pluck her through a ripple of reality, have her on scarred knees imploring for forgiveness beneath the twilight.

An absentminded hand clutched the golden cross stowed under the threadbare collar of her jacket; a dangling sheath of metal that she had prayed over too many times for her aching chest. God wasn’t here. This was a breeding ground of devastation and only the Devil could prosper amidst the chaotic sorrows of humanity’s war. Raindrops accumulated along its frayed edges as she stared at it from beneath rain-sodden eyelashes. She felt a fool for adorning it, a fool for providing false hope.

Y/N weakly lowered herself to a moss-encrusted log, every inch of her body felt as if it accommodated lead weights, her legs cramping with agonizing spasms. The frustrated gulp she took burned her larynx as she gasped for breaths of the humid air, crying despite her distaste for succumbing to this fear.

The ghostly, sweetly bloody fingers of soldiers that failed to be successes of her miraculous hands traced delves into her shoulder blades. They were ambassadors from a misery far away from the comprehension of the sane. The copper sourness exuded from the flickers of their souls in her peripheral, their wounds not healed in the bittersweet glory of the afterlife, rather stark against the ivory complexion of their drained bodies.

Y/N’s throat clawed with the irate exhaustion of her very being to implore for salvation from this eternal hell. Her hand clenched the front of her uniform just as if she was holding what remained of her soul from rotting into the abyss of a lamenting chest. She needed it to stop. Her piteous tears were waving flags of surrender, oval sorrows to the surviving company beyond the slick horizon — to Edward Jones.

Y/N wanted a life with him, oh, how she did. Yet, didn’t desire to be cradled in a life where she was broken and bruised, wrecked from the inside out by war. And that’s why she remained crouched against the fallen trunk, alright with letting the forsaken souls of soldiers take her away, take her away from the death and more dying men. She had nothing left. Ashes of a soul gradually vanishing with each final breath of a fellow soldier. It’s not what her company deserved. It’s not want Edward deserved.

All she could hear was the obnoxious banging of her heart as she peered up with her lungs clenching in her chest almost immediately; a soldier — Japanese — huddled alongside a bullet-ridden tree trunk, glowering at her, eyes searing holes into her soul. Even in the murky shadows, Y/N’s weepy eyes found his finger cramping on the trigger of his rifle.

Yet, she remained there, back constrained against a rooted tropical plant with her own rifle trembling in bloodied hands, a clasp weakening to relinquish the weapon to a congregating puddle. Her mouth was open, but it was an oblivion of silence, not even a single wisp of breath as the pair of them mounted within a tense stare-off. Her bloodshot eyes trickled over the defined, silver corners and edges of the enemy’s rifle — her gateway away from this crimson hell. She wanted to scream at the shadowy soldier to pull the damned trigger, to hush the sullen memories. Pull the trigger, kill the tarnished soul beneath. Dying was quicker than falling asleep. Her achy eyes eased shut, fingers cramping in fragility to renounce her weapon and surrender to a bullet.

Yet, the meager burst of life in her decayed soul desperately thrashed and penetrated the water’s surface her mind was submerged in, writhing against a lotus of misery. It begged for the life she could live, clamored how she wasn’t a bad person. Bad things occurred around her, but she wasn’t a rotten soul for it. She is a categorical victim of war, constantly drowned in tidal waves of guilt, regret, pain, anger. But, she did everything she could have to save those boys.

Y/N heels are what landed roughly first into the crumbly dirt as she anchored jellied legs upon the soiled ground, boots noisily striking rolling pebbles littered in the grass. She cast a hand out to seize up her rifle in a mirror position to the enemy sewed between the foliage. She was the best shot in the company, yet the trigger-happy soldier opposing her trembling stance was a faster one.

Her stomach lurched at the recognized poignant screech from the discharge of a rifle. A successor to shots that silenced golden laughter and made dull lively gazes. Y/N heaved herself absentmindedly backward to elude the contempt trajectory of the approaching bullet. Her boots slipped shortly on slick algae in the shallow water of a stream, trudging through soupy sand until she was struck frozen.

The blast into the gentle air had collapsed into her shoulder and the utter velocity of the meager shard of metal propelled her to the ground. Her chin plummeted through a dense mound of congealed mud, specks of nature’s grime embroidering with the blood splattered across her cheek. Distantly, her bewildered mind detected the silent atmosphere being hindered by fleeing footsteps, a harsh murmur from a foreign land. The soldier thought she was dead.

Her gaze was alight with so much perplexion and despair as she strained to ease herself onto her back, breaths aching her throat. The gaze poked out from eyes swathed with a solidfying concoction of blood and mud, yet her shivering hands trailed to her wound rather than to scrub away the blinding, burning substances.

Cramped fingers shakily reached to apply pressure to what she could access of the wound. She gasped through gritted teeth at the impressive surge of agony trembling her petite frame, her blood now painting her clammy palms.

“Fuck, fuck,” she panted incredibly fast, securing her hands to the accessible portions in a last desire for survival. She was a thoroughly trained medic, yet all that knowledge that was typically at her fingertips, was dissipating with her fading resolve to save herself.

A hollow feeling bloomed at the center of her chest almost immediately at the stark crimson soiling her hands and the brilliant white of pain ricocheting from her shoulder. Dying. She was on a path ending with the turbid shadow of Death. Dead, dead, dead. She was going to die — nobody would be coming. This is what she had wanted, trekked out into the gloomy forest with whispers of intention for death. Yet, was it selfish to forsake Death and proclaim the worthiness of her life? To say she couldn’t leave another soul behind in despair?

However, there was essentially nothing at her dispense to stanch the bleeding without proper assistance. I’m so sorry, Ed. She’ll see him one day. Take your time. I’ll see you on the other side, was her farewell penned to the company’s golden boy in a letter that’ll never be physically scribed. She had touched him for the last time, kissed him for the last time, smiled at him for the last time, spoke to him for the last time, loved him for the last time.

Her mind was prospering with a bitter fire of panic, her chest saturating with this tightening feeling of misery, letting it scorch her from the inside; was this how all those young men felt as they held her hand and cry for their mothers as they bleed out from shredded wounds on their bodies?

But, she never screamed once for any of the troopers that she knew were beyond the rain-sodden horizon — never once in palpable desperation for Edward. She craved death so badly just mere minutes before, and to wish away the desires only festered karma to strike. There was no eluding Death. This was all inevitable and attempting to play God by saving herself, someone not much worthy of living, was foolish.

Her GI-issued uniform was saturated with the rain water and the tickles of sweat emitting from her clammy skin, and it only was anchoring her further into the cradle of sludge. Her free hand reached for the swaying cross on her blemished collarbone, a glance from sore eyes squinting to the cloudy sky for salvation. For a wish that God saw her through a tranquil demise, a desire that he vowed to her that her family — Edward — would fare well without her.

With the smell of Death soaking through and through her skin, perhaps even grazing her rattling bones, she knew she was being anchored into a dusky conscious. The hand planted around the curve of her shoulder uneasily limpened and greeted the plunge of blood that swirled into the rain puddle beneath her. Ragged breaths careened from her glass chest and absentminded fingers poked and prodded at her dog tags suspended beneath her collar. Her mouth was dryer than a sandbox beneath the summer sun whilst her mind contemplated through races of agitation and sorrow being casted. The frustration was a burning rod weaving between the bones of her ribcage, cooking with the shared gaze between her and the sky.

A cacophony of disturbed dirt and pebbles shot through the tension like the bullet bound to the muscles of her shoulder. Her agitation shattered into petrifaction, absentmindedly maneuvering her tender body further into the ink of the shadows. Had the soldier returned to confirm his belief? The belief that she was long dead?

“Y/L/N!”

It was her relief for the patrol that had her ambling amidst the forested graveyard in the first place. Her relief being, by some divine yet sadistic logic, Captain Haldane and Lieutenant Edward Jones. The bitter realization urged her diminishing strength to wrench herself up to sit behind the tree, entirely absent from their view. However, whilst she careened herself up to a sitting stance, she screamed regardless of her resolve to suppress the mind-numbing anguish for the sake of herself and the soldiers not at the mercy of the prowling Japanese.

Y/N fastened her hand over her mouth hastily, clenching her teeth on the begrimed arch of her palm to subdue her whimpers as her wound scraped against rough mounds of bark on the trunk.

Their heels are what landed roughly first into the crumbly dirt adjacent to her shoddy hiding place, skidding a few feet in shell casings, shredded leaves, and rocky sand before a flash of camo green slashed through her spotty gaze. Edward collapsed into dampened dirt amidst the cluster of puddles, blood, and grime whilst Haldane hastened off to retrieve a corpsman. Edward’s expression was consumed with petrification as he regarded her bloodied body heaving against the concave of the trunk. There was so much blood and dirt on her baggy uniform and what skin was exposed.

“Why didn’t you fucking call for help?” He hissed harshly in the midst of recovering a clod of gauze from his jacket, hastily dressing it across her wound without forewarning.

If more strength could have been mustered, she would have nudged him aside and tended to her wounds with more experienced hands, but she was pinned to the ridges of the trunk with her entire body churning with waves of agony. Her chest was heaving and she couldn’t get any word uttered through her clenched throat, the pain superiorizing the need to talk. He rose a few meek fingers on her cheek to shift her amiss gaze to himself, her instinctively subsiding into the meager touch.

Her eyes were just as remarkably expanded as his as they steadied eye contact with one another, and it seemed incredulous now to call her the most dangerous in the regiment when she trembled like an ill child.

“I didn’t because...because....I can’t handle any of this anymore....” she babbled nearly incoherently despite their close proximity, “Just g-go....let me go. I-it’s okay....”

Edward glanced to her with stern glint in his narrowing eyes, “You stop that talk. There’s no outcome in which I leave you here to die. And don’t pity the dead ‘round us now, don’t believe they are dead because of you. None of them are. Their deaths - their blood — that’s all soaking the Jap’s hands, not yours. I see how you pull out every stop to save the lives of these men. You don’t see the wounds, you see the person around them.”

His present hand shifted to skim the rough patch of his thumb across the begrimed apple of her cheek whilst the other one exerted pressure to her wound. And she couldn’t refuse when his hands drew her head into the crook of his neck, embracing her tight to make her cracks remain together. Her leaden arms encompassed his torso whilst easing her cheek to his chest, the aloof ruckus of an approaching medic and her captain resounding behind them.

And she’d go on.

#band of brothers #hbo war #hbowar #dick winters #band of brothers imagines #david webster

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thatboomerkid · 6 years

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The Reverend of Razored Witch-Pyres

The Reverend of Razored Witch-Pyres (a CR 7+ Pathfinder Modern / Urban Fantasy Encounter for Bloodlines & Black Magic)

There are small towns where the Blooded dare not tread.

Little burgs and hamlets, out-of-the-way places like Hobb’s Hollow up in Utah or the quiet city of Rowe over in northwestern Massachusetts. There are thirteen of them in all, and any competent magician of the modern era could probably list at least three off the top of their head: lessons drilled-in by a paranoid mentor during their apprenticeship or else picked-up from idle sessions of rumor, gossip & laughs over drinks with the fellow initiated.

Ask around in any major city and you could probably get a comprehensive list of all thirteen of these infamous scary-spots in a couple of hours. Along with a half-dozen false positives, crackpot theories and bald-faced lies, of course.

These aren’t the sort of towns that you just stumble across, thankfully. Most of ‘em are half-abandoned and far off the beaten path: you’d have to go looking for trouble to wind up there ... or, perhaps, find yourself hopelessly lost following a bad trail of horror about to get a whole lot worse.

Nothing particularly weird can be found-out about these places online, in case you were wondering; the Archons have seen to that, scrubbing the web until it glistens like a raw wound. Feel free to Google them if you don’t mind falling onto a watch-list maintained by the dark heart of the Internet Herself: you’ll find nary a whisper about what happens to those Blooded who set foot in town.

Uncovering the true histories would require access to old & forbidden books, kept by possessive antiquarians in basement vaults under lock & key, salt & spell: held against a purge ordained by the Seven of Secret Names.

These towns? Those of us in the know, we avoid them for fear of the Reverend.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

original image from here

Every few years you’ll hear a tale about some brave occultist or another setting up shop in one of these villages: daring the fates, establishing a witch’s circle or a midnight reading-room right there in the shadowy maw of the beast.

Maybe some of these stories are just that: stories. Maybe nobody’s really that stupid. But if you’ve met some of our contemporaries, you know that there’s always someone -- a magus one High Priestess short of a full Tarot deck, if you take my meaning -- dumb enough to try just about any fool errand.

And everything, according to the old legends, seems to go just dandy for a few weeks. Maybe even a few months. On a single occasion, almost a year.

And then one day ... nothing. Not a peep. Every last member of a Bloodline in that town vanishes overnight. Never to be seen or heard-from again.

And life in that quiet little back-country town rolls on, perhaps just a little bit quieter than before. Local police wash out the dead-end alleys; public works officials clear the storm drains. There are bonfires held on the Sabbath, and whispered prayers before bedtime, and everyone pretends they can’t smell the rust on the wind or hear those sharp clicks rattling out of the woods at night.

The Revered walks his appointed rounds slowly ... but he keeps them all the same, with precise & religious care.

NOTE: So, precisely which towns out there exist under the dreadful watch of the Reverend of Razored Witch-Pyres? Well ... that’s been left intentionally vague, allowing for greater flexibility on the part of an individual GM.

Of course, it’s possible that some of these towns are used by cabals loyal to the Archons: a village under the gaze of the Reverend is a safe haven where no servant of the Goetic Spirits might ever dare to meddle or intrude.

They say that in life, long ago, the Reverend of Razored Witch-Pyres -- whatever his name was, it’s been lost to the machinations of our starry masters for many decades -- served the Archons with unparalleled zeal and efficiency: tempering the roaring blaze of his utter hatred with ruthless & icy professionalism.

By the standards of modern psychoanalysis, we would likely term the Reverend a particularly high-functioning sadist & serial killer: he went to elaborate lengths to understand his targets fully before striking, taking great pains to break each of his victims completely -- mind, body and soul -- before performing a uniquely grisly public execution. His life’s work had genuine artistic merit, from a certain point of view, full of profound allegory & subtle poetry.

He worked for the church, and he hunted witches.

At this task, he was without equal; by his deeds, the Veil was maintained & made strong. No one can say precisely how many servants, sycophants & supporters the Goetic Spirits lost to his blades ... but his victims numbered in the dozens if not in the hundreds, and each of his many obscene “performance pieces” surely terrified another dozen or more would-be-arcanists into hiding.

image from here; the Reverend of Razored Witch-Pyres in better days.

In death, the Reverend was rewarded dearly for his strict devotion to the will of the High Seven by no less august a figure than Yasazziel, Grand Archon of Glittering Things and Earthly Delights: he was gifted an Abhorrent Heaven of his very own, a sprawling realm of dark woodlands & villages full of fearful sinners upon which to vent his most grotesque lusts for all eternity.

To this end, his soul was reforged into a new and brutal shape: an Advanced Barbed Devil with the Implacable Stalker template; in this flesh, the Reverend was loaned-out by his mistress to the aid of her sisters on many occasions, rapidly becoming one of the top-tier problem-solvers for the Archons. The Reverend was frequently unleashed to wipe-out entire Lineages that had finally crossed some invisible line or another and drawn the apocalyptic ire of the Masters of Heaven: cities & fortresses alike burned when the Grand Archons took the honorable Reverend out of his toy-box & set him loose in the real world to “make the wicked suffer, as pleases you”.

And then, one day? Something happened. Nobody knows how, precisely, but one group of magicians or another cobbled themselves together a desperate silver bullet, took a long-shot risk ... and it worked. By unknown means -- most-likely an Incantation of incredible power, although nobody’s talking -- the Half-Summoned Creature template (see Bloodlines & Black Magic, pg. 223) was successfully applied to the Reverend.

And it stuck.

He’s slow and confused, these days. Wandering, alone and lost. Can’t tell where he is; can’t get his bearings nor keep his thoughts straight. He wanders between a few familiar cities that remind him of home: stepping casually across the world via greater teleport according to a half-remembered schedule. About once a month, on average -- usually on some high church holiday or the anniversary of an important event in his mortal life -- he’ll experience a full night of clarity.

During these times, he keeps to the code of the Veil: hunting only the Blooded.

He has been killed a few times, since the curse took effect.

It never sticks for long.

Using the Reverend:

If a character’s Threshold increases to an odd number from direct exposure to the presence (or the power) of the Reverend of Razored Witch-Pyres, she may gain one of the following Oddities (roll 1d8):

Your eyes glow like lit cigarettes; this is visible only in the dark. You add produce flame as a 1st level spell to any one spell-list you possess.

You feel heat on the back of your neck and upon your heels whenever you are within 50 feet of a Lawful-aligned non-mundane creature allied to the Archons such as a devil, kyton, angel or inevitable. Note that not all Lawful outsiders are servants of the Archons, and that some Chaotic outsiders are also under their thrall. The range of this ability is halved (to 25 ft.) for mortal Blooded creatures who fit the criteria above, such as Lawful oracles and slayers loyal to the Archons.

You gain an overwhelming scent of brimstone, ash and smoke, and may be freely detected by all opponents within 30 feet purely by sense of smell. If you are upwind, the range increases to 60 feet; if downwind, it drops to 15 feet. Your exact location is not revealed, only your presence within range and the general direction toward you. When you are within 5 feet of any creature, however, that creature automatically pinpoints your location even if otherwise blinded to you. Upon whispering a prayer, your stench is suppressed for a number of minutes equal to your level.

You are always treated as if you had directly witnessed the death of the Reverend and are thus susceptible to his Nightmare Resurrection ability. While he is alive, this ability has no effect ... although you often see him in your dreams, calmly watching you.

You develop a severe allergy to silver. If you touch, are touched by or are otherwise exposed to silver or alchemical silver – such as by taking damage from a silver weapon or because you are wearing or carrying silver items – you immediately suffer a –2 penalty to Dexterity and Charisma for 1d4 hours (no save). Multiple separate events of exposure stack, but none of your ability scores can be reduced to zero in this way. In addition, you must stay at least 5 feet away from silver, holy symbols and holy water; you may not choose to move closer to such an object or substance if it is within 20 ft. You also gain immunity to fire.

You gain full knowledge of either the Celestial language or the Infernal tongue (your choice).

You gain vulnerability to fire. If you ever possess less than half of your maximum hit points, you lose this vulnerability and instead gain fire resistance equal to twice your level. You likewise gain this benefit if at least half your body is covered in blood from another source.

Roll 1d6+1 twice, keeping both results. If you gain the same result for both rolls, re-roll one of the dice.

#pathfinder #modern #Monster #bloodlines and black magic #devil #angel #witch hunter #cr 9

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eggscelsior · 6 years

Text

A Brief History Of Andrew’s Protective Streak

Andrew learned to do stick-and-poke tattoos during juvie. Nothing fancy; he had always been good at sketching, so his line art was crisp, and he could do shading easily enough by filling in the design with less passes of ink. It was amazing how much cooler a pubescent teen thought he looked with a dragon jabbed under his skin in blue ballpoint ink, instead of just doodled on top. That was, in fact, one of the top requests. Andrew considered it distastefully ironic - Dragon, Draco, Drake.

