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sometimesoliloquy · 2 years

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The Handmaid’s Tale 5x05 “Fairytale”👀

So we have 2 major storylines: June and Luke's ill-advised bowling date, and the miseducation of Ms. Serena as a late in life handmaid-in-waiting. Shout out to the brief but delightful subplot that involved Moira and Lily getting drunk and shit talking, I would totally ship them. I apologize in advance for the snark this quickly devolved into, there may have been wine involved.

We begin with Serena descending down a long staircase, to greet the martha housekeeper at the bottom (wonder where we've seen this before?). I will say, although the Serena/June handmaid parallels this episode are heavy handed—from the stairs and the green juice healthy breakfast to the flashbacks to the very layout of Serena’s room(!)—I actually didn’t really mind because every scene and detail screaming at us that the handmaid's chunky brown boot shoe is now on the other foot was just kind of karmically delicious. Of course Serena still thinks she has power here (at least at first), as she is wont to delusionally believe, demanding requesting to speak with the Commander Mr. Wheeler. Silly Serena, don't you know the menfolk are very very busy with man business? They don't have time for your foolish female prattle! She's able to briefly forget this rejection and her probable indigestion from that smoothie, as Mrs.Wheeler presents her prized pig guest to her gaggle of wanna be Gilead wife friends, who fawn over Serena and her big belly, to her great satisfaction. It's like a good old fashioned Gilead fake labor show but better! (or is it.... guess we'll have to wait and see)

We flash back in time to see Serena and Naomi sauntering their new teal heels through the sterile hallways of an animal children's shelter: they browse the strays through the observation windows but can't quite imagine adopting a mutt into their home, you never know if they're properly house-trained and anyway, they were thinking more of a purebred (they know a breeder). So wonderful we saved these poor children from their ungodly parents to be put in fitting homes!...oh dear, not my home though. Imagine. Serena asks Naomi if she's been approached about a handmaid yet like she's inquiring if she's been asked to prom. Naomi isn't going to prom does not want a whoreful adult stray handmaid in her house any more than she wants one of these illbread brats poor children. She has white couches, for godsake! This scene cemented my suspicion that Naomi 100% never wanted children to begin with. Honestly I felt like this scene was also kind of a irl commentary on the sad fact of so many foster children in need of love and family, especially older kids, too often viewed as "undesireable" or "damaged" Of course there’s the small matter of Gilead causing huge damage to these kids by stealing them, literally traumatically ripping them from the arms of loving parents and families in many cases (which sadly does also sometimes mirror real life). Have to also call out the easter egg throw out line about Chicago rebel forces "they’ll be put down soon”... bitch, we know they’re still fighting like 6-7 years later, so.

Later we see Serena sitting down at Aunt Lydia's trafficking fertility office to pick out a handmaid from their Gilead mugshots. She doesn't look so excited about the prospect anymore at this point (methinks things might be getting strained with Fred at this point, I guess the Gilead honeymoon is over). Anyone else pause their tv to go look super close/upside down at the Handmaid’s files to see if June was in the bunch (or anyone else we know) and also to try and get a glimpse of the first unfortunate “Offred”? Just me? I actually thought the first file she picked up (who also caught Mr. Waterford's eye) looked like June upside down but upon seriously straining my neck was able to determine it was not (then I remembered I could just screenshot and rotate). Maybe Fred really did have a type, though. Ann Dowd’s physical/face acting as Lydia watches over Serena’s shoulder really cracked me up here.

(guess that’s poor nameless Offred the first on the right)

It's time for Serena's business call and Mrs. Wheeler leaves her alone because she couldn't possibly wrap her little woman brain around all that business talk (I kind of love how she manages to fawn over Serena while at the same time throwing shade, it's masterful--or deranged--or both). Joseph gets his first one-liner of the episode in “….You think the Gilead information center... focusing on Gilead... is a mistake?” and of course it's hilarious but fuuuck, he and I may both hate to admit that she’s right, fertility is definitely the best spin Gilead could go with in this fucked up limited supply baby crazy world. Unfortunately for her, it’s once again slipped Serena's mind that Gilead hates women, and she gets a swift buh-bye from creepypants Putnam, who by the way keeps getting creepier by the day. Are they purposely putting pasty corpse-like makeup on that poor actor? Random aside, I wonder if the actor is also like a really nice guy who volunteers and saves puppies or something, like how the cast always would say that Joseph Fiennes is just the loveliest person. Anyway, here we get the first mention of Joe’s pet project New Bethlehem, which Warren promptly shits on. Despite JLaw remaining pretty steadily neutral evil so far this season, I actually felt something from him when he said “or all of this…will have been for nothing”. His motivations lately have felt a bit ambiguous to me, but I did here feel that maybe he really does desperately need it all to mean something: otherwise it means he will have lost Elinor for nothing.

We end Serena' episode arc with the long awaited welcome from Mr. Wheeler, as she prays dutifully at her bedside for everyone to realize how special and smart and superior she is. Even her room here is uncannily reminiscent to me of June’s room at the Waterfords, down to the placement of furniture, window/window seat and door in the same spot (but like a super lux version). I looked away for like a second at the beginning of this next part and when I looked back did a double take because for a split second when he was silhouetted in the doorway I thought wut, NICK?? (I MEAN)

until I remembered we are being cruelly deprived of our boy for two long episodes. Can't even say for sure it's because they have a similar build in the dark from behind or if I was just that desperate to see him. Anyway. Then I did another double take because I know this actor from this random 1 season show where he plays a character working at a renaissance faire, and that is not relevant at all here except that I don't know how I'm supposed to take him seriously as a villain now when I know him for shirtless slap fighting in mud and going by the moniker "Sir Pizzle Humpsalot" (it's kind of like when I realized Val from "Working Moms" was one of the very serious Swiss "go-between" people who fuck over refuse to work with Nick and June in s2). So Mr. Pizzler Whizzler gives a nice little condescending speech during which she--and we--get it drilled once again into our/her heads that Serena will not be continuing with her absurd working woman ambitions, because what is important now is her womb and its contents and that these contents are kept safe so that they can be taken from her. Yeah, WE GET IT, but does she? FINALLY? Serena still seems to have a fundamental issue with the thought that to other Gileadeans (and wannabe Gileadeans), she might not be more special than the countless other women she was totally fine with considering nothing more than a vessel for babies for her to steal. This does not compute. She weirdly doesn't seem to like being treated like a pet/property/child, herself, though (bet Mark and his ill-advised puppy crush are looking pretty good to her now). We leave her here, fulfilled of her daily dose of prenatal vitamins, yet still feeling strangely unsettled... to be continued...

(I mean, upgrade, but still) ---

Over on the still Canada side of Canada (for now, anyway), June is woken up from a Hannah fever dream to a call from Mayday Lily (yay, I love her!). June, Moira and Luke pile into the car for a field trip and flip off some nice Canadian protesters politely (at least one sign said please) telling them to GTFO. They oblige for the day and fuck off to the border, only to get the bad news that Mayday's Gilead contact is stuck on the other side and they're SOL. "Not so!" proclaims Luke, the sudden knight in shining armor. "We shall cross the forest of dangers and rescue the princess from the grasps of the evil queen!" Because he can't wait around for Hannah to appear on tv again with Serena... who is in Canada... ok. I mean it's only been 5-7 years since your daughter was stolen and yeah in all that time the bureaucratic paperwork approach hasn't worked too well (also though, Moira, exactly HOW long did you know about the border camp for?) but sure, right now seems like a great time to suddenly go tromping half-assed into Gilead patrolled woods with no gun, no weapons. Honestly I am really confused by how determined this guy seems to be to repeat history by going into another situation completely unprepared to defend himself and his family, with little else than his bravado and ill-advised optimism. June, however, looks proud and moved by this bravery recklessness and I don't know what I expected because I really do not think Luke brings out the best/smartest in her and she literally got turned on last episode by his pretend murder bluff. I sort of hoped that if anything Moira's common sense alarm would have gone off here a bit more forcefully, but unfortunately she was too busy force feeding us cheesy lines waxing poetic on Luke and June's marriage because they apparently have to try and convince the audience what they are not showing us by telling us.

Moira fucks off to drink with Lily (they got the better end of the deal) and off go June and Luke into the danger woods, holding hands (because I guess this is date night or something). We get an ominous overhead shot of telephone wires far above, giving the sense that nefarious forces are listening/watching, and then it is night in the creepy woods. June starts having trauma flashbacks but insists she's ok, because she still doesn't really think Luke can handle it doesn't want to slow them down. They come upon a corpse hanging from a tree with a "rapist" sign hung from the body. Luke is super disturbed (as would be the normal reaction), June is like same old, same old (her normal is a little different these days) but tells him it wasn't done by Gilead because they "don't use words" (that's only Fred when he's creepy scrabble foreplaying). I wondered if maybe June's murderwoods shenanigans with Fred had spread word and inspired some like minded action in NML?? But am now inclined to think it may have something to do with the people at the end of the episode (not to get ahead). Then it's day again and they finally reach the geocache, but before they can unearth the treasure they are accosted by a young guardian with a gun who I think would actually really love Prince had he been given any chance to know who that was, and it makes me sad that I'm certain he doesn't get the reference. I am going to call this character Guardian Timothee Chalamet from hereon despite later learning his name, Jaeden (they said NO NAMES, Luke) because that's literally all I could think of as soon as we met him. Luke is flustered but June, well accustomed to teenage boys in black training guns on her, doesn’t blink. “Beret”, motherfucker.

Timmy Chalamet is a little brusque and a bit suspicious at first, but he to warms up quickly once they get to his favorite playfort hideout for shirking patrol duties in (don't blame him, it looks cold and boring out there): an abandoned bowling alley that somehow still has power (guess they found a loophole with the electric company), although they still have to reset the pins manually? Timmy gives them some very basic info on the wives schools (like basically the same info June got from Nick with the added episode-themed commentary reassurance that the "Plums" are treated like princesses, at least for the short time they're there before being married off to potentially old abusive pedos anyway (side note: I kind of love that they have slang like the "plums" and it made me wonder what other Gilead slang has developed amongst certain demographics). But never fear! There is a mysterious thumb drive that holds all the answers (ok I am also kind of side-eyeing looking at you on this one, though, Margaret Atwood--#TT #IYKYK). Why do I have a feeling the thumb drive is not going to make it... Anyway, Timmy C tells them they should stay and hang out because it's too dangerous to go back during the day (even though they were just out there in the daytime, honestly, I think the kid is just lonely but can't really blame him). Luckily his youthful charm is so infectious that Luke immediately forgets that he thinks anyone coming from Gilead is automatically an evil monster (replay start of 2x08 bar scene) and becomes bff’s with him, and anyway he's really excited to bowl because he just really loves bowling. I guess they don’t have bowling alleys in Canada anymore?. Ensue very unwise loud competition and man hollering from this bro fest, which makes June understandably disconcerted, as they are hiding out in enemy patrolled territory, theoretically trying not to get killed.

Luke is like June just needs to chill, how about some music and plays some truly absurd old timey songs on the piano that just happens to be there, before doing what he's been dying to do and busting out his falsetto "Let's Stay Together". A variety of emotions cross June's face, ranging from uncomfortable, affectionately amused, contemplative, conflicted, nostalgic, guilty, sad. She sort of looks like she wishes she could jump in with him and surrender to the sentiment whole heartedly, but her heart is not there and she knows it. She can’t quite bring herself to look him in the eyes, looking down when he tries to catch them. Noticing this, he clowns more for laughs and coaxes her to dance with him, and she finally gives in to the (deceptively) carefree feel of the moment, while sweet bb guardian Timothee finds extra mood lighting (cutest third wheel ever). Also, honorable mention to "Did you write that song?"..."yeah I did"... "wow, that's really good" (oh, the innocence!). I left out the part where they ask him about his life in Gilead and he tells them life "before" is "foggy, like a dream", because this was one heavy handed parallel too many on the Hannah front (and yes, I get it, the episode is called Fairytale). Am curious where they guy got beers from though (black market?) and how he smuggled a cooler full into his hideout without anyone noticing.

(which one of these is supposed to be “I’m so in love with this guy singing to me”?)

Then the game's over and they’re taking the scarywoods night shortcut (in hindsight maybe not the best idea but maybe the GROWNUPS here could have sussed that one out). Of course our sweet pure Guardian friend steps on a landmine (we knew from the beginning he was going to be a red shirt, didn't we?), looks terrified but bravely tells them to get back and it's probably fine before he moves a hair and gets blown to smithereens. Just kidding, he just got his leg blown off. He's starting to bleed out and June quickly and calmly goes to work with applying a belt tourniquet (apparently another skill she picked up as a rebel handmaid resistance fighter, or from Youtube) while Luke looks on in horrified shock, a second away from puking (I mean no shade, I'm sure I would, too). Jaeden Timothee Chalament’s guardian friends are calling to him and he White Fang's June and Luke to GTFO so they don't get caught, Luke hesitates and June pulls him up to desperately dash for the border. As she flees, she flashes back--to her and Hannah running in the woods, her running to lead the guardian away in the woods to save Angel's Flight--and this really got me, I found it one of the most (probably the most) genuinely compelling moments of the episode. We end with them surrounded and being dragged away in different directions (foreshadowing perhaps?? who knows). So let us review: every time June gives in to these carefree moments Luke initiates (largely in attempts to win her back as his wife), every time she overlooks her better judgement to concede to his (often ill-founded) optimism, something bad happens. This was the case when Gilead first rose to power and they didn't get out fast enough, and it's still happening now. She lets her guard down, the "old June" starts to seep in, and then BLAMMO, GILEAD IN YOUR FACE, again. Can we just learn the lesson already, June? Honestly, she's already broken the promise she made to Nick like two episodes ago, to keep herself and Nicole safe, because she followed Luke on this half-assed idea to wander into Gilead-patrolled no-man's-land with no gun, no protection and no real plan aside from "find some dude and quote him Prince", so he could "prove himself" or something. To be honest, I actually respected Luke a lot more for doing his thing, that he knows and does well. Fighting with building codes and fundraising and research file folders and making connections with American bureaucrats. It's certainly not the most effective or quickest way to fight Gilead, but at least it’s something and most wars require multiple levels and strategies of offense and defense. That's his wheelhouse, it's who he is, and he can still be that and also support June in her own way of fighting. And if he really is moved to try her way himself (genuinely, not as some desperate ego driven attempt to not lose her), he needs to get some knowledge because at present he is just not well equipped and is more of a liability than an asset. June may be impulsive and sometimes downright reckless but she at least knows the enemy, she knows the game they're playing and how deadly it is. Luke is trying to play checkers in a game of wizard's chess. His pushing of this mission, in all his inexperience and naïveté , combined with June's natural impulsiveness, her desperation over Hannah AND her eagerness to embrace this new side of Luke that is finally embracing the active fighting side in her, gets them into trouble. And the "fairytale" comes crashing down around them.

#the handmaid's tale #June Osborne #osblaine #tht #the handmaids tale season 5

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magicalgirlmel · 1 year

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Anime dropped this year 20: The Legendary Hero is Dead!

1 episode watched

2/10

Transcript under the cut

Y'all, this is baaaaaad. While I can imagine a hypothetical person who might like this one, the whole episode just made me vicerally uncomfortable, and I'd say a solid 80% of that came down to the main character. From what I can gather, this is one of those series where part of the charm is supposed to be in seeing the main character go from scumbag to decent person to hero, and I... I just can't do those anymore.

The reason that they don't work for me most of the time is that sitting through the character being a scumbag isn't something that I am willing to do and when I'm told this is what happens to a character, I'm always wary that the change won't be drastic enough, that too many of the undesirable qualities will remain.

Part of the issue is that too many times these stories go all in on making the lead obviously awful, like is the case here. The lead is gross guy that seems to hate his childhood friend and only is around her because of her "perfect proportions". Excuse me while I gag. This leads into him using her affection for someone against her when he's in their body to make her dress in a skimpy outfit for his pleasure. And with that deception... if his body wasn't literally rotting which gets him caught, I can only assume he would have gone further. The issue is that there's no glimmer that he could be a better person here. He's just terrible and you have to have blind faith that he'll someday be better, which I wouldn't count on.

The other weird thing about this show is that it feels strangely dated. It's hard to really put my finger on, but some of the tropes that are in use here are ones that went out of fashion ages ago, which lends it this quality of feeling at least over a decade old, despite airing now. The artstyle is a little intentionally retro, but at the same time everything looks a little like it's made out of plastic too. There are a few shots that I could see becoming reaction images, sure, but otherwise I'm going to put this one far far away from me.

#anime #the legendary hero is dead #dropped #dropped 2023 #2023

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gamble74vilstrup · 2 years

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gojology · 3 years

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Job Benefits (Part Three)

broken routines - chapter three.

you can find part two here :

part two : undesirable pairing : ceo! gojo x female reader warnings : cursing wordcount : 1442 a/n : im highly disappointed with this but im very hyped abt writing part 4 and uh i need to change my writing style sooner or later wtf is this mess LOL

If there’s one thing Gojo knows more then his own body, it’s routines. It’s what he grew up around, coming from such a bustling family. Since he learned how to walk, he had attended many interviews, gone to parties, all in one day. Of course, it was commonplace in his already hectic life. He saw routine in everything. Imagine his shock when you came into the office in an outfit that differed so greatly from your regular one that his jaw might unhinge and fall off. He can’t wrap his head around why, but he’s utterly confused as to why you changed this up. Was it permanent, and why the change? He had many questions going through his head. This is one of the many negative traits Gojo Satoru has; he thinks his input is important, even though the majority of time it is... Maybe it was somewhat justified. But he doesn’t realize how unnecessary it comes out to be when no one asked. No one had ever told him no, of course they hadn’t, he was ranked nationally as an important kid due to his wit and charismatic personality, essential for entering the business industry. When he opened his mouth to speak, even at 8 years old at his parent’s conferences, the old professionals would all look at him, keenly waiting for his orders, or perhaps his opinion. This was what he grew up having; so naturally he didn’t know any boundaries, nor did he know when to close his mouth. But that’s besides the point, he thoroughly enjoyed the look on you. He takes his normal trip down the hallway into your office, humming a tune, a messy stack of papers in one hand, a custom ceramic mug in the other; made personally just for him. He expects to see you in your regular outfit, a pencil skirt, white t-shirt, the short clicky heels, and the black blazer. It certainly made for an excellent example of casual, formal attire. Unexpectedly, you’re not. You’re calling someone, phone perched delicately on your shoulder almost as if it’s supposed to slip out, your hair framing your face. Lips parting as you start responding to whatever is on the opposite side, and he notices an evident gloss, your lips are a different color too. You glance up at him and gesture to your phone, and his hands are shoved deep into his pockets, taking this extra time to examine you up and down. White turtleneck, layered alongside a slightly unbuttoned dress shirt with a crisp warm toned brown trench coat. Not too long, not too short. Simple gold jewelry adorned your neck, and his eyes caught onto the gold bracelet that jingled on your arm as you swayed it around; he kinda found it cute how even when the person you were talking to wasn’t in front of you, you were still so animated. Gojo can’t see your pants nor your shoes, but he’s about to enter cardiac arrest because truthfully he didn’t expect that you knew how to dress. “What?” you say, words dripping with venom and menace, putting the phone back down. He’s taken aback, what’s with the tone? “What do you mean, what, (Y/N)?” giving you a shit eating grin, he takes a step closer to your table. “Answer my question, I asked first.” you shot back, now crossing your legs, you hope you look bored just to add more insult to injury. The guy deserved it for thinking the world revolved around him. He doesn’t answer, instead staring at you, setting his cup of coffee onto the already crowded tabletop, slightly hunched over. You feel your heart drop. Fuck, maybe seeking some sort of symbolic revenge against your boss wasn’t the best of ideas. Actually, none of your ideas were the best last night. Naturally you’d only think up disasters when you were under distress. “What’s with the new outfit? Buy a new fashion sense on Amazon?” he finally inquires, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice, brushing your... Rude words aside. You shrug, pulling out your planner from the drawer and mumbling, biting your pen before writing inside, they’re mindless words. You hope your acting is good, because you want to cry again even at the slight sound of those words. “I don’t know, I felt like I would try something different.” Fuck, were was the sass? Why did you answer nervously? Why did you feel so scared? There was obviously something that you wanted to do rather then chit chat with him, and Gojo’s now unoccupied hand rubs his neck, this was suddenly so awkward, even for someone as lively as him. “Hm. Right. Anyways, these were in the printer.” he slaps the freshly printed lukewarm pages onto your desk. “Figured these were yours, still had your name on them.” “Ah. Thanks.” you say before yawning, covering your mouth before sliding the papers back into the drawer behind you- as if you had no care for them. Actually, you didn’t. This was apart of your master plan that you had crafted at 1 AM last night, too exhilarated to rest. You would print papers out in Gojo’s printer, which you had used once in a while prior so it wouldn’t be too suspicious, and since Gojo never left the dang office he’d hear the sounds and return them to you. Both of you were silent again, and he’s debating between hitting you up with a topic of conversation, perhaps a joke, but you seem so uninterested he’s not sure if it’s the right moment. “Just to let you know- your lunch break is in 10 minutes.” he adds, whistling to try to appear careless, but he could feel his heart sinking. You were acting unusually cold, no dramatic tantrums from you that he usually loved. In fact, that was the whole reason why he liked coming to your office. That, and the cute stationary. “Ah! Really?” you make sure to act like you just got a ticket to heaven, just as a petty way of saying, “Hey. You’re boring. I want to get out.” and Gojo’s pretty sure that all the contents of his heart was shattered now. Hmph. Whatever, if you continued this behavior he’d swear he’d fire you, but even he knows that’s not true. He had grown fond about you over the small amount of time that you had worked as his secretary, besides, what was a good work life if you didn’t have a good relationship with your very own secretary? He’s sure his banter doesn’t affect you. “Yeah.” he says, now quiet. He turns his back on you, pausing for a quick moment before walking out, not before he bangs the top of his forehead against the door frame, which earned a slight groan out of him, and just like that he left. You still hear the faint clicking against the tile floor from his shoes. You exhaled a sigh you didn’t know you were holding, twirling your office chair to look at the large window pane behind your desk. This was something you admired about the architecture of the building you worked out. Every single office had a large window facing Tokyo, so late working hours would always involve beautiful city lights and the bustling of night life. The sun and sky was bright and cheery, and it comforted your frazzled body. Today wasn’t as bad as yesterday, but it still felt strange from not having your daily ridiculous conversation with Gojo- and strangely you missed it. Instilled with energy and motivation, you stand up, pulling your bento out of your bag, determined to go through with the rest of your plan. You knew Gojo had a good friend that worked here, Keto Sugareu or something like that. You’d have lunch with him, work your feminine charms, and that was that. It wasn’t like you wanted to, but a part of you so desperately wanted to prove to Gojo that you could be smart, witty, yet sexy at the same time. You weren’t a prude- just someone not as exposed to these lifestyles. But you didn’t really eat your lunch in the break room, rather, you were almost always in your very own office. If you weren’t found in there, it’d either be the bathroom or conspiring to steal Gojo’s luxury coffee machine at your house. Infact, you’re not even quite sure if you remember how it looks like. “Whatever.” you mumble to yourself, before scooping up your utensils and napkins and heading out for the break room. You shouldn’t have ever stepped foot into that cursed hellish room that day.

nice to see u down here, u want chapt 4? too bad. just kidding! here, have at it. chapter four : conspiring

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concussed-to-pieces · 4 years

Text

Of Gorgons And Gardens

Fandom(s) : The Mandalorian and Prospect [2018]

Pairing: The Mandalorian [Din Djarin]/Reader/Ezra

Rating: Holy shit uh. Explicit.

AN: That's right. I've done it. It's time for the sex pollen. This is a standalone that's not involved with either of my previous tales related to these fine boys, so we have a Death Watch-raised Mando that takes the Creed incredibly seriously and an Ezra that's well armed. Also I apologize for the constant viewpoint switches. Enjoy!

Tag List: @huliabitch @hardcorewwetrash @helplessly-nonstop @lackofhonor @oloreaa @theocatkov @jackierey09 @zombiexbody @crookedmoonsaultpunk @pedrosbigdorkenergy @absurdthirst @culturalrebel

[!TRIGGER WARNING!: For obligatory dubious consent due to sex pollen, as well as threesome activities, breeding kink and gratuitous bodily fluids. Stay safe!]

The quarry was named Ezra. Not that their name mattered, the chain code was freshly generated. The strangest part was that there had been no image attached to the puck.

Din had tipped his helmet to the side, narrowing his eyes and tapping the bounty puck curiously. "Somethin' wrong with this?"

Karga shook his head. "No, he's just too slick for us to have any holorecords on him. Somebody from Bakhroma wants him alive."

Undocumented quarry was exceptionally rare, and not usually something that one requested a Mandalorian for. It indicated green prey, a first-time offender. "Bakhroma, huh? Pretty far out." He wasn't an idiot. There had to be a reason why Karga had offered him this one specifically.

"Guy apparently walked off with a majority of someone's aurelac pull. Typical floater squabble, but one of them ponied up the mining points for credits and asked for a certified, card-carryin' Mando." Karga had leaned back in the booth. "How's the kid?"

Din had just grunted noncommittally in reply, gloved fingers scooping the puck off the table. "I have to get back to the Crest."

…

"The target has been on Bakhroma relatively recently. Not sure if he was in the Green or not, but either way he'll probably be a walking biohazard." Mando muttered, turning his head towards you. "So you're staying put."

"Until something happens to you and I have to pull you out of the fire again." You retorted with a smirk.

"Hey, that was one time." You knew he was narrowing his eyes, though you weren't quite sure how you knew. Something about the way he tilted his head ever so slightly to the right clued you in.

"You were full of nexu quills."

"One. Time." The Mandalorian growled. "I even said thank you."

"You sure did," You replied, laughing. "Right before you passed out!"

He palmed over the side of your head roughly. "Brat." His grumble was fond, softening the edge of the insult. "Promise me you'll stay on the Crest, Senaar, otherwise I'll ask Omera to take you and the kid for an extended sleepover."

"Fine, I promise." You relented, huffing in annoyance.

He tinkered with his charts for a moment, then tilted his head again. "Where did you go earlier? I got done with Karga hours ago. Couldn't find you."

You stiffened, abruptly absorbed in checking the fuel levels. "Oh you know. Around." You said breezily.

"Well in the future, when you feel like going around, at least let me know so I don't think you've been abducted." Mando grumbled, folding his arms over his chest.

"Aw, you're cute when you care!" You cooed, making him scoff and return to his control panel.

…

In hindsight, he wasn't sure what he was more pissed off about. The fact that this Ezra character had led him on a wild fucking chase over half of a suspiciously verdant moon, or the fact that his brain had apparently decided to shift into overdrive regarding you. He couldn't get you off…

Get you off his mind, that is. Stars, he was so confused.

