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#see joker's goddam hands
cheerio-doodles · 3 years
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‘I can't decide’ plays in the distance 
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askservais · 3 years
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Hi this mun here.
🔫
Y'all are gonna listen to me go off about Dadvais or else you get the water gun because I have an exam tommorow but brain is going brrr Dadvais and this fandom does not give me enough dadvais content.
Like everything else I have to do it my goddam self 🔫
Why am I weirdly aggressive about this?
*aggressive shrugging*
Anyway Dadvais.
(Warning. Intense rambling. Very intense rambling. I have thoughts and this is Dadvais propoganda. Also like. Brief implication of abuse near the end.)
(Also its like 1am aaa)
Anyway Gamers.
Right we commonly accepted that Servais is cat dad.
Which is good. Good content.
I am also just saying, Servais is the kinda of person who adopts 50 kids and denies they're his kids. He's tsundere dad.
But he's also really fucking soft. He really likes kids. They adore his magic tricks and the man loves magic, absolutely try me the best way to instantly bond with Servais is talk magic.
This is not to say he is a competent dad. He's more of 'I'm trying oh god I left Tracy at the market' dad.
Y'all have seen his diary this man has one braincell for magic only. Also professor of literature. Servais. Servais my beloved. Why did you think this was a good idea. Servais.
He adopts like. *does the math* most of the survivors.
And his favourite is Emma. Probably.
Look the whole reason Dadvais exists is because of me developing 'Forever in the manor' (forever in the concept phase would be better name. Do plan to do the first 'canon' fic after Winters last snow-) and plot stuff happens.
In which Emma has two hands so she can have two hands. If you have a problem with this. I will fight you in the tesco's parking lot/j
I am just saying early manor days when it's just the free characters and Servais the two bond.
And maybe they garden together.
And bake a cake.
Yes I am referencing my fic 'A cake's respite' that fic is early days dad Servais. Servais stayed in that Kitchen when he wanted to drink because he wants to make Emma happy.
Also what intensified dadvais was a discord rp where I, the official magician of the server, had no braincells and just instinctively made him go dad mode.
Also minor tangent i know the fandom characterises Servais most of the time as grumpy old man, which like. He is to an extent but can I please have more chaotic Servais. Like. Y'all have seen his tome accessory right. He's a little bit of a goofball and I would love to see more of it.
Sometimes y'all kinda make him a little too mean. Which I know stems from most people disliking him but even ones who do like him just... yeah.
Then again I'm no Servais expert. I'm trying to get his personality as accurate as possible so if I'm wrong feel free to correct me. I've messed up on character before and its my policy of keeping characters as Canon accurate as possible even if I don't like them because other people do.
Speaking of Canon, time to go the opposite direction and talk about the dadvais au. Yes I have a goddam dadvais au the self indulgency never fucking stops.
It is also a work in progress because god has cursed me for my hubris but I will spit in his face and steal his wallet.
To summarise the Dadvais au.
William and Orpheus are street kids who investigate Servais for the death of his mentor John but end up adopted by him instead, beginning the start of Servais's child army.
This au gives me much serotonin aside from the Dadvais serotonin because canonically in this au Servais has no violence rights but Robbie, a toddler in this au, does.
I feel like this is an appropriate moment to inform everyone that unfortunately your mun is a chaotic goblin. I am so sorry.
Anyway, I am going to focus on one section of the dadvais au because I need to not make this a ten page essay.
So we're going to focus upon the point Servais decides to adopt Murro. Also canon ages do not apply in this au because by the time I had discovered Kevin's canon age I had an idea and got too attached so *yeets canon ages out window*.
So Au. Murro is 15-16. Servais is in his 20's. Orpheus and William are around..12. Still working on ages. At this point Naib has been adopted and is around 14. I think. I need to do thing called 'keep track of my characters ages.'
Anyway!
So onto what happens. I feel it is very important to establish the fact that Naib steals Murro from the Circus (its explained why in au) with a little help from Mike (~10) and Joker (16-17).
Unfortunately Sergi tries to stop them and Naib and him fight. Which Naib totally would have won but he didn't. Rip. So he gets caught by Sergi who takes him to Bernard.
Murro heads to Servais' place on Naib's advice and sneaks in with Orpheus' and William's help. The two try to hide him and his boar but fail miserably.
Servais quickly discovers him, recognises him from the circus and questions why he's here, and where is Naib.
And ever quickly discovers what Naib had done.
Which very much terrifies our Magician dad because well, Naib is in some very hot water that Servais is doing his best to keep him safe despite it. So him being trapped at Hullabaloo is.... extra bad.
In a panic he almost tries to force Murro to come with him back to the circus, before he realised he can't.
He can't let Murro go back.
On one level its on the basic moral level. Bernard is a dick and no child deserves to be in a cage and treated like that.
On another. Its because of John. His mentor.
Servais has a guilty conscience.
His actions put blood on his hands.
He can't do it again.
Naib returns, having managed to escape with the secret help of Natalie. He may or may not threaten Servais to keep Murro, which is unnecessary, as Servais has already decided.