He was amused by the idea of stabbing “Drake” hundreds of times in black and blue. But why would anyone want that permanently etched into their body? Andrew had given himself enough marks to remind himself of the opposite: that Drake was temporary, that he could be outlasted. Andrew’s marks were carved as a distraction, dulling one kind of pain by making a fresher, sharper, controlled version. They were for endurance, not aesthetic. He covered his marks with black armbands, not filled them with ink. They were necessary but nothing to be proud of. Andrew had no urge to give himself a tattoo. But the favors he garnered in trade for his skill were invaluable.

~~~

No one had ever kept a promise to Andrew (Cass had maybe tried), and with a lack of any real thing worth living for, he’d decided to create his own value by keeping promises to others, as long as he gained something from it. Andrew made a business out of promising tattoos and following through. He was good at them. And he was good at protecting his goal, because it got him out of the juvie facility one Friday a month for “away” games.

And he might be good at protecting people, if they were people he decided mattered, and that felt…slightly more worthwhile than anything else. There was something in the concept of being needed that made living a bit more tolerable, a bit less boring. He'd hated the idea of a carbon copy brother that had been needed by the woman that birthed them in a way that she hadn't needed Andrew. He'd wanted no part of that shit. He had Cass. Aaron was not his problem. Aaron did not matter.

But then Drake had gotten interested. "Let him visit." "I want to meet him too." "All three of us will be brothers." "Twins are every man's fantasy, AJ. "You'll look so perfect in my bed together.” And suddenly Aaron needed Andrew, even if he didn't know it. Andrew was shocked how vehemently this hit him, how important a priority it immediately presented itself as. The first person who genuinely needed him. It was up to Andrew to keep the carbon copy cleaner than the original. No one deserved Drake, and this was something only he could be relied upon to protect against.

The only way to prevent Drake from eventually convincing Cass to have Aaron come visit, with or without Andrew’s approval, was to remove himself as well. He was used to being hurt, and to hurting himself, so he could handle this loss. Cass wanted to keep him but she didn't need him, like Aaron. So he did what he had to do and landed himself in juvie.

Then he actually met Aaron. Aaron’s mouth listed off the name of some girlfriend – his identical twin was straight? Huh. – and the name of a high school and a position as backliner on the school Exy team, blah blah blah small talk, but Andrew took one glance at the long sleeves and jeans during California summer – there was the edge of a bruise at the collarbone – and the posture – defeated – and the behavior – jittery, twitchy, he’d seen too many inmates crashing to not know Aaron was on drugs that were both addictive and strong enough to kill – and he decided that this carbon copy needed continued protection, lest he end up as marked up as Andrew after all, just by someone else's hand than Drake's.

“Uncle” Luther wanted to help “save” him from juvie, but wanted to send him back to Cass. He needed to go where Aaron was, so he shared a truth that he’d never wanted to voice out loud. Luther did not believe him, immediately marking himself off Andrew’s list of people who had a chance to matter due to blood proximity. Instead he guilted a promise out of the minister to keep other children out of Drake’s reach “in case they’re as incapable as me at ‘judging brotherly affection’ and would come out just as traumatized” and drummed up a cavalry march in Luther’s meddling missionary heart to bring Andrew “home” to his “mother” and brother.

Then he called in a lot of hoarded favors from his tattoo business: “accidental” conversations held within earshot of wardens that painted him in a good light, or at least, in a bad light with the bad crowds. A staged fight that he broke up peacefully, with sharp words and sharper stares, instead of with the fists the wardens knew he was so good with and the shivs he’d only ever been suspected of having. He even had a couple of recommendations from guards that had been impressed enough with his art to get inked by him themselves.

Pristine behavior, a winning streak for the Exy team, and his list of favors wouldn’t take too long to rattle up a parole hearing.

~~~

He was out of juvie, and he was busy. He had joined Aaron’s high school Exy team to keep an eye on him; it was still difficult to pin down all the times Aaron managed to pop pills, so he required observation. Andrew had made a very pointed promise to Aaron’s mother and was arranging to keep his promise because she wouldn’t fucking listen.

~~~

Tilda was dead, finally. It had been ruled an accident, as planned. Aaron was no longer attempting to speak to him, which was fine. He did not require his brother’s approval, just his dependence, and Andrew had fulfilled the promise to protect him. Aaron’s unexpected grief over his waste-of-oxygen mother was annoying, so Aaron glowering from across the room was better than Aaron grieving loudly.

Now was a good a time as any to get Aaron sober. It wasn’t like his twin could fill any more of Tilda’s prescriptions now that she was dead, and Andrew didn’t intend to let him go questing for more sources. So Andrew locked him in a bathroom with canned food – he tossed in Spaghetti-O’s along with the soups and green beans because he wasn’t a monster – and a pillow and waited for sixteen days.

He met with the lawyer in the meantime and signed off for the life insurance payout - A. Minyard. Not a lie. He bought the cheapest cremation possible and tossed the urn on Luther's front lawn for the bastard to make funeral plans around. He bought a car to replace the one he'd made Tilda wreck and put the car’s insurance policy in his own full name. He left Aaron's off. Aaron could depend on him to drive them.

Aaron emerged silent, sober, and craving grease. Andrew drove them to Sweetie's. His twin said nothing about the car, and Andrew didn't offer the spare key of a ninety grand vehicle to a just-barely-ex-drug-addict. There was no point bolstering temptation with means and opportunity.

Then Nicky showed up from Germany. Interesting, that his brother somehow turned out straight but his newfound cousin had managed to worm a gay gene out of Luther and Maria’s chromosomes. Less interesting was Nicky being a fucking chatterbox, making up for Aaron’s blessed silence in a way that no one asked for, as well as Nicky’s complete inability to defend himself even as he assumed guardianship of the twins.

Andrew did not have time to exchange a promise with Nicky in advance, he was too busy beating these four men who’d dared hurt his cousin like they were every man who had ever laid a hand on Andrew without consent. There were a lot of those. That meant a lot of beating. He nearly lost himself in the all-consuming violence tearing out of his core, and came out of the incident with a string of therapists and a bottle of literal happy pills.

They fractured his emotions from his rationality. He spent days with his eyes opened to how amusing and engaging the world could truly be, and then slowly he started to recognize the sick feeling in his gut and the constant edge of a headache throbbing in the base of his skull to the tune of but why is it funny? It’s not. It’s not funny. Stop it. Stop laughing. Stop laughing. STOP.

He became the dead hollow space rotting out the inside of a laughing shell. Why was he living, again? Oh. Promises. Protection. That was about all his brain could hold onto firmly while he was trying to scrape the corners of his ill-fitting smile off his own face with his fingernails. Weeks of practice tamed the giggles down to silent, hard-edged smiles. He could hear the world around his own laughter again.

God, who wouldn’t he kill to stop taking this medication? His brother. He needed to be needed. His cousin too, apparently. The promise was silent but he’d already paid out, so Nicky was his now. The rest of the world could fucking burn.

Aaron was edging away, though, drowning in the misplaced grief he refused to get over. But then Aaron’s girlfriend slapped him, yelled at him for not paying enough attention to her, grabbed his wrist too hard and bruised it. Aaron’s eyes said he couldn’t hit a woman. Andrew didn’t care if it was moral or a psychological remnant of Aaron’s mother’s abuse. A new promise was forged. Aaron was cemented at Andrew’s side through graduation. Andrew broke the girl’s arm and delivered the same promise he’d made Aaron’s mother. The girl quit school.

There were several other girls. Andrew struck preemptively at each. Aaron was his now, he had promised. His to protect. Something to continue living for. Women were nothing but trouble. They turned Aaron into a useless victim. Aaron hated him for his proactive violence, but Andrew only needed dependence to give him a purpose in life, after all.

~~~

And then the fucking Sons of Exy showed up and delivered a grand invite to join the Ravens after graduation.

First of all, it was laughable that they thought he’d leave the brother he was protecting behind to play a worthless sport.

Second of all, he was solidly unimpressed by Riko and Kevin. They were obsessed with Exy, and Exy to him had started as a literal temporary escape from prison and ended up a babysitting gig for his beat up strung out brother.

And third, their tattoos were tacky, unstylized computer font numbers, and unreflective of each boy’s potential in their chosen field. He informed Kevin of this quite pointedly, detailing his lack of interest in someone determined to make a career of coming in second, and the flash of fear in Kevin’s eyes at the implication of holding himself back to second place was…not quite amusing, and only vaguely interesting. It was not his problem. Kevin did not matter.

~~~

When graduation approached, Andrew paid attention. Nicky wanted to go back to Germany. Andrew hadn’t met and didn’t trust Erik, and wanted to delay that as long as possible. Worse, Aaron wanted to run off to college and be a doctor. Lofty goals for someone with shit grades after putting the high in high school several dozen times too many. He’d still try, though. He’d end up in a community college God knows where, no longer bound to Andrew’s side via their promise.

Andrew would not survive his medication without someone to protect.

When Wymack came knocking, Andrew seized the chance and reaped profit all around. Wymack agreed to let him bring his not-great-but-at-least-experienced family along on academic scholarship, and quietly agreed to let Andrew off his drugs for games. He’d seen tapes of Andrew before and after being assigned the pills, so he knew it was to his mutual benefit.

Aaron would get into college, shit GPA or no. The promise was reinstated another four years. Hopefully he’d learned his lesson on the last set of girls.

Andrew called in the favor for protecting his cousin and waited to see if Nicky would disappoint. Nicky waffled, he called his boyfriend-fiancé-whatever to get advice, and he finally caved and agreed a business degree would be good for him.

The drugs would wear off in two years. His promises would hold a little longer. Andrew had no fucking clue what he was going to do after that, but thinking about the future was a waste of time when he spent every spare minute keeping the Joker-laugh restricted to his face and out of his sane mind.

~~~

When Kevin showed up at Palmetto at the beginning of the spring semester with a shattered hand, looking as hollow as Andrew’s own chuckling corpse, he became a thing that mattered.

He promised Andrew a love of Exy – not feasible, but if protecting his goal could magically become a worthwhile purpose, then at least he’d have something to live for after his cousin and brother abandoned ship – and Andrew promised to keep him. Kevin’s life story was vaguely interesting, and Andrew wouldn’t mind breaking some parts of Riko permanently. He didn’t like abusers of his possessions. He stole Kevin’s phone, called up the prick, and made him some promises that involved ending up as bruised and bloody as his school colors. He hoped Riko wouldn’t listen.

~~~

When Neil Josten actually showed up at Palmetto after all promises otherwise, Andrew paid attention. Neil very quickly went from something pretty and mouthy that Andrew wanted to break for something akin to fun, to something he wanted to break to keep his protective promise to Kevin, and finally to something Andrew was going to keep for himself.

Neil's lies were aggravating. Trying to pick the truths out of the lies was interesting enough to keep him engaged. They made a game out of it. Neil was cheating; half the truths he said were not 100% truth. Picking those out was even more difficult. The idea of pushing Neil into full honesty – or at least approaching the asymptote, as one could only know another human being so well – was actually…more entertaining than he wanted another person to be. It felt like power over him.

He liked his foibles to be predictable: cigarettes, 20 to a pack, consumed at a speed he dictated. Crackers, consumed per the quantity that he ordered. Not Neil, who he always seemed to want more out of. More what, he didn’t know yet. He just knew that he gave away far too much information and far too much ground to this half-lie and what he got in return was not enough.

~~~

He was starting to understand what he wanted from Neil. He wanted another Roland. Lithe body, quick wit, good for occasional sexual impulses.

Except Neil didn’t swing, so that was out. It was a good thing Neil was holding Kevin anchored in Palmetto, or he wouldn’t be worth keeping, Andrew told himself.

And yet somehow Neil kept working more out of Andrew than he’d rightfully earned. An extra secret, on credit. Allowing Neil within closer-than-typically-acceptable proximity because he liked breathing Andrew’s smoke. Halloween with the upperclassmen. Dinner with Nicky’s worthless parents.

What the fuck was he giving so much away for?

The answer danced between them for a breath at Exites. He smacked a hand over Neil’s mouth and wasn’t quite sure which of them he was censoring, but the result was the same.

~~~

Drake. DRAKE.

He wasn’t even sure he was conscious. Everything was black, but that might have been a pillow? It was hard to breathe?

There, there was the old familiar pain. He was laughing. He watched his body react irrationally from the inside out. His hollow innards were infinite, pushing out against a heaving, giggling shell that was cracking.

~~~

Aaron. He hadn’t protected Aaron. There was blood on Aaron.

Aaron wasn’t hurt? Why was Aaron touching him. Why was he being touched?

Luther. He made his speech to Luther. Words years in the making.

The fucking drugs were sucking the vindication out of his voice, replacing it with a kind of sick, casual conversational pitch mixed with inane glee.

Sirens. He took off his knives. He already felt so exposed, and it had been only seconds.

Neil was touching him. Why?

No, the scars were personal. Neil hadn’t shared his, why the fuck should he be touching Andrew’s? A promise was delivered. Neil listened and let go.

Huh.

People were talking and his head was going to split open. The drugs were winding down and he was retaining snatches of the hospital room that he didn’t want to keep. A rape kit. Why? Drake was caught in the act AND dead. Intrusive. No. He punched the orderly. He was cuffed to the bed.

Outside he grinned at the expressions on the faces of this group of men he’d kept. He wanted to wipe them all off. His. Theirs. Fuck his chemical smile. Fuck their pity. Men didn’t depend on someone they pitied, and that was all Andrew had to live for. Fuck the drugs.

Bee wanted him off the drugs. He knew there was a reason he kept her around. But…he had promises to keep, and that took precedence. He was used to pain.

Abram. He challenged it just to be sure, but it felt true. He liked truth.

Oh. Neil let Andrew touch his scars, and wow. He’d survived a fair bit, it felt like. Those were true, too. Neil promised to keep Kevin alive, even though he was so prone to running himself, and Andrew thought of the way Neil had actually let go of his arm when Andrew told him to. It was just enough to make him trust, but only barely. Only temporarily. Only in the absence of any other viable solution.

It was time to get clean. Finally.

~~~

He fell back into old survival habits under Proust's hands. In the moments Proust “worked” on him, he distanced himself, like watching something bad happen to a stranger. He couldn't look away, but it wasn't happening to him. Afterward, he reiterated the promises Proust had ignored.

He spent group sessions silent and planning how to keep those promises. He spent individual sessions talking just enough to show them he was making progress towards release. He stole the absurdly heavy tungsten paperweight off the desk of the doctor weaning his drug dosage to aid the exercises he did in his room.

He got clean.

~~~

God. Fuck. The blue eyes were one thing, the hair was criminal. This was going to be a problem. Neil was still here, and he was pretty bruised up, so apparently he’d kept his promise against something without running away. Andrew was content with that. That story would probably be more interesting than a status report on the rest of the outside world, so he put it off till last and commanded Nicky to fill him in on everything else.

~~~

Neil had gone to Evermore. If he hadn’t outright broken his promise to stay by Kevin’s side and protect him, then he’d bent it over backward and fucked it with a rusted fork. Kevin had only been safe from Riko because Riko had been too busy with Neil.

Neil had marks from his past that he’d pressed Andrew’s fingers to, marks Andrew had considered intriguing but dismissed readily enough because it was before his time, before his promise. But this. He smashed the band-aid back against Neil’s cheek, unable to look at the tattoo any longer without needing to punch something, and Neil had been punched enough in the last two weeks to account for several lifetimes.

Andrew hadn’t protected Neil from this tattoo. Andrew couldn’t, because he was getting unfucked in the head and Neil had been a stupid fucking martyr. Proust. Neil had gotten this mark for Andrew, because of Andrew.

Neil had a tattoo that Andrew hadn’t put there. Riko had touched something that belonged to Andrew. Andrew hadn’t protected what was his.

Andrew scaled back the gaping chasm of rage. He wanted to slide out one of his newly-returned knives and carve the fucking tattoo off of Neil’s face. Neil looked like he wouldn’t mind. He scaled further back. He wanted to tattoo over it. Neil probably wouldn’t mind. He scaled further back. He would not do anything to Neil’s face right now because it would cause an adverse reaction from the shitstain roosting in Evermore.

Andrew was a creature that endured. He had patience. He’d kill Riko for this, eventually. For now he needed to focus on what was in front of him. He needed to focus on Neil, on making Neil promise to at least not purposely counteract his own safety.

“If it means losing you, then no.”

Damn the boy. He threw Neil’s keys off the roof and nearly threw himself off two minutes later when Neil wrapped his lips around Andrew’s cigarette filter. Andrew didn’t want a few of his skin cells touching Neil’s mouth, he wanted his tongue between Neil’s lips instead of that cigarette.

Neil’s auburn hair glinted in the sunlight and Andrew was not happy to realize that this was going to be different from Roland, if it was anything at all.

And it wasn't anything. How many times had Neil reinforced that he didn't swing? Neil wasn't flirting with that move. It meant nothing.

~~~

Abram, thought Andrew the first time he felt like touching himself after... everything that had happened in rehab. Abram. Cute old fashioned Christian name. Neil was probably circumcised. He wondered if Neil’s pubic hair had any of that pretty auburn tinge or if it was darker. He thought about Neil's lithe runner’s body and flat stomach and he pictured touching Neil's scars in a way that would make the boy shiver with desire instead of disgust. He wanted to see them.

He wondered how many practices he would get away with sabotaging before someone thought to try sending Neil on court to bargain with him.

Two, it turned out. He didn't hesitate to make his demand. Neil barely hesitated before agreeing.

~~~

He liked touching Neil’s marks of survival, but made sure to keep his touch impersonal. Andrew wondered which of them had more scars in total. Neil’s were obviously larger, and he found himself interested in their stories. The words leaving Neil's mouth were carefully measured and haunted, but they rang true. Andrew didn't feel like he was giving away more than he was getting, this time. He was getting closer to Neil's asymptote and it felt rewarding.

~~~

After admitting his physical attraction to the walking Exy disaster he’d been idiotic enough to keep - the miniature one, to clarify between the two - Andrew went through five cigarettes and spent Roland’s thirty-minute “lunch” break in the back room making out with and then blowing Roland close enough to heaven to yank out one of God’s omnipotent fucking leg hairs, and by the time he was done he had to admit to himself that he was picturing Neil the whole fucking time.

Neil was just a shiny new toy that he was being deprived of blowing. This was nothing.

~~~

It was probably nothing, anyway. At least the one kiss was nice, before Neil had a panic attack.

~~~

The kisses were very nice, actually, and touching Neil’s cock was very nice, and Neil’s orgasm face was actually kind of attractive, and Neil didn’t touch what he wasn’t supposed to. And when Andrew finally got bored, he could always go back to effortless, no-strings Roland.

~~~

This was nothing. This would never be a this.