He felt like he had been walking in circles for hours, the only noise the steady beep of the tracker. He was too hot. Thirsty. His armor was chafing like it never had before; it was less like an extension of his body and more like a too-tight skin he needed to shed. Din finally bent over, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

"You look like shit," drawled an unfamiliar voice while a set of knuckles rapped on the back of his helmet. Djarin jerked upright and immediately staggered, fumbling to grip a tree trunk for support. His vision swam uncertainly, and he blinked several times in an effort to clear it.

The man in front of him was clad in a utilitarian suit that bore an unfamiliar logo, maybe a mining corporation. No duraplast or durasteel visible, no unnecessary frills, old-fashioned rubber gaskets to seal where glove met sleeve. Din's gaze traveled upwards, past the man's chest to his large domed helmet. He kept his motions deliberate. He had been caught off-guard by this man, but he wouldn't--

What?!

"I'll assume you're encroaching upon my solitude to haul my undesirable personage back into civilized spaces?" The man inquired after Din had taken several long seconds to try and understand what he was seeing. "For monetary compensation, if I had to hazard a guess. There are few lures that tempt a man so far out into the uncharted."

Why does he have my face? Sure, the scars were different. Different facial hair, different hairstyle, and a wild little tuft of blond sprang from amidst the dark locks at his hairline. But it was him. Same brown eyes, same nose, same mouth curving into an infuriatingly benign smirk. Djarin was struck with the sudden urge to punch him, his belly writhing.

"I take it the dust has you firm in its grip. A real pity, that. I'd love to sympathize, but regrettably I am at an advanced state of the same condition." The quarry gestured at his right arm, where a bloodstain blooming on the fabric of his suit indicated a loss of the integrity of said suit. "I'm Ezra, though I'm certain you're already well aware. And you?"

"Irrelevant." Din grated out, clumsy fingers fumbling to get his binders off his belt.

"A man of action, excellent! I shall acquiesce, but only because being removed from this Centaurian mass is infinitely better than being confined to it." Ezra replied with a sage nod, extending his wrists. "Whither to, my recalcitrant steerforth?"

"Be quiet." The Mandalorian grunted, his mind still reeling. How does he have my face? Then, a new, far more troubling thought occurred to him.

If he turned Ezra in, people would inadvertently know what he looked like. They wouldn't know, but they would know. What would that mean for him? For his dedication to the Creed? Did things like that count against him? Had something like this ever happened before?

"Tell me you, at the bare minimum, have functional transport?" Ezra asked after Din had relieved him of his blaster, sounding hopeful. It was so strange hearing his own voice with such an odd, imprecise cadence to it. The Mandalorian had worked for years to improve his Basic so that anyone and everyone would be able to understand him through the coarse modulator, though he still ended up sounding hitchy or curt most of the time.

"How else would I have gotten here?" Din snapped, gesturing the other man forward with the encouragement of his own weapon.

At least now he knew how to get back to the Crest, thank the Maker for his helmet and the tracking protocols he had. Now, observing his previous path of forward motion, he realized with a jolt how much it wound back and forth. He had been walking in circles.

Since when did he lose his sense of direction? Even in unknown territory, he usually had a damn good idea of which end was up. That concerned him.

And on top of everything else, Ezra wouldn't shut the hell up.

"Be quiet." Din muttered for what seemed like the thousandth time. How long had they been walking? Probably his own fault. With how much his head was spinning, he didn't dare deviate from the winding trail he had left. Even if a straight path would have been miles quicker.

Ezra continued to drone, "a toilsome marathon of carnage, I assure-"

"I said, be fucking quiet."

The target huffed out a breath, but obliged Djarin's terse demand for the moment. Din's head was pounding, his already short fuse shrinking with every word out of the talkative man's mouth. Was this the Maker's hysterically ironic way of compensating for how little a solitary Mandalorian would speak? Making a doppelganger that was ceaselessly chatty?

Din talked a lot more these days, between you and the kid. Maker, you. His head swam again and a low, guilty heat throbbed in his belly. You talking to him, the way your mouth moved around your words-

No. No, stop, he told himself sternly, two fingers sliding idly between the gasket and gorget at his throat just so he could breathe a little easier. This planet's air felt thick, like breathing through tar.

"I would not indulge that craving, were I you." Ezra spoke up, the man obviously watching him claw at his neck. "The less exposure you have, the better."

Din wanted to snap at him because honestly how many times do I have to say shut the fuck up-

But then he stopped. Since when did he even do things like breach the seal of his own fucking helmet on an unfamiliar planet?! He flinched, tearing his hand away and hating the low, wry chuckle that issued from the quarry. The other man mused, "It's already too late for me, you know. I imagine I'll have an hour, perhaps two."

"What the hell are you talking about now."

"The dust, my armored associate. It permeates. Sludges the mental processes." Ezra shrugged with only one shoulder. "Among other things."

"How do you know so much about it?" Din gritted his teeth against the buzzing pain in his stomach. "Seems pretty stupid of you to hide out here." Especially if you know the flora is deadly.

"There is naught to do on a freighter slingback aside from read." Ezra's eyes narrowed. "And I could hardly pick and choose which moon my pod decided to give out on, you monosyllabic knuckle-dragger."

"Watch your mouth before I break it." Din snarled.

"Lo and behold, he comprehends! I assumed all you knew how to say was a stagnant variation on the theme of be fucking quiet." Ezra retorted with enraging cheer.

Din's gloves creaked with the tension of his fists and he barely kept from slamming them into his temples. They were almost to the Crest. Almost. Once they got there, he would throw this mouthy nerf herder into the carbonite and…

And what? And turn him over? And inadvertently compromise his whole identity, possibly destroy decades of loyally obeying the Creed?

All the deprivation, the loneliness, the weakness of his own heart...

"Be fucking quiet." The Mandalorian muttered, knowing full well that the other man hadn't said anything. Be fucking quiet. Be fucking quiet quiet quiet just fucking be quiet--

Din ground the heels of his palms against the curve of his helmet at his forehead, praying for some kind of relief.

Carbonite, he reminded himself.

…

Ezra grudgingly held his tongue, which even he had to admit was a rarity. Unlike the other floaters that had approached him before and met their swift demise, this particular bounty hunter was heavily kitted. The gleaming plate he sported didn't seem to hinder his motion in the slightest.

Interesting.

Ezra knew when he had been outplayed, and he would be lying if he said he wasn't banking on the other man having a functional ship even before he decided to go peacefully.

The hunter (mentally dubbed Steerforth, he rudely had not introduced himself) obviously had no idea about the pollen, for all his outward preparedness. Clearly Serpentia was not as well known as Ezra had wished.

Regrettable.

He could hope that the bounty hunter hadn't been exposed, he mused. After all, the man was wearing that positively arresting helmet, and his suit seemed of a sturdy (if unfamiliar) weave. Here was an individual that Ezra would have to tread carefully around, if he wished to escape with his life.

His faith waned a bit as he recalled watching the man 'track' him, winding back and forth through the trees like a drunken mule until Ezra had taken pity on him and turned himself in.

The hunter was terse in his speech, likely weary from the chase. Ezra could sympathize, he was weary from running. It had almost been a relief when that last hunter had attacked him and forced him to crash the pod on this moon. Though his relief had quickly turned to dismay when Ezra had done a full turn outside his pod and realized just what was making all the pollen in the air.

Serpentia, Serpent's Tongue. He had never encountered the plant in the proverbial flesh, but once upon a time he had been accidentally doused with the extract when a holding tank had burst while he was on a job site.

His skin crawled as he remembered the torment that followed during his solitary confinement. He had been nigh-certain he would not recover, clawing free of the haze that had gripped him with the barest vestiges of his mental faculties.

This moon's Serpentia population seemed infinitely kinder than the concentrate he had encountered, if only for its soft, creeping approach. It lapped at the base of his brain, dulled the edge of his panic until he was nearly comfortable with the ache that licked hot in his groin.

But thank Kevva for this bounty hunter lumbering through the brush! With a little luck, Ezra would be able to persuade him to accept a few pearls of aurelac in lieu of dragging him back to face that greatly-exaggerated justice.

...

According to the limited information from the Crest's scans, the air on this moon was perfectly safe to breathe.

And if what Mando had said was right, he probably would need the ship to himself for a little while to decontaminate. So you had posted up beside the ramp once he had departed, occasionally wiping the sweat off your brow. The atmosphere was humid and you watched as breezes too delicate for you to even feel nudged the thick pollen in the air this way and that.

The moon was liberally coated with lush vegetation; just finding a place to safely land the Razor Crest had been a Herculean effort. You wondered vaguely if there was a lake or spring nearby that you would be able to cool off in. The ship's fresher was functional, of course, but its water had been sitting in the holding tank for a few cycles now and it smelled rusty.

The pollen covered everything, orange-red substance sticking to your already-damp skin. You grimaced, wondering if maybe you should have put on your suit. But no, the atmosphere was safe. The scans had said so, and you already spent so much of your time in your thick suit…

The sunshine felt wonderful after all the hyperspace travel, like a warm embrace from a friend. You caught yourself wondering what Mando's hug might feel like. Probably uncomfortable, what with all the beskar. You scoffed at your thoughts. You really needed to stop thinking about him like that, he was technically your boss even if he called you his partner. So what if he had passed out on top of you? That had been an infection thing.

It wasn't as if he had stroked your cheek before he dropped, his voice breaking when he called you Senaar...

So what if you had solicited not one, but two Mandalorians during your last stop on Nevarro?

It wasn't as if he noticed anything that you did, aside from when it had inconvenienced him. It wasn't as if you couldn't handle your little infatuation with him, even if it did result in you seeking out Mandos that would give you attention.

You propped your chin up on your hand, your eyes half-focusing on the dust floating in the air. It was nice to just relax for once, though there was a little guilty sensation in your stomach. Because Mando was out there working, while you...were lounging around, soaking up the sunlight.

You weren't sure how long you sat there, but you finally got up with a groan and a stretch that felt heavenly. You would investigate the surrounding area, you decided, maybe you could rustle up something fresh. If you couldn't be active on the hunt for the quarry, you could at least restock the larders.

After what only felt like a few steps, you quickly stumbled across thick vines that bore an unfamiliar, violet-hued fruit. The fruit was the size of your fist, and the skin had slight give to it. Light-colored flowers dotted the vine here and there, their tiny stamens crested with heavy crowns of thick pollen. Clearly you had located one of the many sources of the dust that choked the air.

You picked one of the fruits and propped it up on a flat rock, using your trusty field knife to slice it open. It had orange pulp inside it, and a small hollow in the middle filled with pinkish fluid. The whole fruit reminded you of a sunset. Dimly, you thought that you probably shouldn't be touching this fruit with your bare skin, on the off chance that it might be caustic or toxic. But it looked delicious.

Surely just a little taste wouldn't hurt?

The pinkish fluid was almost overwhelmingly sweet, and sticky. It dribbled down your chin when you tipped the fruit to slurp it up. You laughed at yourself, tugging your tunic to scrub at your face.

Mando will love these.

You weren't sure where the thought came from, but obviously it was true. The idea of Mando being alone, slipping off his helmet to eat...the juice from the fruit glistening on his mouth…

Your breathing had quickened. You carefully harvested more of the round fruit, tucking the ripe produce into the makeshift cradle of your tunic. Once you decided you had enough, you turned on your heel and went to make your way back to the Crest.

...

No.

No no no no no-

Din stared at the partially-ajar ramp on the Crest and he wanted to yell.

"Oh dear." Ezra murmured faintly. "What a predicament." He had been getting quieter and quieter the closer they drew to the ship, so hearing him talk again sent a jolt down Din's spine. "You left your egress open? How careless of you."

"I didn't." Din snarled, wrapping his fingers around the binders on Ezra's wrists. You. The throbbing in his stomach lurched.

Ezra's eyes widened and he abruptly planted his feet. Din hadn't realized just how off-kilter he was, normally something like a shift in weight wouldn't be enough to make him stagger. But he almost toppled, barely getting his balance back in time. "Is there someone else on that ship?" Ezra asked sharply.

"Of course." Din didn't even think to lie. "Partner."

"Would they have wandered? Exposed themselves?" The prospector-thief-quarry continued to quiz him and Din resented it just a little.

"Be quiet," He grunted, tapping at his gauntlet to open the ramp, "and get in the fucking hold."

Ezra abruptly drew himself up to his full height. "I do not believe you actually want me to do that." He intoned with difficulty, his teeth gritted. "Putting myself, yourself and the potential of one more infected person into an enclosed space is a very…" His words faltered. "Oh."

Din whirled, visor traveling up the ramp into the dim hold. And just barely visible at the edge of the ramp, a small pile of what looked like fruit--was that your leg?! He lunged forward, his blaster ready.

"I would not advise you to approach them!" Ezra barked.

"Fuck you!" Din snapped, striding up the ramp to kneel alongside your body. He crushed one of the fruits beneath his knee, lurid pink juice erupting to soak into his suit. The color was high in your cheeks, your body blotchy with flush. Pollen encrusted your neck and shoulders, drifted through your hair; something pink and shiny coated your lips like a strange gloss.

Din caught himself leaning in and jerked back at the urgency in Ezra's voice when the prospector called, "Do they breathe, man?"

"Be quiet!" Djarin roared. Why hadn't he checked that first? What was wrong with him? He shoved his vambrace against your mouth, his chest clenching in relief when your breath fogged the metal. Stars.

"I'm afraid this complicates things quite significantly." Ezra said loudly, fidgeting at the base of the ramp. "I was unaware you had a partner of the...other biological persuasion. Had it just been you and I, two masculine-presenting bipeds, things would have been miles simpler."

"What the hell are you saying now?" Din was getting tired of this shit, tired of listening to the other man talk.

"This plant is...shall we say, heteronormative." Ezra drawled, waving his bound hands in the air to illustrate the cloying pollen. Din cocked his head in confusion. "You know, masculine and feminine? Male and female? Different. Hetero."

Djarin scoffed derisively. "My people don't care about that shit."

"A noble practice to be certain, very forward-thinking."

"This is the Way." The Mandalorian replied.

Ezra soldiered on, "Unfortunately, the plant that infests this planet does indeed differentiate. Fruit for the female, pollen for the male." He added hurriedly, "in the biological sense, of course! I will not make any assumptions about your partner. The fruit is a...a catalyst. Are you familiar with the old-Earth religious writings, the ones that mention the Garden? Or perhaps the Greek pantheon may have been more your style?" When Djarin shook his head, Ezra sighed. "The genus name in Basic is slippin' my mind. But this particular iteration is known as Serpent's Tongue, Serpentia. It is Medusine in nature and it inspires feelings of…" Ezra paused, licking his lips nervously. "Heat."

"Heat." Din repeated blankly, knowing that he must be missing something.

Ezra ducked his head, breaking eye contact. "As in, being in heat." The man clarified after a moment.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm-"

"Excuse me?" Din snarled, running his fingers through the juices that coated his knee. It was thick, sticky like syrup, why was it warm--He bolted to his feet and stalked back down the ramp. Ezra took a step back, and then another, the quarry obviously wary of him. Good. The satisfied feeling took some of the edge off his frustrated panic. "So what the hell is wrong with my partner?" Din grated out.

"Er, to couch it in layman's terms…" Ezra hesitated, clearing his throat. "They are aroused."

Aroused. Aroused. Aroused. "Sexually?" Din hated the way the word came out, all breathy like he was a youngling that had just learned about the wonders of copulation.

Ezra nodded, grimacing. "From the sound of your tone, I would hazard a guess that the two of you have not been intimate."

"Why would we have been?" Din retorted bluntly.

Ezra raised an eyebrow, seeming as if he was avoiding looking at you. Good. Mine. Din had no idea where the hell that thought came from. "Oh of course, I was foolish to assume so blatantly." The prospector muttered. "That does complicate your own matters further, however. Were you previously sexually intertwined, this would have been much more simple." He suddenly doubled over at the waist, a loud grunt forced from his mouth and a low exclamation of, "fuck, fuck-"

The curse sent a hot flicker down Din's spine and it took him a second to realize that you had made a noise in reply. You sounded dazed, scared. He whirled on the ramp and knelt again, taking your hand. "Senaar, you coming around?" Your eyes looked...wrong, blinking open slowly; your pupils were blown like you'd been spiced.

You stared up at him for several long seconds before your mouth opened. "Wanted to make lunch." You managed to say. "I don't feel good."

"Well, you don't look so great either." Din said gruffly.

"Bastard." You groaned at him, trying to sit up. "Maker, I feel so hot, I...oh! Oh no, you smushed one." You appeared to have noticed the remains of the sticky fruit currently seeping into his knee. "I wanted you to try it. Tastes...tastes...it's so sweet Mando, s'like candy." You saying his name (even if it wasn't his actual name, shit) was like a lightning bolt to his groin. You dragged your hand over his knee, gathering up the remnants of the fruit and then sliding your fingers into your mouth.

You brought him food. His lungs felt too full and not full enough. Stars, the idea of you feeding him that, smearing it all over his mouth with those pretty little fingers-

No, the helmet. The helmet. He couldn't take off the helmet. The Creed.

He jerked his head up, looking to Ezra. The other man was still doubled over, holding his midsection as best as he could with his hands bound.

A dark, uncharacteristically evil thought wound its way into Din's mind, sweet and smokey like a good ne'tra gal. "Get in the ship." He grunted. Ezra glanced up and Din was a little startled by the level of emotion he displayed. He wasn't used to seeing expressions play out on his own face. The other man seemed wildly uncomfortable and Din found that grounding, for whatever reason.

"I do not dare to." Ezra panted finally. "Just being this close is...immensely troubling. I am not the master of my own body at this moment, Steerforth."

"Is this the target?" You asked softly. Din nodded and he could almost feel your eyes raking over the other man. "What happened? He's hurt."

Shit, he had nearly forgotten. Ezra was still bleeding from his arm. The quarry had obviously forgotten as well, clearly dealing with a much more pressing matter.

You beckoned to the other man and Din had to rein in the knee-jerk reaction to grab his blaster as Ezra reluctantly approached. He had never been territorial about you before, what the hell was the matter with him?

Ezra halted a good five feet away from you, keeping his head down. "I am Ezra. I apologize in advance for my untoward behavior." He muttered, his voice gone so low and gravelly he actually did sound like Din. The Mandalorian's stomach pitched uncertainly. "I am not myself at this point in time."

"What happened to your arm?" Your tone was warm, concerned. Din's fists clenched. "Did Mando do that?"

"Oh, no! Of course not. Your compatriot has been nothing if not a complete gentleman." Ezra replied wryly. "I sustained this injury during a previous floater's quarrel."

…

You hummed and you saw Mando stiffen up out of the corner of your eye. What was wrong with him? One second he had been leaning over you, all worry and hand holding. The next, he was barking at the quarry.

And the quarry was hurt. Ezra, Ezra, his slow drawl making your head swim and your chest tingle. Never mind Mando, what was wrong with you? You felt so strange, like you were hyper-fixated.

Maker, maybe you shouldn't have eaten that fruit. "I'm sorry." You apologized to Mando, your lower lip beginning to quiver. "I just wanted to give-"

"Be quiet." He ordered, his voice startlingly gentle. A gloved thumb pressed to your lower lip and you stared up at him, opening your mouth automatically even though you knew he was just wiping the juice away. You were startled when he slid his thumb into your mouth, but you obligingly cleaned the juice from the leather with your tongue. Shouldn't this be strange? But Mando just did it, like it was normal. Maybe it was normal.

Your mind flew back to your sultry encounter on Nevarro, how you had occupied yourself while Mando wrapped up his business with the Guild, and warmth lanced through your stomach as you recalled greedy gloved hands grasping and caressing your bare skin-

"Steerforth, if you are to carry on in that heated demonstration I must plead for the carbonite treatment that you were so hellbent on throwing myself into earlier." Ezra sounded like he was in pain. "I have only endured this once before and it was a torment that threatened my already-tenuous sanity. Have fucking mercy man, I implore-"

"Be quiet." Mando snapped, "we have to treat your arm, right?"

"Fuck." Ezra swore again, the sound writhing through your belly. "Hurry then."

"Get in the ship. I'll turn on the filters."

"Do not leave me alone with them, I implore you!" Ezra cried, that domed helmet finally tilting enough for you to catch a glimpse of his face. "I am not the master of my own body, Steerforth."

His eyes were dark, impossibly dark, and frantic as he argued with Mando. His skin seemed tanned or olive through the sun-struck dome of his suit's helmet. Short brown hair was plastered flat to his forehead with sweat, and the lower half of his face was coated in a somewhat unkempt mess of facial scruff. Too long to be five o'clock shadow, but too bedraggled to be dubbed anything else.

Roguish, you decided, wanting to laugh at yourself. He looks roguish. What a ridiculous thought to have! Not obviously dangerous like Mando, but still dangerous. Was that your heartbeat throbbing in your ears? You sighed softly, taking a step towards the other man without meaning to.

Mando's hand was suddenly on your arm. "Hold it. Treatment. We have to treat his wound." He said gruffly.

You nodded. Of course. Who knew what he had been exposed to through the breach in his suit? "I was going to help him walk?"

Mando shook his head. "You get the kit. You've got no gear on. He's contaminated." He reasoned. "Get me the kit and then seal yourself into the cockpit so we can filter the hold." You nodded again and his hand found your cheek, gloved fingers grazing your neck before he jerked back. "S...Sorry." he apologized.

"It's okay." You whispered.

…

Ezra, helmet discarded and suit stripped to the waist, flinched away from Din's touch yet again. "Stop. This is a bad wound. It'll get infected if I do this wrong." Din snapped. He rarely encountered blaster wounds that didn't self-cauterize, even though that tended to come with its own set of problems.

"I do not mean to tear free." Ezra protested. "Blood flow has increased. I am…" He paused, biting his lower lip. "Sensitive. Surely you have a handheld? One of the burners? Just burn it shut man, Kevva, I cannot even endure the graze of your fingers."

"If I give you a burner patch, it'll seal in the infection." Din reasoned, flushing the wound again. "Focus on something else."

"I cannot." Ezra said sharply. "There is only one matter my brain currently wishes to focus on, and it is not the dire straits of my wounded arm."

"Them?" Din asked, keeping his voice low.

Ezra shot him a guilty look from beneath his sweat-matted fringe of brown hair, finally nodding. "It is ludicrous, but I feel as though I can taste them." He confessed. "Gods, I wish I had never landed on this accursed moon. I wish I had never encountered the Serpentia."

"What will happen?" Din did his best to maintain his vocal level as he bandaged the other man's wound.

"Arousal. Sheer, unadulterated arousal. You ache, like the worst fever you've ever had. I've heard it is even more excruciatin' for those of the other human biological persuasion, due to their genitals being internal. Though it is Medusine in nature, so it has a...failsafe, of sorts. You are seized with the primal instinct to mate, conquer, claim. It does not stop until you have buried your...until you have sheathed yourself in an orifice." Ezra was gasping for air. Obviously just talking about it was enough to cause him distress, either that or Djarin was being rougher than he thought. "Steerforth please, I-"

"This will cause them pain?" Din asked slowly.

Ezra nodded jerkily. "I have been told it's like a sickly, stabbing heat. Fingers are not enough to…er, extinguish the flames." His cheeks flushed. "The tongue soothes, but not overlong. Internals require certain length, and...rigidity." Din didn't miss the way his eyes flickered down to the beskar that covered his upper thighs. "When last I encountered this damned flora, I suffered the effects alone and I felt as if I would go mad."

Tongue. Fingers. Rigidity. Din's mind reeled. "Specifics." He gritted out, his body awash with heat in his armor when Ezra made a pitiful noise.

"Kevva, have mercy on me Steerforth."

"I said. Specifics." Din fisted a glove in the other man's hair, tilting his head back and forcing him to look up. Ezra moved, albeit reluctantly, the Adam's apple of his throat bobbing when he swallowed. "Specifics." Din repeated himself, a little softer this time.

Ezra shuddered all over. "They will seek you out. To be fucked." He said, cringing a bit as if he disliked using the word. "You must open them up with your tongue first, dissolve the Medusine barrier with saliva. That's the failsafe, you see, an individual of that biological persuasion who is suffering cannot be penetrated without tender effort. Ease into it and perhaps they will not loathe you when this madness has run its course-"

"I can't." Din interrupted.

"What?" Ezra gawked at him.

"I can't. T-Tongue. Not allowed. Forbidden." Din felt like he was drunk. "Helmet."

The other man's brow furrowed. "You can, I presume, take off other portions of your plate?"

Din shook his head, wishing that he could explain it better. "Technically yes, but it's frowned upon. Exceptions happen. And under no circumstances can I take the helmet off."

"How in the Fringe have you ever-"

"I...inspire feelings in people." That was probably the most delicate way he could have said I cater exclusively to bipeds with a predator/prey fetish. Din grimaced. "I'm large and imposing. Usually that's...enough. No need for warm up." He said awkwardly. "Armor stays on."

"What a bewildering existence!" Ezra tilted his head in disbelief. "So you have never removed…?"

Din shook his head. "Not in the presence of others. The Creed forbids it."

"Your dedication is admirable, but unfortunately it leaves your partner twisting in the wind." The quarry pointed out. "I would offer my services, but I am an unknown and-"

"Yes." Din gritted out, that dark thought slithering back through his mind.

"Yes?"

"Your services." Din took a deep breath. He didn't bargain with quarry, but this man had his face. He couldn't turn him in without jeopardizing everything he had sworn his life to. "In exchange, when this is...when they no longer require your services, I'll let you go."

Ezra's eyebrows bunched together. "I'm afraid I don't follow, Steerforth."

"I don't want them to be in pain." Din's voice grated in his throat and he watched Ezra's eyes widen in comprehension. "I don't want them to hurt."

"You...this is not just the Serpentia. You have a prior attachment to them."

"It doesn't matter what I do or don't have." Djarin muttered dismissively. "Because of the Creed, I...I can't. But you can."

"You can't give them your mouth, certainly, but there are-"

"If it's what makes it possible, you have to do it!" Din interjected sharply. "I don't want them to hurt."

"I need you to comprehend what you're askin' of me!" Ezra shot back, his bound fists clenched tight enough to whiten his knuckles. "They don't know me from Job, and you're all but demanding I violate their trust-"

"I don't want them to hurt!" Din roared, startling himself with his own furious reaction. Whatever else he was about to say was cut off by your staggering descent on the ladder. You looked unwell. Ezra skittered back a few steps, falling on his ass with a muffled swear.

"Mando?" Your voice wavered and you swayed at the ladder. Din lurched forward, tucking you into his arms as you sniffled, "I don't feel so good. I think I'm sick." You were radiating heat that he could feel even through his suit. Your tunic was soaked with sweat.