He tells the kids to stay home or else. Then leaves.
Going straight to talk to Bernard.
Bernard is pissed, and Servais apologises for Naib's actions, then makes an offer.
He will buy Murro from Bernard.
Murro was just an act to Bernard after all. And he puts down a very generous sum. Reminding Bernard Murro's act was losing popularity. Better to cash in now then lose cash on a dying act.
Bernard is hesitant.
Servais raises his price.
Bernard wants that price. But that price for Murro only. The boar has to be paid separately.
Servais clenches his jaw.
Fine.
He leaves the tent at the dead of night. He exchanges a glance with a Mike hiding amongst the equipment.
He leaves and heads home.
Where the kids are anxiously waiting. Murro unsure of whats going to happen to him. Naib prepared to fight Servais to keep Murro. William prepared to play back up with Orpheus trying to reason with them and find a different solution.
When Servais comes home the kids are waiting for him. They wait for him to speak. Or try to. Before Servais can say anything everyone except Murro immediately start yelling/pleading for Servais to keep Murro.
Which Servais tells them to stop. Reassuring them Murro won't have to leave.
He's sorted everything out. Murro doesn't have to go back.
He rubs his temples and sighs. Telling Naib, Orpheus and William to set up the guest bed for Murro.
They'll sort this all out in the morning.
Servais waits from them to leave before leaning against the wall. He covers his eyes with his hand.
He needs a drink.
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hypnoticwinter · 3 years
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Down the Rabbit Hole part 22
“You come…here again?”
“I know we said we wouldn’t,” the Sergeant says slowly, putting great care into his enunciation, “but it’s important.”
“Im…por…tant?”
“Yes. We have –“
“This…many more,” the copepod says, waggling three massive fingers at him. The Sergeant is silent for a moment.
“I don’t understand,” he says finally.
“You kill…this many…more,” the copepod grunts. I can hear it breathing, vast wheezing noises like the space in between notes on a bagpipe. “This many more…since you said…you would leave.”
The Sergeant sighs. “They attacked us outside of the barrows. The ones they attacked had no choice but to defend themselves.”
“This…the…end, four-arms?”
I frown, glance over at Elena. “Four-arms?” I mutter. She leans in closer to me.
“Their word for us. They haven’t got any legs so they don’t really grasp the distinction between a leg and an arm.”
I nod, staring down at the screen on my camera. The copepod looks far too glossy but with the gloves on the suit I don’t really have the dexterity to fiddle with it and I don’t want to take them off presently, so it’ll just have to be glossy. I look over at the two copepods that had come in earlier, still lurking behind the Big Guy like statues, clinging to the wall in positions that look as though they could push off and dart at us with absolutely minimal effort.
The rest of the team seems very relaxed, though; nobody, not even Crookshank, has their rifles up to cover the copepods. “Do y’all come down here often?” I ask.
Elena shakes her head. “I’ve only been down here once before, and that was about a year ago.” Her eyes flick over to Peter. “Investigating a missing person.”
I think of several possible responses to that but bite them all back. None of them would be helpful, and at any rate my impulse to defend Peter has withered a little over the last few days. Probably just the hormones talking. Maybe if I didn’t get such a big damn case of the warm fuzzies whenever I so much as look at Elena –
“The end of what?” the Sergeant asks. The copepod gestures, a vague, open-handed, sweeping motion. It’s a terrifically human gesture and for a moment I stare, wondering, then its segmented mouthparts judder to life again and that horrible, inhuman voice issues forth from them again and some poor pattern-recognizing part of my brain gets whiplash from the disjointedness of it.
“How we…end. Many…spawnings since we…meet, four-arms, and now…there is not…enough…to eat. If we…leave…to hunt, you…kill us.”
The Sergeant starts to say something, but the copepod slams a fist into the ground. Next to me I feel Elena flinch, and on the far wall of the chamber one of the other copepods cocks its head.
“We are hungry,” it tells the Sergeant, and something about the way it says those three simple words strikes me like a lightning bolt, passing all the way through my stomach and out my tailbone. My hands are shaking lightly and part of me wants to panic, wants to be out of here right now, but I close my eyes and swallow hard and force myself to be calm.
The Sergeant, to his credit, doesn’t even blink. “We’re here to talk about that.”
The copepod is silent. It reaches up with its hand and rubs at its face lightly, in a motion that reminds me of a fly cleaning its compound eyes. “Don’t…believe you,” it wheezes eventually.
“We are. We’re planning to start bringing food down for – for your people. But we need something in return.”
I glance over at the crystal again. It’s a good thing we brought Joker; I don’t know how we would have gotten it out of here if he weren’t here to carry it.
The copepod rolls its head back and makes a strange, scratchy, rhythmic noise, that I recognize after a moment as laughter.
“You make…us starve, then…come with…solution…to problem…you made? And…you want…trade…for it?”
I hear the Sergeant sigh, watch him look up at the ceiling. I’m impressed at how well he’s doing so far, especially considering (unless I have egregiously misread him) that he’s a soldier, not a diplomat. But now the copepod has handed him a real zinger.