~~~

“Anything,” Neil promised in return for something as silly as actual effort from Andrew at Exy. He could decide what he’d tattoo over Neil’s number after they won. He had a goal to shut down.

~~~

This would never be a this because Neil was gone, Neil was fucking gone, Neil was a hollow shell saying “thank you” but meaning “goodbye” and then HE WAS FUCKING GONE—

~~~

Neil’s tattoo was gone. Andrew wanted to vomit. Andrew also almost wanted to smile. Riko’s mark was gone from his property, his Neil. Fuck everything, Neil was alive, he could think later. For now, he had to keep the FBI’s filthy hands off his Neil and take him home.

~~~

Neil lay on his back in their bed in Columbia almost a year later. Andrew smoked by the window, watching contentedly as Neil drew lazy patterns against his own shirt.

“I’ve been thinking a lot…about getting a tattoo,” Neil said suddenly, but quietly, like it was a confession. It was almost a question. Andrew’s opinion obviously mattered, though Neil should be perfectly aware by now that Andrew’s interest would not be swayed by the quantity or type of marks marring his skin.

Andrew arched an eyebrow to indicate he should continue.

"I thought I'd never want one after Riko's, but the more I’ve considered it, the more I want to memorialize certain things on my skin. Marks I choose for myself, for once."

Memorialize. So help him, if Neil wanted his mother's name they were going to have a fight. Another useless, abusive female, surprise surprise. And people wondered why he didn't trust them as a rule.

“…A pair of crossed keys. The house key and…I haven’t decided which of the car keys yet, actually. The GS was “first” first, but the Maserati was the first one you trusted to me alone.”

Oh. Andrew exhaled a long stream of smoke in Neil’s direction as he considered this, watching it dissipate as it crossed the room. “Cars and houses change. The basic shape of the two key types don’t. Don’t be so specific. How badly do you want this?”

Neil thought about it seriously. “I’d get it today if I didn’t have one major problem: I’m not going to trust some random tattoo artist to look at my chest, and I want it here.” He touched himself to indicate.

Dead over his heart. Fucking romantic. Andrew sat up from where he leaned against the window, stubbed out his cigarette, and grabbed his laptop. He pulled up a YouTube video demonstrating stick-and-poke tattoos so that his skittish boyfriend wouldn’t bolt, and then walked out of the room to gather the supplies.

Neil was wide-eyed when he made it back to the room with a bucket of gathered up equipment and pulled out a new sewing needle, a pencil, thread, tape, and ink, along with sterilizing supplies. "You're not seriously suggesting I get an amateur tattoo with pen ink and a needle."

"Tattoo ink." Andrew shook the bottle at him, and then set it down to swab his desk off with a paper towel soaked in rubbing alcohol. "Much better than ballpoint, and I've done plenty of good tattoos in ballpoint. You're not getting an amateur tattoo."

Neil scooted over to the end of the bed by the desk as Andrew lined up his supplies. “You have no tattoos.” Neil had earned the privilege of seeing Andrew fully naked about seven months after moving into Andrew’s room.

“I did it ‘professionally’ in juvie, and I was good enough that some of the guards even wanted a free tattoo done, so they got me real tattoo ink. This is a sealed bottle,” he assured Neil, tapping the lid.

Neil considered all of this. “You don’t do anything for free.”

“No. But favors go a long way in a prison.”

Neil nodded and obediently took his shirt off when Andrew flicked his fingers. He lay back down again, but tensed when Andrew disinfected the skin with brisk scrubs of an alcohol-soaked cotton ball.

"Relax," Andrew ordered. "I've done hundreds of tattoos." He could feel Neil's pulse thumping rapidly against his fingertips. He uncapped a blue marker and Neil wordlessly dug in his pocket for keys to trace. Andrew shook his head, though, and Neil went still. He'd meant it: they would share more than one car and more than one house in their lives. Neil was memorializing a concept, not specific key teeth. He freehanded a hardware store house key and an unbranded car key in an X over Neil's hammering pulse. “I’m planning black ink with bold lines and some minimal shading. Unless you want something different.”

Neil craned his head up from where he was laying to look. His expression was pleased.

"Any changes?"

Neil thought a moment, then dug in his pocket again. He selected the key to the Foxhole Court and laid it vertically between the other outlines. This one was specific, so Andrew traced the teeth carefully. It was also a hardware store copy like the house key, so he thought a moment, and then drew a fox paw on the head. Neil smiled, wide and soft.

Fuck. He'd had to stop counting months ago. The percentage was getting too ridiculously high. He hated... He hated how Neil made him feel out of control. For years his reason for living had been curating others' dependence on him. Having his own needs and emotions depend so heavily on another person was terrifying, but he'd resigned himself to it.

And it was Neil. He could trust Neil.

“Can we make the paw orange?”

Andrew shook himself out of his own mind. “I’ll get some orange ink online. We’ll fill that in when it arrives.” He rubbed the design down with another alcohol swab followed by petroleum jelly, and then uncapped the bottle of black ink.

Neil froze again when he picked up the needle and sterilized it. He shot his boyfriend an unimpressed stare as he methodically wrapped thread around the tip, and tipped his chin sharply at a scar two inches north of his design. "You've literally been shot, Neil."

"Once. This is a lot of punctures, okay." Neil took a slow, steadying breath.

"It is not a big deal. I've tattooed twelve year olds that handled this with more grace."

"Then why don't you have any, if it's no big deal?" Neil shot back. "I've never even seen a tattoo artist with no tattoos."

Because I've never had anything worth inking, Andrew wanted to argue. But that wasn't entirely true. He'd had a few passing thoughts about the short list of things important enough to keep with him for the rest of his life. The things he was building his life on. Truth. And Neil.

Neil was actually quaking in their bed. He wanted this so much but was so irrationally afraid.

Andrew silently sat in the desk chair and lifted his left arm, propping his elbow on the desk. He gave his inner wrist a swipe with an alcohol swab, just above the arm band, drew what he wanted carefully, and then dipped his needle in ink and began.

It had been a long time, and it was an eye opening experience, marrying together the familiar resistance and yield of skin under the pressure of the needle with the small, sharp pierces that throbbed with his heartbeat in his wrist. On the whole, pricks hurt less than slices. It hurt, but it didn't bleed or linger beyond a raw throb. Neil would be fine. He saw Neil sit up in his peripheral vision, but Neil wasn’t watching the design, he was watching the angle of the needle. Andrew was done stippling the first layer in about five minutes.

“It’s shallower than I thought,” Neil commented when it was safe to speak without distracting Andrew.

“Deep enough to hold the ink, not deep enough to hit blood vessels or let the ink feather over the muscle.” He went over it again, making it darker.

Eventually Neil piped up again. “How did you learn? I thought tattoo artists generally practiced on themselves to figure it out. Who else would let them?”

Andrew kept his eyes on his work, dipping for fresh ink and falling back into the rhythm. Like riding a bike. He’d always been quite efficient and quick with his work. “You don’t learn on skin. You learn on fruit, like bananas and oranges. The peel has skin-like firmness.”

“And…does it hurt?”

Andrew stopped to wipe off the excess ink again, sending Niel a bored look. “Immensely. I am writhing in pain.” Neil shot him a look in return. “It’s just shallow pinpricks, idiot.”

After a third pass and wipe, he eyed it critically. "Yours will take a good deal longer than fifteen minutes because of the size and shading, but.” He twisted his wrist for Neil to see. “Nothing to it."

Copying was easy for him, with his memory. 'Abram' was written in Neil's handwriting.

There was not 'nothing' on Neil's face. Neil's breath hitched, and the sheer emotion in those pretty blue eyes threatened to drown them both.

Andrew covered Neil's eyes when he couldn't stand it anymore, but he bent forward for a lingering kiss at the same time. "Your turn," he murmured against Neil's lips, pressing his palm to Neil's design. Neil's heart was still pounding, though Andrew didn't think it was due to fear anymore. Good enough.

Neil shuddered under his touch and cupped a hand around his wrist, squeezing gently. Andrew let him, and didn't flinch, but he made a note not to touch Neil's tattoo when it was done.

He kissed Neil one more time, then patted his tattoo down with mild soap water, sealed it over with Neosporin and saran wrap. He re-sterilized and threaded his needle, and Neil let him begin to work.

#andreil #aftg #fanfic #up on ao3 if you prefer to read there

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saucybastards · 4 years

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@butterflyeffekt responded to this post with:

🍭 having an ideal sexual fantasy (for Josh? I’m curious as to what goes on in his head UwU)

SO UHH WHEN I SAID THAT THESE TURNED INTO FULL-ON ONESHOTS -

"Hey!" Mike laughs. "...We're all -- you know, the guys, here, just... hangin' out..."

Josh rolls his eyes, leans further aside with his arm along the back of the couch to mask the roll of his eyes up 'n to a... thoughtful half-lidding out the window - granted, mouth turned to show a slice of teeth in... honest amusement.

At the end of his other arm, he clutches the neck of a now almost-drained whiskey bottle. In front o' that, his knee idly bounces.

He knows where this is going.

"Dude -- !" Chris forces out; Matt says nothing, and Josh figs he's probably gonna keep it that way, if he can help it.

The slice of teeth gets wider, longer.

"Look -- Josh! Josh knows what's up! He can play along...!"

The half-lidding gets heavier.

He is playin' along, he guesses. Trying to look all hip and cool and mysterious, because, y'know, Mike's right.

He also does, in fact, know what's up already because this's not the first time Mike's gotten wasted and headed down this not-so-dark, dark path.

"Josh -- "

Sure enough...

"Josh -- man, come on! What's your..." ...Mike restarts, scoffing to himself, vocally swaggering off of it into the shake and underburn of one hell of a cavalier laugh by a cavalier man. "...What's your deep, dark, scandalous sexual fantasy?"

"Mike," Matt says. (Scratch that last thought; that's the most he's gonna say.)

"Knowing you, shit -- ...It's gotta be something crazy, right?"

The second "Mike" is Chris's.

Josh's grin has already spread even across his face; he feels it pushin' its way bigger and bigger up into the corners, half-abashedly wanting to laugh. Lifting his head, a super-slo-mo nod.

Ee-yup! Hhhyup -- we're... we’re goin’ there again...

He hums up "'Mean..." His fingers tighten around the neck of the bottle and he flourishes it up 'n outward - a faint splashy and hollow and glassy slosh - with it, a puff of air through his teeth givin' way to a low quiver of laughter under spoken word. "...Bet you can already guess, my dude...!"

For not-the-first-time, he says this full-aware that he's friggin' stalling, and it makes 'im wanna laugh at himself for being such a dingus all the more. He knows they can't already guess. He knows that if they did anyway, like -- any shot in the dark they could take would be “like him”, all right, but for the wrong reasons.

'Mean, not like he doesn’t encourage. Last time, according to himself, the thing was that he’s always wanted to film himself in a full (...he'd paused for, like... five, six secs here) scarecrow outfit goin' at some guy or gal chained to one of those wooden X-es, out in the middle of a field. Straight up crop-circle shit, except the crop circle was on fire. Pyro alien scarecrow porno, dude. Mike had scoffed and giggled and asked him if he was serious, prob'ly not caring whether or not, in fact, he was; Chris had tried to look away and tried to keep a laugh nice and bitten back; Matt had coughed, while all the while, he’d said that hell, yeah - he was dead serious, broski. Would a guy say shit like that if he wasn’t, like -- spilling some serious guts?

...Speaking of - maybe that one was earlier.

Maybe the last time was actually the one where he asked ‘em if it’d be weird if he said he’s cranked one out a couple times to the thought of ending up victim to a horde of zombies. ‘S like a gory gangbang when you think about it the right way, y’know? No, gentlemen? You guys not too hot on getting gone down on? Having ‘em lining up to, like -- slobber all over your meat...?

...Pfffshh… that’d been a good bit - Chris swatting in the air with an incredulous “Bro, what -- ?”, Mike leaning back in containing his snickering ‘n asking what the hell all those horror movies’ve actually done to his brain. He bets he woulda seen Matt fuckin’ blushing with laughter, too, if the dude hadn’t been doing such a grade-A job keeping his face covered.

...His smile slackens on one end.

He don’t got no clue how to top either of those yet, but… maybe a little extra grease for the wheels will do the trick.

He puts a pin in that smile so it’s not hanging so loose; passes it as a nice neat smirk-for-the-cameras into the center of the living room. His eyes dart purposefully between Mike’s grin and raised eyebrow, Chris slouched forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands fidgeting together, Matt leaned back with his arm draped over the back of the couch not sure whether to let himself join the story-swapping ring this time or not.

Josh slowly swats his hand downward in the air a few times, letting his voice warm low and hearty in his throat. “A -- all right, guys -- you… You wanna know what’s really been getting… my juices flowing, lately…?”

The corner of his mouth twitches upward at a little… tickle of a prob’ly-sheepish laugh fringing the last few words of that sentence.

He pretends it didn’t happen and hopes they do, too, jumpin’ onto the next thing.

He throws back the bottle, lips sealing around the mouth with another glassy sound, and pretends that for just a sec, he’s not imagining that it’s Sam’s mouth instead, with one or both of ‘em coming in to… steal some sugar, as they say in… wherever’s the exact place where people even say that.

Fading out the idea of that kiss cozily-yet-casually poppin’ loose before they lean together, also cozily, for a bit of R&R, respective party-drinks-of-choice hanging from each of their hands on standby for another swig. Neither of ‘em are wearing anything, and it makes his skin burn in a way that feels downright therapeutic.

Also not wearing anything: Chris, on the other side of him, with whom he’s finally solved the since-middle-school-old mystery of what some good bro-on-bro tongue-kissing would actually feel like - would that imagining could, you know, actually satisfy the actual curiosity - and they don’t got enough time to linger on it and risk making a good-bro-thing weird, ‘cause he’s got a naked babe huddled up next to him, too, her name is Ash Brown, and it turns out that even past the dork chemistry, they do make one hell of a good-looking couple.

One that he’s gonna let those last dregs of nice hot whisky burn up the mental picture of, too.

A last gulp of oily droplets running down the inside of his mouth that makes for a hollow ringing sound, when he pulls the bottle away from himself. Not a slosh to be heard as he plunks it down by his hip, thumbing absently side-to-side over the mouth, and looks back out at the dudes with a glow behind his eyes and castin’ forward.

He can authentically rest into grinning, now; he can bluff this.

He’s not really seeing Chris naked, still.

The mental image of Matt and Mike kissing to make up, too, is blurring and fading - along with Em and Jess not too far off, too, still no clothes anywhere to be seen and that prick of interested will-they-won’t-they wonder if the duos are gonna put the water all the way under the bridge with a four-person quote-unquote cuddle pile just nudgin’ and poised forward; he can laugh at the fact that he is a weak, weak man with some stupidly good-looking friends and let it pass.

It fades before that point of wondering which group of four would group which group of four - the cuddle pile or the cuddle pile, and leaves only a word.

Pile.

He takes it, shuts his eyes hard to see it in the stars behind ‘em, and focuses on what the further-stoked roaring of an alcohol fire in the back of his head is telling him.

Sucks and swallows a last trace of spice clinging to the roof and back of his mouth, lifts his hand in a “wait”-gesture, and draws out, “Aaaaaall right, dogs, get a load of this…”

He just barely opens his eyes again, glazed, somehow still figurin’ he doesn’t have to look at them for now.

Once again, he laughs at himself, and it bounces and vibrates underneath his opening.

“What if -- ...what if I said that… lately, I have been -- wet-dreamin’ nonstop, to thinkin’ about... having sex in a pile of…”

Cans, is what eventually comes to him. Full ones, though. Mushroom soup comes to him next. He takes that and runs with it, too. Once again, he gets ‘em all scoffing, laughing, himself included.

Once again, as he leans back to rest, it takes on a slow, slow relishing in abashment. Ohhh, Joshington, my man. My stupid, stupid man.

Hey, Joshington - my options are make it weird or make it weird, right?

Better I go the way the route that keeps it nothing but good fun…!

#SPOILERS HIS FANTASIES INCLUDE GROUPLOVE AND NOT THE BAND #☆ ooc #☠️ michael myers resplendent | josh washington.#⚠️ NSFT #I APOLOGIZE FOR BEING SO EXTRA THOUGH I SUPPOSE YOU KNOW THIS ABOUT ME ALREADY

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Unlearning War

Maj. Danny Sjursen, Truthdig, Feb. 22, 2018

I’ve lived a soldier’s life. Moved seven times in 11 years. Fought two wars. Lost near a dozen soldiers in one way or another. And, well, lost faith in near everything I believed when it all began at the tender age of 17. In that time, I’ve sought to balance soldiering and scholarship. Perhaps that was my mistake.

It’s almost over now. I’ll leave that life soon enough, some 16 years, seven months, and 19 days since it all began at West Point, 50 miles up the river from New York City.

New Yorkers, of course, hardly know--or care--that the nation’s military academy exists so near their global metropolis. They, especially the city’s resurgent elites, inhabit a wholly different universe from the volunteer, professional soldiers who train, fight and die in their name. To take the 45-minute ride northbound on the commuter rail along the Hudson is to traverse from one dimension to another, to a rather strange, martial world. The system is designed that way. Military men and women exist apart from the society they serve. They are a new, often familial warrior caste. Praetorians of the 21st century.

There’s scant space for dissension in this closed, echoing realm of enthusiastic volunteers. Politicians order, warriors comply, the cycle continues. Only where has it gotten us--as an army, or, as a nation?

U.S. troops are now in 70 percent of the world’s countries and engaged in active conflict--what we used to call war--in, by even a modest count, some seven countries. In 2017-18, we’ve killed and been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Niger and Pakistan. At least for starters.

Chalk up the first three as outright, though ongoing, defeats or stalemates. The other four are deadlocked, and, in the case of Pakistan, slipping ever further from American influence. When a society wages war on a tactic--terrorism--don’t expect decisive outcomes or victory parades (though our current president sure wants one). No; America--and Americans--have both signed up for eternal quagmire, and its beloved warriors (and their countless victims) will foot the bill.

I’ve been just another nobody along for the ride. And what a long, strange trip it’s been. A few hundred books, thousands of articles and too many dogma-altering experiences later, and this veteran doubts any of it was, or is, worth the cost. Unfortunately, one can’t really go back and unlearn it all. Though sometimes, truthfully, I wish I could. When it comes to one’s emotional health, perhaps ignorance really is bliss.

Is broad and deep education a blessing or a curse for a soldier on the sharp end of America’s foreign wars? I carried Sartre and Camus in my rucksack through Kandahar province in Afghanistan and left more confused and melancholy than I’d arrived. What I’ve come to know, or believe, is all too disturbing. At times, I envy those among my peers and among the populace that neither know nor care about these inconvenient facts:

* That the war in Iraq was built on lies and waged without caution. That American arrogance fractured a fragile society and unleashed a sectarian civil war that’s proved impossible to bottle back up. That the tortured bodies we found, and some that we made, were the refuse of obtuse American fantasies about armed democracy promotion.

* That all my poor boys really accomplished in Afghanistan was to secure one square kilometer of land for one short year. That despite the best Petraeus-speak and can-do military rhetoric, we enduringly protected exactly zero Afghans. That when the smoke cleared, the only things my troops lastingly left behind were three American lives and 11 American limbs. How I wish I could unlearn that all that effort, fear and violence was for nothing, and that seeking to impose a foreign-backed centralized regime in rural Afghanistan has almost no historical track record of success. Just ask the Russians--or the British.

* That military actions and the U.S. gospel of hyper-interventionism doesn’t, it turns out, stifle terrorism. That ultimately, foreign armies, by their very nature, generate unrest. That American deployments from West Africa to South Asia increased rather than stifled terror acts and terror groups across the region.

* That the empire, always, by its very nature, ultimately comes home as our militarized domestic police patrol their beats like occupied territory. That we’ve learned to live with mass incarceration and mass shootings--things that only happen here--as a matter of course. That the real terrorism is on our streets, in our schools and lurking among us. That we can’t lay the blame on immigrants, Muslims or any “other.” That guns, violence and slaughter are as American as apple pie.

* That many of America’s purported allies (like the Saudis) are themselves illiberal monsters and our lofty rhetoric rings hollow to the Yemeni children we’re complicit in killing, through bombs, disease and famine.

* That ultimately, violence begets violence, and when all is said and done, twice as many American soldiers will have died these last 16 years than the number of citizens who perished on 9/11. That, of course, exponentially more foreign civilians died at our military’s hands, under their bombs or on account of instability the U.S. unleashed, than all American victims of terrorism in all of our country’s brief history.

How I wish, sometimes, that I didn’t know, or believe, all of that.

How I miss the simplicity and serenity of blind patriotism and jingoistic nationalism.

#war #military intervention

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beeblackburn · 4 years

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Pretender Reads A Little Hatred, Part I, Chapter Six

I feel weighed enough by the chains of procrastination that I wish I got a couple of breakers to smash it all down! Goes without saying spoilers ahead for the entirety of The First Law works beyond the keep reading. Read at your own risk.