"Osi'kyr." Din cursed under his breath after he swapped to his infrared and saw just how brilliant your signature was. "Listen to me, alright Senaar?" He murmured, simultaneously loving and hating the way you nodded in a docile manner. "We know what can fix this. But it's not…" he paused, searching for the right term.

"Appropriate." Ezra supplied loudly.

"I feel awful." Your whimper made Din's stomach ache. His cock rubbed against the confines of his compression leggings.

Ignore it.

"I know you do." Din pressed his palm to your forehead. "Listen to me. We can fix this. You trust me, right?" Your nod was immediate and Din barely stifled his groan. "Ezra knows what's wrong. Ezra can help."

"He can help?" You echoed blearily, looking past Din. "Okay. He said something about the fruit before, right? I shouldn't have eaten it. M'sorry. Was it poison?"

"Poison may have been simpler to endure." Ezra muttered. "It is an aphrodisiac. Do not blame yourself. The fruit is visually appealing for a reason, otherwise the plant would not be able to propagate."

…

Aphrodisiac. Your mouth was flooded with that sweet taste at the sound of Ezra's drawling voice, the groan that followed burrowing into your blood.

You had never felt this way before. Your body ached and twisted, arousal pooling uncomfortably in your pelvis. Everything felt like it was trapped, your tunic sticking to your skin with sweat. Aphrodisiac.

"Please pay attention." Ezra sighed. "I understand this is incredibly distracting, but I have a limited window of coherence." He was trembling slightly, still avoiding your eyes. "Your partner has requested I aid you where he cannot. I will not harm you." He said with gravity. "This is a situation which bodes exceptionally poorly and I am...I am truly sorry for dragging you into this mess."

"Oh, it's okay. Mando gets me into messes all the time." You brushed off his apology and Ezra choked out a bitter laugh.

"I fear you may change your tune once the pain truly starts." He remarked.

"He says it'll hurt." Mando murmured. "Like stabbing."

You knew your eyes widened with fear because Mando was quick to envelope you in his arms again. He had never been this touchy before. It was...strangely nice. The coolness of his armor felt wonderful on your skin and you moaned in relief. Mando went stiff at your noise, his gloved fingers clutching the nape of your neck. Up until this point, you had just felt some minor throbbing. Distracting, but negligible.

This was different.

...

Your breath hitched in your throat and your fists curled into his suit, knees buckling as a low, wavering cry left your lips. Din jerked at the sound. He had never heard you make that kind of noise before, not even when you had been shot--

Oh he was fucked. He was so fucked. Was he excited or terrified? "Easy, you're okay, you're okay," he soothed, clumsily brushing the hair back from your face. Who was he even trying to convince?!

"Make your choice expediently, Steerforth. Am I to be thrown in carbonite or put to work?" Ezra queried through gritted teeth.

"You know I would never do anything to hurt you." Din said to you, ignoring the other man for the moment. "I won't let anything happen to you. I need you to trust me for right now, alright? We can fix this."

Your grip on him tightened even further. "I don't like how this feels." You whispered.

Din closed his eyes in a futile attempt to ward off his own self-loathing, pressing your cheek against his breastplate. "I know, Senaar. I'll be right here with you. I just...can't give you what you'll need." He stuttered, offering on a desperate whim, "I-I can hold you, if you want." You nodded frantically into his armor.

"If you have a...a blanket. A sheet. Something for the floor, we are going to make a mess and I am uncertain if we will be able to protect your partner's modesty." Ezra muttered, his bound hands resting surreptitiously over his groin. "They may be more enthusiastic than one would anticipate."

Din patted your elbow, trying to gentle his voice. "Go get your pillow."

"O-Okay." You gulped.

Din tore into one of his many lockers once you released him, the armored man frantically digging around for his extra bedding. Ezra staggered to his feet, moving in close to Din. So that you wouldn't hear him speak, no doubt.

"There is still time for you to freeze me, Steerforth. I am not a man without morality, tattered though it may be." He murmured, and Din noticed that his weary brown eyes were surrounded by the same deep lines and cracks that Djarin's own face sported. The Mandalorian hadn't ever paid much mind to just how many expressions he still made beneath the helmet, probably because he knew no one would see them.

Din grabbed the other man's shoulder, searching those eyes. Ezra stared at his impenetrable visor, probably confused by his silence. "I need your help." Din rasped seriously. He didn't trust this guy as far as he could throw him, but he could live with the uneasy truce if it would…if it meant that he could…

Stars, this was all so damn wrong.

Ezra finally nodded. "I will do my best to assist with the...emotional aftermath. This is not your fault, or theirs. This is merely an unfortunate side effect of a hazardous occupation."

"Thank you."

Ezra's eyebrows shot up, but other than that he gave no indication of his surprise. Din elbowed him to the side, unfolding the thick blanket and spreading it out carefully on the floor of the hold.

…

This was certainly an odd predicament.

Ezra could not say he had ever been in such a charged scenario, despite his checkered history. His jaw worked thoughtfully as he watched the armored man devote an obscene amount of care to smoothing the wrinkles out of his blanket.

Arousal swirled around him like the thick pollen outside, but it was tempered by the terrible memory of that singular past experience where he had rubbed himself bloody on the inside of his suit. He knew he was worse off than Steerforth. No, what had you called him? Mando.

Curious.

A Creed that prevented the devout from showing the world their face.

Curious. And familiar, somehow. Ezra spooled his mind back, trying to recall why it was familiar. He couldn't focus however, his own breathing becoming too distracting.

Mando hadn't gotten nearly as much of the pollen as him. The other man seemed unbearably, impossibly calm in the light of what was about to occur. Maybe it was an illusion afforded by that unreadable helm, or brought about by his lack of prior experience.

Ezra was wildly jealous all the same. "What is their name?" He asked softly.

Mando fixed him with a look and Kevva, that helmet was indeed imposing. "I call them Senaar. It...it means bird." He sounded reluctant, like he didn't even want to give up that much. "Names are sacred in the Creed. I couldn't give them mine so they didn't give me theirs, but I had to call them something."

"No names in the Creed, either?" Ezra asked incredulously.

The armored man shook his head. "To outsiders we are all Mando. To us, we are Mando'ade. This is the Way."

"A veritable legion of nameless, featureless warriors." Ezra muttered, mainly to himself. He rattled his restraints after a moment. "Am I to remain bound during this frotfest, Steerforth?"

"I'm not stupid enough to give you free range. Be grateful I didn't secure them behind your back instead." Mando snarked.

"I will not harm your little bird." Ezra protested.

"I know." Mando leaned in slightly, broad shoulders made even more intimidating by the blue-steel pauldrons that graced them. "I would kill you before you got the chance."

Oh, such confidence! Ezra wished he was in his right mind, he would obliterate this smug cretin--

His breath caught in his throat as you returned from your excursion. Gods, he had nearly forgotten what he was being called to do. He warred with the obscene urge that dragged his gaze to the crux of your thighs. "A divine sight." He murmured, not lying for once. This entire day had been remarkably truthful.

You actually gave him a ribald wink, and that eased his conscience slightly. Perhaps you were not the unsullied, blushing virgin he had feared you might be. Obviously you had used the time you took to grab your pillow wisely, maybe even given yourself a bit of a pep talk.

"Have you done this before?" Ezra asked, half-joking. He heard Mando audibly gulp in that damn bucket when you nodded, a pained smile curving your lips. "Not under the effects of such altering substances, I pray?"

"Nah, nothing like that." You replied, shaking your head. "It was back on Nevarro, I-"

"Nevarro?" Mando hissed. "You disappeared on me for hours. That's what you were up to?!"

You shrugged weakly. "It doesn't really matter but...there were two Mandalorians, and I wanted, um, something that seemed familiar, I guess." You admitted, your tone remarkably cool for the subject matter.

Ezra hid his grin. He was hardly immune to the allure of saucy gossip, and there was nothing quite like gossip that had no particular bearing on him. "Two?!" The armored man's voice squeaked even through the thick modulation and Ezra burst out laughing, the binders knocking his jaw when he tried to stifle his mirth.

"I meant more whether you had engaged in copulation in general, but I suppose that would have been a pertinent question as well." He mused once he got himself under control, the low buzz in his stomach blossoming into an excited thrum. "How fortunate that you would be so generous when it comes to your partners, little bird."

"What do you mean, familiar?" Mando carried on over him, obviously agitated by the fresh knowledge that his partner may or may not have some...tendencies. Ezra almost wanted to laugh again; you were nothing if not painfully transparent. Seeking out others like the armored man to have their way with you? Clearly you harbored some sort of affection, kept secret and safe by the walls that humans build around themselves.

But Serpentia had a funny way of sliding that dastardly pink slick through all defenses, leaving the body raw and exposed.

"I mean familiar." You replied, your pillow like a shield between yourself and Mando. Ezra settled back to watch the show, well aware that his smirk was probably insufferable. "I have needs, you know." You continued primly.

Mando's fists clenched on his thighs before he pointedly flattened them back out, fingers dragging over the plates. "I...I'm sorry. I shouldn't...I'm sorry." He mumbled, patting his leg.

You wavered again and nearly fell. The armored man caught you, settling you down with a cautious tenderness that fired a thrower shot of arousal directly into Ezra's gut. He had always been a weak fool for chivalry, though he was able to display precious little of it in his own life. Oh, this was the best kind of story.

...

Your face burned with embarrassment; why had you told him about your rendezvous with two other members of his Creed? It was like the words just fell out of your mouth, like your brain itself was against you.

You could still remember the way the larger one had pressed his forehead to your own and then encouraged you down his chest to his groin, the way his helmet had tipped back--

A new flood of warmth swept into your cunt and you bit down on your hand to stifle your noise at the pain that followed. Mando paused, then laid your pillow between his open legs. "Lay down on your back." He muttered, patting his leg again. "This way you can see me. I'll be right here."

"I'm-"

"Don't apologize, please." Mando cut you off. "Once this is over, once everything is...over, I...listen, we'll operate as a sealed unit. This maneuver is scrubbed from the start. I never found the quarry. Nothing that we say or do here will ever be mentioned again. Understood?"

Your breath caught in your throat. He was giving you an out. Or himself, you were uncertain. You nodded slowly and his shoulders drooped a little, but whether he was relieved or disappointed…

Well, some secrets were meant to stay that way.

Ezra nodded his own agreement. "It is best to have certain protocol already in place when engaging in uncharted waters." He muttered. "Decidedly militant, but I must surmise your Creed taught you that."

"This is the Way." Mando said firmly.

"If we are operating under burner infantry orders, then I must voice my trepidation about this engagement," Ezra confessed to you. "I have endured this crisis once before and it was not a pleasant experience. I do not envy the pain I am certain you feel at this moment, but I also know that you are in a...compromised and sensitive position. I...if any advance is unwanted, I trust you will inform me. And if I do not respond, if I am too far gone, please have your associate rescind my invitation." He gestured at Mando with his bound hands.

"Wh-What are you going to do to me?" You asked, your voice high in your ears even as you let Mando maneuver you down to the blanket.

"I am going to do for you what your companion cannot, little bird." Ezra's tongue dampened his lips nervously. "And only that, if I understand the situation correctly."

"What he…" you trailed off as a thought occurred to you. Ezra hummed quietly as if to confirm and the sound reverberated through your core, making you whine and squirm restlessly. "Oh, what, stars, you mean-"

"My mouth, little bird." He had a tiny section of blond hair on the right side of his head, the tuft residing rakishly just at his hairline. You hadn't noticed until now, but the whimsical little patch seemed to soften his stern features. "You will need the saliva, regrettably. I am certain that the idea of the mouth of a lowly aurelac harvester on you is a repulsive one, but it is the only way to get the proverbial ball rolling."

"Wait, you have to eat me out?" You asked in confusion, trying to get back up. "Hang on, I should shower, I'll-" Agony raked down your spine and you spasmed, a breathy sound of pain forcing itself past your lips.

Ezra's incredulous chuckle soothed the sensation back down to a manageable level. "What an unexpected offer, little bird! I cannot recall the last time someone bathed specifically for me. You will wholly ensnare me if you continue such considerate behavior."

…

Din's body felt like it was on fire in his armor.

You had gone looking for people like him.

You had gone looking for Mandos because you wanted familiarity. The idea of you sussing out more of his brothers or sisters because you had needs-

Din wasn't sure if he would survive this particular encounter. He was gripping his cuisses so tightly that the leather of his gloves burned against his fingertips. Mandalorians weren't celibate by any stretch of the imagination, but the Creed could make things...more difficult than they needed to be for a variety of species.

Ezra, despite his hands being bound, was remarkably capable. The man had coached you through the pain when you had tried to move, his voice obviously helping you somehow. Djarin wasn't sure if he was jealous or grateful. Maybe both.

The fact that this was causing you to suffer had him loathing how stiff his cock was in his compression leggings, even though from what he had gathered he couldn't actually help that particular reaction.

"I must beg your assistance in disrobing." Ezra was saying softly, tugging at the overly-knotted waistband of your loose pants. "Please, little bird."

"Right, yeah, of course." You mumbled and Djarin could hear the pain in your voice, could feel the twitchy little flinches as you tried to follow Ezra's directions.

Hesitantly, the Mandalorian moved his hands up until they rested on your shoulders. You exhaled a breathy little moan, nuzzling your cheek against his glove in what he had to assume was thanks.

"Better." You gasped, seeming more sure as you struggled to undo the sash at your waist.

"Well done, Steerforth." Ezra praised, causing something warm and wet to pour into Din's abdomen. The armored man's breathing stuttered, was this what Ezra had been feeling the entire time they had been walking? Stars, how had he even managed-

His cock lurched against the tight hold of his leggings, precome dampening his stomach. Without meaning to, Din's fingers tightened on your shoulders and he grunted quietly.

Your eyes shot up, locking with his visor. He knew you couldn't actually see him, but at that moment he felt exposed. "You alright?" You asked quietly, your breath hiccuping when Ezra brushed the stubble of his jaw against your naked thigh. Din ached to do that himself, Maker he wished-

"I'm fine." He choked, like he wasn't roasting alive from the double-edged heat of artificial arousal and jealousy. His left hand slid down, resting at the hollow of your throat. It soothed his ego a little to see that your eyes were still on him, despite what the quarry was about to do.

Ezra, he reminded himself. This man wasn't prey anymore, for all that he was keeping the binders on. Din at least needed that level of control. He needed the stability.

That recurrent devious thought surged forward again, dark and heady. Utilizing Ezra, he could indulge vicariously in the hazy desires he had fought for cycles. The wish to bury his face between your legs and eat you out until you cried, like in the raunchy imagecasts he picked up on rare occasion. Putting his bare hands on you, stars-

Din Djarin was a man of extreme self-control. So far, he hadn't overstepped or shamed the Creed, unless you counted the time he was loaded out of his mind with bacteria-laden quills. He hadn't realized just how many of them were embedded in his back until his vision started getting blurry as he was standing over the nexu's dead body. Served him right for letting the feline get the drop on him before he put his backplate on.

You had been so worried when he returned. You were patched into his coms so you obviously heard the struggle he had dispatching the creature. Heard how ragged his breath got and how hard he had to actually fight.

Din vaguely remembered flopping down on his belly with you hovering over him, pliers in one hand and bacta shot already buried in the meat of his shoulder. Stars, it was great to have a partner sometimes. If he had come back to just the kid like that, he'd probably be dead from an infection. You didn't even make him take off his suit, you just worked around it.

You ended up removing thirty-seven quills of various lengths, most of them bearing nasty hooked barbs. The pain had hit different because of the infection, leaving Djarin trembling boneless and silent on the floor of the hold while you wriggled quills out of his back. He had never felt more helpless, more vulnerable, beskar be damned.

"It's alright. I'm glad you made it back." You had said calmly. "I'm not letting you go alone next time, though."

"Thank you, Senaar…"

Din's face flushed when he recalled how badly his voice had cracked when saying the name he called you by, less speech and more a plaintive cry. The way his glove had slipped over the skin of your cheek, and how he had longed to remove that glove...

Maker, he sullied the Creed with his inability to reconcile over lack of touch. The hunger for skin-to-skin contact that reared its ugly head every time you were out of your heavy exosuit and durasteel served as a painful reminder, one much more poignant than the simple weight of his helm, that he was a Mandalorian.

But this doppelganger loophole was a gift to be thoroughly exploited and he wasn't about to waste that opportunity.

Ezra buried his face between your legs and Din felt the way your entire body coiled up in anticipation, another trembling cry leaving your lips and your hands twisting frantically into the blanket beneath you. "Mando-!"

His name, his name, you were saying his name even with another man's mouth giving you pleasure. Djarin couldn't help the satisfied little growl that left his lips and made its way through his modulator. He heard Ezra chuckle, the other man pausing to shoot him a sly wink over the length of your body. Din nearly laughed.

"Ezra," He said instead, his voice coming out rougher than he intended. "Make them cry."

He stopped caring about how wrong it was.

…

You gasped at Mando's words, already inches from bursting into tears. Ezra's mouth was slowly coaxing you open, the stubble on his cheeks and jaw rubbing your thighs. Every pass of his tongue, every gentle press and suckle sought to untangle the knotted ball of heat in your belly, but you were certain you would lose your mind before you managed to disperse the agonizing feeling.

You were too full, almost too aroused to handle Ezra's mouth on your cunt but you were positive if he stopped licking at you, you would die. Heat felt like it was sloshing in your belly, there was so much of it...

Ezra placed a series of delicate kisses on your clit, each one lighter than the last. His hands, still secure in their binders, clutched your right thigh for purchase when he pulled back to gulp air. His expression was dazed, eyes managing to focus on the armored man that loomed over you after several long seconds. "Will you not indulge, Steerforth?" He sounded like he was almost begging Mando, voicing what you couldn't bring yourself to say. "They ask for you, how can you sit there so damned impassive?"

Your breath caught in your throat when you heard Mando exhale raggedly, the bounty hunter muttering, "M' not impassive. There's nothing I-"

"Touch them, for fuck's sake!" Ezra cried, pointedly rattling his cuffs. "I cannot do both. We must work together!"

The Mandalorian lurched suddenly up onto his knees, then sprawled over your body, slamming one hand down to support his weight before wrapping his fingers in the neck of Ezra's tattered thermal shirt. "You don't call the shots here, quarry." He snarled in That Voice, the one that he reserved for his bounties.

Your hands crept up to his hips, hyper aware of the sweet taste in your mouth and how good this would feel.

…

Ezra stared at the pitch-black visor inches from his nose. Felt the strength in the gloved hand that threatened to do much more than stretch his shirt.

The prospector took a mental inventory of his body at this juncture, a bit surprised and entertained to find that he was thoroughly invested in this new direction the encounter had taken. Mando was no doubt glaring at him from the safety of that impregnable helm, the other man's hackles obviously raised by the jab from the prospector.

It mattered very little at this point in time, however, as Ezra heard a zipper fly open. Mando flinched so hard Ezra felt it in his back, and the sound you made was enough to get the devil to start sweating. "Seems that you may be outnumbered, Steerforth."

"Target rich--environment-" The armored man snarled. "Senaar, y-your--mouth, fuck-"

He stuttered. He stuttered. Ezra latched onto that weakness with a filthy grin, easily twisting out of the other man's grip to duck his head back down and taste you. Mando's other hand hit the blanket as you undulated your hips up to meet Ezra's mouth. Ezra could only imagine the noises you were making around the other man's cock. He knew you were making them by the way Mando's arms quivered. And wasn't that a sight, a man in full armor rendered helpless by the power of a warm, eager mouth on his cock.

"Watch me now, Steerforth." Ezra crooned, tilting his face up to make presumed eye contact. "This is how you make them weep with pleasure." He was sure that his chin was dripping pink at this point and he knew, even without seeing the other man's face, that Mando was barely hanging on. He had to salute the armored man's dedication. A less devout individual would have given out before they made it to the floor.

The Medusine barrier that the Serpentia formed was slowly weakening under the gentle assault of his mouth, Ezra was pleased to notice. Of course, he wasn't exactly rushing, simply going at a steady pace to keep your pain to a bare minimum. You had begun to leak around the barrier, your arousal even warmer than he had expected. Ezra couldn't tell whether it was because he was under the effects of the pollen or whether it was reality that you tasted immaculate, but he reasoned that it didn't particularly matter.

He was hungry enough to cope with either happenstance.

"Little bird, fuck my face, won't you?" He requested sweetly, chuckling at your enthusiastic response. "Grind yourself to completion on my tongue, break the barrier so that your associate can sheathe himself balls deep in this delectable pussy and give you respite."

...

"Fuck." Din rasped, his eyes wide behind the visor of his helmet. The way that Ezra spoke was like fucking music, the man wrapping filthy words in flowery, incomprehensible syntax.

The Mandalorian's fingers tangled resolutely in the blanket, the armored man panting as you urged his aching dick even further down your throat. Your hands grappled with his thighs, shoving them wider and then taking two hungry handfuls of his rear to encourage him.

"Senaar-" he started to warn you off, but stopped dead when you moaned around him. Stars, he wondered how you could even breathe--

You pulled back, coughing and gasping. "You're doing so well, little bird." Ezra murmured from between your legs. Your only reply was to take Din's cock back into your mouth and oh fuck you weren't stopping-

Your hand found Djarin's in the blankets and you tugged on it, forcing him to try and figure out how to redistribute his weight so you could have the appendage. He managed it of course, he was a fucking Mandalorian after all, but there was a moment where he nearly lost his balance.

You guided his hand to your neck and Din couldn't fight back the groan he let out when he felt his cock bulging through your throat. Fuck, no one had ever been able to take this much of him into their mouth before, halfway was usually the stopping point.

Djarin grunted and tilted his head down to watch you struggle, finally wrapping a hand around his cock and easing it back out of your mouth. Strands of saliva connected the engorged head of his dick to your lips. Din sighed stupidly at the sight, fisting his dick and coating his glove with your spit. "You're good at this, Senaar." He said gruffly, knowing that it wasn't really praise, not like how Ezra said it. But words had never been his forte.

"Keep speaking to them Steerforth, they leak at every word out of your mouth." Ezra encouraged from between your legs. "That's right little bird, just a bit more…"

Din was startled, to say the least. You liked when he talked? "I…" he hesitated, then his brow furrowed. "Can't wait to fuck you, Senaar." You whimpered, your hips shuddering. "Fuck you until you don't remember your own fucking name." Din growled. "Breed you like a good Mando should, pump you full of my come just like my Creed-siblings did, right?"

You nodded against his thigh, your sweat seeping through his flight suit to meet his own liberal perspiration. He was so hot, his armor had never been this hot--

"Kevva, that's a kink I didn't anticipate." Ezra panted, pink slick smeared all over his nose and chin. "They certainly like it though, if I understand correctly."

Din could smell you, smell the sweet scent of that fruit mixed with your own arousal. His fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of Ezra's neck and he nearly headbutted him on reflex, barely reining the power back in time. Ezra seemed confused at first, the other man obviously dazed with heat and just sort of allowing Djarin to shove his face against his helmet.

…

The helm was so cool, Ezra couldn't restrain a relieved sigh when he made contact. Mando appeared to be rubbing your essence all over his helmet, utilizing Ezra's face as a paintbrush. Unorthodox, but effective.

"Oh," Ezra realized, "you've got some sort of olfactory sensors in there, don't you. You lewd creature you!" He teased breathlessly. "If you think they smell sumptuous, I regret to inform you that their taste utterly puts that to shame." Words were heavy in his mouth, the prospector having to work harder and harder to put sentences together. It wouldn't be long before his senses wholly abandoned him, he was certain. "Release me, Steerforth, I must…I must carry out my end of the bargain." He groaned, struggling free. "We are almost at their climax."

Mando was nearly vibrating with anticipation, gloved fingers clawing at Ezra's hair. "Careful," was all the armored man said hoarsely.

Ezra nodded, once again touched by the bounty hunter's surprising display of consideration for his partner. "When the barrier breaks, they will need your cock immediately, Steerforth. I will...not be coherent for much longer." He mumbled against your cunt, giving up on speech after Mando nodded.

With one last sweep of his tongue, the barrier dissolved. You sobbed out, your voice breaking as you writhed beneath your large companion and bucked your hips up against Ezra's eager mouth. Slick fairly poured out of you, leaking down your thighs and soaking the blanket beneath you.

Ezra didn't remember wriggling his bound hands beneath your rear, simply returning to his senses with your legs over his shoulders and his lungs burning for air but you tasted so good, he felt raw with hunger.

Mando's gloved hand covered nearly the entirety of his face, easing him back from his feast. Ezra watched the other man's chest heave in a daze until he suddenly remembered what he was doing. "I apologize, I...I am too far gone." He murmured in contrition, lowering your hips back to the floor.

"Ask nicely to fuck their mouth." Mando ordered, his blunt words digging into Ezra's groin. "You said it hurt you last time because you were alone. You helped them not to hurt. If they don't want to let you to fuck their mouth though, I'll…" he hesitated, "I'll figure something else out. Nobody has to hurt."

"'Something else'?" Ezra repeated, stunned. What on earth could this armored man possibly be offering? Those gloves were remarkably soft, the leather worn smooth from a lifetime of use, no doubt- "Oh."

…

The pain had eased, only to be replaced by a searing emptiness. You squirmed beneath Mando, tangentially aware that he was engaged in a discussion with Ezra. Your hand flew to your pussy, the drenched area making an embarrassingly loud noise when you thrust two fingers into yourself in an effort to quell the ache.

"Maker, please, please, Mando!" you begged, barely aware of what you were saying. The heat concentrated in your pelvis was burning you alive, desperate tears pouring down your face.

Mando stood to his full height, towering over you, just watching you quiver while you pleaded deliriously. He fairly ambled around your body, moving until he stood between your spread legs. His boot shoved your ankle, opening you even further, exposing every inch of you and the mess that covered the blanket under you. "Senaar." The low burr of modulation made you rock your hips up, whimpering and nodding when he stroked his cock like he was showing off.

Somewhere, deep in your soul, you prayed that he liked what he saw even without the strange pollen instigating.

He knelt, gloved fingers curling beneath your chin to pull your eyes up from his thick, perfect cock and the puddle of precome it was currently weeping onto your pubic mound. His touch sent flickering trails of electricity through your body, and you could barely focus on what he was asking.

"Ezra...mouth?"

You nodded rapidly, making Mando bark out what could have been a laugh. He cupped your jaw again, and then his hand stroked your hair in a way that was almost tender.

"I'll make you feel better." He promised. Ezra was a mess, he looked like you felt. The quarry simply let Mando shove him down onto his knees, his eyes half-lidded. "Undo your suit." Mando ordered and Ezra shakily attempted to obey. He was having a difficult time with his hands still in the binders so you reached out, batting his hands away impatiently to unzip the lower portion of his exosuit.