“We never meant to hurt you,” he says. The copepod shifts lightly, the spongy floor creaking under its ponderous bulk. “There has been a long and bloody history between us and I wish it weren’t that way. I wish that things had been different, so many years ago when the first one of us had met the first one of you. I wish we had known to leave you alone and not interfere with your way of life. But the past can’t be changed, all we can do is try to right what wrongs we can.”
“What…you want?”
The Sergeant points to the crystal. “That,” he says. The copepod looks over at it and then reaches out and drags it, one handed, using what seems to be practically no effort, out from behind the pile.
“Not…for trade.”
“Not even for regular supplies of food?”
“Not…for anything.”
“Nothing at all?”
The copepod stops and looks at us. Its eyes seem to fix on something.
“Give me…that,” it says, pointing, and we all turn and stare at Crookshank, who the Sergeant had given his rifle to and who is now carrying both of them, somewhat awkwardly, beneath his armpits. He looks perturbed for a moment before he realizes and unlimbers one of them and sets the stock of it into the floor. I can see the muscles in the great knotty bulge of the Sergeant’s jaw working before he turns back around.
“Absolutely not,” he says.
“Too…bad.”
The Sergeant very clearly doesn’t know what to say, and then after a moment throws in the towel. “Alright,” he says. “Give me a minute, I have to ask.”
Then he turns around and takes a couple of respectful steps away before reaching down to his radio and calling Makado.
“They want what?” she groans, after he’s told her the news. The rest of us, listening in over the squad link, cast glances at each other but remain silent.
“One of the slug rifles,” he repeats. “I told him that we’d bring them regular shipments of food instead but he didn’t go for it.”
I hear Makado curse under her breath.
“You told them we’d bring them food? Goddam it,” she mutters. “You didn’t have any authority to –“
“Veret,” the Sergeant snaps, his voice barely edging on civil. “We don’t have time for this –“
“You expect me,” she hisses, her voice mingling with the static, “to give you the go-ahead to give them a fucking slug rifle? Why don’t we also turn off the sonic traps and leave the seal unlocked on the way out?”
“What do you want me to do, then?”
The copepod is watching this one-sided conversation with interest. The Sergeant’s voice is low and sharp but I’m sure the copepod can still hear some of what he’s saying. Its vocabulary seems fairly good but as for how much it understands…
“You said there’s only three of them in there right now, right?” Makado asks. I see the Sergeant shake his head.
“Absolutely not,” he says. “No way.”
“Sergeant,” Makado starts. I can hear a note of steel buried somewhere deep in her voice. “We need that crystal.”
“I’m going to give him the damn gun,” he tells her. Somewhere miles above us Makado slams her hand on her desk.
“Do not –“
“I am not,” the Sergeant says, very quietly, “letting any more of my people die down here today. There are three copepods in here, and fifty within two hundred yards, and a hundred within a mile, and they all are going to come running the instant we fire one of these guns.”
Makado is silent for a moment. “Fine,” she says. Her voice is hard enough to cut glass. “One rifle, no mags.”
“Fine.”
The channel cuts out with a resounding click. Elena and I trade glances; I can tell from her face that she’s never heard Makado that angry before.
The Sergeant reaches out for Crookshank’s rifle wordlessly and Crookshank hurries forward and hands it to him. The copepods on the walls draw in a little closer. I can see them practically twitching with anticipation, waiting for one of us to make the wrong move. The Sergeant turns, the slug rifle held in one hand, the barrel toward the ceiling. The copepod reaches out for it and the Sergeant places it gently in the thing’s hand.
Next to me I feel Elena shift her grip on her own rifle. The copepod looks down at the rifle in its hand for a long while.
“You should have taken the food,” the Sergeant tells it. The copepod in turn makes a snorting, chuffing noise. Then it closes its fist over the gun and with a sound like a groan of relief it bends and breaks. The bolt pops out and whizzes off somewhere in the darkness and the slugs pour from the ruined breach of the rifle like marbles, five of them clunking dully to the fleshy floor and rolling someplace out of sight. It tosses the bent frame of the rifle aside, and it clatters into the pile of junk and detritus and causes a small avalanche. The Sergeant steps back, eyes wary.
Then the copepod reaches over and shoves the crystal towards him. Its sharp spikes stick in the floor a little and leave bloody gouges in their wake. Whatever is inside it casting that green glow shifts lightly, with a kind of exaggerated slowness to it like it were floating in oil, and I glance down at the camera, make sure it’s in focus.
“Take…it,” the Big Guy tells us, and I can see by the look on the Sergeant’s face that he has a lot of questions he wants to ask, but instead of asking them he turns and gestures to Euler and after a little bit of prodding Euler manages to walk Joker forwards and find a decent place to grasp the crystal firmly, and then it picks it up.
One of the robot’s joints groans under the strain and Euler quickly prods at the joystick and it freezes, but after a few moments for he shrugs and continues twiddling, and Joker hefts the crystal like it were nothing and marches, a little unsteadily, back to us.
The copepod, meanwhile, has turned, rolling its enormous bulk delicately past us, and, with the assistance of one of the other copepods, which puts its arms on the Big Guy’s sides and is helping push, slithers out of the room. The audience, apparently, is over.