Chapter Title: The Breakers Point-of-View: Vick dan Teufel

“What sort of a name is Vick, anyway?”

“Short for Victarine.”

“Very fucking fancy,” sneered Grise. Vick hadn’t known her long, but she was already getting tired of her. “Daresay you’ve got a fucking ‘dan’ in your name, too, eh, your ladyship?”

It’s okay, Vick, I’ve just known Grise two sentences and I’m already tired of her.

That being said, Vick doesn’t beat around the bush in her voice, does she. And this short exchange already suggests, along with the chapter title, that the Breakers aren’t as monolithic in character as the first trilogy’s peasant rebellion was, an evolution of the old of the peasantry through the ones of nobility to the new status of giving voice to the commonfolk.

Also, hell’s yeah. More working-class voices! After fantasy’s gout of prioritizing noble or royalty voices (or commonfolk who turn out to be royalty by royal blood), this is super welcome. I’m all for more eyes into the anger and wrath of the common men!

She held Grise’s eye. “I did have a ‘dan’ in my name, once. My father was Master of the Royal Mints. Had a great big apartment in the Agriont.” And Vick nodded towards her best idea of where the fortress was, though the points of the compass were hard to tell apart in a mouldy cellar. “Right next to the palace. Big enough for a statue of Harod the Great in the hall. Life fucking size.”

Grise had quite the frown on her round face now, light flickering across it as boots, and hoofs, and cartwheels clattered past the little windows high up near the ceiling. “You grew up in the Agriont?”

“You weren’t listening. My father had an apartment there. But when I was eight years old, he trod on the wrong toes and the Inquisition took him. I hear it was Old Sticks himself who asked the questions.”

Master of the Royal Mints... who... wait... Sepp dan Teufel? The guy whose finger joints Glokta chopped off near The Blade Itself’s start? Damn, that’s one hell of a deep dive! He’s not exactly a character of importance, being only in one chapter, and all we knew of him is that he was kind of a blowhard using his position and connections to try and get out of Glokta’s tender care.

Why bring the Teufel connection into this then...?

“My father was innocent. Of what they accused him of, anyway. But once Old Sticks got started…” Vick slapped the table with a bang, Tallow jumping so high he nearly hit the ceiling. “He leaked confessions like a broken drain. High Treason. They sent him to Angland. To the camps right up North.” Vick didn’t feel much like it, but she grinned. “And no one likes to split up a happy family. So they sent my ma with him. My ma, and my brother, and my sisters, and me. The camps, Grise. That’s where I grew up. So don’t question my commitment to the cause. Not ever.”

Oh damn. That’s why. For every man Glokta ruined and forced into confession, there were others connected to each body. Sepp dan Teufel himself doesn’t matter, it’s what Glokta did to Vick’s entire family is what matters. She's the consequences of the first trilogy’s actions writ small, the collateral bodies that ended up in misery and suffering because of what Glokta’s done, regardless of guilt or innocence, but sheer political expediency.

Sepp dan Teufel being a relative no-name actually works better than if it was a bigger name Glokta tortured, because he was swept aside rather quick in the greater narrative of the first trilogy... but Vick’s here, reminding us that most actions Glokta undertook had a terrible cost attached, damaging more than the men he chopped flesh off of. It’s just an extension of how monstrous Glokta’s actions really were, detached of his more wry, humorous, self-pitying narrative.

And, on a character note, that forced smile makes me think of Savine’s performance, except with greater bitterness. Whereas Savine performs to gain leverage and points over people, Vick... there’s just this feeling of negative space. This feeling that there’s nothing inside her, no joy or mirth or humor, because the camps hollowed those things out of her and all she can express is what she forces herself. It’s a greater effort, emotionally, for Vick.

You could hear the ill squelch as Tallow swallowed. “What are the camps like?”

“You get by.”

Oh, the filth, pain, hunger, death, injustice and betrayal that she buried in that phrase. The black chill of the mines, the searing glow of the furnaces, the gnashing rage and sobbing desperation, the bodies in the snow. Vick forced her face to stay blank, pressed down the past like you might press down the lid on a box full of maggots.

“You get by,” she said, firmer. When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it. Goes double for the ones you tell yourself.

Oh, Vick. The fact that you can consciously recall all that misery, yet you still have to lie to yourself that “you get by” in that hellscape? It reads off as an trauma reaction, a victim rationally recalling what was done to her, but has to emotionally suppress the horrors of what was done, lest it overwhelm her all over.

My heart.

And, you know what strikes me about Vick’s general character? She feels like a refinement of Cathil, way back in Before They Are Hanged. Now, Cathil herself was a blatant device to give more insight into West and the Dogman, thanks to Abercrombie’s mishandling of his female characters, but when you think about it, she’s another survivor of the camps, even right down to the camps being from Angland. Someone who had to surrender her pride and shame, in order to get by, just like Vick.

Someone hollowed out by the camps, just like Vick...

She grabbed hold of West’s arm as he turned away. “It’s no easy ride here.” Her voice was a surprise. Soft, smooth, educated. “Cathil is my name. I can work.” West looked down at her, ready to shake his arm free, but her expression reminded him of something. Painless. Fearless. Empty eyes, flat, like a corpse.

—Before They Are Hanged, Small Crimes

... Except the Cathil figure here gets to have the POV to herself, instead of being the prop to a guy’s storyline, only to be discarded later after her use is run out. Vick, here, gets to deal with her own turmoils and tragedies and struggles, being our lens into the Breakers as a woman actively part of the rough-and-tumble of it. I could be wrong, and Abercrombie could horribly disappoint me by killing off Vick early, but she absolutely feels like a deliberate second chance with Cathil. And, you know what? I’m all for it. Vick’s hardened in a way that the earlier POVs just aren’t and that’s equal parts intriguing and tragic.

Grise spun around as the door squealed open, but it was only Sibalt come at last, Moor big and dour at his shoulder. He planted his fists on the table and took a heavy breath, that noble face of his sadly sagging.

“What is it?” asked Tallow, in a tiny voice.

“They hanged Reed,” said Sibalt. “They hanged Cudber. They hanged his daughter.”

Grise stared at him. “She was fifteen.”

The Breakers from Orso’s chapter. You know how I said that this Breakers plotline feels different from the Tanner plotline back then? This is why. Abercrombie doesn’t let us forget that the commonfolk victims have personhood and names. They were people and not checklists to note off a coming-of-age heroic quest list. This is what happens when you give vent and voice to the working class people such royalty-homogenized stories use to prop up a king-in-the-making.

What happens when you take off the royalty lens and put a commonfolk lens onto a fantasy story. You’re pressed against all the injustices the royalty’s tools have perpetuated, committed, all for the status quo to stay.

Also, dang, even Grise is horrified that they hung a child. Not as hard as she thinks she is, huh.

“What for?” asked Tallow.

“Just for talking.” Sibalt put his hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Just for organising. Just for trying to get workers to stand together and speak with one voice. That’s treason now.”

D’awww, Sibalt.

Part of why I don’t particularly like privileged royal twats is that when you compare the hardships of them to the very real threat of death, just for wanting social advancement and a bit more rights that the royalty and nobility enjoy effortlessly, that commonfolk face, my sympathy generally runs drier for those twats when common children are getting hanged for wanting better. Hence, why I loved that moment in The Blade Itself where Ardee tears into Jezal for being a giant baby about having to work hard for once.

But yes, let too much dissent like that thrive, and you allow such rebellious thoughts build up. You don’t put out the fires of revolution swift enough, and it spreads too fast and much for you to smother down the road. So, you stomp it out as soon as possible. You make examples out of the dissidents, so you put the fear into the rest of the common people.

“Then the time for talk’s fucking past!” snarled Grise.

But, at some point, you don’t engender fear so much as deep anger.

Vick was angry as anyone. But she’d learned in the camps that every feeling is a weakness. You have to lock your hurt away, and think about what comes next. “Who did they know about?” she asked.

There’s a very workmanlike quality to how Vick operates. There’s a no-frills attitude that pervades her entire POV, few details on the environment she’s in, just the important details of people’s actions and what’s said between the Breakers there. She’s very no-nonsense, allowing for her anger, but refusing to have it define her actions. Not if it overrides her thinking and plotting capabilities. In that sense, she very much reminds me of the practicality of Logen and Glokta from the first trilogy.

You have to be realistic.

Vick looked from her fist to her eye. “Whatever names they knew, they’ll have given up.”

“Not Cudber. He wouldn’t.”

“Not even when they put the irons to his daughter?” Grise had nothing to say to that, shock gradually wiping the anger off her face. “Whatever names they knew, they’ll have given up. Lots of other names, too, ’cause once you run out of truth, you start spilling lies.”

Moor shook his big lump of a head. “Not Reed.”

“Yes, Reed, Cudber, his daughter, yes, you or me or anyone. The Inquisition’ll come for whoever they knew about, and soon. So who did they know about?”

There’s a lot to be said about how much torture doesn’t work as a method of gaining information. And Abercrombie’s pretty clear-eyed about it as a tool that Glokta mainly uses it as a method of gaining confessions, rather than truth. Not to mention how much Glokta spoke of his own experiences in truth and how much, after he ran out of truth, he lied out of his ass and got nowhere. And, for most Inquisitors, the amount of bodies they make without substantial gain makes a greater point that Abercrombie really doesn’t believe torture necessarily works.

... There can be a point of criticism that Abercrombie still has Glokta capable of extracting truth out of his victims for plot reasons, thus still validating a sense of torture working, and I can see that as a problem. Which is partly why I love this acknowledgement that torture will not work and you can easily get a mixture of lies along with the truth, depending on what the victims think the captors want to hear. It’s a very stripped-down, sober look at torture as an institutional tool of the government from the side of those who might be next under the knife.

And no amount of willpower can prepare you for the very real and visceral reality of systematic disfigurement. The slow and sure breakdown of one’s body and spirit and mental strength. Anyone can break.

“Who the fuck are you to give orders?” Grise leaned down over her with a stabbing finger. “You’re newest here!”

“So maybe I’m thinking most clearly.” Vick let her hand lie on her belt buckle where her brass knuckles were hidden. She didn’t rate Grise much of a threat, for all her bulk. People who shout a lot tend to take a while working up to more. But Vick was ready to put her down if she had to. And when Vick put someone down, she made sure they went down hard.

And that’s what makes Vick so dangerous in this world, just like Logen:

Logen shrugged. Hard words are for fools and cowards. Calder might have been both, but Logen was neither. If you mean to kill, you’re better getting right to it than talking about it. Talk only makes the other man ready, and that’s the last thing you want. So Logen said nothing. Calder could take that for weakness if he pleased, and so much the better. Fights might find Logen depressingly often, but he was long, long past looking for them.

—The Blade Itself, First of the Magi

Both hardened and knowing not to give away their weaknesses, knowing when to put someone down for good. Just a fascinating contrast to the more naive and young charges of past chapters, Vick is.

Lucky for Grise, Sibalt laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and eased her back. “Vick’s right. I have to get out of Adua. Just as soon as we strike our blow.” And Moor slid out a dirty paper and unrolled it across the table. A map of the city. Sibalt tapped a spot in the Three Farms. Not far from where they’d started building that new canal. “The Hill Street Foundry.”

“Though Hill Street’s gone,” said Moor, in that plodding way he had, “since they pulled it down to build the Foundry.”

“They’re fitting new engines there,” said Sibalt.

Tallow nodded. “I passed ’em on the way. Engines that’ll put two hundred men and women out of work, I hear.”

I’ve read about how new technologies are going to replace some workers, leaving them out of a job. Now, of course, it makes perfect sense for companies to seek out new improvements that net them more profits, but without the social conscience and the consideration that you can train those old employees to work the new tools, you’re just left with money as the only bottom line, leaving countless souls helpless and scrambling without the job security that held up their families, their mental health, their very survival.

Industrial or contemporary age, human nature and greed really doesn’t change.

“We’re going to blow the lot to hell,” said Grise. “With Gurkish Fire.”

More signs of technological progression, what with Gurkish Fire being more commonplace nowadays since the ol’ days of the last Union-Gurkish War. Coming off The Heroes’ death tubes, this isn’t a surprise, but it’s definitely a nice continuity of Bayaz’s experiments with gunpowder.

I wonder if those death tubes got better... you’d think they’d be a leg-up, technologically, against Monza’s army, yet Terez said that didn’t go well...

“Well, you can stop worrying, ’cause it comes straight from Valbeck,” said Grise, smug as a king’s tailor. “Straight from the Weaver himself—”

“Shush,” hissed Sibalt. “Best if no one knows more than they have to. Don’t worry, the powder’s good.”

Grise slapped her fist into her palm. “A blow for the common man, eh, brothers?”

“Aye,” said Moor, slowly nodding his big head. “We’ll strike a spark.”

“And the spark’ll start a fire,” said Sibalt.

Vick sat forward. “If we do this, people get hurt. People get killed.”

“Only those that deserve it,” said Grise.

“Once the killing starts, it rarely sticks to those who deserve it.”

(arches an eyebrow) The Weaver? Aw, shit, is this like the Tanner all over again? Is Bayaz pulling the strings of another peasant rebellion, just to give a decisive victory to the royals? I like Jezal, and I don’t even hate Orso that much, but this will right piss me off if that happens.

I hope Yoru Sulfur, if he’s doing the Tanner bit under a different title, gets blown up by Gurkish Fire instead.

... And that last exchange is ultimately the sticking point. Revolutions are messy, messy business, and, as much as you want to keep the deaths solely on those who’ll deserve it, collateral damage is inevitable. Everyone who participates in one can die, and die ignobly.

Ultimately, I believe that revolutions are necessary, it’s what happens when you push around oppressed people so much their corpses pile up high as mountains and they cannot bear to be silent, and I refuse to wag my finger at them. Just because there’ll be blood to be had in revolutions doesn’t mean the status quo isn’t supported by gears and cogs, rusty with blood. Sometimes, inaction is a greater crime than wanting blood against those who operate the great machines.

That being said, I am all for everyone in a revolution being aware of the potential costs and trying not spill more blood than needed. But, well... easier said than done, right?

“You scared?”

“If you’re not scared, you’re mad or stupid, and there’s no place for either on a task like this. We need to plan every detail.”

As Logen would tell you:

The Northman chuckled. “Fearlessness is a fool’s boast, to my mind. The only men with no fear in them are the dead, or the soon to be dead, maybe. Fear teaches you caution, and respect for your enemy, and to avoid sharp edges used in anger. All good things in their place, believe me. Fear can bring you out alive, and that’s the very best anyone can hope for from any fight. Every man who’s worth a damn feels fear. It’s the use you make of it that counts.”

—Before They Are Hanged, Fear

Courage or strength isn’t defined by the absence of fear, it’s acting in spite of it. It’s using fear to work for you, carrying you to survive through sharpening your mind, your senses, and using it to your advantage.

Grise sneered her disgust. “All you ever fucking talk about is the risks!”

“Someone needs to. This has to be something we choose, not something we blunder into ’cause we’re sore and can’t think of anything better to do with ourselves.” She looked around those four faces, strange in the flickering light of the cellar. “This is what you all want, is it?”

Honestly, she’s right. Vick’s the one there pointing out that you can’t be a bunch of angry children playing with matches. She’s the only one right now speaking how to be mindful of starting a revolution, blessings and curses. If the Breakers are meant to be the spark to a great fire, to be a movement that’s meant to endure, they have to intend this and plan accordingly.

And they have to commit to it. All of it. No backing down.

“It’s what I fucking want,” said Grise.

“It’s what I want,” said Sibalt.

“Aye,” rumbled Moor.

Heh. I love how economic to their characters these responses are. Grise’s the heated, angry one who wants to fight back, no caution, Sibalt’s more measured and calm about how the cause needs to move and operate, and Moor’s just the big, slower musclehead. In fact, I generally like how this chapter gets across the different attitudes of the respective Breakers there. They all have skin in the game, but they’re different people with separate thoughts and input in going about breaking things.

She looked at Tallow last. He couldn’t be older than fifteen himself, and might only have had three good meals in that whole stretch. Reminded her of her brother, a little. Those skinny wrists sticking from frayed sleeves just a touch too short. Trying to put a hard face on but beaming fears and doubts out like a lighthouse through those big damp eyes.

“There’s a Great Change coming,” he said, finally. “That’s what I want.”

Is that a crack in the armor, Vick? Harder to suppress your feelings when reminders are right before your eyes. And, man, Tallow’s a brave little boy who shouldn’t have to commit to a fight that might kill him without remorse, given he found out about Cudber’s daughter’s hanging just a short while ago.

I hope he survives, but Abercrombie isn’t so gentle. So it goes, with hopes.

Vick smiled a grim smile. “Well, if I learned one thing in the camps, it’s that talking isn’t enough.” She realised she’d closed her fingers to make a fist. “You want a thing, you have to fight for it.”

Not as hard as you make yourself out to be, huh, Vick. Not as empty as you make yourself out to be, if even you’re getting carried away by the spirit of revolution. Other than that, damn straight. There’s a time for talk, and there’s a time for a fight.

She stayed straddling him for a while afterwards, his chest pressed against hers with each snatched breath. Kissing at his lip. Biting at it. Then with a grunt, she slid off him, rolled onto her side next to him on the narrow bed, dragging the blankets up over her bare shoulder. It felt chill now they were done, frost showing in the smudges of lamplight at the corners of the little window.

Wow, this book is just way more hornier than The Blade Itself. I mean, I don’t really mind, especially since this reads as more wholesome and sex for wanting it, rather than more abusive, like the first trilogy’s sex scenes, but wow.

Finally, he turned towards her. “Sorry I couldn’t step in with Grise—”

“I can look after myself.”

Sibalt snorted. “No one better. I’m not sorry ’cause I think you need my help. I’m sorry I can’t give it. Better if they don’t know we’re…” He slipped his hand up onto her ribs, rubbing at that old burn on her side with his thumb, trying to dig up the right word for what they were. “Together.”

“In here, we’re together.” She jerked her head towards the warped door in the warped frame. “Out there…” Out there, everyone stood on their own.

Whole swathes of Vick’s mindset just leaches so much warmth out of me. It’s such a cold, and dispassionate “everyone out for themselves” mindset that the camps instilled into her, but this? I’m glad Vick has some measure of happiness in her life, having someone by her side, at least.

He frowned at the little gap of coarse sheet between them as if it was a great divide that could never be crossed. “Sorry I can’t tell you where the Gurkish Fire comes from.”

“Best if no one knows more than they have to.”

“It’ll work.”

“I believe you,” she said. “I trust you.” Vick trusted no one. She’d learned that in the camps, along with how to lie. Learned to lie so well, she could take one tiny sliver of truth and beat it out, like the goldsmiths beating a nugget of gold into leaf, till it could cover a whole field of lies. Sibalt didn’t doubt her for a moment.

(arches an eyebrow) I’m reminded of Ferro’s belief of the word trust here:

“Stay with us. Give it a few days. If you don’t change your mind, well, I’ll help you pack. You can trust me.” Trust was a word for fools. It was a word people used when they meant to betray you. If he moved forward a finger’s width she would sweep the sword out and take his head off. She was ready.

—Before They Are Hanged, The Thing About Trust

But why would Vick betray Sibalt? Isn’t she just as committed to the Breakers cause as he is? Who would she betray him to? Is Sibalt a Breaker rogue element that someone asked Vick to watch after? If so, who? She can’t go to the Inquisition, considering her history with the camps, so maybe a Breaker higher-up Sibalt doesn’t answer to?

In any case, so much for happiness, Vick. And poor Sibalt, if Vick's going to betray him. He’s so sweet to her and respects her so...

“I wish I’d met you sooner,” he said. “Things might be different.”

“You didn’t and they’re not. So let’s take what we can get, eh?”

“By the Fates, you’re a hard case, Vick.”

“We’re none of us hard as we seem.” She slipped her hand around the back of his head, through the dark hair scattered with grey, held it firm, looked him in the eye and asked one more time. “You’re sure, Collem? You’re sure this is what you want?”

(jaw drops) Oh my god. Yeah, this puts the nail on the idea that Vick = Improved Cathil wasn’t intentional. Another Collem and another victim of the Angland camps. Except this Collem doesn’t treat her like a vessel for his own issues, unlike West did. Oh, Collem, you already met Vick once sooner, in the pages of Before They Are Hanged instead. Except, now, it’s flipped, with Vick as the POV, and Collem as the love interest as a reflection of her character.

I LOVE HOW MUCH ABERCROMBIE REMIXES HIS OLD SHIT BETTER, YES!