His thermal leggings were threadbare like his shirt, the waffle-weave fabric soaked through. His cock visibly twitched when you exhaled sharply. "Do not tease me, little bird, I feel as if I am on death's doorstep." The man pleaded through his teeth, "I am raw and agony gnaws at my skin; please take me in your mouth."

"I have to get your pants off." You tried to explain, fumbling with the article of clothing. The noise of despair he made had you frantically clawing at the pants, finally dragging them down low enough that his cock was freed. It slapped against his belly and he moaned, bound hands digging helplessly into your hair.

"May I please have your mouth?" He requested raggedly. "I will not take it if you do not give it freely but please, little bird."

After he had worked so hard to get you to come? You were nodding hurriedly before he finished speaking, and his deep, drawn-out groan of relief was like music to your ears when you swallowed him down.

…

You were radiating warmth, your hips twitching and shifting restlessly even as you tried to get Ezra's dick out of his suit. Din had to hand it to the other man, he did ask nicely.

But there were much more pressing matters to attend to. Mainly, your neglected cunt that was currently leaking all over the underside of his cock. Djarin took a steadying breath, and then slowly sank himself into your waiting heat.

Your cry of relief was fucking primal, a hungry, feral snarl that slithered hot and seething in his stomach under the beskar plate. Din was wholly, entirely lost, finding himself mentally shattered at the first stroke into your body. Your thighs trembled on either side of his hips and then your legs fell open, like you didn't have the strength to hold them up.

Shit, he knew he should say something, he knew he should be reluctant about this, but it was like every cell of his body needed you to fucking survive.

Maybe he always had.

Din bared his teeth and growled back at you, his attention divided between watching you eagerly suck Ezra's cock and watching the way his own dick split you open. His passage was eased by the strange pink fluid that continued to ooze out of you, stars it was so hot-

Ezra's fingers tangled in your hair after a moment, the prospector cradling your head to his groin in a manner that could have almost been described as gentle.

"Is this how my Creed-siblings f-ucked you, Senaar?" Din's voice grated in his chest, the armored man barely aware of the heated words tumbling out of his mouth. "Filling you, claiming you, fucking your throat and pussy?"

"Kevva." Ezra breathed. "Your peculiar voice working in tandem with your cock appears to be the thing that turns them into a voracious harlot. I do not know if I have ever-" His sentence broke momentarily, "oh, fuck, very well little bird, take the whole of it then." He grunted, raking his fingers through your hair as you deepthroated him. "You are absolutely magnificent at that, you know." The other man praised shakily.

Your cunt fluttered around Djarin's cock and he felt your arousal soak through his suit, hot fluid sliding down to coat his balls. "Stars, did you just come?" He groaned, unable to stop the filthy noise he made when you whined around Ezra's dick and nodded as best as you could. His fingers gripped your thigh, digging into the skin as he began to rut against you. The Mandalorian threw his head back, panting, "Feel so fucking--good around me, fuck, Senaar, so good-"

…

You felt like you were falling apart again and again. The taste, the sensations, the curling knot of heat in your belly that released inch by inch. Mando's hand on your thigh and Ezra's grip on your head were the things that allowed you to hold on to your sanity, but only just.

Mando was conquering you utterly, his dick driving into you with enough force that you knew you would be aching later, but in the moment you never wanted him to stop. You had craved him, wished for him for so long, to finally have him was total bliss.

And Ezra, Ezra, his silky voice caressing your body as his bound hands carded through your hair. His cock choked you again and again and every time you had to pull back off of him for breath he praised you, talked about how good you were, how no one had ever taken him as deep as you…

You were in heaven.

Ezra abruptly retreated, his cock smearing more precome across your lips. "If you continue on in this manner I will be undone, little bird." He muttered. "Your one-sided assault, while inescapably delicious, is rendering me wholly base. You wish for me to spill my seed on your face?" His hips twitched. "Or shall I fuck my come down your throat, request that you swallow every drop?"

"Fuck it into them." Mando rasped before you could say anything in reply, a gloved hand grabbing your chin. "Fuck your load i-into that sweet little mouth of theirs. Give them what they fucking need, quarry." He demanded, and you nearly came again from how unhinged he sounded.

"Well, little bird?" Ezra asked softly, his eyes dark with want. "Shall I take my pleasure from your lewd little mouth and let your beautiful throat milk me dry?"

"Please!" You begged, opening your mouth and sticking out your tongue to encourage him.

Ezra sighed blissfully at the sight, lacing his fingers through your hair and encouraging you to take his cock until your nose rested against his groin. "Fuc-king gods, you are positively celestial." He groaned, "Relegating yourself to a singular partner would be doing you a disservice, little bird. I highly encourage you to weaponize your talents in whatever field you wish."

Come flooded your mouth, his cock twitching heavily against your tongue. Your eyes rolled back, your lungs burning for air and you dimly heard Mando snarl, dropping his helm to rest on your sternum. The metal was blessedly cool even through your tunic, helping to anchor you to reality.

"Fucking touch me, please." Mando's voice shook even with the modulator, his words buzzing through your body. "Senaar please, fuck, pl-please, touch me, fucking--"

Your palms crashed into his shoulders, hips bucking upwards to meet his next thrust and you came again. Mando made a noise that you could only liken to a roar, the armored man grappling at your hips and grinding himself against your dripping cunt.

"Senaar, Senaar, Senaar--" The name he had given you punctuated every thrust, his rasping tone making your belly drop out. You weren't sure if you would ever stop coming, grasping blindly at Mando and Ezra while your cunt gripped down on Mando's cock.

…

If Ezra still had any doubts about being a blatant proxy for the armored man, that was obliterated in his post-orgasm daze.

A gloved hand slid to the back of his neck and tugged him down to your mouth. Ezra went clumsily but willingly, the prospector humming when he tasted himself and the cloying sweetness of the Serpentia on your tongue. You sobbed against his lips and Ezra soothed you with his mouth, accepting all of your hungry whimpers and whines as he stroked your hair back off your forehead.

"Little bird, little bird, you will want for nothing with this individual pummeling you so mercilessly." He breathed, relishing the soft cry that quivered against the skin of his neck. "I imagine you can feel every inch of that prodigious girth, burning like unquenchable quicksilver, threatening to breach your very womb." He moved his bound hands down, resting them on your stomach. "Steerforth, I trust you are punishin' their cervix with every thrust?" He queried, chuckling darkly when Mando just snarled in reply.

You threw your head back, hands fisted in the fabric between Mando's pauldrons and gorget. "Mando-!" You pleaded, "fuck!"

Mando's hands dug beneath the small of your back and he canted your hips upwards, sheathing his cock in the cradle of your body over and over. Ezra envied the armored man's stamina, grunting when he felt his member trying to rise again. Whether he could blame the pollen for that, he was unsure, but the lovely company certainly did nothing to dissuade his arousal. Watching this large, almost knightly figure rail into you, your face still a mess of tears from when Ezra had fucked your mouth…

Kevva, he could not recall a time where he had been so content to simply play voyeur, pressing the occasional kiss to your lips at Mando's behest. "Such tenderness, what a dichotomous sensation for you," the prospector mused, "the contrast between armor and flesh." His mouth brushed against your ear when he continued, "However, I believe you're beginning to realize that there is an untapped wellspring of man beneath all that metal, am I correct little bird?"

...

You squeezed your eyes shut and Din's hand reached up, the bounty hunter unable to keep from cradling your cheek. "I always knew." You said, your voice barely audible. "I-I always...I always-"

"Be quiet." Din grunted. "Y-You...don't have to say it." His heart slamming in his chest had nothing to do with his current exertion. You knew. Shame reached him dimly through the haze of arousal. All the times he ached to touch you, all the times he battled with himself over his desire for contact…

Your hand gripped the back of his helmet and he flinched sharply. He hadn't noticed you move and you could pull his helmet off, shit, he was so stupid for doing this! His eyes flew to yours, even though he knew you couldn't see through his visor.

After a moment of him fighting back his panic, you just shook your head. "S-Sealed unit, ri-ght?" You asked, your words hitching with his thrusts. Djarin nodded warily. Your eyes half-lidded and you knocked your forehead into his helmet, the gesture unmistakable to a Mandalorian.

A kiss.

Was his heart breaking, or just fucking giving out under the assault of this insane pollen? Was he overloaded? Was this all just some wild hallucination?

Din frantically shoved his helmet against your face, pinning your head back to the pillow. Shit, he needed to be careful, you didn't have armor. "Senaar, I--" Basic had always been so damn heavy on his tongue. Mando'a flowed, but it was secret. Sacred. Djarin hesitated and you reached up again, cradling the indents on his helmet.

"Always. Even with this." You whispered.

His brain had short-circuited. The roaring in his ears was deafening and he knew he was making some kind of ugly, wounded noise, but he couldn't actually do anything about it.

Always. Always.

His heart must have blown, he reasoned desperately. That was the only explanation for what he was feeling right now.

…

The sound that Mando made after you assured him was heartwrenching, a guttural sob that seemed like a mixture of agony and ecstasy. He clawed at the blanket beneath you, gasping for breath as he all but broke you in half, his dick ripping yet another orgasm from your hungry cunt.

You were lightheaded from his prolonged fucking, your pussy in spasm around his thick cock, but you refused to give out yet. "Did you feel me come, Mando?" You whimpered against the side of his helmet, wringing more feral noises out of him. "Is it good?"

"Fuck, incredible, s-so--" Mando gripped your thigh, hitching it up over his hip and then dragging his fingers hungrily through the pink slick that had pooled in the crease of your hip. "Never want to leave, fuck, m'sorry, I know I'm t-taking--forever-"

"Only a fool apologizes for his length in the bedroom." Ezra remarked dryly, dipping down to kiss you when you laughed. "How do you fare, little bird?"

"So good." You sighed, feeling half-drunk on your orgasm high. The knot in your belly had finally gone slack, leaving you weak and trembling beneath Mando as he chased his own completion. You hummed and Ezra rumbled back, his touch remarkably careful when he cupped your chin.

"You have done so well." Ezra murmured. "Serpentia is no simple storm to weather, yet you have endured." Mando wordlessly bumped his helmet against Ezra's temple, the metal rubbing over the blond tuft of hair the quarry sported. "You are most welcome, Steerforth." Ezra chuckled. "One is glad to be of service, but please. You threatened to fill them, didn't you?"

Mando's hips faltered in their rhythm and the armored man finally came with a shattered moan of relief. Stars, you weren't sure if you had the Serpentia to blame for the sheer volume that he came; you could feel it frothing out of you around his cock as he continued to shudder and writhe through his orgasm.

"Holy shit, Mando." You said incredulously, unable to fight back the urge to slip a hand down between your bodies. "You told me Mandalorians were rare."

"We--are." Mando panted raggedly, his cock still twitching inside you.

"If you come like this, how?" You asked, your combined fluids soaking your questing fingers. Mando just stared at you for a moment, shoulders heaving while he struggled to catch his breath.

And then he started laughing, which was...not nearly as terrifying as you had expected, honestly. "Stars, you--" He wheezed, his helm thudding gently against your forehead. "Fuck you, Senaar." You could hear him grinning, his voice still warm with laughter.

"Odd method of displaying affection. I take it your Creed is of a fraternitous bent?" Ezra commented, a quiet noise of surprise escaping him when you tugged him down for a kiss.

"Thank you." You mumbled drowsily into his mouth.

"Hardly. I ought to thank you. When last I endured the Serpent's grasp, I was incarcerated and driven to gratify myself to ribbons on the inside of my gear." Ezra informed you, his tone nonchalant. "This experience was a rare moment of hedonistic bliss in my life. Believe me when I say I shall cherish it."

He straightened up before you could say anything in reply, extending his bound wrists to Mando.

"Whither to, my recalcitrant steerforth?"

Mando ignored him for another moment, stroking your forehead tenderly. He appeared to have noticed your weariness, because he sounded softer when he spoke. "Sleep, Senaar. It's over."

…

"I'll cut you loose on Sorgan."

Ezra swiveled in the co-pilot chair, knowing that his expression must border on the befuddled. When the armored man had left you to sleep, hauled Ezra into the cockpit and secured his binders to the chair, the prospector had assumed that whatever agreement they struck previously was rendered null and void. "I would be...wholeheartedly grateful to you, Steerforth." He breathed.

"I never found you. Your pod malfunctioned and you burned alive in the atmosphere." Mando instructed him in that level, modulated voice. "Stop stealing shit and I won't have to hunt you down again."

"Those men stole from me!" Ezra retorted hotly, knocking his elbow down into the white case that hung off his hip. "I worked alone for stands and they came along right at the most opportune juncture, put a thrower to my head and robbed me! I simply reclaimed-"

Mando waved a hand, interrupting his self-righteous tirade. "You and I both know that it doesn't matter. I'm forfeiting the credits this time, but next time…" he trailed off pointedly. "Don't get caught again. If someone else from my Guild chapter picks up your bounty, Mandalorian or otherwise, they will catch you."

Mando leaned in close, his elbows resting on his knees and helmet propped up on his folded hands. Ezra felt for all the world like a specimen underneath a microscope, barely suppressing the urge to squirm nervously.

"The bounty specified that you be captured warm." The armored man said after a beat. "No promise of half-payment upon cold delivery or even proof of demise. So whoever you got into a pissing match with wants to be the one to put that last slug into your brain. You already heard my advice. For your own good, I suggest you lay low and be fucking quiet." He gestured out the cockpit viewport at the green sphere that hovered in the distance. "There's good people on that planet. Good people that I care about. If you bring hunters to their doorstep, I will find out. And then I will find you."

Kevva have mercy, this man was no joke. Ezra was having a difficult time just mustering up the breath to give him an affirmation! Was this truly the same Lancelot he had watched engage in lotus-eating debauchery with his Guinevere not two hours hence? Ezra's belly roiled uncertainly, arousal and fear a potent combination. This must be how the bounty hunter indulged himself without divesting his plate, the prospector reasoned dimly. Fear was a remarkably stimulating thing. "Of course." He finally answered, his voice a little reedy. "Your mercy is...unexpectedly generous, but no less appreciated for its spontaneity."

Mando grunted, seeming satisfied with his response. The armored man returned to the control panel after a moment, flipping a few switches. The entire ship appeared to be miles above what Ezra was used to. Even the Testin had a dog-eared manual that hung from a chain by the central dash, and the craft was such a rattling nightmare that she needed three bodies just to keep her straight. But this man, this...Mandalorian, he operated the whole blasted vessel with a fluid ease.

His next words were so quiet Ezra nearly missed them. "Thank you."

"Pardon?" Ezra queried blankly.

Mando heaved a sigh that made his pauldrons visibly dip. "I said, thank you." He growled awkwardly. "I don't know what...I don't know if I would have hurt them because of--because of how I am."

"It will do no good to ruminate on such dour subjects." Ezra hesitated, then continued, "but your Creed...would you have broken it for them, had you known about the requirements of the Medusine barrier?"

"I…" Mando tightened his hold on the directionals, those gloves creaking with his tension. "I'm not sure." He admitted, lapsing into silence afterwards.

"Your ship is marvelously responsive." Ezra murmured by way of changing the subject. "It reminds me of a diminutive Screamer-class that I endured a few stands on, oh, nearly fifteen cycles ago-"

"Be quiet."

…

Din watched Ezra until he vanished between the large trunks of Sorgan's conifers, the Mandalorian then dropping back into the pilot's seat with a groan. Maker, he hoped he was doing the right thing. Hoped he hadn't just unleashed some mass-murdering psychopath on the unsuspecting populace.

Djarin tilted his helmet back against the headrest of the seat, aimlessly staring up at the fuselage.

What the hell was he going to say when you woke up?

Din's heart sank. He knew that he couldn't believe anything that had come out of your mouth while you had been under the effects of that fruit. Serpent's Tongue. He chewed his lower lip meditatively.

He could lie.

He fucking cringed at the thought, then shook his head at himself. You would be embarrassed at best, but at worst…

Shit, he didn't want to lose you, even if you didn't feel the same way about him. And then there was the kid to worry about. No, a lie would be better.

You had sought out other Mandos. His stomach lurched as he recalled that little fact. Fuck, fuck, was it hope that beat so insistently in his throat?

A sealed unit, he had said.

He just wouldn't bring it up. He was the one who had insisted that this whole maneuver was struck from the proverbial records in the first place, right? He just wouldn't mention it. Easy enough. If you said something, that was fine, but otherwise…

Din nodded firmly. This is the Way.

Part Two

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inkwell1013 · 3 years

Text

Conversations with other selves - Persona 5 - Haru and Milady

Pairing: Haru and Milady (plationic/familial)

Genre: Drabble, angst, found family.

Word count: 782

Warnings: Stalking and some violence (no injuries).

Summary: Haru is having trouble with her ex-fiance and Milady offers to help.

- - - - -

Haru slammed the front door shut and threw her bag to the floor. She took a deep breath, trying her best to calm her racing heart. How dare he treat her so poorly! Sugimura had no right to harass her like this. She had rejected his proposal weeks ago, and with good reason too - she wanted nothing to do with him. Why wouldn’t the sick bastard leave her alone?

“Milady, have you ever had to deal with… undesirable suitors?” she asked.

“Of course, my dear girl,” replied Milady from within the crevices of Haru’s mind. “It was part of being a woman in my time.” Her voice was gentle and kind; Haru liked to imagine it was what her mother’s voice would have sounded like, had she lived long enough for Haru to hear it.

“What did you do? How did you get them to leave you alone?”

“I carried a pistol with me.”

“A gun?” exclaimed Haru. “Was that really necessary?”

“It was. And I must say, for all some men like to seem big and tough, the mere sight of a weapon was enough to send a majority of them running for the hills. As for the remainder… Well it was nothing a bit of good old-fashioned threatening wouldn’t fix.”

“Wouldn’t you get in trouble for that?” asked Haru.

“Not really. Most men aren’t brave enough to admit they were frightened of a woman, so few reported it, and any other claims were written off as meaningless slander.”

“It’s a shame I can’t do a similar thing,” laughed Haru. “I’d be arrested right away, if Sugimura had anything to say about it.”

“You can intimidate him without using a weapon,” said Milady.

“I can?” Haru could practically hear Milady smirk.

Soon, a plan began to form. One that involved Milady herself.

***

A few days later, while Haru was walking home from school, the plan came to fruition. She was alone in the quiet backstreets of the city, much against her better judgement. She really should have asked someone to walk with her…

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Sugimura was following her again, and when he noticed that she had seen him, he rushed up to her, and grabbed her by the arm. Haru decided she didn’t like him any more than she had when she first met him.

“Leave me alone,” she snapped. “I’ve told you to stop following me.”

And that sleazeball just had to open his mouth. “Why should I? You’re still my fiancé. I own you.”

“You cannot own a person Sugimura. And you are not my fiancé.”

“Whatever you say brat.”

She had had enough of him, and decided to go through with the plan. “Come forth Milady!” she called. For a moment, nothing happened, and everything was just as still as it was when the conversation started.

“Are you a moron or something,” snapped Sugimura. “There’s no-one here to help you.”

In that moment, there was a sudden gush of wind, so strong that it knocked Sugimura off his feet, though Haru kept her balance and was unaffected by it. Sugimura glanced up at her with a certain smug look painting his features, likely trying to hide his shock, and maintain some semblance of control over the situation.

That look slid right of his face when he saw what was floating behind her. Milady was a sight to see; she was over eight foot tall, and dressed in elaborate finery. She was also wielding several large guns, all of which were pointed directly at Sugimura. For the first time since she had met him, she knew he was scared. Genuinely scared.

Sugimura scrambled backwards - trying to get to his feet - but Haru grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and held him in place. There was no way she was letting this bastard go without teaching him a lesson.

“You will leave me alone,” she ordered, feeling a little of Noir coming through. “Or I will hurt you like you wouldn’t believe. Is that quite understood? And if I find out you’re harassing other girls… Well, I’m sure you can use your imagination.”

Sugimura violently nodded, squirming in her grasp. “I won’t. I promise. Please don’t hurt me,” he begged.

Pathetic. He always was a sniveling coward.

Haru let go of his shirt. “Get out of my sight.” Sugimura rushed to his feet, looked Haru in the eyes one last time and ran.

“I don’t think he’ll be bothering you again,” said Milady, as the pair watched Sugimura flee the alley, as if he had seen a ghost.

“I don’t think he will,” said Haru, with a dark laugh.

#persona 5 #haru okumaru #milady #haru okumara and milady #persona 5 angst #also a bit fluffy I guess #can threatening a guy be wholesome?#I say yes #sugimura #is there too I guess #p5 #persona 5 fanfiction #inkwell writes

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sleepymarmot · 3 years

Text

My reactions to Clive Barker’s The Forbidden. Under the cut I end up quoting like half of it because I have no self-control.

Surprisingly, Trevor’s relationship with Helen is very fleshed out, and he plays a major part in her initial motivation for the investigation. Also, nice setting description!

It was a chilly business. She was not an expert photographer, and the late October sky was in full flight, shifting the light on the bricks from one moment to the next. As she adjusted and readjusted the exposure to compensate for the light changes, her fingers steadily became clumsier, her temper correspondingly thinner. But she struggled on, the idle curiosity of passersby notwithstanding. There were so many designs to document. She reminded herself that her present discomfort would be amply repaid when she showed the slides to Trevor, whose doubt of the project's validity had been perfectly apparent from the beginning.

"The writing on the wall?" he'd said, half smiling in that irritating fashion of his. "It's been done a hundred times."

The mural is just as impressive as it is in the movie. Honestly, I halfway expected it not to be in the short story at all -- it’s such a cinematic image.

Here, the artists had also been at work, but had produced an image the like of which she had not seen anywhere else. Using the door, which was centrally placed in the wall like a mouth, the artists had sprayed a single, vast head onto the stripped plaster. The painting was more adroit than most she had seen, rife with detail that lent the image an unsettling veracity. The cheekbones jutting through skin the color of buttermilk; the teeth, sharpened to irregular points, all converging on the door. The sitter's eyes were, owing to the room's low ceiling, set mere inches above the upper lip, but this physical adjustment only lent force to the image, giving the impression that he had thrown his head back. Knotted strands of his hair snaked from his scalp across the ceiling. [...]

Was it a portrait? There was something naggingly specific in the details of the brows and the lines around the wide mouth; in the careful picturing of those vicious teeth. A nightmare certainly: a facsimile, perhaps, of something from a heroin fugue. Whatever its origins, it was potent. Even the illusion of door-as-mouth worked. The short passageway between living room and bedroom offered a passable throat, with a tattered lamp in lieu of tonsils. Beyond the gullet, the day burned white in the nightmare's belly. The whole effect brought to mind a ghost train painting. The same heroic deformity, the same unashamed intention to scare. And it worked; she stood in the bedroom almost stupefied by the picture, its red-rimmed eyes fixing her mercilessly.

After the entire beginning of the story set in the haunted neighbourhood, an absolutely stunning cut to the daily life of the Rich Intellectuals. I laughed out loud at the fancy italian name of whatever food that is, it was so jarring after the vivid descriptions of poverty and misery:

"The man apparently had a hook instead of a hand."

Trevor looked up from his plate of tagliatelle con prosciutto. "Beg your pardon?"

More of the Very Functional and Satisfying Marriage!

Helen had been at pains to keep her recounting of this story as uncolored by her own response as she could. She was interested to know what Trevor would make of it, and she knew that if she once signaled her own stance he would instinctively take an opposing view out of plain bloody-mindedness.

"He had a hook," she repeated, without inflection.

The story keeps bringing up how Helen and her circle are privileged and liberal. On another note, congratulations on being haunted! (I’m pretty sure in the movie this realization is shifted to the scene where she listens to Candyman’s horrific backstory, her expression distant and her face washed in a romantic soft filter.)

Why did it matter? Was it that she wanted to have her worst feelings about Spector Street proved false? That such an estate be filthy, be hopeless, be a dump where the undesirable and the disadvantaged were tucked out of public view—all that was a liberal commonplace, and she accepted it as an unpalatable social reality. But the story of the old man's murder and mutilation was something other. An image of violent death that, once with her, refused to part from her company.

The book makes a point of saying that Helen feels alienated both by her own hollow world of academia, and the hostile impoverished world of the neighbourhood...

The suggestion that she investigate was not a bad one, though doubtless he had ulterior motives for offering it. She viewed Trevor less charitably day by day. What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again, take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. Nor, more's the pity, was he alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster. On occasion their circle seemed entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale rhetoric and hollow commitment.

From one wasteland to another.

...And the only thing that electrifies her is Candyman’s portrait.

She made her way to number 14 and spent the next hour in its befouled confines, meticulously photographing both the bedroom and living-room walls. She had half expected the impact of the head in the bedroom to be dulled by reacquaintance. It was not. Though she struggled to capture its scale and detail as best she could, she knew the photographs would be at best a dim echo of its perpetual howl.

Much of its power lay in its context, of course. That such an image might be stumbled upon in surroundings so drab, so conspicuously lacking in mystery, was akin to finding an icon on a rubbish heap: a gleaming symbol of transcendence from a world of toil and decay into some darker but more tremendous realm. She was painfully aware that the intensity of her response probably defied her articulation. Her vocabulary was analytic, replete with buzz-words and academic terminology, but woefully impoverished when it came to evocation. The photographs, pale as they would be, would, she hoped, at least hint at the potency of this picture, even if they couldn't conjure up the way it froze the bowels.

Reflection on the nature of the monster and why he needs to stay mysterious:

Standing in front of the charmless building, the wind gusting around her legs, she couldn't help but think of what had happened here. Of the man-child, bleeding on the floor, helpless to cry out. It made her queasy even to contemplate it. She turned her thoughts instead to the felon. What would he look like, she wondered, a man capable of such a depravity? She tried to make an image of him, but no detail she could conjure up carried sufficient force. But then monsters were seldom very terrible once hauled into the plain light of day. As long as this man was known only by his deeds he held untold power over the imagination; but the human truth beneath the terrors would, she knew, be bitterly disappointing. No monster he, just a whey-faced apology for a man more needful of pity than awe.

Helen enjoys scandalizing the Polite Company with the horrors she has learned, and I say, good for her!

The dinner guests looked gratifyingly appalled at the story, and Trevor, to judge by the expression on his face, was furious. It was done now, however; there was no taking it back. Nor could she deny the satisfaction she took in having silenced the interdepartmental babble about the table. It was Bernadette, Trevor's assistant in the history department, who broke the agonizing hush.

Unlike the movie, by the beginning of the story, Helen and Trevor’s relationship has fallen apart almost completely. He’s cheating openly, and she can’t bring herself to care, especially now that she has discovered something (or someone) more interesting. More haunted.