We all look around at each other but nobody feels any need to speak. There’s nothing to say. Crookshank is looking wistfully at the rifle on the ground, the barrel twisted like a piece of straw, but as we all begin to file out of the organelle and back into the snaking outer vent that got us there, Elena squeezes my hand firmly and I believe for a moment, just a moment, that everything might work out alright.
 * * *
 Elena twists around sharply and stares back into the darkness, her rifle low and ready. I peer backwards anxiously, then glance at her.
“What is it?”
She shakes her head, holds a hand up to me. “Shh,” she tells me.
Behind us the rest of the group marches onwards. There’s a distinct sense of relief in the air. Many of them, I realized belatedly, had expected that we were going to our deaths, that we were going to have to try to take the crystal by force. Ellis thought so for sure; his smile is unbearably bright and the Sergeant has had to tell him to shut up multiple times on the journey out, but his enthusiasm is so overflowing that he can’t shut up, he just keeps babbling on about whatever is in his head, what he’s going to do when he gets back to the surface, how nice it’ll be to have fresh air, so on and so on.
Elena is standing there quite still, her head cocked to one side. I listen but I can’t hear anything, and I start to tug at her sleeve, thinking that –
Wait.
I thought for a moment that I might have heard something, something very far away, but it was the sort of quiet, subtle noise that is hard to notice even in dead silence, and our current environment is very far from that. Everything down here seems to make noise; it’s a little like being in a forest in the middle of a windstorm. Instead of trees creaking and groaning and leaves scattering and wind rushing, you have the tramp tramp tramp of metal-plated feet, and the corresponding squelches of cleat sticking into the floor and the equally horrible meaty slurping sound with each step as they come unstuck. Then on top of that there’s groans and moans and straining noises. If you put your ear to someone’s stomach after they’ve just eaten you might get a sense of what it’s like, except fifty times louder and without anything in the way. The hallways shift around you, little wriggles of convulsive muscle movement going through them, and the noise is concurrent with the size and force of the muscles doing the moving. But there is a difference between the shrieking of a taut muscle and the shrieking of something in pain, far off in the distance, perhaps…
Elena leans in very sharply and reaches out with a balled fist and smacks the quick-release on the side of my helmet. The visor jets up and instantly the fetid smell of the Pit assaults me. My eyes start to water. “What the fuck,” I start to blurt, but Elena puts a gloved hand over my mouth. Her eyes are very clear and very bright; she’s already popped her own helmet so she can talk to me clearly.
“Listen to me, Roan,” she says, her eyes glancing over to the side and back the way we came before flicking over to me again. “If something happens down here, you stick to me like glue. Got it?”
I start to say something but she gives me a dangerous look and I swallow hard. “Got it,” I say.
“Okay, good,” she says. She flashes me a quick grin but I can tell she’s just giving me lip service, just from the way her eyes jump like roulette balls, scanning the surroundings even as she reaches over and flips my visor back into place. I had started to ask – well, I don’t know what I was going to ask. Probably something useless, some infantile plea for assurance that we were going to be okay. Clearly we aren’t if Elena is spooked like this. I look ahead of her at the rest of the team; they’re wary but not as wary as she is.
“Elena, what’s wrong?” I ask her, taking a hold of her arm, and she looks over at me and starts to answer, and then everything goes to hell.
Behind us I hear the sound I thought I had heard before, except much louder and clearer – a chittering shriek of either pain or rage, or perhaps some of both. Something about the tone makes me think it’s a copepod. The scream is cut off halfway through, and then we hear other screams, loud gurgling ululations, echoing through the vents. Everyone is yelling, everyone’s rifles are coming up very quickly, heads are whipping around and scattering the broad angry cones of headlamp light across the wet, glistening walls. The shrieks and cries are reaching a crescendo and it seems impossible that we can’t see any copepods at the present moment.
The side of the vent bulges inward suddenly and I see a long tapered mass move by, like a throat swallowing, and I realize that it must have been a copepod, sliding past as quickly as its resin-coated carapace will allow.
Elena has her hand under my arm and is tugging me along as quickly as we can go. I am deathly afraid I’m going to trip and fall and splatter face-first into the wet, bloody floor; I’m not digging in the cleats all the way, there isn’t time to with the way she’s rushing me. I want to reach down and pull out my sidearm but I don’t trust myself to keep ahold of it if I were to.
I can see a flickering glance of Euler’s face, bringing up the rear behind us, feverishly punching buttons on the controller and working the joystick. He looks frightened and I feel suddenly and incongruously bad for Euler, because he clearly has hated this place from the second he came down here, and it’s only his job that’s making him do it, and now he, and probably all of us, are going to die because of it.
I remember Makado very seriously considering us just opening up on the Big Guy, on the king of the copepods or whatever the hell the hierarchy is down here, just because he wanted a gun instead of just giving us the crystal. The wan green light is still pressing tightly against my back from where Joker has the damn thing clenched tight in his metal hands, and I feel my lip curling and realize that maybe Elena is right, maybe Makado is out of line, maybe she’s let her – her obsession with making sure that the Pit doesn’t hurt anything and anyone else lead her to some bad decisions. Or maybe –
There’s a shriek behind us, sounding terribly close now. Elena and I look back, as does Euler, but we still can’t see anything.