“Don’t really matter what we want, does it? Bigger things than our future to consider. We can strike a spark that’ll set a fire burning. One day, there’ll be a Great Change, Vick. And folk like you and me will get our say.”

“A Great Change,” she said, trying to sound like she believed it.

Sibalt’s a true believer to the core, but Vick? She’s been beaten too badly by the camps to necessarily buy into the shiny ideals of that wholesale. She’s endured Inquisition care too long to think this will be as glorious as what Sibalt thinks. She believes in the cause, but she’s got a more cynical head about it, wearier and sadder for it.

“You should come with me.”

She should’ve kept silent on that, too. Instead, she found she’d asked, “Where would we go?”

A grin spread across his face. Seeing it made her smile. Her first in a while. Hardly felt like her mouth should bend that way.

There’s so much of Vick that feels so... hollow or restrained that glimpses and cracks in her voice like this really stuck out. And I think she actually loves Sibalt beyond the confines of taking him along, only to betray him. Just that made her smile bit. Like she didn’t intend to, but couldn’t help herself. She has so few opportunities for happiness, I sense.

Few of the characters in this series do.

The frame groaned as he reached down beside the bed and came back up with a battered old book. The Life of Dab Sweet by Marin Glanhorm.

“This again?” asked Vick.

“Aye, this.” It fell open at an etching across both pages. As though it was often opened there. A rider alone, staring out across a sweep of endless grass and endless sky. Sibalt held that drawing at arm’s length as if it was a view spread out in front of them, whispered the words like a magic spell. “The Far Country, Vick.”

“I know,” she grunted. “It says under the picture.”

“Grass for ever.” He was half-joking. But that made him half-serious. “A place where you can go as far as your dreams can take you. A place where you can make yourself anew. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Hah! The biography Sworbreck derided!

On a more somber note, there’s something to be said about how even a fantasy, a falsehood, can inspire us. Dab Sweet himself pointed out that his exploits were blown up beyond his capacity and he ended up having to live with the weight of all that he never did, but just because we know things to be false doesn’t mean we can’t want for better and more, right? It’s part of why we dream and yearn beyond our reaches. Abercrombie once talked about how you have to hit upon truth to impact your readers, well, the truth is, a fantasy can propel us to action, to want for better for ourselves and others.

“Aye, I guess.” She realised she’d reached towards that drawing with one hand, as if she might touch anything there but paper, and snatched it back. “But it’s a made-up drawing in a book full o’ lies, Collem.”

“I know,” he said, with a sad smile, like thinking about it was a fun game to play, but just a game. He flipped the book shut and tossed it back down on the boards. “Guess there comes a time you have to give up on what you want and make the best of what you’re given.”

Wanting that life too, Vick, no matter how much you consciously shut it down? But they have to make the best out of reality, no matter how tempting the fantasy is.

You two are going to make me cry, damn it.

“When we strike that spark,” he murmured, voice loud in her ear, “it’ll change everything.”

“No doubt,” said Vick.

Another silence. “It’ll change everything between us.”

“No doubt,” said Vick, and she slipped her fingers through his and pressed his hand tight to her chest. “So let’s take what we can get. If I learned one thing in the camps, it’s that you shouldn’t look too far ahead.”

Chances are you’ll see nothing good there.

Ouch. Full-blown pessimism from a childhood in the camps. No hope enters, no conscious dreams, because all they do is invite misery and broken optimism.

Just. Damn.

As a chapter, The Breakers is a set-up one. Going into the details of future events and dropping intriguing seeds like what the deal with the Weaver and the Vick/Sibalt. But, at the same time, it’s a first lens into the common people, and how much they’re varied in character and thoughts and are thinking through (or not) the consequences of revolution. In short, it’s putting faces and a name to the Breakers, extending to even the victims of those hangings in Orso’s chapter, which is why it makes sense to put this right after that one. It’s definitely a chapter that isn’t self-contained, but it’s interesting and a refreshing glimpse into the working class folk.

As a character, Vick is... depressing. In an intended way, of course, but there’s a hardness to her that the younger POVs thus far just don’t possess, a weariness that the younger generation will gain once they’ve been through enough hardship like she had. In a way, I come back to this idea of Vick being negative space. Whereas the other POVs so far have had the coddled and pampered upbringings to whine and laugh, and take joys in comforts, both small and large, and have parents who care about them... Vick got stripped of all that in the camps long ago, and this is the kind of person that comes out of those circumstances. Hollowed out. She makes for an intriguing contrast to the other characters, and while I can’t say she’s more interesting than Savine and, maybe, Orso, she’s a necessary lens into the revolutionary end of the Breakers, while possessing a practicality that calls back to the first trilogy’s adults and a vulnerability in the cracks of her POV, that makes her rather refreshing to read about.

And, as a re-do of a first trilogy female vessel character? Yeah, it’s very appreciated. Thanks, Abercrombie!

PART I

Chapter One: Blessings and Curses Chapter Two: Where the Fight’s Hottest Chapter Three: Guilt Is a Luxury Chapter Four: Keeping Score Chapter Five: A Little Public Hanging Chapter Six: The Breakers Chapter Seven: The Answer to Your Tears Chapter Eight: Young Heroes Chapter Nine: The Moment

#a little hatred #a little hatred spoilers #the age of madness #the first law #joe abercrombie #vick dan teufel #a little hatred part I

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cometsweepandleonidsfly · 5 years

Link

“There is nothing more powerful in the world than a good story.”

These are the words of Tyrion Lannister toward the end of Game of Thrones’ series finale. Meaning that they are the words of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Meaning that the pair’s 80-minute send-off to Westeros on Sunday night was not just an accidental explosion of indulgent self-defensiveness, but a conscious and true effort in expounding its own genius to an audience that has every right to now feel corrupted and betrayed.

For (most) of its previous seven seasons, Game of Thrones was a creation that appealed equally to the head and the gut. Its blend of ultra-detailed mythology, emotionally complex characters, classic themes, expensive set-pieces, frequent nudity, and buckets of gore swirled together to create the smart person’s trash, and the trashy person’s jewel. In 1996, novelist George R.R. Martin created a fantasy for those who supposedly hate fantasy, but in 2011, Benioff, Weiss and whoever cuts those massive cheques at HBO turned that creation into an uber-fantasy. Here was something so overwhelmingly compelling in its material and slick in its execution(s) that the announcement of its end has forced the culture to question whether or not culture itself will ever be so easily united under one single act of creativity.

And then GoT’s eighth season unfurled, and the first word I could ever muster every Sunday night was: ugh. As in, ugh, how did Benioff and Weiss (and, we can only assume, Martin) find and then magnify every flaw in what has otherwise been a fantastic production? As in, ugh, how are we to accept that characters who we knew to be layered suddenly turn into parodies of themselves?? As in, ugh, how did HBO hear Benioff and Weiss’s plan for the final stretch and not decide, hmm, maybe you guys need a half-dozen more episodes to actually accomplish that without it seeming stupidly rushed??? As in, ugh, can no one on GoT figure out how to properly light a damn battle scene????

At least Benioff and Weiss seem all-too-aware that these questions might be asked as audiences were exposed to this last stretch. After all, “The Iron Throne,” the sixth and final episode of the series’ eighth and final season, is consumed with responding to any and all of the potential criticisms of the material that came before it, especially last week’s horrendous “The Bells.”And their answer, by the way? Well, it is just as Tyrion puts it above: We’re great storytellers, so shut up.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s start with talking about what went right in “The Iron Throne.” First, there was that fairly cool, if obvious, shot of Dany walking in front of Drogon’s wings. Then there was the interesting decision to abandon any score for the episode’s first 10 minutes, to underline the hollowed-out nothingness that has become King’s Landing. And then … okay, that’s all I’ve got, because right now, all I can think about was everything that went wrong. This might take a while.

Or not, because if Benioff and Weiss decided to abandon so much of their own thought and consideration into this season’s narrative, character, themes and aesthetics, then why should I devote any of my own to their supremely thin effort at defending their own creative powers in this, their final (and, as they would surely say, finest) hour? So, here’s more of a rapid-fire rant of all the many things that sank GoT’s finale:

Dany swaps her wardrobe for something Sith-esque, because if you’re going to have a beloved character suddenly turn into a genocidal monster, it’s best to have her start wearing black immediately.

Drogon must really hate chairs. Oh, and Tyrion really loves rearranging chairs. This episode was very obsessed with chairs. (Wait: Does Drogon think the chair killed his mother? Or is he just heavily into obvious metaphors? Maybe this is something that will be clarified in the inevitable GoT spinoff, Warg This Way with Bran the Broken.)

Bran? Really, Bran?? I’ll come back to this in a moment.

It’s wonderful how the various lords and ladies of Westeros can seemingly teleport into King’s Landing at the drop of a hat to decide the fate of their kingdom. Also wonderful is the chin-scratching/Googling that everyone must have been doing during this scene to remember who Tobias Menzies used to play on this show (answer: Edmure Tully).

“Bran the Broken”? Okay, really, I’ll come back to this again.

How much of Benioff and Weiss’s script was just "Character X walks away portentously”?

I wish we could all pull a Brienne and go into the history books to write a better ending.

When Samwell hands Tyrion a copy of A Song of Ice and Fire, I swear we were all one Sigur Rós cover of All Along the Watchtower away from GoTpulling a Battlestar Galactica. (If that sentence makes no sense, I’m sorry. And if it does: I’m even more sorry.)

I just know that there is a half-decent Donald Trump joke to be made about Jon’s fate at the Wall, but there is no way I’m going to attempt such a thing at this late hour.

It was nice that Jon got to see his direwolf Ghost again, and I’m all for any Tormund appearance, but are we to believe that the man was brought back from the dead by the Lord of Light … just to kill a woman he himself helped put in power? That is not just me quibbling with the “logic” of magic, either. It is a simple question of the strength of Benioff and Weiss’s (and, again, Martin’s) narrative foresight.

Okay, back to the Bran thing: Tyrion essentially puts GoT’s favourite creepy weirdo on the throne because “he has the best story.” It is a pretty good story, no doubt. But has no one on this show been paying attention to Arya’s arc? You know, the one in which she started off as a little kid who watched her father die and ended up becoming a face-changing assassin who defeats the greatest evil in this world’s history? Bran can fly, but Arya can slay.

I guess we’re never going to know why the Night King was so obsessed with arranging his victims’ corpses in that circular pattern, hmm? Okay, no problem! I was just wondering if that was a deliberate storytelling decision or another one of those “it-simply-looked-cool” ideas.

I could go on, but it’s late and you likely have 17 other GoT-related tabs open on your browsers (because not only does “The Iron Throne” mark the end of HBO’s cash cow, it spells the end of such guaranteed traffic drivers as this very review; publishers around the world are drowning their sorrows in Dornish wine this very moment). And besides, what more could be said of an episode that name-checks its own storytelling brilliance? Well, perhaps on this note Tyrion puts it best again – and, again, highlights in bright yellow the smarmy satisfaction that has characterized so much of Benioff and Weiss’s work this season: “It’s a good compromise,” the once-and-future hand of the Seven Kingdoms says, “if no one is happy.”

Fair enough, my friend. Fair enough.

#game of thrones finale #got finale #game of thrones #spoilers #this is savage and i am here for it #such rotten storytelling #so much hubris

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feuillerpg-blog · 7 years

Photo

INTRODUCTION;;

Name: Sawyer Lincoln

Age: 30

Hometown: Feuille, Louisiana

Occupation: Owner of The White Fang

Pack: Marten; Pack Alpha

A/B/O: Alpha

FC: Stephen Amell

PERSONALITY;;

Positive: Adaptable, Levelheaded

Negative: Boyish, Repressed

Sawyer’s the type to just go with the flow, which makes him highly adaptable. He can shift, adapting easily even in high stress situations. He never reacts in anger, but instead with a calm demeanor, adapting easily to whichever drunk patron he’s deal with. Sawyer also keeps strict control of his emotions, allowing him to be levelheaded in most situations. He reacts logically, instead of emotionally. Because of this quality, he’s quite adept at giving good, unbiased advice as long as it isn’t to himself.

Despite being Pack Alpha, and all the responsibilities that go along with that, Sawyer has always had a boyish charm. He’s playful, flirty, and is often credited as the Alpha with a boyish charm. However, in his quest not to end up like his father, Sawyer doesn’t drink and in fact lives quite a repressed life – both socially and emotionally. It’s hard for Sawyer to express what he’s feeling without hiding behind a joke. He’s much more the type to act out how he feels, but his repressed nature keeps even that in check most days.

HISTORY;;

Sawyer had always been a man with eyes set on the disappearing horizon. Even as a child, nestled close to his mother’s bosom, he’d been a dreamer. After all, there had to be more to the world than his sleepy, southern town with the same, tired people, right? His mother had indulged him in his fantasies, encouraging that delicate nativity that all children exuded in spades with a smile and a laugh. He was a sensitive child, always hiding behind his mother’s skirt, especially when his drunkard of a father was around.

Their home was large, but homey – thanks solely to his mother, who somehow found the time to make the place warm while cleaning up after his father and keeping up appearances. After all, they were Montgomery wolves. They were affluent, wealthy, even as his father spent more than he made on booze and an assortment of proclivities. Even when his father became violent, trashing the house, screaming obscenities, his mother carefully hid them away in his room, locked the door, and stroked his hair, humming soothing tunes. She was his world – his light in the dull, nothingness of Feuille.

A light that would be snuffed out, so violently and quickly, it stole the breath from his young lungs. In the end, however, It’d been his fault; he had no one to blame but himself. He’d asked her for ice cream – begged for it, as a reward for his mediocre grades. And she had laughed, tucked his hair behind his ear, and whispered of course, darling. He remembered that day clearly – it’d been raining so his mother had dressed him in a raincoat, with rubber boots to match, before she took him by the hand and led him to the car, buckling him in.

She hummed along to some slow pop ballad playing on the radio while Sawyer bounced in his seat, just a child excited for a simple treat. He never saw it coming, didn’t even recognize the squeal of tires and what it meant. The shattering of glass and crumpling of metal was what came next, followed by a sickening scream and abrupt silence from his mother. His world flipped and twisted, pain exploding in the back of his head.

When he awoke, it was in a hospital bed, and when he asked for his mother, the adults looked at him with an expression he was too young to identify – abject pity. Then his father came, piss drunk, with hatred in his eyes. But his words didn’t sting, for nothing could take away from the empty hollowness permeating in his chest at the words the nurse had uttered gently – your mommy’s gone to be with God now, okay?

His father took him home, drank, and for the first time Sawyer understood why his mother hid them away behind a locked door. His father wasn’t a nice man. He beat Sawyer, neglected to feed him, clothe him, and soon, Sawyer was forced to learn how to do these things for himself.

He adapted to his father, cleaning up behind him, filling the fridge with food, and cooking. Still, he was a child, after all, and he was no match for his Alpha father. While his pack was large, they cared little to interfere in what they referred to as family matters. It was all about appearances to them -- they hardly cared for the small child, the victim of his father’s demons. So Sawyer took the beatings, and he bid his time. Things only got worse, however, when he presented as an Alpha – then, his father began to see him as a threat.

It all came to a head on Sawyer’s eighteenth birthday. His father raised his hand to him for the last time. Sawyer fought back, hurtling all of his hurt, all of his loneliness and heartache into each slash and bite. He wanted to maim, to harm. The end result shocked Sawyer to his core. He’d beaten his father bloody and all the bastard could do was smile. As if this ugly, savage side of himself had made his father somehow proud.

He left the house that night, staggered into the nearby bar -- The White Fang, owned by the Pack Alpha of Marten -- knuckles bruised and lip split. It was there he met John. He was an older wolf, with a quick mouth and no patience for bullshit. He took one look at Sawyer and knew who he was -- after all, the Marten and Montgomery packs? They weren’t exactly on the friendliest of terms. He had every right to kick Sawyer’s sorry, underage ass to the curb.

But he didn’t. Instead, he talked to Sawyer. Poured him a glass of water and soaked up the pain of Sawyer’s weary heart. Then, he proposed something: join his pack, leave his family and the misery that the Montgomery pack had brought him behind. He accepted immediately. It caused quite a stir in the Montgomery pack. One of their own? Leaving to join Marten? Absurd! But, for Sawyer, it was the new beginning he’d always wanted.

Years went by, and soon the alcohol that had once been a poison to his father, was used as a tool to bond with John. The Alpha, who’d long ago given up on having children of his own, took Sawyer under his wing as his own, became the father figure he’d always craved. And so, it really came as no surprise when he stepped down, passing the right of Marten Pack Alpha over to Sawyer with little to no fanfare. He also signed over the bar to Sawyer, making him promise to take good care of her.

It’s been five years since then. Now, as Pack Alpha, Sawyer’s made it his mission to bridge the broken relations between Marten and Montgomery packs.

#gay rp #gay rpg #slash rp #omegaverse rp #abo rp #stephen amell #alpha #marten

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canaliculi · 7 years

Text

Remember to Breathe (2/2)

Gravity Falls

Bill/Ford

NC-17: dubious consent, lots of hands, casual victim shaming and blaming

There’s more than one way to crack an egg. The egg, in this instance, being a stubborn human’s metal-lined skull.

1 | 2

Bill doesn’t need to directly interfere with his mind for all of Ford’s thoughts, waking and dreaming, to revolve around him. At first, there is blissful, empty darkness, an escape that flashes by in the blink of an eye. Then he’s falling – Crampelter must have pushed him, Stan wasn’t there – and then he’s lying in his mother’s lap, soothing hands brushing over his sore head; soft, comforting, cooing that she had never displayed before.

And then he’s trapped, pinioned by hands, spread and pinned like an insect, another hand is reaching for him. His face is sticky, tacky. His head is ringing, reverberating with the hollow singing of sharp claws against metal, he’s being jerked around so hard he fears his neck will snap. Pain, blinding pain, the sickening, dull scrape of bone against bone, awful crunching noises so loud in his head, he’s going to be sick, his stomach is churning –

It’s not the pain – Bill has done worse to him. It’s the fear. The thought that this monster was going to crawl back inside him. It sets his limbs shaking uncontrollably. The one protection he thought he’d finally gained, about to be ripped away. Each time Bill stops tugging, insidious hope worms its way back into Ford’s thoughts. He can’t get in. It’s doused with one sharp crack. Some part of him doesn’t believe Bill will do this to him. Most of him just wonders why he didn’t do it earlier.

He dreams of Bill ripping him apart, over and over again.

He dreams of wheat fields burning and towers collapsing, and mountains that crumble in the distance.

He dreams of his brother, of the kids, of Fiddleford.

The Oracle.

Bill.

Bill watched as the human tossed and turned, wrestling his own personal demons; he was vaguely gratified to see how many of them wore his face in one way or another. Of course, it didn’t change the fact that the only person little Fordsy over there should be blaming was himself, but it was always nice to be appreciated for your work. After their impromptu play session, Bill had mended Ford’s skull, fresh as the day he was born - sans soft-spots - and plopped him down on the cool tiles of the suite.

It would have been simple to reach into the shell-shocked and shredded fragments of Ford’s mind to rip the pieces of the equation out, but Bill chose to wait. So much time – not that that meant anything anymore – wasted, so much fun put on hold; the demon really wanted to savor finally getting his way, fully trampling the pesky mortal who thought he could stand against him. Ford had put up a decent enough fight, he supposed; really, Bill probably could have ended it a long, long time ago, but something about the human made Bill want to tear him apart slowly, force him to look at what his ego and his sniveling need for validation had cost him, had cost everyone he held dear.

If there was a deeper meaning to it all, Bill didn’t see fit to examine it. He did what he wanted, and that didn’t include introspection. His eye was fixated on Ford as the human finally began to stir. He held back a chuckle when the man’s freakish hands shot straight to his fluffy head, even before he’d dragged himself into a fully seated position. What a riot! Bill wouldn’t have even needed to remove that useless plate of scrap-metal to read exactly what was going through Sixer’s cunning little brain.

“No DREAM, Sixer – not THIS time! Though I’m FLATTERED that you THINK about me enough for THAT to be an option!” With barely more than a spare thought, a glowing blue collar snapped around Ford’s neck, a long chain stretching from his prone position to Bill’s right hand. He allowed the line to lie slack as his pet slowly caught up to the situation.