She didn't go back to Spector Street until the following Monday, but all weekend she was there in thought: standing outside the locked toilet, with the wind bringing rain; or in the bedroom, the portrait looming. Thoughts of the estate claimed all her concern. When, late on Saturday afternoon, Trevor found some petty reason for an argument, she let the insults pass, watching him perform the familiar ritual of self-martyrdom without being touched by it in the least. Her indifference only enraged him further. He stormed out in high dudgeon, to visit whichever of his women was in favor this month. She was glad to see the back of him. When he failed to return that night she didn't even think of weeping about it. He was foolish and vacuous. She despaired of ever seeing a haunted look in his dull eyes; and what worth was a man who could not be haunted?

He did not return Sunday night either, and it crossed her mind the following morning, as she parked the car in the heart of the estate, that nobody even knew she had come, and that she might lose herself for days here and nobody would be any the wiser. Like the old man Anne-Marie had told her about: lying forgotten in his favorite armchair with his eyes hooked out, while the flies feasted and the butter went rancid on the table.

More self-awareness!

Frustrated to the verge of tears, she stood among the overturned rubbish bags and felt a surge of contempt for her foolishness. She didn't belong here, did she? How many times had she criticized others for their presumption in claiming to understand societies they had merely viewed from afar? And here was she, committing the same crime, coming here with her camera and her questions, using the lives (and deaths) of these people as fodder for party conversation. She didn't blame Anne-Marie for turning her back; had she deserved better?

Helen is really in love with that painting:

One call demanded to be made before she returned to the car however: she wanted to look a final time at the painted head. Not as an anthropologist among an alien tribe, but as a confessed ghost train rider: for the thrill of it.

And yet, as much as she loves the thrill of looking at disturbing art, she draws the line at gawking at real death:

She turned her back on the woman and jostled her way out of the crowd. There would be nothing to see, she knew, and even if there had been she had no desire to look. These people—still emerging from their homes as the story spread—were exhibiting an appetite she was disgusted by. She was not one of them; would never be one of them. She wanted to slap every eager face into sense; wanted to say: "It's pain and grief you're going to spy on. Why? Why?" But she had no courage left. Revulsion had drained her of all but the energy to wander away, leaving the crowd to its sport.

Haunted!

"Forget the dog," Trevor said. "And the child. There's nothing you can do about it. You were just passing through."

His words only echoed her own thoughts of earlier in the day, but somehow, for reasons that she could find no words to convey, that conviction had decayed in the last hours. She was not just passing through. Nobody ever just passed through; experience always left its mark. Sometimes it merely scratched; on occasion it took off limbs. She did not know the extent of her present wounding, but she knew it was more profound than she yet understood, and it made her afraid.

Haunted so much that the neighbourhood feels like home now:

Nor was it simply the presence of so many people that reassured her; she was, she conceded to herself, happy to be back here in Spector Street. The quadrangles, with their stunted saplings and their gray grass, were more real to her than the carpeted corridors she was used to walking; the anonymous faces on the balconies and streets meant more than her colleagues at the university. In a word, she felt home.

Helen feels transformed already. And straight up goes on a date with that painted face...

She reached the maisonette and was surprised to find the door open again, as it had been the first time she'd come here. The sight of the interior made her light-headed. How often in the past several days had she imagined standing here, gazing into that darkness. There was no sound from inside. The dog had surely run off—either that, or died. There could be no harm, could there, in stepping into the place one final time, just to look at the face on the wall, and its attendant slogan?

"Sweets to the sweet." She had never looked up the origins of that phrase. No matter, she thought. Whatever it had stood for once, it was transformed here, as everything was; herself included. She stood in the front room for a few moments, to allow herself time to savor the confrontation ahead. Far away behind her the children were screeching like mad birds.

She stepped over a clutter of furniture and toward the short corridor that joined living room to bedroom, still delaying the moment. Her heart was quick in her: a smile played on her lips.

And there! At last! The portrait loomed, compelling as ever. She stepped back in the murky room to admire it more fully and her heel caught on the mattress that still lay in the corner.

I like how the hypnosis is explained as a sleepiness of a warm summer afternoon among flowers and bees.

She turned, and the light in the bedroom diminished as a figure stepped into the gullet between her and the outside world. Silhouetted against the light, she could scarcely see the man in the doorway, but she smelled him. He smelled like cotton candy, and the buzzing was with him or in him.

"I just came to look," she said, "... at the picture."

The buzzing went on—the sound of a sleepy afternoon, far from here. The man in the doorway did not move.

The emphasis on the overwhelming sweetness is very different from the movie.

The buzzing had quieted a little, and in the hush the man in the doorway spoke. His unaccented voice was almost as sweet as his scent.

"No need to leave yet," he breathed.

"I'm due ... due ..."

Though she couldn't see his eyes, she felt them on her, and they made her feel drowsy, like that summer that sang in her head.

"I came for you," he said.

She repeated the four words in her head. I came for you. If they were meant as a threat, they certainly weren't spoken as one.

I am delighted to learn that Book Candyman looks like a clown. Very funny how his entire aesthetic was flipped 180 degrees to Tall Dark and Handsome for the movie. The original certainly makes the imagery more consistent!

"I came for you," he murmured so softly that seduction might have been in the air. And so saying, he moved through the passageway and into the light.

She knew him, without doubt. She had known him all along, in that place kept for terrors. It was the man on the wall. His portrait painter had not been a fantasist: the picture that howled over her was matched in each extraordinary particular by the man she now set eyes upon. He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a waxy yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies. His jacket was a patchwork, his trousers the same. He looked, she thought, almost ridiculous, with his blood-stained motley, and the hint of rouge on his jaundiced cheeks. But people were facile. They needed these shows and shams to keep their interest. Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones rolled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self.

And she was almost enchanted. By his voice, by his colors, by the buzz from his body. She fought to resist the rapture, though. There was a monster here, beneath this fetching display; its nest of razors was at her feet, still drenched in blood. Would it hesitate to slit her own throat if it once laid hands on her?

Book Helen seems to find Candyman’s offer more appealing than her movie counterpart:

"If you would learn," the fiend said, "just a little from me ... you would not beg to live." His voice had dropped to a whisper. "I am rumor," he sang in her ear. "It's a blessed condition, believe me. To live in people's dreams; to be whispered at street corners, but not have to be. Do you understand?"

Her weary body understood. Her nerves, tired of jangling, understood. The sweetness he offered was life without living: was to be dead, but remembered everywhere; immortal in gossip and graffiti.

This dialogue makes much more sense as a single scene than it did as scattered dialogue in the film. I don’t think in the film he ever insist he won’t force death on her, which is fair, because he sure does absolutely everything to push her to the brink!

"I won't force it upon you," he replied, the perfect gentleman. "I won't oblige you to die. But think; think. If I kill you here—if I unhook you"—he traced the path of the promised wound with his hook; it ran from groin to neck—"think how they would mark this place with their talk ... point it out as they passed by and say, 'She died there, the woman with the green eyes.' Your death would be a parable to frighten children with. Lovers would use it as an excuse to cling closer together."

She had been right: this was a seduction.

"Was fame ever so easy?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I'd prefer to be forgotten," she replied, "than be remembered like that."

He made a tiny shrug. "What do the good know?" he said. "Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?" He raised his hooked hand. "I said I would not oblige you to die and I'm true to my word. Allow me, though, a kiss at least...."

Oh, so Helen fainted during the kiss on purpose:

The hook was at her neck. If she so much as moved it would wound her. She was trapped, as in her childhood nightmares, with every chance of escape stymied. When sleep had brought her to such hopelessness—the demons on every side, waiting to tear her limb from limb—one trick remained. To let go; to give up all ambition to life, and leave her body to the dark. Now, as the Candyman's face pressed to hers, and the sound of bees blotted out even her own breath, she played that hidden hand. And, as surely as in dreams, the room and the fiend were painted out and gone.

The residents actively conspired against Helen. Which is interesting, because I thought the point of faith in Candyman was that nobody knew the truth for sure. I guess they acted on their own volition, never interacting with him directly?

They were crazy, these people. They had known all along what her presence in Butts' Court had summoned, and they had protected him—this honeyed psychopath; given him a bed and an offering of bonbons, hidden him away from plying eyes, and kept their silence when he brought blood to their doorsteps. Even Anne-Marie, dry-eyed in the hallway of her house, knowing that her child was dead a few yards away. [...]

She could just make out Anne-Marie's figure, moving to the edge of the piled timbers and furniture, and ducking to climb into its heart. This was how they planned to remove the evidence. To bury the child was not certain enough; but to cremate it, and pulverize the bones—who would ever know? [...]

She fought to be free of him, to cry out for them not to light the bonfire, but he held her lovingly close. The light grew: warmth came with it; and through the kindling and the first flames she could see figures approaching the pyre out of the darkness of Butts' Court. They had been there all along: waiting, the lights turned out in their homes, and broken all along the corridors. Their final conspiracy.

The bonfire caught with a will, but by some trick of its construction the flames did not invade her hiding place quickly; nor did the smoke creep through the furniture to choke her. She was able to watch how the children's faces gleamed; how the parents called them from going too close, and how they disobeyed; how the old women, their blood thin, warmed their hands and smiled into the flames. Presently the roar and the crackle became deafening, and the Candyman let her scream herself hoarse in the certain knowledge that nobody could hear her, and even if they had, would not have moved to claim her from the fire.

Apparently, the pile of sweets and razors was a summoning ritual. Also, even though Helen doesn’t outright win as in the movie, she is effectively seduced to accept her fate:

Soon the heat crept down Helen's throat and scorched her pleas away. She sank back, exhausted, into the Candyman's arms, resigned to his triumph. In moments they would be on their way, as he had promised, and there was no help for it.

Perhaps they would remember her, as he had said they might, finding her cracked skull in tomorrow's ashes. Perhaps she might become, in time, a story with which to frighten children. She had lied, saying she preferred death to such questionable fame. She did not. As to her seducer, he laughed as the conflagration sniffed them out. There was no permanence for him in this night's death. His deeds were on a hundred walls and ten thousand lips, and should he be doubted again his congregation could summon him with sweetness. He had reason to laugh.

I’m glad Book Helen still feels the power over Trevor.

So, as the flames crept upon them, did she, as through the fire she caught sight of a familiar face moving between the onlookers. It was Trevor. He had forsaken his meal at Apollinaire's and come looking for her.

She watched him questioning this fire watcher and that, but they shook their heads, all the while staring at the pyre with smiles buried in their eyes. Poor dupe, she thought, following his antics. She willed him to look past the flames in the hope that he might see her burning. Not so that he could save her from death—she was long past hope of that—but because she pitied him in his bewilderment and wanted to give him, though he would not have thanked her for it, something to be haunted by. That, and a story to tell.

Alright, here’s my takeaway:

I liked the short story more than I expected! Didn’t think I’d enjoy a version of this story without the racial tension or the victorious ending, which were central to the movie experience. But even the short story’s more tragic ending doesn’t read entirely like a defeat. Which is helped by Candyman’s pursuit of Helen being much less horrifying and predatory than in the movie. The first meeting, the kiss, the bonfire are all a single sequence, unlike the movie, where he repeatedly hypnotizes her, terrorizes her, and systematically and purposefully destroys her life. This makes the dialogue between them flow better, too. So overall, I’d say I liked both the original and the screen adaptation, and neither of them really diminished my appreciation of the other, which for me is pretty significant praise.

#candyman #the forbidden #blah blah blah

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bigskydreaming · 5 years

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Imagine the Batkids hanging out at like....the food court of a mall or something, Jason keeping paparazzi at bay with finger guns that manage to be wildly ominous even if the gulping paparazzo have no true idea WHY that particular motion from this particular man has cold beads of sweat breaking out on the backs of their necks. Damian loudly proclaiming he hates everything and everyone even though he only half means it, well at least until Tim asks if he needs them to go get him a booster seat. To which Jason stops long enough to cackle about Tim finally finding someone he can actually literally look down on, it must be like Christmas for him, and meanwhile, Duke idly says to no one in particular that he can never decide if he accidentally got adopted into the Addams family, the Manson family or the Kardashians.

“I would be great at being a Kardashian,” Jason muses.

“Well you’re already 90% ass, so you’ve got that going for you,” Steph chirps brightly.

“Die, but for real this time,” Jason volleys back, equally pleasantly.

“I can’t believe the English major is suggesting I plagiarize him,” Steph says with eyes wide in mock bewilderment. Jason scoffs.

“What English major? In case you’ve forgotten, I never even finished high school, I was busy being de - “

He cuts off as Cass holds out her palm and Dick and Duke both slide ten dollar bills across the table to her, accompanied by groans. Tim jabs a finger at her with a scowl, half rising out of his seat in outrage.

“That doesn’t count, he didn’t even finish saying it!”

“Also, you’re cheating,” Damian adds on hotly, too incensed to notice he’s literally standing in solidarity with his most hated enemy. Though Tim catches it, if the slightly constipated look on his face is anything to go by. “Do you really think us so blind we can’t tell that Brown blatantly set that one up for you?”

“Don’t hate the players, hate the game,” Steph says sagely, as she and Cass split the take.

“What the hell just happened?” Jason asks. No one looks anywhere near the zip code of apologetic.

“Well we definitely didn’t all get together once a majority of us had done the knock knock knocking on death’s door thing ourselves and wound up making a long-standing bet about how long you can go without bringing that up and where the clock restarts each time you do,” Steph says thoughtfully, eyes intent even as she stares off into the distance, like it’s an actual mystery and she’s really trying quite hard to scry out the answer.

“What?” Jason says flatly.

“In my defense, they were doing it long before I came along and they said it was like, a family tradition,” Duke offers.

“I mean, it’s not like we lied,” Tim shrugs. “Besides, it was Cass’ idea and she’s died twice, so it’s allowed.”

Jason redirects his ire on their sister. “Why are you the worst.”

She shrugs. “I died.”

“I used to think having a sister would be cool. I can’t believe you ruined sisters for me.”

“Bite me, little brother,” she says sweetly. His face flames. Detonation imminent.

“I’m older than you!”

“Not if you don’t count the six months you were dead,” she sing-songs. “Besides, Tim’s lying. It was his idea.”

Jason’s head swivels like a turret-mounted missile launcher. Tim chokes on his French fry.

“What the hell! That’s not tr - .” He trails off then, frowning slightly. “Wait, was it? Oh. Right.”

Jason’s eyes narrow, tension on the trigger, but Tim rallies and just shrugs unrepentantly.

“Eh. You’ve tried to kill me like three times. Suck it up.”

“Next time, I’ll be sure to try harder,” Jason growls. Tim smiles serenely and takes an extra obnoxious slurp of his milkshake.

“See? You’ve learned something new today. You’re welcome.”

“Why am I not live-tweeting this,” Steph wonders, yanking out her phone and sending digits swiftly flying across its keys. Dick leans over on her left to view her screen.

“Are you tweeting as Batgirl about her fellow vigilantes, or the random blond stranger always seen out with the Waynes but that no one can determine their connection to?”

“First off, I’m the EXOTIC blond stranger, excuse you. Get it right. And second...idk. Either. Both. Does it really matter?”

“Well, it might if you actually do tweet the same content from both accounts and someone somehow manages to spot some kind of connection,” Tim says dryly. Steph scowls without looking up from her phone.

“Stop oppressing my shenanigans with your logic, Timbleton.”

“Timbleton?”

“It’s my new name for you. For it is both pretentious and douchey, as are you.”

Tim glowers. “Sometimes I honestly can’t remember why I went out with you.”

She shrugs. “You were a fifteen year old virgin and I have a killer rack. It wasn’t that deep.”

“Hey, you are still just the exotic blond stranger seen with us all the time, right?” Dick says suddenly, seemingly lost in thought. “Like, B didn’t adopt you since I last saw you or anything.”

“No, and you know you don’t ACTUALLY have to ask me that every time you see me.”

He shrugs. “I mean I kinda do. You are always here, and it is Bruce. It’s not like he ever tells me when he adopts someone new so like, you could be my sister for four years before I even realized it if I didn’t ask.”

“Ooh. A sighting of Dick angst, spotted in the wild. Those are rare,” Jason snickers. Dick just eyes him.

“FYI, I still have footage of a certain Robin, age fourteen, singing Backstreet Boys. And I have Roy on speed dial. Tread lightly, Little Wing.”

“You said you deleted that!”

“I lied. I do that sometimes. I’m terribly problematic.” Dick beams beatifically.

“Why have I not seen this footage?” Steph shrieks.

“Make me an offer,” Dick says as leans back smugly.

She wastes no time, fingers dancing across her keyboard again, and moments later Dick pulls out his own phone and reads her incoming text. One eyebrow arches significantly.

“That’s an offer, alright.” He frowns. “You came up with that quick. I’m either impressed or disturbed.”

Steph shrugs. “I get bored on stakeouts sometimes.”

“You can be dispressed,” Cass pipes up helpfully. Dick nods solemnly.

“An excellent suggestion, Cassandra, thank you. Just for that, I’ll send it to you too.”

“I will stab you,” Jason says dangerously.

“Just think, Jay, if you didn’t try and stab me all the time already, that might actually be incentive not to....oh whoops, finger slipped, just hit send, how terrible, much regret.”

“I feel like there’s supposed to be a life lesson in there somewhere,” Duke murmurs.

“Stay out of this, new kid on the block.”

“Does that make you Marky Mark or like, Donnie?” Tim wonders idly. He shakes his head at himself then, baffled. “Why do I know the names of the New Kids on the Block?”

Stephanie meanwhile is watching her phone with what can only be described as naked glee. It’s muted - she’s never one to share her spoils freely after all - but apparently that is more than good enough for now as far as she’s concerned. Beside her, Cass intently stares at her own screen, shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

“I will kill you all someday, and when I do the courts will rule it justifiable homicide and I shall be vindicated.”

“Please, Todd. As if I don’t have contingencies in place to ensure you receive my vengeance even from beyond the grave, should I ever perish at your hands.”

Silence falls across the table as they all stare at Damian.

“See, now I’m dispressed,” Tim says. “Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to take a guided tour of your brain, but then I think why not wait til Halloween and sell tickets too.”

Damian glares at him, but to the surprise of everyone, Tim included, he reacts no further than that. A few seconds later though, Duke bolts upright in his chair across from him, directing his own baleful glare at the smaller boy. Damian just stares at him meaningfully and jerks his head in Tim’s direction. Duke rolls his eyes and sighs.

“Shut your facehole, Drake, you blithering dolt,” Duke says robotically. “Also, you are excessively diminutive for your age and nobody likes you. Allegedly.”

Once more silence reigns supreme.

“Oh fuck, can he possess people now?” Jason asks.

Dick waves them all down, gesturing for quiet before he takes the lead, studying Duke with an intent focus. “I think I speak for all of us here, when I say: no, but seriously, what the actual fuck.”

Cass nods gravely. “What he said.”

Duke shrugs a half-hearted apology. “It’s nothing personal Tim. It’s just that Damian and I have an alliance, and part of the terms are I have to defend his honor, since - and I quote - ‘tt, the very notion I need assistance defending my actual person is laughable, Thomas, don’t be daft.’”

“Wait, we’re doing alliances now?” Steph asks, because of course that would be the part that catches her attention. “I want an alliance. Cass, make an alliance with me.”

“Kay.”

“Whose idea was this alliance, anyway?” Jason asks. Duke just shrugs again, this time defensively.

“Hey don’t look at me, Dick’s the one who apparently thought it was a good idea to introduce Damian to Survivor reruns.”

All eyes turn to the eldest. In a particularly accusatory fashion.

Well, with the exception of Damian, as he has returned to his meal and is quite contentedly dining with a distinct air of smugness about him. (Even more so than usual.)

“What? I couldn’t get him to agree to watching anything else on TV, and then we came across some reruns and I thought it might appeal to him.”

“And you saw no potential drawbacks to him seeing appeal in the basic premise of voting people off the island?” Jason asks skeptically. Dick picks up a fry and studies it with clear deliberation and an equally clear attempt at avoidance. Subtlety, thy name is not Grayson.

“In hindsight, it’s possible mistakes were made.”

“I mean, at least now Dami’s attempts at casting undesirables out of the family are rooted in democracy instead of totalitarianism. That’s progress, right?” Steph asks. Heavy on the uncertainty.

“Right, and I have some beachfront property in Kansas to sell you,” Tim says sardonically.

“Nah, you keep it. I’ll just get it in the divorce when we get back together in ten years, marry, and I abscond with half of your fortune.”

“Wait, what?”

“Shh, just let it happen.”

“Hang on, back to this alliance,” Jason says, turning back to Duke. “So what are you getting out of it?”

“Oh, he has to do my calc homework for the rest of the semester,” Duke replies.

“Duke, you should have just told one of us you needed some help with your homework,” Dick says with an unmistakable note of concern in his voice. Duke shoots him a quizzical look.

“I don’t. I just don’t want to do it.”

“This is why Duke is the most valid,” Steph nods knowingly. Cass nods in agreement.

“Hey, did nobody else notice that in essence, Damian implicitly admitted he needed help protecting his feelings from getting boo-boos,” Tim pipes up oh so casually. The youngest among them narrows his eyes.

“In my spare time, I peruse the occult tomes recommended by Raven and the Zatara brat in search of a ritual that will make it so you never existed in the first place,” he says, matching his tone to Tim’s conversational one. Not deterred in the slightest, Tim just adopts an expression of over the top faux sympathy.

“Sucks you can’t just ask me for help. I already know where one of those is.”

“Dami, no!” Dick speaks up sharply. Their little brother slumps back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest.

“I wasn’t actually going to do anything, Grayson,” he sulks. Dick snorts.

“You were absolutely about to jump on top of the table and kick Tim in the face. Don’t even try and pretend I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I was an only child once,” Jason muses. “I should have appreciated it more.”

“But then you couldn’t form an alliance with me, little brother,” Cass points out, equal parts sweetness and wickedness. He hesitates, visibly torn between wanting to protect his vaunted older brother status and agreeing to an alliance with the most feared of them all.

“You’re evil.”

She shrugs but doesn’t contest the point.

“I’ll form an alliance with you, Cass,” Tim says, smirking at Jason.

“No thanks.”

Tim’s mouth falls open and he looks between her and his now cackling older brother. “What the hell? You’ll form an alliance with Steph and Jason but not with me? Why not?”

“I’m chaotic neutral,” their sister explains sunnily, as she steals some more of Dick’s fries.

#look they all actually so love each other okay #this is just how siblings are #just like #with less actual murder attempts

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dreadwulf · 5 years

Text

*sigh* Okay, I just had to write this all out to get it off my chest and hopefully get over it and move on.

People tell me I look just like Brienne of Tarth. I’m tall, blonde, broad-shouldered, and homely. I get mistaken for a man, even when I have long hair that goes all down my back, even wearing a dress. I’ve gotten used to it.

My earliest memory of school is lying on the ground while a crowd of boys are kicking and hitting me, because I was an ugly freak. Girls grow earlier than boys do, you see. I was the tallest kid in my elementary, and I was hated for it. I endured constant abuse. When I got a little bit older, and I was almost 6 feet tall when I was 12, the abuse mostly turned away from being physical and into emotional and psychological. Girls followed me into the bathroom, laughing at how my clothes didn’t fit, how awkward I was, how masculine. Boys no longer hit me, just ignored or ridiculed me. Because it was the 80s I heard constant references to the East German olympic team, how I looked like a member. I didn’t understand the references at the time, but I knew it was yet another reference to how I didn’t measure up as a woman. Much later I learned about how those women were dosed with testosterone by the government against their will - a terrible story that the people around me regarded as a joke. There’s nothing funnier than a manish woman, apparently.

When I was young I was undatable, never considered an option to anyone. I never kissed anyone until I was in my twenties, and was a virgin until I was 25. It’s bizarre when I look back now at photos of myself, because I’m expecting a hideous monster, and all I see is an ordinary girl - a little taller, broad-shouldered and plain, not pretty, but ordinary. But it all got into my head, you see. Inside I still feel like a freak. Undesireable. Unloved.

I started watching Game of Thrones from the first episode (mainly because I’m a big fan of Peter Dinklage!), and I was intrigued. Intrigued, but not obsessed, not yet. I’m a grown woman and I don’t have time for that sort of thing. But the first time Brienne of Tarth took off her helmet onscreen and I saw her face, I literally pointed at the screen and said out loud, “that’s me!”

Never in my life have I reacted that way before. Never before, and never since.

Granted, the actress who plays her is a great beauty, but the character of Brienne I latched onto instantly and felt a deep kinship with, especially after reading her story in the books. How as a child she was a girl very much like Sansa, who loved songs and romance and dancing and other girlish things, but the adults around her told her she was too ugly. Her septa told her no one would ever love or want her. She was shamed for wearing dresses and trying to be feminine, was told she was embarassing herself because her body was not womanly enough. She was made to feel like a failure just for existing, for being umarriagable, for causing the end of her house by being so ugly that no one wanted her. But instead of just crumbling and disappearing, Brienne of Tarth took up a sword and decided to make something else of herself. She wanted to help people, she wanted to contribute something to the world, and she decided to find a good lord and serve them as a knight. Brienne is brave and caring and defends the weak and wants to protect the people she loves. Brienne is a hero. She is a hero while not being tiny and delicate and pretty but large, sturdy, and ugly. In that she is completely unique, and completely wonderful.

A lot of old wounds opened up, watching that story and reading A Feast For Crows. Old issues I thought I was over all came back up. I identified powerfully with having your femininity stolen from you because your body is different, with being abused for not being woman enough, and with longing for love in a world that hates you. I remembered being hated, constantly and visciously hated, just for existing. I relived the bone-deep belief that I would spend my entire life alone, because no one would ever want me, a belief that was constantly validated by the actual people around me. I became painfully aware of the sense that I still have to this day of being constantly too big, too loud, too much, that has me slouching and shrinking and taking up less space and whispering timidly and the effect that those things have had on my life and career to this day.

And watching Brienne’s story, I saw how someone can endure the same things I did, and keep trying. Can keep struggling to succeed, and even fall in love. That was the most amazing thing of all, you see. This woman on television who looked like me, she was a love interest! She had her own romantic storyline! I could hardly believe it at first. I watched through my fingers trying to talk myself out of hoping. Because this never happens - an ugly woman, a masculine woman, is never desirable in fiction, never important enough to the story to be a love interest, and never worthy of romance. Yet here it was, it was happening right in front of my eyes.

Her love story with Jaime Lannister was a competely unique thing on television. An ugly woman with a beautiful man. A bond of deep respect and admiration, with undeniable sexual tension. Here were two people who can understand each other because they have both been hated for reasons beyond their control, who sought refuge in honor and knighthood and were loathed for it. Brienne understood how hatred can warp a person, make them someone they never meant to be, just the way she herself had been made to harden and close off to the world. She saw the person that Jaime might have been, if things had gone differently, and the man he could still become. Jaime for his part saw worth in her when everyone around him called her ridiculous, even though she was his enemy. He still knew that she was more deserving than any knight in Westeros, and believed in her when no one else in the world did. He gave her a sword and a quest and even a squire, lost his hand defending her, and he put his own life on the line to save hers.