I have never felt so helpless in my life. If a copepod comes out of nowhere and snatches me right now, that would be it, I’d be done for. I don’t want to even pretend that Elena would turn everyone around and get them to come charging back into certain doom to save my skinny ass. I can imagine the conversation now: “Oh yeah, El, sure we know you were getting your pussy eaten by that frail little skeleton girl from admin but no way in hell we’re risking our neck for her, capisce?”
All it would take, I figure, is for one of them to dart up from behind, where our visibility is the worst, grab my leg, and then reverse and zoom out of sight. They can move so quickly down here it doesn’t seem real. It’s like the way seals move, fluttering around on the ice on their bellies, tucked down and torpedo-shaped, their arms slicked back against their sides unless they’re reaching forward to dig in with their blunt, ichor-caked fingertips, adding momentum, whipping around hairpin turns.
A crazy thought strikes me as I stumble again and Elena wrenches me back to my feet – being a copepod must be like living in a funhouse where everything is a slide. I almost start to laugh but I shove it back down, deep down.
It happens very quickly. There is a loud chittering screech from ahead of us and we both whip around. There in front, clinging to the ceiling of the vent, is a slender copepod, slithering towards us hand over hand. When someone’s headlamp – I think it’s Fumi – strikes it in the face it shrieks and falls on him and one of the guns roars and even though my earplugs are in it is louder than loud, the flash from the muzzle is like the sun, and I think I shriek in terror and surprise and then I really do fall, but Elena, angel that she is, is there to pull me back to my feet.
While I’ve been face-down on the floor someone has shot the copepod a little off-center, and a hole as big around as my fist is half-heartedly gushing a chunky, glutinous white ichor. The copepod’s arms and fins are fluttering and we all give it a wide berth, hustling towards the exit.
It is such a long way off, though, and that copepod was only the first of many. Once we shot the first one there was no going back, and the air quickly turned smoky and foul with the cordite stench of gunfire. It’s impossible to hear anything besides rage-filled animal screeches and the great pounding thud every time someone fires off one of the guns. The pounding and the sharp crackling report melds together in my head and it sounds as though there is an idiot child pounding on a giant drum, having a temper tantrum, right next to me.
Elena tugs me onward. A copepod breaks into the center of our formation and brings its titan fist down in an arc, and though it is pinioned by rifle fire and dies twitching its fist still hurtles downwards and impacts square on Ellis’ head. He falls like a tree and there is cursing over the radio link and someone very close is screaming Ellis’ name and it takes me a moment to realize that it’s me, that I’m the one heaving out his name like it were vomit and staring back at his body, splayed spread-eagle on the ground, his visor shattered, part of his spine jutting through the thick fabric at the back of the neck of the suit. The copepod had hit him so hard that some part of him broke, and his head was forced downward, crushing his neck.
After that I consciously observe very little. It’s like my mind retreats into some dark corner of the inside of my skull and sits there in a huddle weeping while whatever animal, lizard part of me takes the reins is utterly unfazed by everything. I remember little flashes here and there, lit by gunfire; I remember copepods like enamel-white cruise missiles, darting in from barely-seen slits in the walls, their hands reaching for me, Elena slashing at them desperately with her knife; I remember Fumi’s bearded face, drawn and ashen, down on one knee slamming another magazine into his rifle and the sound it made when he pulled the bolt back was like glass shattering; I remember vast white fingers wrapping around Crookshank’s thick waist and jerking him off of his feet and whisking him away into the darkness while everyone twisted and shot haphazardly, trying not to hit him. His face I remember particularly, for it was wide and frightened and for a moment I thought I could see the little boy he’d once been, peering out at me from inside the man’s body and wordlessly begging me to save him, but of course I couldn’t. I had joined in, snatching the pistol from my waist and squeezing off every shot in the magazine back into the darkness behind us. I don’t think I hit anything, other than the walls of the vent, leaving bleeding puncture-marks and a haze of smoke. Then Elena yanked me off of my feet again in her hurry to get us out of there and I had dropped the gun. I cried out for it but there was no helping it, we were long gone.
Our numbers dwindle one by one, first Ellis then Crookshank. I don’t see Klaus get taken; he just disappears in the frantic haze of gunsmoke and flashlight blur, and everyone is calling out for him. I remember the Sergeant barking, his voice like sandpaper, that Klaus is gone, his vitals aren’t registering, just go, and us all going.
I remember seeing Joker, seeing snippets of Joker, rather, caught strobelike in the lights, battering aside a copepod, flashing a gunmetal-grey arm out to block one from reaching for Euler, the crystal set aside on the ground for a moment to give the machine a greater range of motion. I see its fingers fix around the wrist of the copepod and then twist and with a piercing cry of rage the thing draws its hand back, clutching at the bloody, spurting stump where its hand had been, the shock of it giving Joker the moment of hesitation it needed in order to bound towards the copepod and slam its metal fist through the tough but brittle exoskeleton and submerge up to its elbow in the copepod’s guts. It pulls out a handful of slime and then closes its mechanical fist and pounds the copepod in the head and silences its screeching. Then –
“Roan, we have to go!” Elena screams from next to me, but I don’t hear her, I’ve stopped, or almost stopped, turned half around, walking precariously backwards.