“You personally invade my dreams to torment me, what do you expect?” Ford muttered caustically in response. There was a subtle tremor to his words, and his thoughts were cold enough to burn, nothing but fear, a panic attack away from full blown breakdown. It was the most Sixer had said to him in weeks, and it felt like a victory.

“Not JUST your dreams.” Bill walked his fingers up a few links of the chain, slowly beginning to stretch it taunt. Ford gave a shudder, loathe to be near him. “But I’m GLAD you’re feeling TALKATIVE today! Finally seeing what RESISTANCE and MULISHNESS gets you?” Apparently not, as Bill lifted a rather detailed imagining of Ford ripping his eye out from the man’s mind. Well, well! Maybe he’d let him try.

“What do you want, Bill? You have the equation – you won.”

“Oh, Fordsy, that doesn’t sound like YOU!” Bill said in feigned shock. The human glowered at him. “Giving up ALREADY? I thought you were the HERO of this sad little tale! Don’t you want to at LEAST beg me for your FAMILY’S lives?”

“I know better than to expect mercy from you.” Even when they were talking about his family, Ford somehow made everything about himself. The thoughts shifting through his head had briefly flashed to his family, but were now ringing echoes of the plate’s removal. Bill pulled the chain tighter.

“You always WERE a smart one! But I’ve got a SURPRISE for you!” The human went pallid, tense as a statue. “A GOOD one this time! I DON’T have the equation; not yet!”

That seemed to really throw him for a loop. There was a derisive scoff, followed by an eye roll, Ford assuming he was just telling a stupid lie. But slowly confusion dripped in, and the painful splinter of hope, and dread. What more was Bill going to do to him?

“Why?”

“I want YOU to give it to me!” Bill laughed at the uncomprehending stare Ford leveled at him. “I know what you’re thinking – LITERALLY now – and yeah, I suppose I could SHRED your mindscape to SLIVERS and just get the EQUATION from there…” He gave the chain as sharp tug, the action causing Ford to spill over onto his hands and knees. “But I don’t WANT to!”

A low, frustrated noise came from his pet, six-fingered hands clenching into fists against the cold floor. “What makes you think that I would give it to you now? I’ve endured everything you’ve been able to do to me – nothing could ever make me help you again!”

The demon kept pulling on the chain, the collar catching against Ford’s throat as the man struggled to rebel, threw his weight back to avoid coming any closer. The feeble resistance was similar to a gnat throwing itself into a window pane. Bill didn’t even need to use his other hand to yank hard enough to drag his reluctant pet forward.

“Things CHANGE, why do I have to keep telling you PINES that?” It was hard to keep his voice free of amusement as he watch Ford floundering. The human even tried to get up from the ground, but Bill materialized an extra hand that roughly pushed him back down. Finally getting the message, Ford grit his teeth, studiously keeping his furious gaze on the ground as he crawled forward. “Anybody ELSE getting some déjà vu here?”

Ford didn’t reply but Bill could see the tension shiver in his shoulder blades, in the rigid line of his spine. Of course he wasn’t the only one seeing familiar sights, though it was true that the last time Fordsy was crawling around on his hands and knees it had been a bit more consensual. And the human was certainly taking him time with all this, like he was enjoying stretching the humiliation out further. Bill gave short, harsh tugs of encouragement whenever he paused for too long, until the man was kneeling just in front of where he was seated, his body trembling minutely.

“I BET you’re thinking right now, ‘why Bill, my DEAR friend and LENIENT master, what could possibly have CHANGED?’ And you DO have a point! You’re KNEELING at my FEET like the obedient little DOG you’ve ALWAYS been!” Sixer made it too easy to push all his buttons, wearing his heart on his sleeve all the time. But despite all the uncharitable - and frankly, uncivilized – thoughts chasing themselves in circles through his head, Bill was sure he wasn’t about to fight back just yet.

“Is there a point to all this, Bill?” Ford ground out through clenched teeth. He lifted his head to glare directly at the offending creature, though Bill found it undermined slightly by the red flush that had yet to fade from his cheeks.

“There’s no point to ANYTHING, Sixer; I think I’ve told you THAT before, too!” Bill replied cheerfully. Playfully, he wound the glowing chain around his hand, slowly forcing Ford to shuffle even closer. With his free hand, he scratched at the stubble along Ford’s jawline. The man flinched heavily, wincing when the instinctive urge to flee caused him to jerk against his collar. “But YOU’RE the genius here, I’m SURE you can figure out what’s DIFFERENT this time around – you ALREADY said it YOURSELF!”

Ford’s brow furrowed in sudden concentration, mind turning over their conversation. These were the kind of thoughts Bill preferred to see out of his pet. Revenge fantasies, however elaborate or well-earned, were boring, the stuff that anyone could come up with if tortured and tormented long enough. The analytical workings of Ford’s mind were some of the only worthwhile features of the man, as far as Bill was concerned, and even if their current puzzle was practically a no-brainer, it was enjoyable to see that part of him churning into motion again.

The chain swapped hands, one moment coiled around his right hand and the next gone, freeing him to burrow his fingers in Ford’s hair, above skin and bone he had sliced, smashed, removed just hours ago. The action had its intended effect as Ford stiffened. He still looked confused, like the answer he’d come to didn’t make sense.

“The plate?”

“DING DING DING, we HAVE a WINNER!” Bright strobe lights sprouted from the slopes of his sides, a big ‘winner’ sign flashing in the air. Ford winced, eyes squinted like they hadn’t been prepared for such a garish display. It all vanished in an instant and Bill scratched against the human’s scalp, gently, eye curving at the shiver of fear, of pleasure that it provoked. Ford brought his hand up to Bill’s, desperate to make the strangely, falsely affection gesture stop.

“You’re insane if you think literally ripping part of my skull out is somehow going to make me more inclined to give you what you want.” Apparently feeling emboldened by sheer annoyance, Ford actually swatted at his hand. Bill laughed.

“Oh, come on IQ, think about it for, like, TWO SECONDS!” The demon ruffled his hair and then withdrew his hand, and with his left hand now pulled the man a little closer, halfway to having the human sprawled across his lap. Another good thing about Fordsy: he didn’t let the paralyzing fear that crawled up along his spine balk him for long. He must’ve learned how to compartmentalize on his multi-dimensional hitchhiking trip. “Okay, I’ll make it SIMPLE for you – you LOST!”

An ugly glare twisted up the man’s face again. It vanished hilariously quickly as his clothing suddenly unraveled around him, the loss of the protective layers prompting an almost visceral panic. “B-Bill! What are you-” The end of his question was muffled as a muzzle suddenly clamped around his jaw.

“If you’re not going to THINK for YOURSELF then DON’T interrupt!” One more sharp yank of the chain had Ford pitching forward, his hands coming up automatically to keep himself falling all over the demon, ending up with them pressed firmly against Bill’s surface. The muscles of his arms twitched as he tried to push himself away, but Bill held him there with hardly any effort.

He gazed over Ford’s shaking shoulder, at the scratched out and faded remains of a tattoo that had once been an effigy. The tips of his claws ghosted over Ford’s taunt flesh, catching every now and then against the raised and ragged edges of scars, old and new alike. Ford shivered under his touch, breath coming out in short puffs against his surface. He stroked up and down the arched column of his back.

“The way I see it, Fordsy, is that this is GAME OVER for you! You had your FUN, you did your REBELLION thing, but it’s all OVER!” Bill could feel the rising tide of fear, sharp and biting, radiating off Ford’s mind, and he laid his palm flat against the middle of his back, over his own image. “It was a nice TRY, but there’s NOTHING left to FIGHT! Regardless of whether you YIELD now or NOT, I’m GETTING that equation!”

That muzzle had been a bit of serendipitous foresight. Whatever inane thing Ford was trying to say – and he sounded angry about it – was completed unintelligible.

“Hey, I GET IT! You spent a long, long, long, loooong time fighting me. And you did MUCH better than MOST! But the ONLY THING standing between ME and the BEST PARTY this DIMENSION has ever SEEN is – WAS – you!” He lifted his hand from his faded symbol to Ford’s fluffy head of hair. “And without that PLATE, let’s FACE IT, there ISN’T A WHOLE LOT you can DO!” Ford fixed him with a glare, and Bill laughed. “Come on Fordsy, wake up and smell the FUTILITY!”

Ford’s entire body twitched, shifting against him, bruising himself against the collar tight around his neck. Bill tightened his grip on his hair, pulled his neck back, enjoyed the sharp intake of breath his action caused. Ford’s eyes were burning points of anger, frustration, betrayal above the gold and white silk cloth of his gag. Within a blink, Bill’s eye flipped into a mouth, and his tongue slithered along the side of Ford’s face.

“You’ve been fighting for your dimension, your family, right?” He tugged Ford closer, and this time there was less resistance. “Well, it doesn’t MATTER what you do from here on OUT! Either way, I’M going to WIN!” Ford didn’t reply, and Bill could smell blood in the water, kept laving against his jawline, down the crooked column of his throat. “You could GIVE IN – right now! – and NOTHING would be different!

“And I KNOW you’re tired of fighting me,” Bill said. His eye had flicked back and he fluttered his lashes against Ford. “Tired of fighting for a bunch of people that don’t even LIKE you!” Ford flinched, his eyes closed. “An entire DIMENSION full of people who REJECTED you for, what? An extra FINGER? A BRILLIANT mind? And a family that NEVER saw you as anything more than a MEANS to an END!” The anger that had been radiating off of his pet was slowly being stomped out as Bill plucked all those raw nerves. It was difficult to keep from laughing.

“We’ve had some BAD TIMES recently, but there were GOOD TIMES too!” He stroked his fingers through Ford’s hair, let them intentionally brush over the missing plate. “With that PLATE gone and the EQUATION in HAND, I don’t NEED to hurt you anymore – and I don’t WANT to! I never wanted to, Fordsy, but you really didn’t leave me much CHOICE, did you?” A second pair of arms abruptly sprouted from his sides, encircling Ford in the closest approximation to a loving embrace Bill could muster. It seemed pretty convincing, if he did say so himself.

“I won’t even hold any of that against you! It’s all in the PAST now! I won’t HURT you again, and neither will ANYONE else – I’ll make SURE of that!” Bill had always found it weird how the human mind reacted to physical and emotional pain in nearly the same way. “All those people who would THROW you away JUST for being DIFFERENT, for being TALENTED – they don’t DESERVE your SACRIFICE, Sixer!” At that, finally, Ford made a muffled reply, the muscles of his jaw tensing between the strips of leather binding him. The muzzle vanished.

“Just take it,” Ford repeated, unable to even look at him. “The equation. You can have it.”

And there it was, at last, sitting pretty at the top of Sixer’s thoughts, buoyed up on wave after wave of self-loathing and regret. Ah well, plenty of time to fix his pet’s emotional problems later. He could just scoop it up from there and be done, but Bill wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to be invited into his favorite mind. His psyche leaped out of his physical body.

“Bill! Wait!” Bill rolled his eye but paused his movements, looking down to the human. Oh, it was probably a little uncomfortable for Ford now that the form holding him in place was made of stone.

“Just gimme TWO SECONDS, Fordsy! Don’t GO anywhere!” With that, he plunged into the man’s mindscape, and the starry expanse that greeted him seemed subdued somehow. Bill didn’t pay it much mind as the shining fragments of the equation coalesced, and jeez, it wasn’t even that complex. Probably could have figured it out himself if he hadn’t been so fixated on battering it out of his pet. It was more satisfying this way anyway.

His mind was already racing with the possibilities. Finally, finally they could get this show on the road, really get the party started! Bill couldn’t wait to show this dimension a good time, to warp and bend and break it until it was the kind of disorderly mass of chaos someone could really be themselves in. He popped back into his body, laughing, and nearly dropped Ford in his excitement to get going.

“Whoa, almost LOST you there for a second!” Bill said, chuckling. Ford’s eyes were downcast, his thoughts a stuttering, swirling heap of self-derision. A little unusual coming from the man, but not unheard of. The hand still kept buried in Ford’s hair slid around to cup the back of his skull, and the extra pair holding onto the mortal slid up and down the broad planes of his back, blunted claws dragging against his skin. He gave the chain a short tug, just to remind them both it was there. “Hey, I think you deserve a reward, huh? For finally being the good pet I’ve always known you could be!”

Ford didn’t reply, but a small quiver that seemed to come from equal parts shame and pleasure rolled through his form. The fact that he was practically being ignored again was irking Bill just a tad, and it was kind of pathetic how Fordsy was wallowing in self-pity and disgust. Thankfully, Bill was decently confident that he had a surefire way to drag the human out of his boring emotional turmoil, and it started with dark hands, living shadows, dragging themselves out of the strange floor of the suite to firmly press against the meat of Ford’s inner thighs.

The human jerked spectacularly and Bill couldn’t help but to laugh. Ford’s entire body was tense, but the hands applied subtle pressure, slowly pushing his legs apart as they rhythmically squeezed the tight muscles in their grasp. If he wasn’t watching it happen before his all seeing eye, Bill wouldn’t believe that such a small action could provoke the, honestly, out of proportion response it gained. Ford’s heart was hammering in its bony cage, face bright red and eyes wide. His mouth opened and closed a few times, and Bill sprouted another arm just to have a spare hand to place one finger on the bottom of Ford’s jaw and hold it shut for him.

“Thought you weren’t in the MOOD to talk, Sixer!” His newest hand shifted positions a bit, holding onto his chin and maneuvering so his thumb could roughly drag a dull claw along the fleshy curve of Ford’s lower lip. “And I’m not going to MAKE you, even though BEGGING is the ONLY THING that smart little mouth of yours is good for!” Ford squirmed, but his tongue suddenly darted out to wet his lips, to lave against the digit still scratching at his mouth. Bill chuckled rather darkly, enjoying his complicity. “You don’t have to say anything at all, Fordsy; I already know what you want.”

Like a particularly unsettling field of flowers, more and more arms began budding from the floor, stretching like taffy or bending with sharp snaps into rigid angles to pet against his human’s flesh. One pair of hands with unnaturally elongated and thin fingers wrapped around Ford’s wrists, tugged his arms rather forcefully behind his back. Bill watched with rapt attention as Ford sucked in a sudden, quivering breath, the man’s entire body feeling heated underneath his innumerable hands.

“Looking GOOD there, IQ!” Not exactly a lie, either. Most of those borderline depressing thoughts had been ruthlessly shoved away, and there had always been something appealing about the stark contrast between the pale expanses of Ford’s skin against the nightmare black of his own limbs. The way Bill could mottle and bruise him simply by applying the smallest bit of pressure. Tiny beads of sweat accumulating on his pet’s flesh, red, angry trails that appeared whenever his hands got just a little too eager with the claws – not that Ford seemed to mind. “But I THINK I see room for IMPROVEMENT!”

Ford being himself, took the comment to mean something innate about himself, and Bill could literally feel the man’s embarrassment, trying to curl in on himself. The demon rolled his eye and sidestepped through reality, vanishing briefly and reappearing at Ford’s back. The various appendages directly connected to his body rearranged themselves, the hands that had been busy tracing various dimensions’ constellations across the map of Sixer’s back now raking down the man’s front side.

Slipping his hand free from Ford’s hair, he lightly drew a straight line down the bumpy contour of Ford’s spine, from the back of his skull to the tip of the faded triangular tattoo, drawing another wave of prickling skin and twitching muscle from his pet. Bill tapped his finger against it, once, twice, and without much more warning sunk the tip of it into Ford’s skin, drawing a pained hiss from the human. Following the worn and damaged pattern, Bill carved his claw through the thin flesh of Ford’s back, the wound knitting neatly behind him. Instead of crumpled scar tissue, his actions left behind smooth skin, stained a deep black.

Bill took his time, enjoying the way the muscles along Ford’s back tensed and jerked. His various hands held the man tight, didn’t allow him to twist or squirm away from his attentions, the human’s breathing shallow and panting, particularly when his claw would skip over the hard bones of his spine. Blood still spilled out, hot and thick, during the brief intermissions that Ford’s flesh was split, and by the time Bill was on the upward slant back to the point, long trails of the sticky red liquid were running in meandering patterns down the length of Ford’s back, and had thoroughly coated Bill’s hands. With a flourishing flick of his wrist, Bill completed the triangle, his mass of hands spinning Ford around to face him.

“THERE! Perfect!” Ford’s face was all twisted up with the aftermath of pain, but his eyes opened and there was nothing short of hunger, devotion, wonder in his gaze; a look that briefly shot Bill back about 30 years. As much as Ford may love getting his ego stroked, Bill loved it more, and a look like that was nothing short of intoxicating, particularly considering the stubborn piece of shit it was coming from. His gaze traveled down the bound human’s body, over his heaving chest and the long, irritated marks his claws had scratched all the way down his stomach. Past the man’s half-hard cock and down to his still forcefully splayed legs, every inch of the man trembling with dread anticipation, with barely subdued wanting.

The hands across his body, which had grown still, began to move once more, and down the central line of each palm – what shrewd liars referred to as the “life-line” – the darkness split and cracked, lolling tongues and sharp teeth revealed nestled beneath the black approximation of flesh. They licked against his pet, nibbled at all those sensitive places that Bill remembered used to cause his human to unwind, and he wasn’t disappointed by the sudden, broken moan that slipped out between Ford’s lips when his hands lapped at the sensitive junction at his hips.

One of his hands was still lingering along Ford’s jawline, as a joke Bill had it lick its way up the human’s chin, lave across the man’s lips, but to his utter surprise Ford opened his mouth, sucked the wandering tongue in, his soft lips moving eagerly against his palm. Bill’s energy briefly fluttering, the glowing light radiating off his form flickering.

“Pretty DESPERATE, huh?” Bill murmured. He drew his hand away and came forward himself, and Ford’s mouth was immediately against him, that strangely squirmy and deft tongue running against the lid of his eye before he could even transfigure it. The demon caught up quickly enough, capturing Ford’s lips with a pair of his own, their tongues tangling and sliding together in meaningless, nonsense patterns. In the middle of it, Bill wrapped a hand around Ford’s cock, drinking his moan like it was water as yet another tongue licked against the man’s firm, hot flesh.

Bill pulled away, watched as Ford whimpered and groaned. His hands pressed bruises into the mortal’s skin, around his arms, his legs, against the curving ridges of his ribcage. Various mouths licked and bit and suckled purplish marks into his devotee. The hand wrapped around Ford’s cock, twisting and lapping – and nipping, causing Ford’s heart to stutter, his breathing to catch – would pause in its ministrations, and Ford’s hips would twitch forward, mindless in his need for continual stimulation.

His pet’s thoughts were scattered, needing renditions begging for more, and his own name was breathed on every shuddering exhale, every gasping inhale. Ford was getting close, he could tell in the building tension of his muscles, the single-minded pursuit of his own pleasure. Somehow, Bill had forgotten the overwhelming need Ford would get in the mindscape – the need to be close to Bill himself, to reciprocate the affections being lavished on him.

In the mindscape, the only thing holding Ford back from his deepest desires had been the man himself, and thanks to the symbol he’d just carved into the mortal’s back, the same was true now. It wasn’t enough of a dose of the reality-warping potential that Bill possessed to actually pose any sort of threat, but if Ford was able to gather himself together enough to harness it, it would manifest as abilities well beyond any mortal was capable of. And seeing as Bill hadn’t bothered to inform Ford that he was subtly infusing him with anything extra-dimensional, the demon had barely even bothered to process the idea of Ford utilizing it any time soon.

Of course, he wasn’t too full of himself to be incapable of underestimating another creature, and Bill had to admit that he may have done so to Ford when, with wet, tearing, crackling sounds brand new arms had suddenly split the flesh along the human’s ribcage, were darting forward and sinking claws – claws! – into his form and forcefully tugging him closer, into range of Ford’s mouth that was licking against the slope of his side and then biting against him, his slim edge caught between the two rows of Ford’s teeth.

His energy leapt, the feeling – pain? pleasure? – not something that Bill had felt directly in over a millennia. There was the urge to pull away, to punish his pet for overstepping his boundaries so brazenly, as much as there was an urge to stay still, and see how much farther the mortal could go. Bill settled for pushing rather gently, encouragingly against the man’s shoulders, and found himself surprised yet again as Ford let out an animalistic growl, and surged forward, breaking free of his multitude of hands to literally pin his form to the floor.

The sharp talons of Ford’s new appendages had speared straight though his physical body, gouging deep ridges into the hard stone underneath him. Bill wasn’t concerned, wasn’t worried, but this wasn’t going exactly how he’d thought it would anymore. The chain was long since forgotten, dissipated when they weren’t looking, but the collar still glowed and hummed around his pet’s neck. Bill reached both his hands up, hooked them around Ford’s clavicles, cutting through flesh and muscle to hold onto the slim bones directly.

Ford rutted against him mindlessly, the human’s cock, dripping precum, sliding against his front surface. It would have been hilarious if not for the twelve points of contact where his very form was breached. Still, with his two main hands, he urged the man onwards, pulled him closer, harder, rougher against him as the man rocked and groaned.