Jaime openly adored her, looked at her like she was the most wonderful thing in the world, and I have never seen anything like that. A woman who looks like me, being looked at like that. Do you know what that felt like for me? Can you imagine it?

This story meant a lot to me, is what I’m saying. It was healing for me. I believed in that story, and I expected that even if there wouldn’t be a happy ending, at least there would be that respect for the character, and that she would be taken seriously by the narrative and her story would be completed in some fashion.

And then they aired Season 8.

In season 8 we learn that not only did the show never bother to adapt her storylines from the books, where she is slated to face Lady Stoneheart and the Brotherhood Without Banners, they gave her no story in replacement. She has no material impact on the storyline of the show, she simply doesn’t matter in any way. The only major storyline they kept from the books was her romance with Jaime Lannister, and in Season 8 they destroy that story in the cruelest possible way.

After emphasizing that Brienne is an adult virgin, they give her one scene with what we thought was her love interest, where they share one kiss. One. Onscreen within seconds of Brienne being naked Jaime looks dissatisfied and unhappy, and in the same episode, leaves her to go back to his traditionally beautiful ex. Leaves her crying and pleading with him to stay. And then her story ends, except for a brief bookend where she writes an entry in the White Book showing she still loved him, even though he abandoned and betrayed her in the worst way possible.

Right now I’d really like to know if anyone involved with this show ever gave a moment’s thought to what it would be like to watch that happen. After years of patiently waiting to get the love story we were promised for five seasons, instead, to humiliate and punish Brienne for daring to think she deserved love. Did anyone ever consider what that would feel like for women like me? If they did think about it, I hope they enjoyed the hurt they caused me, because the way this story played out felt outright malicious and hateful. They could have given me one tender moment, one declaration of love or affection, just to know what it would look like to see that onscreen for a woman like me. Instead they deliberately withheld that. And then went out of their way to invalidate absolutely everything about the storyline we had been watching, as if it had never happened, as if we had imagined it all, and been foolish to believe in it in the first place.

Yes, I know, it’s only a story, but stories matter. We wouldn’t put nearly the effort and investment into them that we do as a culture if they didn’t. My story has never mattered before, and it meant something to me over the last 8 years that someone was telling it. So was this ending intended as a deliberate slap in my face, or was that collateral damage that the show simply did not care about?

The messages sent by our media are sometimes unintentional, but they are usually given at least some consideration. So I wonder what sort of message was trying to be sent by giving the gender non-comforming woman who dared to open her heart an immediate rejection, and have her then swear to serve a celibate organization for the rest of her life? Giving up her inheritance, her island, her own sworn vows to Sansa, and everything else she cared about? Am I meant to regard this as a happy ending, I wonder? Her feelings and dreams don’t matter, but hey, she has a position in the small council, so Girl Power! Was there a single woman anywhere involved in this production who might have pointed out how awful this is?

I understand that what’s done is done and there’s no fixing this, and complaining about it is pointless. But what I really want, what I wish for, is for somebody to confirm that at least at some point this was a love story, and that for whatever reason, network interference or showrunner decision or whatever it was, it was changed at the last minute. Just tell me that at some point the intent was real. To know that would be helpful. Because right now I feel like a stupid chump for ever believing that anybody wanted a woman like me to have a love story, and you cannot imagine how much that hurts.

#braime #brienne of tarth #jaime x brienne

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hvssans · 4 years

Text

(OLIVIA HOLT, CISFEMALE) - Have you seen PARKER HASSAN? PARKER is in HER SOPHOMORE year. The COMMUNICATIONS MAJOR is 20 years old & is an ARIES. People say SHE is INTREPID, DISARMING, BRASH and UNRELIABLE. Rumors say they’re a member of KINCAID SOCIETY. I heard from the gossip blog that SHE WAS IN THE CAR ACCIDENT THAT KILLED HER EX AND LEFT HIM THERE TO DIE.

trigger warning: death, alcohol, drugs

basic info

full name: parker theresa hassan

birth date: april 13th, 2000

pronouns: she/her

hometown: hillsborough, north carolina

sexuality: pansexual

height: 5′1″ on a good day (actually 5′0″)

eye color: brown

hair color: blonde

build: athletic

tattoos: the ny yankees emblem on the back of her neck

piercings: earlobes, won’t go any further because she would have to plug them during baseball season and it’s a pain in the ass

style: comfort over style, function over fashion. unless she’s going out then as little covered as possible while still being considered “decent”

favorite color: orange

favorite food: cupcakes

zodiac: aries sun, leo moon, sagittarius rising

mbti: estp

hogwarts house: gryffindor

enneagram: type 7 wing 8

temperament: sanguine-melancholic

alignment: chaotic neutral

growing up, parker was always really close to her dad. tom hassan was a minor league baseball player that had almost made it to the pros before he suffered a career ending injury, and parker had inherited his athletic ability. she was able to throw a baseball at the ripe young age of three, and by the time all of her friends were starting tee-ball, she had already joined little league. not that there wasn’t a fight to get her into little league with the traditional southern values of her small town, but they got her in and that’s what mattered. practicing brought parker and her dad closer together, and she knew if she looked out from the pitcher's mound, her dad would be in the stands watching.

and then one day, he wasn't.

when parker was a sophomore in high school, and the only girl on the boy's baseball team, she was a pitch away from throwing the first no-hitter in her school's history. she was on fire, and nothing could break her focus. she looked up to meet her dad's eyes - like she always did before she was about to throw the last pitch - and tom hassan wasn't there. parker lost her focus and the batter hit a home run; her team ultimately won the game, but parker still felt like she lost.

after that day, parker gave up on everything. she wasn't ready to take on so much responsibility; she was fifteen, for crying out loud! she did everything she could to stray away from responsiblity: she quit the baseball team, her grades slipped, she started hanging out with an undesirable crowd, and she discovered the wonders of alcohol. it was nice to forget her problems for a night, even if they came to confront her in the sober light of day. (DEATH TW) but one night, she got in the car with a guy she'd been seeing - she knew he'd been drinking, but he swore he was good to drive. parker was too far gone to argue, so she climbed in the back while he and his friend claimed the front two seats. what happened next was a blur, but the next thing she knew, the car was wrapped around a tree. the two guys were unconscious or dead - she couldn't be sure which - but she luckily had come out relatively unharmed. she climbed out and ran, the adrenaline sobering her up enough to get her to a safe place. nobody ever found out she was in the car with them, and she swore nobody ever would. she was only sixteen.

after that night, parker felt the need to turn her life around again. with the help of her old coach, she got back into fighting shape and back on the mound. her oldest brother replaced her dad in the stands, usually accompanied by at least one of her four siblings, and she led the team to victory again. college scouts sought her out, and she ended up choosing yates. she’d gotten better offers at schools with better baseball teams, but at a liberal arts school she knew she could continue being the star player - she needed the attention to survive, like tinkerbell.

parker started her radio show during the spring semester of her freshman year at the campus radio station. it took a lot of work to convince her professor to actually let her start one, since she wasn't exactly known for being "responsible", but with months of research and planning to back her up, her professor finally gave in. with parker's popularity around campus, "parks and sex" quickly became the most listened to radio show in the area, and once it became available for download on spotify, the most downloaded podcast. it was the first time she’d ever accomplished anything outside of baseball, and it’s nice to have something that isn’t directly connected to her dad.

fast facts!!

she’s a big ole cuddler

she keeps sneaking stray dogs into her room because she loves dogs so much and wants to save them all

(stray cats she usually leaves alone because they like being outside but she still loves them)

her best feature is her ass

she is the first person you’ll notice in a room

you either love her or hate her there’s no in between

she has five dogs and four cats at home, and they all miss her terribly when she’s gone (though they tolerate the rest of her family)

(imagine fitting nine animals into your bed at one time because that’s what it’s like when she’s home for breaks)

she can’t cook for shit and also can’t mix drinks so unless you’re making a drink for her, she’s drinking it straight (or just incredibly unbalanced lmfao)

wanted connections

friends friends friends

hook-ups hook-ups hook-ups

exes exes exes

the friends that sit in the stands at her games wearing shirts with her name on them or holding up signs

her roommate having to put up with her constantly bringing animals home

girl squad

(also let her romance all the wlw pls we need more GAY)

flirtationship

a “one that got away” type of thing where they both clearly had feelings but never got their timing right

idk that’s all i got really!! thanks for reading!!

#yatesintro

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witharsenicsauce · 4 years

Text

Chosen Stories From the War #21: Everything in Time

(Content warning: This chapter contains brief descriptions of burns.)

Her feet dancing along with the shadows that haunted the corridor, the Shrinemaiden stepped out of her room and into the hall, examining her surroundings almost instinctively. She stood there for a moment, waiting for someone to come running out and tell her this next mission was a joke.

Not that she had a problem being assigned with Savitr. It simply felt like there was more going on, something the Commander wasn’t telling her. She had that gleam in her eye, the one Kon-Mai learned to recognize. The one that meant Senuna was plotting something.

She heard footsteps around the corner and stood at attention, expecting to meet her team, but the only one who came to her was her comrade himself. While Savitr was a tall man, he still stood a full head shorter than her, even when he stopped with his back straight as he could stretch it, and bowed to her respectfully.

“Mordenna. It is an honor.”

“Vallinor.” She nodded. “I shall say the same, once I see how you perform in battle.”

He seemed to deflate a bit at her cold tone, but maybe she had imagined that.

“Who else is joining us?” She asked.

“Two human soldiers.” He said. “A Templar is one. Another is a Reaper.”

Kon-Mai nodded but inside, she was sighing. So they were the only non-humans on this mission. This definitely was Senuna’s doing.

“Very well. Let’s join the others then.” She brushed past him and he turned, keeping pace with her as they made their way to the garage.

The Templar was the first one they saw, a young man with deep earthy skin slipping on his helmet. He turned to them, eyeing the non-humans up and down suspiciously. “Oh.” Was all he said to them.

“Oh, come on now, give them a break.” The Reaper approached them, an older woman with grey hair and a rich tan. “Hi there, you’re our crew? I’m Gili Hildred, Reaper Major.”

“You seem to be much more forward than the other Reapers I have met.” Kon-Mai bowed to her. “If I recall from my time observing your kind, you have no love for those of alien blood.”

“Since Elena married that Skirmisher, a lot has changed around here.” Gili chuckled. “Not that the Templars seem to get it.” She looked over to their companion. “Hassan.”

Hassan, the Templar, seemed to growl under his helmet.

“Hassan. Come on.” Gili sighed. “That’s Hassan Apoorva. He’s an asshole but most Templars are.”

“Cunt.” Hassan grumbled at Gili.

“See?” Gili crossed her arms. “I rest my case.”

“What is the subject of our mission?” Kon-Mai asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Oh, that.” Gili chuckled. “Volk just tells me to go somewhere and kill someone. I do it.”

“A Haven was recently wiped out in Georgia.” Hassan mumbled. “The COUNTRY, not the state. We’re going down to look for any survivors, and to investigate.”

“Investigate what? If it was ADVENT?” Gili chuckled. “I think that’s pretty obvious.”

“No. Investigate what kind of tools they wiped it out WITH.” Hassan said. “If they somehow got hold of nuclear bombs, we need to know about it.”

“He has a point.” Savitr nodded. “When shall we depart?”

“When Hassan gets his fuckin’ suit on.” Gili giggled.

“You are an old bitch.” Hassan chirped. This time, Kon-Mai couldn’t help but notice Hassan’s soft tone as he said it.

When Firebrand dropped them off, the first thing the Shrinemaiden noticed was the lingering smell of smoke.

The nearby ADVENT city center was visible from the hill they stood upon, the rolling fields of green being the only thing standing between them and the Haven. She could sense the air around her, and could still hear the dying screams of the murdered echoing on the wind. It chilled her.

“Where is the settlement?” Kon-Mai asked.

“Over here.” Gili pointed behind them. “Down this ravine and over one of them cliffs.”

“They are far too close…” Savitr mumbled. “Why did they not make camp farther away?”

“Perhaps they thought themselves well hidden.” Kon-Mai mused.

“One is always well hidden.” Savitr sighed. “Until they are found.”

“I can turn invisible.” Kon-Mai assured him.

“You can.” He almost smiled at her. “I doubt the humans could, though.”

They made their way through the grass, the sky above them cloudy and grey with smoke. The burning smell grew stronger as they grew closer. Kon-Mai listened, directing almost all of her attention to the sounds around her, or lack thereof.

Then she got down low to the ground as they began to cross the ridge. “Hide.” She hissed.

“Why?” Hassan asked.

“I hear…” She listened carefully. Over the ridge, it almost sounded as though someone was squirting water from a hose over a closed window. Under that was the sound of conversation, and Etheric words. “Troops.”

“We can take a few Troopers.” Gili chuckled.

Savitr said as he knelt down beside the Chosen woman. “How many do you suppose there are?”

She hesitated, closing her eyes to block out other, distracting stimuli. “...An undesirable number. I would say five at least, though I suspect there are more.”

“What’s that weird noise?” Hassan muttered as he crouched. “It sounds like a hose…”

Kon-Mai grit her teeth. “I know not, and I doubt we shall fully know until we can get closer.”

“Do you need a distraction?” Savitr asked.

“Unnecessary.” She smiled. “Please, stay here and do not move.”

“What if we have a clear shot?” Gili giggled as she saw Kon-Mai bare her teeth. “I’m kidding! We’ll stay put.”

“Hurry up.” Hassan muttered. “I don’t wanna spend all day hiding in the grass like a rabbit.”

Kon-Mai gave him a dirty look as she slipped into invisibility, her psionic cloak washing over her body and rendering her unseen. She took off into the smoke and began jogging down the hill towards the town, and the first thing that hit her was the smell.

She knew the stench of death all too well. And now it mixed with the scent of fire and ash. And as the many stimuli wafted together in the air, her blood ran cold.

Kon-Mai crouched again as she came up behind one of the tiny cottages. She crawled around the side, peeking out and holding her breath, determined to not make a sound. But when she saw the remains of the village, she could not help but gasp.

At least five or six Purifiers stood there, clad in their orange armor, waving their hoses of fire over dried grass and fallen tents. She’d been right in her count at least; a good five of them worked in the center, and others were emerging from cloaks of flame. In the center was a wooden pyre they had fashioned from old logs and the remnants of homes.. Every so often, one would toss something onto the coals. Another log? No, it was limp. A body.

Kon-Mai ducked back down again and went around the other side towards a tall building near the north side. This one seemed to have been left intact, so far. Maybe they hadn’t gotten to this one yet? The lights inside were out, so she could hide in it, at least.

She took a running start and jumped, grabbing hold of the second story window frame. A bit of broken glass dug into her palm, but she shook it out and pulled herself inside. Upon scanning the room and seeing no one there, she let her cloak flake away in purple shards, and began her search.

The room seemed to belong to a couple: a soft, fluffy double bed rested in the center of the floor, downy sheets covering the mattress. Silk curtains hung beside the window she’d climbed through, and a simple but elegant dressing bureau sat against the wall. Kon-Mai looked at her reflection in the mirror and smiled, flicking one of her braids back over her shoulder.

There was a loud SMASH. Her cloak came back on and Kon-Mai dove behind the cover of the bed, her hand on her sword. She waited a moment, hearing the definite rustling of movement. Someone was in here with her.

Then there was a soft, tiny cry, like the coo of a dove. She peeked around the corner, and her eyes fell on the sliding door of the closet. Another rustle, and a small squeak echoed from inside.

Kon-Mai slowly crept out from her hiding spot, her hand still on her sword but her grip loose. Slowly, her cloak fell away again, and the sound of movement stopped as she drew closer and closer to the door of the closet.

She reached out, holding her breath, and lingered there for a moment. Then she threw the door open.

The little girl inside the closet let out a scream so loud it could wake the dead, and Kon-Mai jumped back on instinct before she dropped her sword and held out her hands. “Hush! Hush child! I am not here to hurt you!”

The child was sobbing hysterically, but her tears were quiet and fearful. She shook like a little leaf, her once pretty white dress now smudged and blackened with soot. Her wispy, fair hair hung around her face, falling messily from a little bun that had once been tied so neatly. She did not move a muscle as Kon-Mai knelt down, pushing her sword away.

“I will not hurt you.” She said softly. “...Do you speak English, little one?”

The little girl held up her thumb and forefinger. “...Little.”

“That is very good for someone so young.” Kon-Mai smiled, keeping her mouth closed so as not to scare the child with her teeth. “What is your name?”

The little girl seemed to think for a minute, either about the words, or about whether or not she could give Kon-Mai her name in trust. “...Tsiuri.”

“That is beautiful.” Kon-Mai said. “A very pretty name.”

Tsiuri seemed to nod in thanks.

“Where are your parents?” Kon-Mai asked then.

The child blinked, her eyebrows furrowing at the words.

Kon-Mai pointed to the large bed. “Where is mother? Where’s Mama?”

Tsiuri’s eyes only grew wider, and tears began to form as she started to sob.

“Oh, no no.” Kon-Mai scooted forward. “Hush now, it’s oka-”

The little girl threw her arms around Kon-Mai’s neck and practically leapt into her arms. Kon-Mai reciprocated the hug, if only to keep Tsiuri from knocking her over.

“Tsudi khalkhi mat ts’aiq’vana!” Tsiuri weapt. Kon-Mai didn’t understand the words, but from the intensity of her voice, she felt as though she knew what happened. No doubt the poor child’s parents were now kindling on that fire outside.

“Shhhhhh…” Kon-Mai sat cross-legged on the ground with Tsiuri, bouncing her gently as she held her. She barely knew what to say, for both the language barrier and the situation at hand, but the child seemed content to simply be held for now. She just kept blowing quiet shushes next to the girl’s ear, and in the midst of her weeping, it seemed to calm her.

“Yo Konnie. Report.” Gili said over her comm. “You still alive?”

“I am.” She said quietly. “I have found a survivor. A child, her name is Tsiuri.”

“One is better than none!” Gili said happily. “You ever find what’s causing the fire?”

“Purifiers are causing the fire.” Kon-Mai growled.

“That’s it?”

“What do you mean that’s it? There are at least seven, maybe more!”

“I mean I expected there to be-” She broke off as the ground gave a shake. “...The fuck was that?”

Tsiuri let out a scream into Kon-Mai’s shoulder. “Uk’an! Monst’ri dabrunda!”

“What’s wrong, sweet one?” Kon-Mai hugged the little girl closer to her chest.

“She says the monster’s coming back.” Gili hissed. “Konnie, get out of there!”

“What monster?” Kon-Mai asked, gently shaking the child. “What’s coming?”

A roar from below shook the entire house. The roar of a Berserker.

“My diamond's clouded over where it used to shine like light, And the day keeps running faster into the arms of night... Stitches on the tapestry say, "Everything in time, Will find its way home again," But I'm tired of crying...”

Dhar-Mon rested his head in his hand and his elbow on the tiny table. The booth he sat in was slightly too small for him, but it was better than those bar stools that would no doubt give under his weight. The crowd today was small, but a group had still gathered to the sound of the Commander singing. It wasn’t exactly unusual: from what he heard she sang every weekend. And when she did, the soldiers flocked to her.

Senuna wore her hair up in a ponytail today, a bit like the way Jane styled hers. Instead of her uniform, she had “dressed” a ratty pink t-shirt that was full of moth-chewed holes, and some very old-looking blue jeans. She was also barefoot, to the chagrin of Bryni as she made extra sure that no one broke any glass on the floor.

“Hi Stranger.” He heard a familiar voice say, and Malinalli sat down in a chair across from him. She, too, had her hair in a ponytail, but the weight of her locks kept it down by her neck.

“Malinalli, you know me. I am no stranger.” Dhar-Mon said, looking genuinely worried.

“Oh, no, it’s a figure of speech.” Malinalli giggled. “Sorry.”

He harumphed and looked away, his blue skin turning purple. “It is alright…”

“Didn’t expect to see you in the bar, is what I meant. Come to watch the Commander, huh?” She turned around and looked at the Commander. “She looks like she’s having fun up there.”

“No Second Chances Don't knock on my door There won't be any answer I won't be here no more…”

The Commander had a smile on her face, but her voice dripped with a deep, profound sadness. Dhar-Mon saw a familiar look in her eyes as she met his gaze, only briefly.

“Yes…” He said softly. “Malinalli, how much do you know about the Commander?”

Malinalli seemed to almost freeze at the question. “...Um…” She turned back. “It’s kind of embarrassing but...not a lot.”

“That is not embarrassing. I did not know much about those I reported to in ADVENT.”

“I know, that’s why it’s embarrassing…” She tucked a strand of curly black hair behind her ear. “Humans are supposed to be…” She trailed off.

“Be what?”

“More...social. ADVENT is the one who locks all that information away, not us.” She looked back over her shoulder. “But I don’t even know the Commander’s last name.”

Dhar-Mon nodded. Most humans here went by their last name if they didn’t have a callsign. “Perhaps she has no surname.”

“Maybe…” Malinalli sighed and leaned on her palm, copying Dhar-Mon. “Why do you ask?”

He hesitated. Should he tell her what he’d heard on the radio? That Senuna had apparently been a singer renowned throughout the land? Or perhaps she already knew. “Her...singing is very…” What was the word? “Arousing.”

Malinalli gave him a weird look, and he immediately stammered.

“Nonono that is not correct. I meant...I am not-!”

“I assume you mean inspiring?” Malinalli giggled, her smile reaching her eyes.

“Yes. That.” He covered his face. “I am sorry, Malinalli.”

She reached over and grabbed his hand. “It’s fine. It was kind of hilarious~” She chuckled. “And you’re right. Her voice is...angelic.” She sighed wistfully. “It’s so...warm and familiar. Like when your mom sings you a lullaby.”

Dhar-Mon put his hand back on the table. “...I would not know that feeling.” He admitted. “I do not remember my mother...my human mother, that is.”

“...That makes two of us then.” She smiled sadly.

He looked up sadly. “I am sorry.”

“No, don’t be. I’m not the only orphan on board by any means.”

“...Do you know what happened to them?”

She shook her head. “I assume it was ADVENT…like most people here.” She sighed, running one finger along the wrinkles on his hand. “All I know was Dad was from Mexico, and Mom was some kind of European.”

“I am so sorry.” He said softly. “You...have no memories of them? At all?”

She pondered this for a minute. “...I remember my mom singing to me, and...when she leaned close, her hair would tickle my face. I liked that…” She stared at the table, seemingly lost. “Dad had a beard, his skin was dark and he smelled like fresh water…” She looked up. “And Donají said I must have my mother’s eyes, because she’s never seen a girl as dark as me with eyes this bright.”

“Donají?”

“The midwife for our tribe.” Malinalli replied. “She was the one who raised me, after my parents…” She shook her head. “After they disappeared, I suppose.”

“I see.” Dhar-Mon smiled. “She sounds like a kind woman.”

“She was.” Malinalli looked back over at the Commander. “She died, too.”

“...ADVENT?”

“Yep.” Malinalli grumbled. “Sorry, I-”

“Do not apologize, little phantom.” He scoffed. “This is ADVENT’s fault, not yours.”

She looked back at him, her eyes wide, and at first Dhar-Mon thought he’d said something wrong.

“This house we had together Might still be in its place But the rest of this is much too hard to face…”

Then she smiled. “...Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For saying that.” She whispered. “I’ve always known it’s true but...hearing someone else say it…” She nodded. “It feels validating.”

“I speak only the truth.” He chuckled.

“There'll be No Second Chance…” Senuna held that last note just a tad too long, and her voice broke.

With the child in her arms, the Shrinemaiden leapt from the window and onto the ground. Her breath in her throat and Tsiuri’s face pressed into her shoulder, Kon-Mai stood, pressing her back against the wall of the house, and closed her eyes, listening.

She did not have to listen long. A whole slew of noises hit her at once. The scream of Hassan as he charged down the hill, the shots from a Reaper’s rifle, a Berserker roaring. Tsiuri held onto her tighter, whimpering softly. “Deda...deda…”

“Hush, little one.” Kon-Mai absently stroked aside the child’s hair. “No harm shall come to you.” She pressed her comm. “Savitr. Are you there?”

“Mordenna, we have been drawn out!” He said, his voice tight and strained. “Where are you?”

“Behind the house. I have Tsiuri with me and cannot bring her into combat. I must get her to safety.”

“I will distract the troops.” He said. “That will give you time to get her to safety.”

“Where can she go?”

Savitr was silent for a moment. “Behind the ridge, on the right, there is a ravine. At the bottom, a cave. It’s small but it will be big enough for a child to hide within.”

Kon-Mai sighed in relief. “Thank you. I will join you soon.”

“We will hold them until you do.”

Kon-Mai pulled Tsiuri away from her shoulder and looked her in the eye. “I am here.” She whispered, not certain if the child would understand. “I will always protect you.”

The little one nodded, and instinctively, Kon-Mai pressed her lips to the top of her head. The action had her cold heart melting; something in her burned with the heat of deep anger, and yet happiness. She pressed Tsiuri tighter into her grasp and ran.

The Purifiers saw her, pointing her out and shouting in Etheric. The Berserker’s roar shook the ground. Kon-Mai was faster than them all, though, and she weaved in between the buildings and sparse trees until she saw the ravine and launched herself over the side. Sliding down the gravel on her boots, She came to a stop and crouched down.

The cave was small, like Savitr said: only big enough for a child. She began to let Tsiuri down but the girl hung onto her neck, whispering “Ara. Ara. Ara. Ნu mimat’oveb. Deda, nu mimat’oveb!”

Kon-Mai could sense the desperation in her voice, and hung onto her for a moment more. “Child, you must go. I cannot fight and hold you all at once.”

“Აr gamishva!” Tsiuri grasped Kon-Mai’s long, white braid, and one hand brushed her cheek. A deep, primal sadness welled up in the Chosen woman and she pulled the girl closer, as though she were her own.

“I will protect you.” She whispered. “But you must hide. Save yourself, child. I would rather it be me that dies.”

It took a moment, but Tsiuri’s grip loosened, and she crawled into the darkness of the hole. Her big brown eyes stared out at Kon-Mai.

“Აr mok’vde.” Tsiuri said with power in her tiny voice.

Kon-Mai stood up, bowed to her, and leapt out of the ravine, sword in hand.

“Well, I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happened to call…”

The Commander switched to another song; a slower one this time that had the soldiers getting into pairs, swaying with each other. Malinalli looked up, about to speak before she glanced slightly behind Dhar-Mon. “Oh…”

“What is it?” He asked.