There is something looming in the darkness behind Joker, something decidedly not a copepod. Joker’s head whips around, some sort of sensor or scanner detecting the movement, and the floodlights built into the machine’s face illuminate the writhing, terrible bulk of the Leechman, standing there in a slump on two wormy, leech-filled feet, shiny and slick and horrible. I let out a wordless cry and Elena looks back at me and sees it too and stops, I can hear her words die in her throat.
The Leechman is enormous, its height and bulk so immense that it seems to fill the entire breadth of the vent with a solid wall of squirming leeches. Joker cocks its arm back as Euler goggles up at the monstrosity lurking, head cocked at an inquisitive angle, staring down at the metal toy in front of it.
Then before Joker can throw the punch the Leechman reaches down and envelops the machine in one massive appendage. I can see metal cracking, rivulets of rust and slime trickling down Joker’s armored legs. It manages to grab one of the leeches and crush it in its fist but then the Leechman tightens its grasp and one of Joker’s arms pops off, sparking all the way down until it thuds on the corridor floor. Elena is tugging at me but I can’t move, I can’t think, I can only watch, mute, praying the camera is getting all of this, as it scoops up Euler as well in the other arm. He tries to run but doesn’t get anywhere, the arm stretching out after him and nabbing him, tendrils of leeches knotted or grown together slipping over him. I can see them biting into him, forcing themselves into him, and when he opens his mouth to scream they pour inside and he chokes and sputters and then they close over him and he is gone.
The Leechman tosses Joker to the side and he clatters to the ground like a mannequin, the roll-bars on his ribcage bent and shattered, his head dented and compressed. He rolls once then lies still.
Then, with barely a glance in our direction – if it even has eyes, if it even has anything to sense with as I understand the word – the Leechman reaches down and picks up the crystal, and stomps off down the vent. It is such a banal, normal motion that I almost burst out laughing, but I get the feeling that if I let myself laugh I will keep laughing and laughing until everything falls out of me and I’m left empty and echoing.
Ahead of us someone shoots again and a copepod screeches. I turn to see it, darting in, fins streamlined and tucked against its body, spewing ichor from one double-fisted hole in its carapace, a grazing wound, apparently, as it tugs Peter off his feet and down beneath it. I scream his name and start to rush forward but Elena blocks me, then steadies her rifle, but before she can fire the copepod pushes off and bears him struggling into the darkness.
“Goddam it!” I shriek and start after him, but Elena tugs me back and pushes me forward so hard that I go sprawling onto my knees. I cast her a furious glance and scramble to my feet but before I can say something cutting and hurtful that I’ll probably regret, even if Peter’s just been fucking snapped up by a copepod, the Sergeant calls from ahead of us to hurry the fuck up, it’s time to leave, ladies, and I look ahead and see something that makes my jaw drop and my heart do flips in my chest – there ahead of us is the vast metal retaining wall that blocks off the barrows from the rest of the Pit, and there in the center of it is the great reinforced door, standing open and letting a flood of light pour in.
I look at Elena and take her offered hand and she has tears in her eyes but she isn’t faltering, not even for a moment, and in that instant whatever anger I could have felt at her is gone, utterly gone.
Behind us a copepod shrieks and then Fumi – oh, thank god, at least Fumi made it – fires at it, and the slug passes so close to me that I can feel the wind even through the suit, and then we, Elena and I, her arm around me urging me forward and keeping me upright, make it to the door in what feels like an instant, and once we’re through the Sergeant slams it closed and spins the wheel to lock it.
And then, having nothing else sensible to do, I fall to the ground and start to cry.
 * * *
I’ve got my helmet off and my sleeves rolled up. My gloves are lying on my stomach. Elena is running her hand softly through my hair and my eyes are a little puffy and sore but I’ve stopped crying. My nose, also, is becoming a little less stuffed, but that means I can smell the Pit again, so it’s a mixed blessing.
Elena’s been crying too but somehow I think she’s pulled it off more gracefully than I have. Instead of bawling and letting it all out in one go she’s managed to keep it down to a mute trickle. Every now and then she wipes at her eyes again and I squeeze her hand tighter for a moment and she squeezes mine back.
Ten minutes ago she’d leant in and held me very tight, even at the awkward angle she could manage, there on the ground, and I could feel in her a shuddering relief, an ease of tension. The copepods had stopped banging on the door ten minutes before that, and we had heard soft slithering sounds as they had retreated, and then we were alone in the silence.
I don’t feel like I’m alive. I don’t feel like I really made it out of there, I feel like a ghost, like I’m looking down from a great height at this slim, dark-haired girl in an ugly orange suit laying on the fleshy floor, looking beat-up and tired and done with this shit but not in a determined way, more like a resigned, given-up, “okay just keep rolling over me, fucking whatever” kind of way.