Finally, suddenly, Ford cried out his name almost wretchedly, and Bill could feel some new slickness splatter against his form, across his front, and even some of it arched up into his eye, Bill letting go of the death grip he had around Ford’s collar bones to rub at the orifice. He let the sticklike black limbs drop to his sides and he stared at the panting human above him, every blink accumulating more of the milky, sticky fluid at the corners of his eye.

They were both silent for a moment, Ford hunched and twitching over top of him. Bill’s multitude of conjured hands slowly moved over to brush against the mortal’s flesh again, though they were cautious and gentle, exposing some hesitancy that existed in the demon’s mind. As always, Bill was the one who recovered first, and he blinked away to hover in the air again, the holes Ford had carved in his form quickly knitting.

“WELL! That sure was FUN, wasn’t it?” Bill said. He didn’t sound convincing even to himself. “But ENOUGH’S ENOUGH, time to get this PARTY on the ROAD!”

He turned to leave, determined to deal with all this a little later, when he’d had some time to properly process all this muck. But a long, dripping red and sharp-clawed hand was suddenly around his edges, scratching against him, begging him to turn back, to come back to the half-ascended human he was trying to run away from.

Well. Bill had some time to spare anyway.

#status!tag: complete #f!tag: GF

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saikostories · 3 years

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MHA - Please, Just stay with me (TodoDeku)

Not a death fic this time I promise...

“So did you enjoy today’s class?”

“Totally! Everyone is so cool! Especially when you froze everything! It was really cold but still... You’re getting so much better Todoroki! Oh and thanks for offering to walk me home...” Midoriya said, awkwardly scratching the back of his neck.

Todoroki shook his head. "Don’t worry about it. It's just, it's late, and this city isn't exactly the safest place ever..."

Midoriya smiled. His friend’s concern for him was always touching.

The duo was walking down the sidewalk, taking the back road to Izuku’s family home after a day of school at the U.A. They were still in their school uniforms, with their backpacks over their shoulders.

"It's pretty cloudy tonight, don't you think?" Midoriya observed, putting out his hand. "I wonder if it's gonna rain."

Todoroki looked up at the sky, and then back at the ground. "Maybe," he said. "But hopefully we can make it home before that happens."

Midoriya nodded. They were passing a couple of run-down buildings with dark alleys nestled between them, and Todoroki was thinking about what he'd do differently during training tomorrow at school, when—

"Todoroki! Watch out!"

Midoriya dove suddenly, collided with her, and the two hit the ground. Almost immediately, a long, silver something swooped over their heads, missing them by mere inches.

It took Todoroki a total of two seconds before he realized it was a sword. A long, silver, real sword, like something out of a fantasy book. Todoroki knew that, if Midoriya hadn't noticed, it would have taken their heads clean off.

"My, my, what trooooublesome little braaaaats…"

It was a hollow and sing-song voice, carrying through the chilly night air and sending an icy shiver down Todoroki's spine. The voice echoed in the alley and resounded through him head far after the speaker's voice faded. He and Midoriya got to their feet again, more on-guard than ever before in their lives.

Then, the villain stepped into the streetlight.

It was a man, tall and lanky with black hair, thin skin as white as death itself, and gleaming, red eyes. He was dressed in a solid black, fine-looking business suit and had a sword in one bony, pale hand; his othim hand was empty, but deformed, like it'd been cruhed and healed wrong somewhime along the line.

"A villain." Todoroki said it, even though it was obvious. Midoriya nodded, though, in further confirmation, Todoroki noticed Midoriya shift his feet into a stance he saw him take up often: a combat stance.

The villain tilted his head sideways, a curtain of greasy black hair obscuring the left half of his pale, drawn face. Every bone in his body was very prominent, almost like he was a walking corpse that'd already been dead for weeks. Even his voice sounded empty and inhuman.

"Victims that fight back…" the man drawled in that same hollow, dead but eerily sing-song tone, "have to be the woooorst and most anoooying of them all…"

And suddenly, his arm extended until it was five times its usual length, and Midoriya and Todoroki were ducking beneath his sword again.

Does he have an elastic body? Is that his Quirk? Todoroki's mind was reeling, searching frantically for answers. Judging by the look on his face, that's probably what Midoriya’s thinking, too…

The man's arm retracted once again, and Todoroki was hit by the sudden realization that running wasn't an option. If the man really did have an elastic body, with an elastic sword-arm, then turning their back onhimfor an instant would be fatal.

Which left only one alternative.

Midoriya put up his hands and shifted his weight, biting his lip.

They were going to fight. And if they didn't win, it meant death.

"You think you can beat meeeeee?" the villain sang softly, taking a step forward on his long, bony legs; Todoroki and Midoriya, in turn, took a step backwards. "Children from the U.A. really are troooooublesome…"

Midoriya pulled back his fist, but the villain met them head-on before he had the chance to actually do anything.

His sword went towards them, and Todoroki and Midoriya dove in opposite directions. All the while, Todoroki's mind was spinning. They were heroes. In training, granted, but heroes nonetheless. They'd fought against an abundance of villains, most much scarier than this one, at the battle of the USJ.

Todoroki Immediately tried to attack him with ice... but as he did, the villain swung his sword and it cut through it immediately. So he tried launching a fire attack, only for the same thing to happen again.

“What the hell? A sword that can cut through anything?” This was going to be harder than he imagined.

The villain swung both arms at once; the sword arm towards Todoroki and the deformed arm towards Midoriya. Todoroki ducked and put his hands in front of his face; the sword met ice before slicing it cleanly in half. Then with another clean cut, the villain hit the alleyway wall and a half a dozen bricks tumbled to the floor, one of which landed promptly on Todoroki's ankle.

Something twisted and snapped, and he shrieked in pain.

"Todoroki!"

Oh, that was Midoriya. Todoroki pulled himself up, trying to ignore the pain though it was easily overcoming the rest of his senses. Once he was on his knees, he shoved the brick off his foot and looked up. He couldn't see anything; there was a very fine screen of dust from where the building had been damaged, and his eyes were stinging.

Midoriya, Midoriya, where's Midoriya...wait, where's the villain? The villain, the villain, where's the villain—

"Say goodbyeeeee, troublesome hero…"

And suddenly the villain was right in his face, and his sword arm was pulled back, poised to strike.

Todoroki's mind went blank as he stared into this monster's cold, dead eyes. For a brief moment—and only for a brief moment—he wondered why. He didn't understand how someone with power would use it like this, to kill instead of to protect…

The world faded around him, and his line of sight gradually narrowed until all he could see was this monster and his deadly weapon.

Is this…

...How I die?

The sword came at him, and he shut his eyes, bracing himself for the feeling of metal in his flesh.

But it never came.

A sickening sound; a splatter of something warm on his cheek; a sudden inhale of breath.

And he opened his eyes.

There was Midoriya, standing just in front of where he was crouching, the silver, bloody blade of the villain protruding from his back.

Todoroki's breath caught in his throat. His eyes went wide, wider than they'd ever gone in his life, and horror—pure, unbridled horror —completely overcame him.

"MIDORIYA!" It was more of a guttural scream than actual word. The villain retracted his blade, and Midoriya hit the ground like a stone.

Todoroki was frozen in place, his breath coming in great, heaving gasps—and then, before he was aware of what was happening, he'd scrambled to Midoriya's side and grabbed his shoulder.

"M-Midoriya," he said desperately; he was lying on his side, but he didn't dare move him. "Midoriya, n-no, Midoriya..."

He didn't know what to say, let alone do. His tongue felt too thick for his mouth, and he was numb with the mere terror of this situation. Midoriya's eyes were squeezed shut, and he gasped in sharp, shaky breaths from between gritted teeth. Blood pooled beneath him; Todoroki felt it, hot and sticky on his knees.

And he was suddenly very, very scared.

More scared than he'd ever been in his life, and he'd been through a lot of scary stuff.

This was scarier than the battle of the USJ. Much, much,

much scarier

"Oh, I believe I understand it nooooow," the villain droned; Todoroki ignored him, his hands grasping Midoriya's shoulder tightly. "Your friend...he's the sacrificial type, isn't heeee? What a waaaaaste…"

"Midoriya, M-Midoriya, please, please talk to me…"

And when he didn't—couldn't—Todoroki began to sob.

"Don't worry about your ffrieeeend," the villain sang softly—inhumanely. "His pain will end soooooon…"

"I-It's going to be okay, M-Midoriya…" Todoroki said the only thing he could, because what else was he supposed to do? The villain wasn't coming at his anymore; instead, he simply stood back, almost like…

...Almost like he was waiting for Midoriya to bleed out.

And now that Todoroki actually stopped to think about it…

...He was.

"T-Todoroki…"

Midoriya's voice came, shakily and guttural, and he coughed wetly, adding more blood to the puddle on the ground.

"P-Please d-don't," Todoroki pleaded, shaking his head feverishly. "P-Please d-don't speak, it's...it's going to be okay. I-It'll be o-okay…"

"Hmm, I wonder," the villain cocked his head to one side again, "how it feeeels to lie to your frieeeend…"

“T-To-do-roki”

Midoriya choked again.

"S-Stop," Todoroki begged. "P-Please s-stop, Midoriya, sto—"

"Run."

It was a simple word, but Todoroki froze immediately.

Run.

Run?

"Hmm...yessss, you could do thaaaaat," the villain said, having caught Midoriya's one coherent word. "Taking down one U.A. student is revenge enoooough…if you ran now boy, I'd let you goooo…"Todoroki's mind was still spinning. Run. Run. Run.

Midoriya wanted him to run. He'd already saved his life twice today, and now he was trying to set his safety in stone.

Running. Turning and running. Leaving him behind. That's what he wanted him to do, and honestly, it was terrifying how easy it would have been. It was terrifying how simple turning and running was when it came down to your own life.

But...Midoriya's simple word had the opposite effect on Todoroki.

And suddenly, he found the strength to stand. The pain in his ankle meant nothing anymore.

For a second, he saw Midoriya relax, dropping his head to the ground, ready to accept his fate.

He thought he was running.

But he wasn't.

He stepped forward and stood over him, putting himself between him and the villain. He shifted his feet, like he'd seen Midoriya do so many times, into a fighting stance and held out his hands.

He was shaking. His entire body was downright trembling. He was scared. Terrified. And he wasn't afraid to admit it.

But he wasn't going to leave Midoriya. The mere thought of leaving him like this was enough to light a flame within him, enough to give him strength.

The villain looked at him, shocked and confused. "What is thiiiiis?" he sang. Then, his expression morphed into something like amusement. It was sickening. "You aren't runnnning?"

"T-Todoroki…" Midoriya realized in an instant that he hadn't listened to him. "W-What…" He coughed; it sounded really, really painful. "G-Get...g-get out of...of here…"

Todoroki was wracked with chills, and he grit his teeth, but his mind was made.

He wasn't going anywhere.

"Stay down, Midoriya," Todoroki said, hoping his voice didn't give away just how frightened he was. "You've saved my life plenty of times already. Now it's my turn."

The villain's amusement faltered. "Playing frieeeends is a dangerous game," he warned. "You can stillll ruuuuun…"

Todoroki put up his fists. He knew it. He knew he could still run, and the logical part of his mind was screeching Go! Save yourself!

But that wasn't an option. It'd never even been an option.

"I'm not afraid of you! Todoroki said to the villain, swallowing thickly. “I'm not afraid of you!"

Maybe he said it to convince himself. Because he was scared. He was.

But not scared enough to back down. Not scared enough to turn tail and run. Midoriya was more important to him than any kind of fear.

And suddenly, he was overcome by another fear: the fear of losing Midoriya.

And that fear was much stronger than all others, including the fear the villain caused.

The thought of losing Midoriya…

It brought such utter terror to Todoroki's mind.

"Ah, piiiiity," the villain said, but his tone didn't back up his words. "Guess I'll be delivering two dead bodies to the U.A.'s doorsteeeep…"

The villain's deformed hand suddenly popped into Todoroki's mind again. So it was revenge he wanted, to strike fear into the hearts of the other students and heroes…

Todoroki grit his teeth even harder.

"Oh weeeeell," said the villain. "Suppose you step back, boy, let me put the boy out of his miiiiseryyyy… Plus… it’s not like you can hurt me since I can cut down both your ice and your fire" He extended his sword, just slightly, for emphasis.

Todoroki stood his ground with more courage than he knew he had. "You're not touching him again," he seethed, and his voice didn't shake this time. "I don't care if you stab me a hundred times, you're not touching him again."

"Oh?" the villain began curiously. "And hooooow do you plan on doing thaaat?"

Todoroki had spent hours and hours perfecting his new move. What kind of hero would be if he didn’t have a backup plan. With a fist clenched he brought it above his head. Then in one quick motion he brought it down.

The villain had just enough time to roll his head in confusion before the loose building bricks—all of them—came crashing down on his head. As he was dodging attacks, Todoroki had frozen bricks in place. With his heat, he could melt the ice that held them against the wall.

All so they could fall down on top of the villain.

One by one they bounced off his skull and thudded onto the cement below. For a few moments, the villain stood, swaying slightly on his feet, his eyes wide open and his expression unreadable.

And then, his knees buckled, and he collapsed.

Out. Unconscious. Probably with a really, really, really bad concussion to boot. Todoroki stood there breathlessly, bile rising in his throat; his stomach churned horribly, and he thought he'd be sick.

But he wasn't.

Instead, he turned and crashed to his knees by Midoriya again. Right now, he was more important than any physical pain he was feeling, and that included the pain in his (probably) broken ankle, which he hadn't so much as thought about.

"Midoriya, Midoriya, we have to go," Todoroki said, shaking his shoulder as hard as he dared. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off and the threat of the villain was gone, a new threat introduced itself, not for the first time:

Midoriya's injury. His injury was a threat far worse than the villain.

Todoroki retracted his hands and tore his shirt, ripping off strips as long as possible to use for bandages. His hands were shaking. His knees were scraped and covered in blood (his own and Midoriya's). The entire alley was blood-splattered, like something out of a horror movie.

Todoroki sucked in a deep breath to mentally prepare himself, then grabbed Midoriya by the shoulders and pulled him upright.

He was careful, and he knew it would hurt him regardless of how gentle he was, but he still wasn't prepared for his reaction. He screamed. He flat-out screamed, and Todoroki's heart shattered, and the tears started again.

"I'm sorry," was all he could say, as he held him upright and tried to get the bandages around his midsection, where the damage was worst. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

Please forgive me.

Please, please, please forgive me…

I'm so…

...I'm so sorry…

He wrapped it as best as he could. It was nowhere near what it needed to be, and blood already soaked the bandages, but…

...It was enough. It was enough until they got help.

Now that it was over, Todoroki couldn't help it; he wrapped his arms around Midoriya and pulled him closer, embracing him as tightly as he dared. For a second he considered letting go and giving him some breathing room, but then he wordlessly embraced him back, though his hold was much more limp.

Her breath hitched, and he tried in vain to swallow the lump in his throat.

"H-H-Hey, M-Midoriya…"

The tears were back with vigor, and he buried his face in his matted hair to hide them.

"L-Let's go h-home, okay?"

***

"Midoriya, please, please, Midoriya, c'mon…"

As Todoroki dragged himself and his semi-conscious companion down the street, desperate to find someone, anyone, who would have more control of the situation than him, he felt more helpless than he'd ever felt before in his entire life.

The night sky was filled with dark clouds, so not even the light of the moon was visible. Todoroki's way was lit only by dim, flickering street lights that lined the old, broken road. His ankle was throbbing terribly, and though his head felt light, his legs were heavier than ever.

"Hang on, Midoriya. Just a little...just a little bit longer…" he managed to choke out, despite him own pain and exhaustion. he grit him teeth and forced his legs to keep moving. One step, two steps, three steps—one painful footfall after the other.

No matter how beat up I am, Midoriya's worse, he told himself firmly, if just to keep himself moving. Midoriya's way, way, way worse.

Honestly, when Todoroki thought about it (and he really, really didn't want to think about it), it was a miracle Midoriya was still even alive.

His eyes were shut, blood streaking down his face from a still-bleeding gash on his hairline. He was still conscious, remarkably, but only barely, and he couldn't stand on his own; Todoroki had to support him entirely,

His arm around his neck and his arm hooked around his waist. Even in the faint light of the streetlamps, Todoroki could easily see how horribly pale his friend was, and how awful he really looked. His skin was waxy and clammy; his breath rattled painfully in his chest, and Todoroki knew that each shuddering exhale had the potential to be his last.

(Todoroki really, really, really didn't want to think about that, either.)

Hot, wet something seeped into Todoroki's torn, tattered clothing, and he was reminded yet again that Midoriya's head wound was the least of their worries. Of course, compared to any other kind of injury, the head wound would have easily been the most serious.

But not in this case. Not by a long shot.

Because Midoriya had been flat-out impaled by that hideous villain, straight through his stomach.

Todoroki swallowed thickly against the bile that rose in his throat at the thought and shook his head vigorously.

No, now's not the time to think about that. I have to…

...I have to get Midoriya somewhere safe...

He pulled him closer, holding him against his side and kept on moving, dragging himself and his precious, precious friend through the abandoned street, back to the U.A.

His legs were still uncharacteristically heavy.

Every step he took was harder than the last.

But nonetheless. He refused to give up.

After all, when they were cornered in the alley by the villain, it had been Midoriya to stand his ground. Shy, timid, but oh so brave Midoriya, the sweet, precious fanboy who came dead last in the U.A. initiation test. He'd held his ground and fought alongside Todoroki against the horrendous villain.

Midoriya hadn't given up. Not once.

And anyways, it was Todoroki's fault in the first place. In reality, it shouldn't have been Midoriya who'd ended up hurt like this.

No. It was supposed to be Todoroki, but because Midoriya was such a...such a...such a stupid, selfless, caring, dumb idiot, he just had to jump in there, right when the villain's weapon (a gleaming, terrifying long sword) was poised to strike Todoroki's heart.

He just had to take the blow for himself.

Todoroki stumbled over a crack in the old street, and he heard Midoriya inhale sharply in pain. Todoroki grimaced and whispered, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," to his nearly unconscious friend. He didn't respond, and he hadn't been expecting him to.

He paused a moment to let him breathe (and to catch his breath, too), then kept moving. They had no time to spare.

The makeshift bandages Todoroki fashioned from the torn hem of his shirt weren't doing their job anymore, and he heard quiet drips,almost like rain, as Midoriya's blood sprinkled the dark street. He felt all the sicker because of it, but refused to let it overcome him.

He didn't have time.

(Midoriya didn't have time.)

"To-do-roki…"

It was just one word. One single, solitary word, but it still fired a dozen icy arrows straight into Todoroki's heart.

His voice. His freaking voice. It cracked in about a million different places, and it shook almost pathetically, giving away just how scared he was, and just how much pain he was in. Todoroki's heart clenched for the upteenth time, and he blinked back tears, refusing to cry for Midoriya's sake (although he knew he wouldn't be able to keep it up for much longer).

"...It's okay, Midoriya, you don't have to say anything," Todoroki whispered, trying to quiet him, because he couldn't take it. he just couldn't take it.

Although they'd only known each other for a short time, they'd been through a so much, and through it all, Todoroki had never, ever heard Midoriya sound so broken.

It was wrong.

It was. So. Wrong.

"I-It'll be alright, Midoriya." he really hoped his voice didn't betray how terrified he was. he was trying to be strong for Midoriya's sake alone. "It's gonna be okay. It'll be okay. We're going home now, we're going home…"

Home. Home. It seemed such a distant thing, and Todoroki longed for it. Longed to be in a place of total safety, with his friends, his teachers, all the people he'd grown fond of, the people he'd started to see as more of a family than anything...

Midoriya stumbled and pitched forward, and it took all of Todoroki's strength not to trip along with him. He halted dead in his tracks, shaking him as hard as he dared.

"H-Hey, Midoriya, s-stay with me, okay?" Todoroki said, keeping his voice as steady as possible (which was actually a lot shakier than he'd hoped). "It's going to be fine, just stay with me…"

He'd never been this blatantly terrified in him entire life.

He liked training to be a hero, he could handle it all. He could handle all that and more, and practically anything else, but...

But he couldn't handle this. He couldn't handle this struggle, to keep himself upright and keep Midoriya awake (alive, more like). This wasn't a problem that had as easy a fix as beating a couple villains in a fight. Compared to this, fighting villains suddenly seemed ridiculously easy.

He swallowed thickly and kept moving.

Midoriya was slowly getting heavier—maybe he was finally losing the grip with his consciousness, or maybe Todoroki was reaching his own limit—but Todoroki kept moving, forcing himself on. He'd definitely messed up him ankle during the fight, and every step brought a shooting pain through his leg.

He ignored it, though. Even though it hurt, he forced himself to keep moving. He was plowing through just by sheer willpower now. He had to keep moving.