“Um…” She put her hand up in a meek wave.. “...Vicky’s here. She doesn’t usually come out on weekends…”

He turned. There she stood, messy brown hair up in Micky-Mouse buns, big brown eyes red from crying, pale skin washed out by the light, he couldn’t help but growl at the sight of her, and that was when she turned and noticed him.

“What’s wrong?” Malinalli asked.

“It was her who joined us on the mission to rescue Zhang.” He said.

“Yeah, I know.” She put her hand down. “Her mentor Shamil died there.”

“Not just he. We all nearly died there.” He hissed. “She was tasked to attend to Colonel Zhang while we fought. Instead, she fascinated herself with Shamil’s corpse.”

Malinalli blinked, her dark skin going almost grey. “...Oh…”

“Yes. And worse still, Malinalli, she insulted my siblings.” He looked at the table. “Insisting that I would...leave them to die. That my love for them means nothing! They mean everything to me, Molly!”

“I know.” She reached out, and her touch calmed him in a way nothing else could. “Want me to distract her while you make an escape?” Malinalli asked.

“...No.” He shook his head. “Let her not spoil the event.”

“What if she wants to talk to you?” She asked. “Or me?”

“Did the Commander not eliminate her from the roster?” He chuckled. “She will not be a thorn in our side for long.”

Malinalli was silent, looking down at the table. With her nail, she picked at a piece of the wood. “Well…”

“Well what?” He asked.

“I uh…” She swallowed. “I kinda...I went to the Commander about that.”

“Oh?” He asked allusively. He was waiting for her to finish the thought before he spoke.

“I thought her termination was...unfair.” She said. “So I…”

“Malinalli.” He sighed. “She is leaving?”

“No…” She looked up. “I’m sorry, Dhar-Mon. I didn’t realize what she did on the mission.”

Dhar-Mon growled, his teeth bared but his gaze distinctively away from her.

“I’m sorry.” She said again. “I had no idea.”

He wanted to be mad at her. He really, really did. But when she let go of his hand, he reached for hers again.

“Why?” Was all he asked.

She seemed to seize up. “...Because I found her crying...” She whispered. “And...I want to believe she was sorry.”

“Do you feel good about your decision?” Was what he asked her next.

“Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks Oh and you brought me...something We both know what memories can bring... They bring diamonds and rust.”

“...I did.” She said, sitting up. “I did at the time, that is.”

“No longer?” He raised a brow.

“Look it’s...I don’t want to put the idea in people’s heads that they can abuse you and the others.” She ran her hand through her thick hair, pulling out her hair tie. “But, if the Chosen can change, why can’t a human? Vicky’s a cunt but...I feel like she needs another chance.”

Slowly, Dhar-Mon rose from the booth. “Let us test this. I shall confront her, and we shall see if she truly does deserve another opportunity.”

“You’ll do what?” She looked shocked.

He leaned on the table. “My siblings were hurt by the girl. I know you meant no harm, Malinalli, and you have a kind heart. But if she remains here, boundaries must be established.”

“...Okay.” She let go of him. “Just...don’t let it take over you.”

“It is too late for that.” He muttered as he walked to the door. Vicky stood there, her knees shaking as he got closer.

Finally they stood face to face, Dhar-Mon bearing his sharp teeth as he stared down at the girl that was less than half his height.

“What do you want?” He spat.

He could see the tears welling up in her eyes. Behind him, Senuna’s voice carried on the metal walls.

“Now I see you standing With leaves falling around And snow in your hair Now you're smiling out the window of that hotel Over Washington Square Our breath comes out white clouds Mingles and hangs in the air Speaking strictly for me We both could have died then and there…”

“I want to apologize.” She whispered, her voice so, so soft. He could barely hear it, and somehow it made him angrier.

“Speak up!” He demanded.

“I’m sorry.” She whimpered, trying to raise her voice. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for what I said to you, what I DID to you. I utterly failed, and you picked up the pieces of my mess…”

“You are right. You failed.” He crossed his arms. “You left a man to DIE.”

She flinched. “I know…”

“But worse still, what you did insinuate…” He spat. “That I do not love my brother and sister, THAT is SLANDER. At best!”

Vicky looked slightly shocked at this, but her gaze quickly returned to the floor.

“My siblings are all I have.” He said. “They are my blood. My kin. My family. Since leaving the Elders, I have been adrift, and I would have floundered if not for them. I awoke to them beside me. If asked, I would brave the depths of the Void for them.” He leaned down close to her. “I believe it is YOU who does not understand how to love, Victoria.”

She shook her head. “I loved Shammy…”

He stopped, blinking.

“Shammy was everything to me.” She wiped a tear away. “Shammy raised me.” She looked up. “My attitude got him killed, and I’m so sorry it almost killed you. I’m so sorry I ever suggested you didn’t love them…” She stopped to cough. “I’d just never...lost someone like that before…”

Dhar-Mon’s expression softened. “This is a war, Victoria.”

“I know.” Her voice was quiet, filled with resignation. In a way, he knew her pain. His siblings had “died” once before, as well. The empty sadness he felt had only been bearable because of his faith in the Elders. Vicky did not have that.

Senuna’s voice cut through his trance again.

“Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Oh, then give me another word for it You were always so good with words And at keeping things vague.”

He thought back to his stronghold. To the people in the City Center. To the town of Guardia, and the hundreds of bodies still rotting there, because of his own priests. Because he led them there.

Vicky sniveled before him, and as she looked up, he saw just a hint of that blue child who would prostrate himself before demons to win their favor.

He had made mistakes, too.

He sighed. “I...accept your apology.”

For the first time, he saw her genuinely smile up at him. “Really?”

He sighed. “Yes. But, you must earn back the trust we once placed in you.”

Vicky nodded. “I’ll do anything you need me to. I mean, I’m just a squaddie now so I guess I can’t do much anymore but...anything in my power!”

“Here is something in your power.” He smirked. “You are not holier than us. Stop acting as though you are.”

She chuckled a bit. “Yeah I...I was a bitch, wasn’t I?”

“In my mind, you still are.” He insisted. “Prove to me otherwise.”

She straightened up and saluted him. “I will, sir!”

“Good.” He couldn’t help but chuckle. “I was like you once, Victoria, and it almost destroyed me. Do not fall victim to such temptations again.” He leaned toward her. “And never, ever insult my siblings. We can be your friends, but betray us like that again, and we shall be your most dangerous enemy.”

Vicky looked puzzled at that last part. “...Friends…?”

He blinked and pulled away. “Yes. You do have friends, child. Don’t you?”

She stared forward for a moment. “...Not really.”

He furrowed his brow. “Who did you converse with outside of missions? Did you not have anyone to share your space with?”

“I’d go talk with Shammy in the lab.” She said. “I’d keep going even now but...they won’t let me back in. They said I’m not welcome now that he’s gone.”

Dhar-Mon let his arms drop. “Oh. You pathetic excuse for a human.”

“Yeah.” She squeaked. “I know.” She looked back at Malinalli, who smiled at them worriedly.

Dhar-Mon sighed. “...Malinalli.” He called softly. He nodded towards Vicky and raised an eyebrow. With that action, her face lit up into a smile.

“‘Cause I need some of that vagueness now It's all coming back too clearly Oh I loved you dearly And if you're offering me diamonds and rust I've already paid!”

The Berserker let out a roar that shook the trees. If anyone had been alive to hear it, it would have killed them where they stood. As it was, Hassan and Gili seemed to be barely standing their ground.

Thankfully the two hybrids were used to this sort of thing.

Kon-Mai, katana in her hand, charged forward into the mass of Purifiers standing between her and the beast, and was promptly blasted in the face with a stream of fire. She blocked her face with her sleeve but the heat still singed her hair and burned her skin, and she hissed.

She heard Savitr scream her name, but as she tried to stand, another outpouring of fire caught her unprepared, and she fell back to the ground. She protected her face, but her hand suffered greatly and she felt the white hot pain of a burn stretch up the length of her left arm. At least it wasn’t her sword arm.

Hassan let out a bellow and rushed forward into the fray, his purple swords glimmering in the fading light. The Purifiers turned their flames on him, and the Berserker rose up behind them and let out a roar. As it slammed it’s fists into the ground again, Kon-Mai bit her jacket and dug her fingers into the ground, pulling herself away.

Hassan sprinted past the soldiers in front, all the way to the back, and let out a scream as he leapt through the air, honing in on one unlucky Purifier. “STAND BAAAACK!”

Kon-Mai covered her head, just as Hassan sliced through one of the Purifiers, his Templar blade sparking in the light of the flame. A surge of heat wafted over them, and then the fire exploded upward and outward, causing a chain reaction. Three more Purifiers burst into an explosion of flame, and the Berserker let out a scream as it caught fire as well.

Kon-Mai was not fooled, however. This would not hurt the Berserker as much as it would just anger it. And by the sound of it, it was very angry.

She jumped to her feet and watched as the Berserker swatted the Purifiers to the side. Hassan’s charred body flew a few feet and landed in the burning grass, his eyes locked open in a blank stare. Kon-Mai drew her sword, her right arm still good, and took up a stance against the Berserker. The beast met her eyes, huffed, and charged at her.

Sword in hand, Kon-Mai rushed forward. She slid under the Berserker’s heavy fist and stabbed upward. Her sword slammed into the hard plating under the jawline, cracking the bone plating and bringing the beast crashing forward, almost crushing her underneath. She rolled out from under the Berserker as it screeched in pain, and once again nearly demolished Kon-Mai with another strike to the ground.

The dirt shook, and Kon-Mai tried to get to her feet but slipped again, landing on her bad hand and screaming in pain. She scooted away, and immediately saw a flame coming at her from the left and rolled away again. The surviving Purifiers were on their feet again and coming in, surrounding her.

Perhaps her poor angle contributed, but there was no escape here she could see. She jumped to her feet and began to run in a random direction, knowing it was cowardly but just needing to get away. Another jet of flame, and this time the ground at her feet caught alight and she stumbled into the wall of a timber house. Shaking, she bared her teeth in a snarl.

The Berserker, jaw still shattered and dragging in the dirt, let out a screech and went to charge again, not caring of the Purifiers in it’s way. Kon-Mai took a breath and closed her eyes.

Then a flash of purple cut across the darkness. Screams of Etheric filled the air as the Purifiers flew off to the side, opening up her escape. Kon-Mai took the moment and dashed to the right, and there she saw him.

There was Savitr, with his hands outstretched, psionic energy flowing from his fingers as he glared up at the Berserker before him. It turned, roaring at him, and he dove to the side as it’s huge mitt swiped at him. Rolling to one side, he held up a hand, a bubble of purple suddenly encasing him.

“Stasis…” Kon-Mai whispered. “A priest…”

The beast was not done, and while it had been slowed, it was not deterred. This time, though, Kon-Mai was ready once again. She held up her hand, closing her eyes and calling forth her own psionic power. A large, purple star the size of her hand landed, spinning, in her palm. She raised her arm and, barely aiming, threw it.

Just as Savitr emerged from his stasis, the purple star flew over his head, wrapped around, and stuck the Berserker in the side of the head. It stumbled and roared as it staggered backward, and Savitr turned to the woman it had come from.

“Mordenna!” He called to her. He raised his arm, a purple glimmer on his wrist.

Kon-Mai nodded, kneeling in a running stance just as the creature ripped the shuriken from it’s head, the weapon fading in a shower of purple sparkles.

As Kon-Mai dashed forward, Savitr knelt into a crouch and held up his arm over his head. Upon his forearm, a beautifully decaled shield bloomed like a flower. She took a small leap into the air, landing on his shield, and with all his strength, he hoisted her into the air.

She flew, landing on the Berserker, digging her sword into the tense muscles on it’s back and slicing open what armor was left intact. Her sword cut deep as she slid down it’s body and landed in a crouch, the creature turning on her once again, covered in rage and blood.

It was now or never, but her legs had locked in exhaustion and pain, and she watched the fleshy beast prepare to bring her down

A shot from the ravine echoed through the valley, silencing all who heard it. The beast froze, it’s muscles tensing, and then it slowly fell backward, Savitr scrambling away to avoid it.

Kon-Mai stared down at the beast’s broken body, only just awake and ready to kill her. Footsteps coming up behind her caused her to look, only to see Gili come sprinting down the ravine towards them. “Konnie, thank GOD! Are you ok? Yeah you are, you’re fine. Hassan! Where’s Hassan?!” She called.

Kon-Mai let out a sigh of sorrow. “He is…”

Gili’s face fell, and she nearly buckled beside Kon-Mai. A hand to her face, she let out a quiet sob, so quickly you could have missed it in a blink. But as soon as it started, she straightened up and took a breath. “I’m going to get the body. Savitr, patch up Konnie’s hand. I think she burned it.”

Kon-Mai watched Gili slowly wade off into the sea of bodies, finally stopping where Hassan lay and falling on her knees beside him.

The Shrinemaiden pried her eyes away, and turned to look at Savitr as he crouched beside her. He was purposefully avoiding her gaze, but as he finally looked up, she smiled.

“Thank you.” She whispered.

“For what?” He asked softly.

She smiled knowingly.

“And the winds will cry, and many men will die, And all the waves will bow down… To the Loreley!”

Senuna took a deep bow as her set finished, and Dhar-Mon clapped loudly, his giant hands generating the most noise of all the crowd. It still amazed him how well she sang, how godly her voice was, and he figured perhaps it was not so odd she used to be a singer. By the sparkle in her eyes, it certainly brought her joy.

He heard footsteps behind him, and looked up to see Gur-Rai was also matching his clapping with his own. “Wonderful, wonderful. What are we cheering for?”

“Commander Senuna.” Dhar-Mon sighed. “What do you need, Gur-Rai?”

“What, I can’t drop in to say hello?” He winked at Malinalli, who rolled her eyes.

“Nice try, Abe Sapien.” She stuck her tongue out. “Go play with the other girls.”

“Maybe I will.” He scoffed. “At least they appreciate all this~” He ran a hand down his chest.

Malinalli chuckled. “What brings you here? Want a drink?”

“Only if you’re buying.”

“They don’t cost…” She sighed. “Whatever. Dhar-Mon, will you save my seat?”

“Of course.” He pulled her vacant chair closer to him as she got up and went to the bar. That didn’t stop Gur-Rai from leaning on the back of said chair, though.

“Why are you here, Brother?” Dhar-Mon asked. “You have...that look.”

“This is not a look. This is just my beautiful face~” Gur-Rai chuckled. “But actually, I am waiting to speak to Senuna.”

“Oh? About what?”

“About our resident Sectoid.” He winked. “And his first mission~”

Dhar-Mon pretended not to look interested, but he was poor at hiding such things. “And...what IS his first mission.”

“A simple scouting call.” He sat on the edge of the small table. “A small distress signal blinks from the darkness of the Kakamega forest in Kenya. The beacon was quite alien looking.”

His brother smiled as Dhar-Mon now turned his full attention to him. “A ship? One of the Elders fleet?”

“Possibly.” Gur-Rai nodded. “It seems we may have caused an exodus, Brother.”

Dhar-Mon scoffed. “The Elders’ grip on the mind is unrelenting...it takes much to overcome it.”

“Well you did.” Gur-Rai patted his back. “You’re an inspiration, my dear brother.”

“I am no such thing.”

“Don’t be that way.” Gur-Rai kissed the top of Dhar-Mon’s head and grabbed the drink out of Malinalli’s hand as she returned. “Well I’m off to see the wizard. Catch you kids later~”

Malinalli started after him as he sauntered right up to the stage. “Why is he…?”

“Like that?”

“Yeah.”

Dhar-Mon chuckled. “He’s a special one.”

The garage was a scary place. Kon-Mai had wanted to take Tsiuri into her arms as soon as they had returned to the Avenger, but Bradford had intercepted her. She had only half listened to his praise for her as she searched amidst the crowed, and by the time she finally got away, Tsiuri was gone. In her moment of deep, panicked disappointment, she felt a presence behind her.

She turned. “Savitr.” She said, swallowing her sadness.

“Are you alright?” He asked, his yellow eyes worried.

“Aside from the burn on my hand, I am quite fine.” She took a breath and smiled.

“But you’re crying.”

“...I am not.” She whispered, her hand moving to her cheek. Sure enough it was wet, and the water felt salty. She took a deep, shaky breath. “My eyes hurt from the smoke. They are...sensitive.”

“Was the battle quite stressful? I often get scared-”

“No.” She snapped. “I’m sorry I...I’m distracted.” She pressed a finger to her temple. “It was a tremendous battle, was it not? You were quite formidable.”

Savitr almost seemed to blush. “What I did was nothing, Morde-”

“Kon-Mai.” She snapped. “Call me Kon-Mai.”

He looked frightened for a moment, but seemed to realize her intentions. “...Kon-Mai, what I did was nothing compared to you.”

Kon-Mai met his eyes, hers full of surprise. “I would beg to disagree.” Her voice dropped low as she leaned close. “I did not know you were a priest.”

He didn’t pull away from her. “It is not a past I am proud of.” He admitted.

“Why ever not?”

“Are you proud of the things you did in the name of the Elders?” He asked, his yellow eyes meeting her magenta ones. “No, you would not have left if you were.”

“And yet you use your power.” She crossed her arms. “I suppose it is a serviceable tool.”

Savitr did not respond. Instead he just studied her face, almost as though he were examining an ancient sculpture. “I have kept very little from that time. Only my powers. And this.” He patted his chest.

“Yes. A strong heart is needed to survive on the battlefield.”

“That’s a wonderful sentiment.” He chuckled. “But it is not my heart.” From under a flap on his armor, he drew back the cloth and undid something shining in the low garage light. He handed it to her. “Please, be careful with it.”

Kon-Mai took it from his hand carefully. It was smaller than her palm: a gold pin in the shape of a disk, with many points rising from it. The disk in the middle had a smiling face etched into it.

“...It’s the sun.”

“Yes.” Savitr nodded. “I obtained this broach from an old man in Suriname; a homeless preacher who was lamenting the death of his only daughter...at the hands of blue men.”

Kon-Mai met his eyes. “I assume he did not give it to you.”

Savitr, once again, lowered his gaze. “No. It was all that survived of his body.” He said. “But his words, his voice, stuck with me. And his words.” He closed his eyes. “Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ, tát savitr váreṇyaṃ, bhargo devasya dhīmahi dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt.” He spoke almost as though he was in a trance, and though she had never heard it, it sounded familiar.

“It is a mantra?”

“The Gayatri Mantra. A dedication to the sun.” Savitr smiled. “And so, when I broke free, when I escaped...I knew my name.”

Kon-Mai ran her thumb over the pin once again, the smiling face of the sun staring back at her.

“...Do you know what happened to the child?” She asked. “Tsiuri? I wanted to…” She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, exactly.

“She went with Gili.” He said. “Gili is taking her to the Reapers. She speaks Georgian, she’d be a good mother to the girl.”

Kon-Mai felt her heart drop, and her whole body felt like lead. “...And the child...went willingly…?”

Savitr nodded. “She was very overwhelmed. I’m sure she would have loved to say goodbye first had she known.” He smiled. “She seemed quite fond of you.”

“I had hoped she was.” She handed the pin back to him, her fingers lingering on his for just a moment longer than normal. For her at least.

(I was running into a dilemma where some of the chapters that were very important story-wise were also ones that people might have trouble with due to their content. I’ve decided that I’m gonna include a summary of the chapter at the end, at least on all the chapters with content warnings, but maybe on all chapters regardless. Let me know what you think of this system!

The chapter begins with Kon-Mai and Savitr meeting for their mission together, that Senuna seemed to set up. They meet Gili the Reaper and Hassan the Templar, and make their way to a Haven in Georgia that was destroyed by Purifiers. Kon-Mai meets a human child, Tsiuri, and rescues her, forming a bond with the child before hiding her away so Kon-Mai can fight the ADVENT threat. Hassan is killed after meleeing a Purifier in an act of self-sacrifice, and in defending Kon-Mai from a raging Berserker, Savitr is revealed to have been a priest. On the Avenger, Senuna performs for the soldiers while Malinalli and Dhar-Mon discuss the past. Malinalli mentions the village she grew up in, and how her parents disappeared. Halfway through the set, the disgraced medic Vicky shows up. Dhar-Mon goes to confront her, and she apologizes for her deplorable behavior. It’s an apology he tentatively accepts.

The songs used in this chapter were Loreley and No Second Chance by Blackmore’s Night, and Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez.)

Archive: https://chosenstories.tumblr.com/

#xcom #xcom 2 #xcom 2 war of the chosen #xcom assassin #chosen assassin #xcom au

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breezeinmonochromenight · 5 years

Text

Eh, fuck it. I’m goin’ in (by request).

In head actual canon, Vergil is written as a quintessential anti-villain, but later on also displays quite a few of the traits of a Byronic hero.

Anti-Villains usually have mostly good, well-meaning, or reasonable end goals (e.g. seeking power to protect themselves). However, their means of getting to those goals are pretty dark — usually anging from undesirable to evil. Alternatively, their goals may even be selfish or have long-term consequences for others that they don't care about, but they usually do have some good in them and would typically team up with the hero if their goals/means to achieve those goals didn't conflict with those of the hero or the hero’s ideals. (e.g. totally kill Arkham for being a traitor and a clown - not necessarily in the correct order - but still want to use your fancy new rotating Monopoly property to gain unspeakable power).

Byronic Heroes have strong passions regarding their ideals, but are nonetheless still deeply flawed individuals who may act in ways which are socially reprehensible because it is contrary to mainstream society’s beliefs. Byronic heroes are on their own side and have their own set of beliefs that they will not bow for. They will not change those beliefs for anyone. A Byronic hero is a character whose internal conflicts are heavily romanticized and one who ponders and wrestles with their beliefs and the struggle that comes with those beliefs. Vergil does exactly this by being a jade-colored glasses type cynic that has a dark and troubled past that he was shaped by. He even has the romantic element of this trope in the form of the mysterious tryst that produced his son.

Both of these are well-used tropes that can be used to add a lot of dimension to a character. And in this case, it is, and this is why people are interested in Vergil. The writers of DMC have pretty much stuck to this characterization to different degrees to reflect Vergil’s experiences — with him going from a straight-faced, no-nonsense, arrogant teenager with a ton of repressed emotional baggage in DMC3 to a slightly softer, more sarcastic version of himself in DMC5 that’s willing to win the age-old rivalry by default... a thing Vergil would never have done in DMC3. Ever. If one was to actually shut up and pay attention, they might pick up on just how big a deal these tiny little changes in behavior actually are as emotionally repressed as Vergil.

In the canon script, Vergil is actually a bit of a fucking brat in DMC3, and does not really give a shit about anything except his pursuit of power, and he pays dearly for the decisions he makes he makes as a jilted teenager at the end of the game. He cares about only himself at the beginning of DMC5 because he is finally fucking free of his Nelo Angelo prison, but he is dying and he is desperate and desperate people do desperate things.

Whenever I see a very daft woman-child with clearly lot of hang-ups attacking people in fandoms and screeching nonsense, I often wonder ‘what went wrong?’. A weak sense of belonging is correlated to depression, and groups with shared interests, more often than not, do wonders for mental health. I also notice that women-children like this tend to make fun of other women and men (and they are men if they are in a certain age range - 18+ generally - manhood is not defined by who they are attracted to) and non-binary folks for ‘fawning’ over a character, I wonder just how fucking deeply sexually repressed you have to be in order to be this angry over other people expressing affection/shared interests in a fictional person.

I’m reminded of the time they mentioned those 3 background characters ‘fangirling’ over Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, because he was traditionally handsome guy and they, like the first time viewer, didn’t know just how awful he actually was. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the original topic, at all, so I also find myself wondering this person is projecting their anger issues onto random fictional characters again, and why they seem to have such a grudge against women or anyone they feel is completion/threat.

I’m also reminded that they clearly don’t understand Fight Club, either, or they wouldn’t be emulating Tyler Durden and using snowflake to describe both real people and fictional characters. They would get that the movie is a warning against hyper-masculinity and that, in calling things ‘snowflake’ in true Tyler Durden fashion, they create a very special type of irony where they externalize an idea about not being unique in order to create their own unique identity in opposition.

I also wonder why they mention the whole Punisher thing at all, and just assume they’re raging because because their Twitter got suspended for death threats to politicians/harassing game devs/getting destroyed in political debates by actual fucking racists and Neo-Nazis that should have been fucking cake to clown on, because all this person can do is spew the same 5-7 insults and threats despite these people being legitimately horrible people. Then I move on, because this is all fucking ridiculous as is, and I realize that my thoughts are already gonna be long enough.

Lastly, I wonder what clown fuckers and monster fuckers have to do with Vergil in this context? Like at all? Regardless of my own personal preferences, I only see someone who is angry over other people’s sexual preferences and attraction because they don’t understand their own and going off on weird, unrelated tangents because of it. It makes me wonder if they would be angry if I expressed interest in space Nazis who are not attractive by conventional means and go about being complicit to mass genocide on a planetary scale while also actually committing patricide?

Christ on a Bike.

*Sigh* I have to do all the heavy lifting, don’t I?

Might really is everything (to Vergil, because he sees it as a means to an end and the only to avoid being hurt again). And he takes this way, way too far and pays for it dearly.

Some people are too arrogant and too stupid to look past their own nose* and try to understand that people can make cataclysmically stupid decisions when they get pushed too far into a corner and see no other way out.

The way I see it, Vergil and Dante were already abnormal children that had a severely fucked up childhood — one that was defined by a horrific event they experienced from two separate, very different perspectives. Children are incredibly impressionable and their brains are like sponges — I could not imagine being scared and alone with something after me and having no one come look for me. It would scar me no matter what the explanation was. It’s reasonable believe that a 7-8 year old child who experiences something like that would grow up looking for a way to ensure it can never happen to them again, all while festering feelings of jealously toward a sibling who was shown (inadvertent) partiality on top of anger/betrayal because they didn’t understand why mom didn’t love them enough to come help. Kids can’t process trauma like adults, and this kind of shit mentally fucks children up in the real world for a lifetime. Traumatized minds don’t just ‘bounce back’ from something like that when given new evidence on a traumatic event — brains function like computer processors, but they aren’t just fixable like them. I’m sure if one was to actually look, they might actually see a fairly poignant message in all this.

People who are too arrogant often turn out not to be as smart as they think they are. If you’re excessively confident in yourself, you’re not going to listen to other people. (Note: Good job! this is ironic as fuck but the one line I didn’t have to edit!)

The only time Vergil smiles (& it’s a small, but genuine one — a grimace is literally the opposite of a smile and involves a frown, clenched teeth, etc.) is when he’s fighting Dante. This is because it is something he finally knows again — something that’s not part of a ~20 year long personal-made hell inside a suit of Angelo armor. There’s no real heat or tension in their DMC5 fights, and it’s comforting thing for both of them. Judging them for working out their shit this way is moronic because a.) they’re half-devil and don’t follow human social norms and b.) it’s a work of fiction anyway, you fucking numpty.