The Sergeant is quietly arguing with Makado about ten feet away. I’ve turned off my radio so I can’t hear her, just him, one-sided and quietly serious, his face like an Easter Island statue. Moa? Moai? Maui? I should look up the word. I should know something like that.
“Klaus, Crookshank. Ellis is dead for sure, we saw it. Euler. Fumi is okay, Roan’s okay, Elena is okay.”
A pause, then he closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
I can hear a tinny scream from all the way over here, of terrible rage that turns to grief partway through, and I know from the sound of it that she’s asked about Peter. I look at Elena and she looks at me.
“Are you okay?” she mouths at me, which is a question so incredibly dumb given the situation that my immediate instinct is to roll my eyes at her. Then it strikes me how incredibly understated just rolling my eyes would be and I nearly start crying again, and she sees it on my face and immediately her whole face shifts. She leans in and the sheer amount of care there does a strange thing to me and I bite my lip hard and reach out for her and put my hand to her cheek, and she kisses my palm despite how sweaty and gross it must be and I allow myself the indulgence of one brief moment to feel utterly, stupendously, selfishly relieved that her and I both are okay.
I again want to tell her something I know I shouldn’t but I stop myself. “No,” the Sergeant is saying, meanwhile. “No, we didn’t get the crystal.”
I hear another, quieter outburst from the other end, and the Sergeant holds the radio a little further away from his ear. “Joker’s fucked,” he says patiently. “As is Euler.”
“The Leechman got the crystal,” I call. My voice is scratchy. I cough, clear my throat and then repeat myself. “I saw it,” I add.
“Me too,” Elena nods, glancing at me. “Roan’s right, it was the Leechman.”
The Sergeant glances at us for a moment, probably wondering if our judgment can be trusted at the present moment, then nods and repeats what we’ve just told him to Makado. I hear a tiny sound of something shattering as if thrown and then the radio clicks off with a screech. The Sergeant sticks it back into his belt holster with a sigh and looks over at us. Fumi hasn’t said a word since we made it through the barrier; he’s slumped against the wall with his head in his hands. He looks up and when I can see his face it’s as though he’s a different person – that aura of impenetrable cool he’d maintained so elegantly up until now is utterly shattered.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” the Sergeant tells us, and after a moment Elena nods and gets to her feet and helps me up and then we get the fuck out of there.
We make our way through Oyster’s Shame and up the Cord. It is, insanely, four in the afternoon, which seems so banal and impossible to me that I nearly start laughing when Elena tells me the time. It feels like it’s about 13 in the evening or so.
We take frequent breaks, rest our legs and our hearts. There is less of a sense of urgency now, and the Sergeant doesn’t care as much what we do as long as we all stay together. Even so we don’t talk much. There’s nothing to say, or maybe there’s too much.
When we get to the top of the Cord the Sergeant looks back at us, pausing before he opens the door. It looks like he’s going to say something, but he stops, shakes his head minutely, and throws it open. The light from the harsh fluorescents pours down on him and for a moment all I can see is a silhouette.
Then a gunshot rings out from the vent behind him and the Sergeant takes one step forward, totters and falls. He lands hard on the metal grating of the floor and doesn’t move. A red pinprick brightens in the middle of his back, just on the other side of where his heart would have been.
I hear rattling from the staircase below as Fumi somehow manages to spur himself into action and sprint down it, taking the stairs two at a time. Before Elena or I can force ourselves to move, a figure steps into view. It holds a very big revolver and it’s aimed straight at me. Elena and I glance at each other and then raise our hands shakily into the air, and the figure cocks its head lightly, and as my eyes adjust to the light I can see it grin. Then I can see more of its face and I feel my mouth drop open as I start to say its name.
“Surprise,” Erica Walken says.
Continue with Part 23
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eyoricka · 5 years
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Pete Davidson fluffly ABC
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Words: 3600
Warning: mention of drug (weed) and I try my best to not be too cheesy but I am pretty sure I failed
A = Attractive: what do they find attractive about the other?
You love his smile. He is so cute and adorable whenever he smiles or laughs, your heart automatically melts. When he is happy his face lights up with joy, his eyes shine, and he has a bright smile on his face. This happy charming puppy face is your favorite thing in the world even though you are a sucker for his tattoos.
About his personality you love how honest and opened he is about his feelings, his life and all. He never hides something from you, whenever he feels sad he tells you, whenever something is on his mind, stressing him out he is opened about it. He is him no matter what, no matter how he feels and that is so important for you.
Pete on is part adores how tiny and cute you look next to him. He finds any excuse to hold your hand and loves how small they are compare to his. He thinks you are the cutest girl he ever met. And god knows how much he loves your hair, he finds them stunning. He always likes to play with them because to him they are as soft as you are.
He also is really attracted to your personality. You support him no matter what, you never judge him or his decisions but rather try to understand them and do your best to show him that he is not just making a bunch of errors. He can also talk about his mental health issues and personal troubles with without fear or shame because he knows that you will not judge him but rather discuss the problem with him to try to solve it or simply listen to him whenever he needs it. He is amazed by your patience and still process the fact you are never bothered by him and those discussions.