He had to keep moving.

Keep moving.

Keep—

Midoriya slumped against him, suddenly limp.

Sirens went off in Todoroki's head, and he shifted his feet so that he didn't fall over when the rest of Midoriya's body weight was added to his load.

"...Midoriya, h-hey, Midoriya…" he tried, shaking him, his voice wavering worse than ever before. He looked like he was still breathing, but his breath was nothing more than a painful, shallow rasp now.

"M-Midoriya!" Todoroki shouted at him, shaking him once more. If he passed out now...he didn't know if he'd ever wake up again.

"P-Please g-get up!"

He'd lost so much blood…

"Midoriya, you have to get up!"

And, blessedly, Midoriya opened his eyes. He stared off into space, blinking rapidly. His skin was even whiter than before, and his bangs were matted to his forehead with blood and sweat. "...T-Todoroki…" he choked.

Todoroki released the breath he didn't know he was holding, him relief so immense he could have laughed (but of course he didn't do that).

"Y-You...you scared me, M-Midoriya," he breathed shakily. "D-Don't do that again…"

"S-Sorry…" Midoriya coughed weakly. "D-Didn't mean t-to…"

Todoroki shook him head feverishly, finally managing to calm himself down now that he knew Midoriya was conscious (and alive). "You don't need to apologize," Todoroki told him, "I know you're tired, and you're hurt, but you have to stay with me, okay? Please."

He pulled Midoriya's arm tighter around him neck, clenching him teeth and steeling him resolve. It wouldn't end here. It wouldn't. It couldn't. He wouldn't allow it to end here. Not like this.

The blood was still dripping onto the street. It was horrifying, how much of the stuff Midoriya had lost thus far. It was a miracle he was conscious, or even still alive for that matter, and Todoroki's panic was steadily growing once again.

I need to get him somewhere before he bleeds out, he thought frantically. The U.A., a doctor, even someone's house, I just need to get off the street!

But there was no one around. Overall, this was a pretty abandoned part of the city, and he had somehow ended up taking the back way to the U.A., where there were the least amount of civilians and buildings. And besides, Midoriya needed help—professional, miracle-working help, and that kind of help could only be given by the U.A.'s very own specialized healer, Recovery Girl.

There was no help for Midoriya—no help at all—until they reached the U.A.

And at this rate, if things kept going like this…

Midoriya coughed, harshly and raggedly, and blood dripped down his chin.

...He's not going to make it all the way.

As soon as the thought entered his mind, Todoroki shook his head, very angry with himself.

No. I can't think that way. I can't. Not now. Not...

...Not when this situation is already as bad as it gets...

Since his emotions were all over the place, he shifted to the logical, problem-solving part of his mind. He had to rewrap his wound. That was the only option. Yeah, he'd rewrap it, and they'd get to the U.A., and Midoriya would be safe, and Recovery Girl would heal him, and he would be fine, he would be fine, he had to be fine...

Todoroki stumbled towards the nearest streetlamp and carefully—ever so carefully—slipped Midoriya's arm from around his neck and knelt down, leaning him against the lamp post. In the dim, flickering light, Midoriya looked even worse—or maybe that was just his condition deteriorating even further. He didn't even bother keeping his eyes open anymore, and though he was conscious (if you could even call the dazed, exhausted state he was in "conscious"), he was still limp.

He was fading fast, and Todoroki knew it.

He knelt by him classmate's side and raised him hands, stained with dry (and fresh) blood. Midoriya's blood. He shook his head instantly, forcing him mind away from that. If he started thinking along those lines now, they'd never make it home. He had to be strong now. He had to be strong for him, if only for Midoriya, just like Midoriya would be (and was) strong for Todoroki.

Todoroki carefully tore away the sodden makeshift bandages and got him first good look at Midoriya's wound. His stomach churned worse than before, and this time, bile burned the back of his throat. He felt lightheaded, like he'd faint, but he stayed conscious for one reason and one reason only.

Todoroki averted his gaze and hastily began tearing long strips from the rest of his blood-splattered shirt. He shivered in the cold without his shirt. Midoriya’s was covered in blood but he tore that too to act as another layer for his bandages. Todoroki had to get that wound wrapped. He had to stop the bleeding, right now, before Midoriya lost any more blood. It probably wasn’t the best idea for Midoriya to be shirtless since he needed to keep warm… But Todoroki had to, he had to, he had to, he had to, he had to, he had to...

I have to, I have to, I have to.

"Midoriya...this...this is going to hurt," was all Todoroki managed to choke out, once he thought he had enough fabric to work with. Midoriya didn't even respond verbally; just gave a weak jerk of his head, which could've been a nod (Todoroki just assumed it was although it really could've been anything). Todoroki took a deep breath, mentally steeled himself, and began.

His hands were remarkably steady, which surprised him. Considering the situation, it was a miracle he wasn't all over the place.

But somehow, in the back of him mind, he knew the reason why his hands were so steady, why his fingers moved as though on their own accord.

Because right now...

...He just wanted his friend to live. That was all that mattered. He knew this, and so did him hands, and they worked quickly and professionally to wrap his friend's grave injury.

Midoriya didn't scream or shout, like Todoroki was half expecting him to. Instead, his hands tightened into fists until his knuckles were white, and tears left white streaks on his dirty face. Muffled, choked sobs squeezed their way through his clenched teeth, and it took all of Todoroki's willpower not to break down then and there.

The first time he'd wrapped his stomach, it'd been in a flurry of panic, and then, Midoriya had screamed in pain, but now that he was silent, it scared Todoroki all the more, because it meant he was too weak to so much as make a sound.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry, Midoriya…"

In the end, apologies didn't really make a difference, but he couldn't stop himself at this point. Because this was his fault. All his fault. Not Midoriya's. His. His. His and his alone.

In the end, he hadn't been strong enough to protect him dearest friend.

By the time it was finally over—when the wound was finally wrapped and the bleeding was slowed—they were both openly sobbing, and Todoroki was more exhausted than ever.

But that didn't stop him.

He stood on unsteady, shaky feet, and somehow managed to lift Midoriya up with him, pulling the latter's arm around his neck and supporting the whole of his bodyweight. In any other situation, Midoriya would've been easier to carry than cotton candy, but right now, Todoroki felt like he was trying to lug an entire sack of rocks over him shoulder.

It would've been easier if he could've just used a Quirk to make Midoriya weightless, but that wasn't an option. Uraraka wasn’t here. He was alone.

Midoriya couldn't keep his head up anymore, and Todoroki's mind was starting to go blank thanks to exhaustion, pain, fear, adrenaline, and panic. His feet moved on him own, and he felt oddly detached, like he was passenger instead of driver, his head filled with cotton.

"Hang on, Midoriya," he pleaded, completely and utterly desperate by now. "Please, please, don't give up on me now, just...just hang in there...hang in there...hang in there...please hang in there…"

He wasn't sure who he was talking to anymore, himself or Midoriya, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. The only thing that mattered was reaching the U.A. and getting Midoriya the medical attention he so desperately needed.

"Please, please, please, please, please, please…"

He was so, so desperate.

"Stay with me, please stay with me…"

He could see the building now. The U.A. was merely a huge silhouette in the dark, but Todoroki knew exactly what it was.

"Midoriya, M-Midoriya, stay awake...it's okay, I've got you, I've got you, just...just...j-just stay with me..."

And, before his clouded brain had the chance to register it, he was standing in front of the U.A.

He stared up at it as if seeing it for the first time, Midoriya limp against him. Despite everything...they'd made it. Somehow, somehow, they'd made it.

"M-Midoriya…" Todoroki managed, him lips twisting into a small, exhausted, but genuine smile. "Midoriya, look. We're...we're home..."

He swayed, the ground swimming beneath his feet, and he barely managed to lower Midoriya to the ground before he collapsed, right beside him. He was just so exhausted; if he took another step, he knew he'd pass out instantly. His ankle was throbbing terribly, as was his head, and he still felt nauseous and dizzy, but...

...But in the end, though, he'd done it. he'd gotten himself and Midoriya back to the U.A. Now Midoriya could get help, and medical attention, and—

"M-Midoriya...Midoriya...?"

Todoroki lifted him head to look at his friend, and all at once, his heart skipped a beat, and his blood ran cold.

Midoriya wasn't breathing.

Todoroki's panic returned in a flash, and he shot upright, reaching over and shaking Midoriya's shoulder harshly. Probably too harshly, actually. Harshly enough to leave a bruise. Not that it mattered.

Because he wasn't breathing anymore.

Midoriya wasn't breathing anymore.

"M-Midoriya, w-wait, I…" he stuttered. His brain was already foggy enough; he couldn't comprehend this.

No, I...I got him home. He...he can't…

No, he can't...he can't be...he's not…

"...M-Midoriya...Midoriya...MIDORIYA!"

The reality of the situation set in all at once, and Todoroki screamed. He completely lost it.

"HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!" he screeched as loudly as he possibly could, tears streaming down him face as his hands shook the cold, unmoving body of his friend back and forth.

(He'd never felt so scared before in his life.)

"I NEED HELP! SOMEBODY! HELP ME! PLEASE! S-SOMEBODY!" his screams ripped him throat to shreds.

(He'd never felt so helpless before in his life.)

"MIDORIYA! MIDORIYA, NO! TALK TO ME! MIDORIYA! MIDORIYA, NO! MIDORIYA!" he shook him again. Todoroki’s heartrate skyrocketed; his lungs worked over time; his breath came in great, heaving gasps.

(He'd never felt this much pain before in him life.)

"I NEED HELP! SOMEONE HELP ME! IT'S MY FRIEND, IT'S MIDORIYA, HE'S...HE NEEDS HELP!"

Someone...please!

...Help him!

And then, all at once and all too suddenly, it seemed everybody at the U.A. was there. He heard voices, and shouts, of people he knew well and people he was barely acquainted with, but all he cared about was Midoriya. All that mattered was Midoriya, cold and still and definitely not breathing—

"MIDORIYA! MIDORIYA! PLEASE GET UP! GET UP, MIDORIYA! GET UP RIGHT NOW!" he cried, shaking Midoriya back and forth, back and forth, and then back and forth once again, because he didn't know what to do and he was so scared and everything was spinning and him thoughts were clouding over and he couldn't think and he couldn't move and he suddenly couldn't breathe—

Someone grabbed him shoulder, tried pulling him away, but Todoroki fought back, wrenching from their grip. As if they'd be able to drag him away from Midoriya now. As if. Todoroki had gotten this far and he wasn't going to give up now.

Besides, he...

...He wasn't breathing anymore. His friend, his closest, best friend, wasn't breathing anymore.

No...no, no, no, no, no...please...don't...don't let...don't let it end like this...

"Todoroki! Todoroki!" Someone had their hands on his shoulders, and he knew he recognized the voice, but he just couldn't place who it was at the moment. "Calm down!"

Todoroki wanted to scream—no, wait, he was already doing that, loud and long. It grated his throat and made his lungs ache, but he couldn't help it. he was just...just...

Just so terrified…

He raised his head slowly. Everything was blurry and swirled together, like he was on a merry-go-round that was spinning too fast. He saw a group of people gathered around Midoriya, but that was all he could make out.

"Todoroki, calm down." The person holding his shoulders—probably a teacher, he decided—was still talking to him, but he didn't care. All he cared about, all that mattered…

...Was Midoriya.

Stop worrying about me, he wanted to say so badly. The edges of his vision turned black, and his eyelids felt too heavy. Don't...don't think about me...

His voice stopped working. He couldn't say anything.

Midoriya's...he's not...

...He's not breathing anymore...

"Todoroki, calm down, calm down, calm down…"

...Please...help him...

...Just help him...

His vision swam, and dark spots danced before his eyes. Everything he heard sounded like it was spoken through water, and a numbness overcame him. He couldn't move.

"Midoriya...M-Midoriya…" he managed to choke, the world darkening around him.

"Todoroki, calm down, it's alright…"

"Midoriya...Midoriya...Midoriya…"

"We've got him, we've got Midoriya. He's going to be okay."

"I'm sorry...I'm so sorry, Midoriya…"

"Todoroki...Todoroki!"

The world was pulled out from under him, and Todoroki plunged head-first into unconsciousness.

***

"Midoriya!"

Todoroki shot upright with the exclamation, his breathing all over the place and him head pounding. his leg—the one he'd messed up in the fight—was throbbing something awful, not that he really cared about that.

He looked around wildly. White walls, white ceiling, white beds in rows...it took him only three seconds total to recognize him surroundings. The infirmary of the U.A. he was on one of the beds, his leg and head both wrapped tightly with gauze.

Where's Midoriya?

His mind instantly moved to his classmate, and he looked around once more—and then, all his worries were suddenly gone.

Midoriya was lying on the bed just beside Todoroki's own, unconscious but thankfully—blessedly—breathing. There was an oxygen mask over his face, and an IV needle pricked into one wrist, a blood transfusion in the other. Gauze was wound around his head, and the more serious wound was hidden by a blanket, but Todoroki assumed that it was wrapped as well.

He fell against the pillows again, feeling weak with relief. Midoriya was alright. He was breathing now, and though he looked awful, he was definitely better than before.

They were safe. They were home.

Todoroki surveyed the room once more, though with far less urgency. No one else was around, not even Recovery Girl, which surprised him until he remembered the peril some of the training sessions put the other students in. After that, his surprise diminished considerably.

"Todoroki…"

He turned towards the only other person in the room, a little startled at first. Midoriya was (somehow) awake, looking dazedly at him with half-closed, glassy eyes. But, through the exhaustion, he saw relief embedded in his stare, and before he knew it, he found himself smiling softly.

"...Midoriya," he said, keeping his voice low though he didn't know why. Maybe it was because he didn't have the heart to break this newly found peace and serenity. It was such a contrast to the chaos he'd passed out to. "...How are you feeling?"

"...Tired, but...pretty okay," Midoriya croaked, equally softly, and his voice cracked, but not as badly as it had before. He blinked at him, and then directed his gaze towards the roof of the infirmary. "...I...feel like I've...been in here too many times…"

Todoroki cracked a genuine smile at that. He was right; Midoriya had a bad habit of getting himself injured.

And then, suddenly, he frowned, a more concerned expression taking root. Though Midoriya was conscious and safe and recovering now, he hadn't been until recent. he glanced at his bandages, at the oxygen mask, at the blood transfusion, and the gravity of the situation finally caught up with him.

We could've...we almost...

...Died.

The reality had never hit him harder.

He felt sick again, and something burned the back of his throat. They could have easily, oh so easily, just died. Died, dead, murdered by some villain while Todoroki was walking Midoriya home from U.A.

They could've died.

They almost died.

And out of the two of them, Midoriya came the closest.

"...Todoroki...you okay?"

Todoroki broke away from his thoughts, instead focusing on the quiet, raspy voice of his friend. Midoriya sounded so concerned for him, like he always did when it came to his friends, and Todoroki didn't think it was fair. It wasn't fair of him to worry when he himself went through so much. It wasn't fair to him.

But he shouldn't have been surprised. That was just the kind of person Midoriya was, always so sweet and compassionate, never thinking about himself.

"...Yeah, I'm okay," Todoroki lied. "I'm a lot better off than you, you know."

He smiled, faintly and tiredly, but honestly nonetheless.

"...And it's because of you that I am," Todoroki added. "Midoriya…" There were so many things he wanted to say, but he couldn't find the right words.

"Thank you," he settled for. It was small and insignificant compared to what Midoriya did for him. Honestly, he could never thank him enough for what he did, using himself as a human shield to protect him.

"Oh...y-you're welcome," Midoriya murmured, his speech slurring. "I would...do it again...in a heartbeat…"

Todoroki smiled gently. "...You should try and rest," Todoroki said. "I don't care how 'okay' you think you are, you were just stabbed." It occurred to him now that he didn't actually know how long they'd been in here. How long had they been in the infirmary? Midoriya was still on a blood transfusion, so it couldn't have been more than a few hours...

"'Okay," Midoriya said, nodding. "And...you should, too…"

"I will." Because Midoriya wouldn't rest until he knew he was okay and resting, too. It was endearing, really, it was, but he wished he would think about himself sometimes, especially when it came to his own physical well-being.

Midoriya shut his eyes, satisfied with his response. Todoroki closed his eyes as well, but sleep didn't come as easily as he'd hoped, which was odd considering how exhausted he was. He waited a beat or two in silence, and then,

"Hey, Midoriya?"

Midoriya cracked open one eye to look at him.

"...I'm...I'm glad you're alive," Todoroki said.

Midoriya blinked, and then smiled softly. "...I'm glad you're alive, too," he murmured.

Todoroki smiled back at him, and then fell silent once again, letting Midoriya get the rest he so desperately needed. He closed his own eyes, and this time, sleep rushed to meet him.

***

When Todoroki awoke, it was with a start, and he found himself staring upwards at the white ceiling of the U.A. infirmary.

He swallowed thickly and draped his arm over his eyes, his chin quivering.

That...was the last thing I wanted to remember...

He glanced over at the hospital bed beside him. Midoriya was still there, sleeping soundly. He wasn't on oxygen anymore and a little colour had returned to his whitewashed face, but the bandages were still very much there and necessary, and the IV drip was still there, too.

"I see you're awake."

Todoroki glanced over. The official U.A. nurse Recovery Girl stared back at her. The look on her face was unreadable.

Todoroki sat up and turned towards the nurse's other patient."...How is he?" Todoroki asked. "How's Midoriya?"

"He'll be fine once he sleeps," said Recovery Girl. "I drained most his stamina fixing his insides and I put him on medication to help manage the pain, but he still couldn't sleep soundly, so I gave him a sedative to let his body calm down so he could rest."

It stung at first, the knowledge that Midoriya had to be literally sedated in order for him to sleep without feeling the pain of his injuries, but then Todoroki was relieved, relieved that Midoriya wasn't feeling the pain of his injuries and could get the rest he so desperately needed.

"...I don't know the extent of what happened out there," Recovery Girl said, and Todoroki turned to look at her. "But I believe I know enough." The woman pulled up a stool and sat down on it with a weary sigh. "You were attacked by a villain, were you not?"

Todoroki nodded at once. "We were," he said. "In the alley, on our way home...and Midoriya was hurt…"

Recovery Girl nodded gravely and Todoroki let his voice fade out. "You two were very brave," Recovery Girl said. "It takes a lot of courage to do what you did, and as students, too…"

Todoroki swallowed. A lot of unwelcome images plagued his mind; Midoriya, bleeding and unconscious; Midoriya, struggling for breath; Midoriya, no longer breathing…

"The school is very proud of you both," said Recovery Girl, hijacking Todoroki's train of thought. "You and Midoriya fought bravely when you were unprepared and unarmed."

"...Midoriya was braver," Todoroki said, his voice wavering slightly. His hands balled into fists against the white mattress. "He...he saved me. The villain, he…" He could feel hysterics bubbling in his chest. "H-He was...he was aiming for me, but Midoriya…"

"You don't have to explain anything to me," said Recovery Girl, "I understand. But you mustn't be angry at yourself, Todoroki. I know for a fact that if your roles were reversed, you would have done for him exactly what he did for you."

Then, the little nurse smiled.

"...And you did protect Midoriya," she said. "You brought him home, despite your own pain and fear. You protected him just as much as he protected you. You were very brave, you and Midoriya both. I'm proud of you."

Todoroki swallowed. Honestly, when he'd been against the villain...he hadn't felt very "brave." He'd been shaking from his head to his toes, barely able to hold up his hands. He had felt completely powerless too… since everything he threw at the villain had ultimately failed. Why am I so weak? Midoriya had been far more brave, going so far as to tell him to run and save himself when he was bleeding out, dying, at the mercy of a deadly, horrifying villain.

"Don't trouble yourself with this any longer," Recovery Girl said sternly, getting up from her chair and crossing the room towards the door. "Proud of you or not, you and Midoriya are both my patients and you both need to rest." She paused, just slightly, one hand outstretched towards the doorknob. "Do you need something to help you sleep, dear?" she asked Todoroki softly.

Todoroki shook his head. "N-No, I'll be fine," he said, and he hoped he wasn't lying. "Thank you for everything."

Recovery Girl nodded and left.

Todoroki stared at the closed door for a moment or two, and then laid down again, though he doubted he'd be able to sleep again if he tried. He glanced over at Midoriya (he seemed to do a lot of that lately), frowned, and then reached over.

He paused, hesitant, and then laid his hand over Midoriya's. His fingers were cold, and he was reminded—horribly—of how cold his skin had felt before, when he was shaking him back and forth in front of the U.A., screaming for him to wake up.

He squeezed his eyes shut tightly to block out the images that flooded his mind, but it was too late. The damage was done. His throat burned; he felt like crying.

And then, Midoriya's fingers wound themselves around his. His grip was weak, but he'd definitely moved, and Todoroki looked up suddenly, startled.

"Midoriya?"

But he was still out of it. Completely and totally out of it. It had totally been a subconscious move for him, grasping his hand, but for some reason it felt so much more than that.

Todoroki suddenly felt a lot better, and he squeezed his cold fingers and smiled softly.

That was how Recovery Girl found them hours later when she came to change Midoriya's IV: sleeping soundly, their fingers entwined.

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