We don’t know if Vergil has remorse for the events he’s involved in because Vergil would not outwardly show remorse for raising the Temen-ni-gru or Temen-ni-gru 2: Horticulture Edition — that would be out-of-character for him. Any fan of the series should know this. However, if V is anything to go by (and he should be, because, y’know.. 👀), then yes, Vergil likely is remorseful.

The Abusive Parents trope is played with between Vergil and Nero, both with the loss of Nero’s arm and Vergil’s involuntary 20+ year absence because of his ownstubbornness and destructive decisions. Vergil did not know he even has a son and is emotionally constipated anyway, and Nero’s a hair-trigger hothead that wears his heart on his sleeve more than he is (probably even) aware of. Nero’s probably gonna be way too similar to teenaged Dante for Vergil’s tastes, and they’re gonna clash a lot, which creates drama intended to be entertaining for the audience.

Nothing says “I have fully missed the point” and “holy shit what went wrong in my life?” quite like someone arguing the same poorly researched 5-7 takes they have been arguing for like 6 months now on multiple social media sites.

I saw this one Youtube commenter a little while back and I almost spit out my drink... I knew some people that didn’t like DMC5 were obsessively angry to the point of being totally fucking mental about people liking the game, but arguing in YouTube comments? Holy fucking shit that is another level of feral (and not the fun kind). I’d describe this person as a “cuck” or “bootlicker” but then I realize I’m not like 12 and don’t say the n-word on Xbox live, and that those insults don’t make sense anyway.

And this confusing shit, making me wonder what fucking game this person was playing?:

If one is going to use a quote to end something, like, say, a legitimate character critique that is not steeped in the bias of their opinion, it makes the most sense to use a quote from something/someone like an objectively important literary work or author. Since Vergil is a Literary Boi™ and there may be “sci-fi / horror fangirls” reading this, I’ll throw a bone out to ‘em (since we’re at the end of this dog walk) and use a quote from Guy de Maupassant’s Le Hora et autres novelles fantastiques:

“A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”

For the unfamiliar: Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is often considered the father of the modern short story, and used pessimistic and disillusioned terms to depict the lives and destinies and interactions of the people and society as a whole in his stories. His short stories Le Hora and Diary of a Madman inspired the 1963 Vincent Price horror movie of the same name as the latter. Maupassant’s later life was heavily characterized by self-isolation and paranoia, and he penned his own epitaph before he attempted to slit his own throat with a letter opener and died in an asylum at age 42:

“J’ai tout convoité, et je n’ai joui de rien.”

I will let whoever reads this translate, and think, on that.

—

(And no, no sources cited section because I’ve never been a particularly religious bitch.)

*It’s an idiom, don’t even try to spin that shit as anti-Semitic you absolute fucking loon.

#Long post #Dmc Vergil #DmC Dante #dmc #Devil May Cry #Devil May Cry 5 #DMC5 #Dante #Vergil #thephantomporg84 #derelict stranger

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happy-haunts · 4 years

Text

Captain Blood (pt.2)

CAPTAIN BLOOD Pt. 2

Chapter one | Constance pt.1 : Constance pt.2

Chapter two | Mister Topper pt.1 : Mister Topper pt.2

Chapter three | Madame Leota pt.1 : Madame Leota pt.2

Chapter four | The Hostess

Chapter five | Captain Blood pt.1 : Captain Blood pt.2

Chapter six | Emily DeClaire pt.1 : Emily DeClaire pt.2 : Emily DeClaire pt.3

Chapter seven | Finale

She grabbed her skirts and turned away from me, sliding her bare foot over the ground in a half circle, looking over her shoulder at me with a mischievous grin, I sighed and watched as she began a solo tango- but you know what they say about tangos? It takes two.

I slid in behind her and spun her around, we twisted and slid across the cobblestone, I leaned her over my arm and swung her just over the street and then she was pressed back against my chest as we looked into each others eyes - our chests heaving.

“Now may I get down to business?” She rolled her eyes and slipped past my arms, walking down the street- she looked back to me.

“Are you coming? Captain business?” I came up beside her as we walked. “I swear, first Mister Topper and now you, why is everyone so concerned with business? There is a whole world staring all of you in the face and yet you choose to subject yourself to one place.” I chuckled as I listened to her rant,

“I take it you’re used to traveling with the caravan then?” She looked to me, confused.

“No, but I would if I could…” she looked longingly at the stars, “Can you imagine? They’ve probably been to Spain… England… China?” She held herself and twirled as she walked.

“I can see why the Mayor wants to meet you.” I smiled, but her upbeat attitude fell as soon as I mentioned him. “I have to say it was rather simple putting together who the canary was, I mean … yellow dress?”

“What? The Mayor is looking for me?” She was becoming panicked, “Please, you can’t tell him you saw me out here.”

“Whoa, whoa calm down - I already told him I wasn’t interested in bird hunting some gypsy for him.”

“I’m not a gypsy.” Emily whispered, “I live here, in this town.” I can honestly say I was rather shocked by that considering what normal person walks around barefoot?

“Well you’ve caught my interest, a lady from the town that dances with gypsies, dances with pirates, and is sought after by the most powerful man in town… well second now that I’m here.” I puffed up my chest and hoped she would be impressed.

“I’m flattered Captain, but I am already seeing someone.” I deflated my chest.

“Well could you at least do me the honor of escorting you home? Wouldn’t want you running into any undesirables.”

“Oh no?” Emily giggled and linked an arm with me, “I would like it very much to walk home with you, Captain.”

“Please, Call me William.”

❧

It was easy to establish myself in the town as a wealthy aristocrat seeing as my parents had attempted to groom me into the lifestyle for my entire childhood, and I already had all the treasure I could possibly ask for so I could look the part as well with minimal effort.

I was invited to several different parties - all of which were a means of gaining a higher status in the community, it was hilarious to attend such parties because I absolutely loved messing with the upper-class to see what it was they would do to keep their status.

I can recall one evening where I was entertaining and a group of ladies had gathered about me while one tall glass of blonde stood back - looking rather bored I must admit. The ladies were all asking me about how my skin was so perfectly smooth and I attempted to win the attention of the blonde by toying with the girls a bit.

“Oh I went to see a painter about my skin.”

“A painter?”

“Yes, you see I asked him to paint a portrait of myself, something that made me look radiant.”

“How did that help?”

“Well I took that portrait to a witch-doctor and he cast a spell on it to make me look like that forever, the portrait is in my parlor.” I gestured behind me and surprisingly the girls weren’t appalled by the joke I made in such poor taste.

“What was the painter’s name that you commissioned?”

“Was it that Cavanaugh girl that lived here?”

“No I’ll bet it was Eddy, he is so talented.”

I turned my attention back to the blonde, her blue eyed gaze had settled onto me now but as soon as our eyes met she rolled hers.

“If you can excuse me ladies.” I moved through the girls and slid beside the blonde. “I couldn’t help but notice your doubt in how I treat my skin, William Gracey, and you are?” I took her hand - kissing her knuckles.

“Constance Harper.” She groaned and rolled her eyes again, “Married.”

“Ah, no wonder you’re onto me, married women always know better. Especially happily married women.” Her eyes began wandering over the dance floor, I had to observe closer to notice. “Unless you aren’t happily married? Mrs. Harper?” She looked to me quickly and straightened.

“I am perfectly happy thank you very much Mister Gracey.”

“Well I was just thinking if you were then you would be wearing your wedding ring.”

“My Husband went missing, if you must know.” She avoided my gaze, “And I am assuming the worst - so is my mother.” I followed her gaze to see an older woman talking with a few gentlemen and pointing back to Constance.

“I see, well then what are you doing tonight Miss Constance?”

“Not joining you.” She gave a tired sigh.

“My that hurt, did you have someone else planned for this evening perhaps a nice gentleman?” I prodded and gave a playful smile, “Or a nice girl?” She looked at me in a panic and slapped me across the face.

“You are out of line!” I rubbed my cheek as I looked at her in shock.

“It was only a bit of fun, I apologize if I struck a nerve.” Constance sucked in her breath as she composed herself, giving a small nod.

“I understand but you will forgive me if I don’t find any of your jokes that entertaining.”

“Aw, even the painting joke?”

“Even the painting joke.”

“Well then I think I’ve run out of my best material.”

“So who is it?” She had her arms crossed while she looked me up and down.

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“The girl, you have no interest in me or any of these ladies here, I can tell by your lack of remorse- you poke fun at us no matter if it is making fun of us or not.”

“Well I didn’t think I was an open book until now.” I laughed, but Constance remained straight-faced, I cleared my throat. “I suppose there is a … um … other love.”

“How did she reject you?”

“She didn’t!” I said it louder than I intended, a couple people turned their gaze on us. “She… I … We were separated.”

“I see, so she has moved on but you haven’t.” I could feel my lips tightening into a thin line, she was trying to get under my skin … And it was working.

“It doesn’t much matter really, say I’ve been talking to the mayor and he says you have a local legend? The Canary?” Constance’s cheeks turned red and she shrugged her shoulders in response. “Surely you’ve heard of her? Apparently she’s really starting something in this town?”

“Yes I know of her, she’s …She’s just a very kind girl that’s all, regardless if anyone else is nice to her.”

“And what makes you say that?”

“Because, she seems to get along quite well with the Haberdasher from what I understand? The town says that she is constantly going in and out of his shop.”

“Really? Are they courting perhaps?”

“Please, she wouldn’t be interested in someone like you.” Constance snorted and shook her head to me, “I think you should stick to a girl who doesn’t see through all of … this.” She gestured to all of me and walked away.

I made a mental note to make time to visit the Haberdasher- you know just to see if he was right for Emily? Not that I was bothered by him, not bothered at all, not that I was really in love with emily either- no way.

Not at all.

❧

I stood before the Haberdashery now, a little hole in the wall shop with a sign hanging out front in the shape of a hat … No text on the sign but I suppose that customers could figure it out themselves.

Not that I was being critical or anything.

Just that it could be better.

I stepped inside and caught the yellow dress of Emily in the back where the Haberdasher himself was working on a hat, she had picked out a ribbon and held it against the velvet material as the Haberdasher turned and kissed her.

I cleared my throat to let them know I was inside before it got too involved.

“William!” Emily grinned and hurried over to me, giving me a big hug.

“Well Hello there! I was just coming to order a hat but it is lovely to see you little one.”

“So this is William.” The man working on the hat now stood behind Emily as he cleaned his hands with a rag, his brown eyes looked me up and down suspiciously.

“William this is Mister Topper!” She placed her hands on her cheeks as she blushed. “We’re courting.”

“I could kind of guess.” I chuckled.

“Emily has told me alot about you, Mister Gracey, forgive me if I don’t trust you since you have a background of piracy.”

“Emily, did you let in Mister Topper on my secret?” She gave a small shrug.

“I can’t help it! I can’t keep secrets from him.” I couldn’t be frustrated, not to mention it was bound to get out sometime while I was here.

“And to think I got to meet the famous Captain Blood?” Mister Topper chuckled, “You’re alot more scrawny than I expected.”

“Well you’re much older than I expected, the town holds you in such high regards Mister Topper.”

“Why don’t you order a hat then Captain, and I can show you what I can do?” I cocked an eyebrow in response to him, this old man had a spark to him.

“Oh yes! What kind of hat did you want?” Emily was sitting on his workbench in the back while kicking her feet. “I think a nice traditional black top hat?”

“Perhaps, I would like one with wildflowers on the rim though.” At the mention I saw Mister Topper stiffen, he worked his jaw a bit.

“Flowers are usually a fashion worn by ladies.”

“What does that matter? I’m sure it will look wonderful in your hands Hatty!”

“It’s Topper.”

“That’s what I said, Hatty.” I nudged the man as he wrote down my order in his little journal. “If that’s all I think I’ll be on my way, but both of you are invited to the mansion - it’s usually my turn to host the parties on the third Thursday of the month.” I paused and flickered my gaze to Emily still seated happily on Topper’s work bench. “But both of you can show up anytime, you will always have a place at my table.” I looked back to Topper who seemed to soften a bit at my mention.

“We will keep that in mind, thank you Mister Gracey.”

“We’ll try to stop by William!” Emily waved, “Take care of yourself an you had better stay out of trouble!”

I stepped outside where things began to get a bit more complicated, it seemed that my brother Vincent sent a gypsy woman here to get me to visit him in New Orleans, it was a good thing I had run into her since the Mayor was about to throw her in jail by the look of his blood pressure. I quickly took her in and found her a place inside the mansion.

❧

The next few weeks consisted of Leota and I getting to know one another, but it was the day she read the mayor in one of her sessions that really caught my attention.

“Wow, I’m the only one who can get the old man’s face that red.” I called from my front door. “What did you tell him you saw?”

“I saw his truest desire.” she stated matter of factly.

“Well whatever you guessed - it hit close to home.” I took Leota’s table and followed her back to her wagon as I began putting her things away.

“I don’t guess, he was after a young girl’s heart and kissed her while she was gathering flowers.” she reached back to me from her wagon to take her table.

“Gathering flowers…?” I mumbled, “What was she wearing?” Leota rolled her eyes and leaned on her wagon before me- arms crossed.

“It hardly matters what she was wearing, he had no right to touch such a young girl like that.”

“T-that’s not what I meant!” I turned red and ran my hand through my hair. “You know what never mind, do you need help with anything else?”

“That should be all of it… William let me give you a reading, I’m curious to know what dirty deeds you have resting inside here.” she poked my chest making me cock an eyebrow to her, but I rolled my eyes and held out my palms.

“Alright but hurry up, dinner is ready and I don’t want my roast to be cold.”

she placed her hands on mine and closed her eyes, I felt a little shiver go up my spine which I assume was unrelated, curses and magic weren’t real as much as he world wanted it to be.

Once she came back to reality she was smiling (shocking really).

“You knew the girl in black!” She was so excited, she wanted to know all about her and what the Mayor had done or if I knew anything about it, she wanted to know about my days of piracy as well, and she also had the gall to threaten me.

“You know…” I remember telling her after a couple glasses of wine, “I got this B by pissing off the Pope himself, he thought even when I died I would have this scar to show God that I was unworthy of Heaven.”

“You pissed off the Pope?!” Leota cackled and leaned back inn her chair while sloshing her drink about, “Is that why you were on your way to raid a church in my vision?” she was still laughing as she took her next gulp of the merlot.

I looked into my dark red wine and smirked, “I raided several convents but none of them had the treasure I was looking for, because… I was looking for a girl.” I looked up from my glass but Leota was slumped over the table and falling asleep, I smirked and lifted her up- taking her to her room and setting her on her bed while I sat on the edge of it. “The girl in black… Was the only girl… I have ever loved, and I only wished that I could have said so before I was sent away from her.”

❧

The next thing I can remember is what happened to Mister Topper, I had come back to the Haberdashery to pick up my hat and found Mister Topper scrambling to pack his things between customers.

“Um, do you mind if I ask what is going on? And if you tell me you’re skipping town from Emily I swear to -.”

“No! No, I am taking Emily with me…. Have you seen Emily lately? She is supposed to be here in an hour or so and I wasn’t sure if maybe you had passed her on the way here?”

“I haven’t…” I blinked while looking him up and down, something was wrong. “What happened?”

“I- Well…” Mister Topper ran a hand through his hair, “She came into me the other day with bruises on her neck and I … I’m getting her out of here, out of this town and away from these people!”

“Whoa, whoa!” I grabbed onto Topper’s wrist as he kept trying to pack. “You’re going to tell me who hurt her and we’re going to take care of them like they ought to be.”

“I won’t say, I promised her I wouldn’t say…”

“Topper at least take some of my men, they’ll do anything for you if you pay them as much … Except Charlie- that boy has a heart of Gold.”

“We’ll be fine, I’ll have Emily write you as soon as we get into the next town I assure you.” He placed a hand on my shoulder with a smile, “But thank you for the offer, you’re a good friend to Emily.” And he shooed me off onto the streets, I don’t think I had ever drank more in my life than that night, ranting to Leota about ‘How could anyone hurt such a sweet person?’ or ‘I should burn this town to the ground!’ And when I saw Mister Topper’s ‘Closed sign in the window the next day I figured it was all over, that I was going to hear from them any day now when they got to the nearest town to us …

But of course things aren’t ever so simple.

Charlie, a former crew-mate, came to me as I sat in the dining hall waiting for Leota so we could begin dinner.

“C-Captain…” He mumbled, wringing his hands as he stood beside me.

“Charlie, call me William we talked about this.”

“Captain this is important, the other night Henry and I got a job and … Well we got a job to … well it involved….”

“Just tell me! For god’s sake!”

“It’s Miss Emily, the Mayor had us teach her a lesson the other day and I thought it was just an old intimidation job on this Topper fellow but it turns out….” Charlie shut his eyes as he thought back to what happened, “Henry and I were beating the daylights out of him all while Miss Emily was there, when I noticed I tried to help sir I really did! But Mister Topper sir-.”

“What happened, Charlie.” I growled, standing up now.

“The Mayor… Mister Topper… He’s dead.” I slammed my hands on the table and ran my hands through my hair, I wasn’t sure what to do exactly, the Mayor needed to b dealt with but at the same time I needed to get Emily back.

“What happened with Emily?”

“That’s the thing sir, the Mayor is her grandfather and I … I think he’s doing something unsavory to the little Miss.” I inhaled deeply as I thought, despicable.

“Thank you Charlie, please leave…. I need to think.”

The Mayor had everything he wanted, power, admiration, money … yet he was still after more. And what could I bring to the table to take him down- my family’s name could only get me so far in this town but not far enough to bring down the mayor.

“So did you want to talk about it or am I going to be eating alone tonight?” Leota asked as she pulled up a char beside me, I threw my glass at the wall in response. “Mature.” She nodded with a chuckle.

“I can’t say I just… I’m stuck in a situation where there is little I can do.”

“With your reputation? I would have thought you could get away with anything.”

I was nodding expecting her to be giving some long speech about ‘putting your mind to it’ and nonsense like that, but she actually had a good point. My reputation!

“Leota! You’re amazing!” I hugged her making her spill her wine all over her shirt, and then hurried out of the room to begin planning.

❧

I knocked upon the Mayor’s door the next day, he was the one who greeted me at the door, his blue eyes looking down on me as though I was a bad taste in his mouth.

“William Gracey, what can I do you the pleasure for?”

“I came to discuss business with you Mister Mayor, I hope you don’t mind if I come in?” I stepped past him and looked around the familiar space with all of his son’s pictures hung on the wall, now knowing his blue eyes looked just like Emily’s.

“I thought our business would be over Mister Gracey, you refused my offer before I-.”

“Well, I have a new offer Mister Mayor.” I turned on my heels and looked him in the eyes now, “I can either take your reputation from you or your granddaughter’s hand in marriage.” He stepped toward me as if he were about to attack but composed himself.

“My son is dead, Mister Gracey, I don’t know-.”

“Don’t try that with me, I know the Canary was a way to keep track of Emily, I know you killed Mister Topper, and I know you will do everything in your power to keep your records as clean as a whistle.” I Got into his face, “So I wish to marry your lovely granddaughter, if not then I will let this entire town know about my history of piracy and how you had a hand in the murder of Mister Topper as well as the mistreatment of Emily DeClaire.”

His face was blistering red with rage but I could tell he was giving up, I had won this, he called a servant named Delilah to fetch Emily as she was escorted down the stairs in a different dress… a scarlet dress.

She looked stunning.

As soon as she came down to stand beside me I took her in my arms and held her as tightly as I could, my heart almost broke in two as I felt her arms tugging me against her and her head bury into my chest.

And we were out of the house - shopping for a dress and flowers all at once as well as my tux. We planned the ceremony to take place in the ballroom of the mansion and transition to the reception- we would travel the world after we were married and I would show Emily everything she desired, I would let her be free.

We announced our engagement to the caravan and then after a long night of partying I left with Emily up the stairs to get ready for bed.

I flopped onto the mattress and sighed with a smile, looking at Emily as she stood beside the bed- I jolted upright and got to my feet. “I didn’t mean to presume…” She placed a hand on my lips and shook her head

“It’s okay, I just…” she wrapped her arms around my torso and rubbed her face into my chest. “I don’t want to be scared anymore… I want to already be gone.”

“Everything is going to be okay, Emily.” I whispered and smoothed her hair down, “I won’t let anyone hurt you again.”

But I did.

I was too late.

I let her die.

I couldn’t even save her.

So much of that day is all a drunken stupor now, but the days to come… Those I remember clear as day… Those I take great pride in.

The mayor tried to start talk in the town that I murdered Emily and her lover, they erased themselves entirely from her story - calling her a gypsy that entranced men with her beauty, calling her a harlot.

They convinced the town her image was nothing more than a seductress, not that she was kind, loving, or gentle! Not that she suffered in silence! Not that she had such a big heart that she believed no one was ever what they seemed.

She never believed I was what I seemed.

I remember how they died even more clearly than when I died.

I had heard the whispers in town and decided to make a complaint to the mayor himself - at night so most of the town would be asleep.

When I knocked on the door Delilah answered but I grabbed her by the arm and whispered in her ear. “Grab all the servants and wait outside, I have a show for you all.”

The mayor himself graced me with his presence then, there was a sick grin on his face.

“Can I help you Mister Gracey?”

“You surely can! I have been getting several accusations thrown my way, accusations I feel are better suited for you.” I poked his chest, he didn’t move.

“I cannot stop the town from talk, and what the authorities believe… well…” he shrugged, “From what I’ve heard they are quite convinced you’ll do time.”

“Ah I see, I see… Although there is something I would love you to do for me before I must go away.” He took a step back from me but I grabbed his coat and knocked him in the face. “I want to hear you beg.” I snarled and punched him again.

He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the ground then began pummeling my face, I grabbed both of his fists and spat the blood in my mouth on his face- whacking him in the head with his own fist and kicking him off me into the stair railing.

I found my feet as did he, but as he gripped the railing I came up to him and stomped on his leg- hearing the stomach turning crack of his bone followed by the scream of pain.

“Beg for me Howard!” I laughed and broke the other leg. “Come on now! Surely you know how to beg! You listened to Emily for EIGHT DAMN YEARS! IT’S YOUR TURN NOW, BEG!”

I pressed my foot on the mayor’s leg.

“Beg.” I growled. “Isn’t this better? Don’t you feel how small you are? Don’t you feel how helpless you are? I want you to feel the same as you made her feel every single day.” The tears rolled down my cheeks, but this was no use. I skipped to the end and tied Howard up to a chair and poured the oil from he lamps onto his head and then lit a match. I continued with curtains, carpets, mattresses, pillows, and anything else that would set the house a blaze.

I paused only as I saw Emily’s room, I knew it was her’s because there were dried up and dead wildflowers scattered on the floor, inside was only a cot, a mirror, and some books. I wondered how she could stand it in here for so long, then I noticed the largest thing in her room was her window - the moonlight filtered inside like a spotlight and the stars reflected off the view she had of the river, the wildflowers dancing with the breeze.

I opened her window and stood there on the ledge but when I jumped I rolled off the over hang- landing softly in the flowers below, sparks were flying from the house and fading into the night sky as I lay there.

I had hoped with the fall that I might also die, that I could be with her but it was almost as if the soft cushion from the flowers were her arms- keeping me from harm. She would have wanted that, to try and keep me safe - that’s how sweet she was.

I slinked back to the mansion as the authorities took stories from witnesses, I had made it all the way back to the stretching room, standing at the top above where a few pictures were hung - just beneath the glass ceiling.

“Mister Gracey you are under arrest for the murder of Howard DeClaire, I order you to come down immediately.”’“If I come down then I’ll have to do it my way.”

“As long as you come down, we need to take you back to the cells and then we can discuss your sentencing.” I strolled a bit as I tied my knot and gave a small nod, walking up to the ledge.

“Alright then.” And I stepped off.

But time seemed to have stopped, I was standing in the air- moonlight poured into the stretching room… There were new paintings on the walls?

I walked down on the air as though they were stairs and then moved my way through the halls of the mansion- everything was old as though it had been left abandoned for several years.

Was this hell? Living in my mansion alone? Remembering Emily.

Oh Emily…

As I thought it, then it became, I heard sobbing from one of the rooms and I materialized accordingly, it was the attic and sitting by the window with her glowing heart beating in her chest- was Emily.

“Hurry…” she whimpered, “Hurry back … Please Hurry… I’m scared.” I felt the pain in my chest as I knelt beside her.

“Emily…” I whispered, “It’s alright now, you’re alright… At least I think you’re alright?”

“William?” She looked up and her glowing blue eyes lit up, “You came! William!” She wrapped her arms around me. “He was here and he was about to push me- when…”

“Emily…” I stopped her, “You are dead … we’re both dead… I didn’t…” I kissed her hands gently as I shut my eyes. “I was too late, I couldn’t save you…”

“He… Killed me?” She looked at herself and the sound of her heartbeat was deafening, “But… He wouldn’t… why… he would.” It’s as though she was coming back to the realization of who her grandfather was. “Oh god…” her transparent hands were shaking as she began to sob once more.

I wished I could make her forget… I wanted her to forget she was ever hurt and to just be herself.

And as I wanted it to be… It was.

She blinked the tears away and looked at me with a smile as if just realizing I was there, she hugged me. “William! I heard you let Leota into the mansion! Topper told me when we were…” she thought a moment, “I don’t remember what we were doing but anyway! We should dance! I love dancing!” She flew into the air and lifted me up with her. “We can have a swinging wake!” She laughed and spun herself around.

I pressed my luck, commanding that the dead of this mansion rise- but I couldn’t risk the thought of Hatty telling Emily what he knew so I slid into the walls, I became the mansion, I could hear the chatter in the house in the back of my mind and materialize when needed- but as soon as my form disappeared Emily would cry and beg for me to hurry back for what I made her forget was controlled by her bright beating heart.

And so when she moved through the halls alone she would call, waiting and wailing until I or another apparition appeared to calm her or distract her from her tragic death.

❧

They all stared at me as if I was a completely different person, all except Emily who hugged me with tears pouring down her cheeks.

“Oh William! I didn’t know I hurt you so much!”

“It wasn’t you at all weren’t you listening?” I sighed, patting her head. “I’m just sorry I acted so rash and made you forget everything Emily…”

“I know you wouldn’t hurt me William!” She smiled up at me with her chin on my chest, “I trust you.”

Constance and Red both made faces, not understanding why exactly since I had done so much to prove otherwise. “But you did leave a good bit of details out of your story, so I’ll tell them mine! That is if everyone is okay with going to my favorite spot for it? And luckily I think it’s a full moon tonight!”

#captain blood #william gracey #wdw #disneyland #disney world #fanfiction #the haunted mansion #madame leota #constance hatchaway #emily declaire #ghost #we wants the redhead

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