B = Baby: do they want a family? why/why not?
Yeah, he definitively wants one. He always imagines having kids around the house running, playing giggling and he looks forward to have them. He has a bit of practice with children after his road trip with Colson and Cassie and it gave him even more envy to have children. He doesn’t necessarily want a huge family, but 2 or 3 kids seem perfect for him. He even keeps a bit of place on his body to tattoo for their names and dates of birth.
C = Cuddle: how do they cuddle?
Whenever you are doing something, he just likes to come behind you, circles his arm around you and holds you close. Most likely you would turn to bury your face in his chest and wraps your arms around his neck. You could remain like this for an eternity completely forgetting what you were doing because his warmth is relaxing, making you feel home.
In bed, you enjoy when you rest your head on his chest, hearing his heartbeat, while your hand runs against his bare skin. He likes feeling your breath on his skin and plays with your hair when you are like this. It would relax both of you and most likely drive you to sleep.
D = Dates: what are dates with them like?
They are almost always spontaneous and absolutely sweet. Pete doesn’t really like to plan everything so that the same with dates. So yeah obviously for your birthday or anniversary, he calls a nice restaurant in advance and tries to plan romantic gesture but that exceptions. Most of the time your dates are more unplanned. It can be anytime and anywhere. You can be watching Netflix when he would ask you to go outside stargazing with him. He would wake up a random day and say that he was in a mood for a walk in a park where you could eat something you would prepare before going out… He also tends to have original ideas, restaurant, parks, picnics… are okay by him but not his favorite dates. He rather throws a kid party with where you craft a Pinata together or make you try graffiti or buy some Lego for you to build together your perfect home (you never finish it because you end up laughing to hard at your crappy construction). Your favorite date nights are when you build a pillow castle and wrap yourselves in blankets while talking about everything that is on your mind, eating sweets and having the time of your live.
E = Everything: “you are my ____” (e.g my life, my world…)
You are my high. Because even if he smokes a lot and all, he never feels so high than with you. Your simple presence makes him feel better, he forgets everything that put him down and he is just high on happiness. He knows it sounds cheesy, but he doesn’t care, he loves you.
F = Feelings: when did they know they were falling in love?
He realized he was head over heels for you after few months of dating. You had sleep at his house and spent the morning with him. You were eating breakfast in his garden when a small seemingly lost bunny ran across the garden and stopped next to some flowers. The rabbit was skinny and looked afraid. You guessed the poor bunny had been chased by a predator. It broke your heart and you went in the kitchen to grab some celery, carrot tops, broccoli leaves and raspberries that you put in a bowl. You also added some dandelions of the garden. You calmly walked to the scared animal and gently put the bowl close to him but with slow movements. You didn’t go too close or pet him too scared that he would then smell like you and that his mother wouldn’t recognize him and abandon him. Then you walked again in the kitchen to pour some water in a bowl and brought it to the bunny. This latter ate and drank a bit seemingly calming himself before leaving the garden. You carefully watched him just in case. Then you insisted that Pete should always keep a bowl of fresh water and one with vegetables and some fruits if some animals need them to stay alive. The way you looked after the creature with him not being yours and the way you carefully took care of him made Pete’s heart melt and he realized there was no turning back, he loved you, your dedication to the others and your kind heart.
You were once again spending all your time on a work project and you were a nervous wreck. This project was stressing you out and time consuming and you kinda felt bad to always said no to Pete, you couldn’t see him or do anything with him. You hadn’t seen him in few days and you dearly missed him. You had decided that would work until dinner and then call him to spend the night with him. You were lost in your project when your bell door rang, and you grumpily opened the door to face a smiling Pete. He kissed your cheek and showed that he had brought take out. You ate with him and he took your mind away from this goddam project. He told that he understood why you could not be as present as you wanted and that he would always support your career even if that meant making small personal sacrifices like not seeing you for few days. At that precise moment you knew he was the one.
G = Gentle: are they gentle? If so, how?
Let’s face it Pete is a soft boy, he is so gentle. Anytime he wakes up before you (that doesn’t happen a lot though) he leaves a note with a cute message on it to express his love, support in a gentle way or just a bad pun so you wake up in a good mood. After a long day he likes to snuggle. He usually helps around with choirs.  Pete is clearly not really self-confident, and he is still amazed that you accepted to date him so he does everything he can to shower you with the love and affection he thinks you deserve. You try to convince him that he worth your love, but you can’t deny that his soft gentle side is charming.
H = Hand/Hold: how do they like to hold? how do they like to hold hands?
When you walk down the streets together you do the pinky grip. Some people might think that it is because you are distant, but this is actually the opposite. It is just for you a cute and reassuring way to show the other that you are by his side and that if one of you needs it, he can intertwine his fingers with the others.
When you are waiting for something or sitting Pete holds your hand in his and gently massage your palm. That always brings a smile to your face and you wish that it never ends.
I = Impression: first impression/s
You knew Pete from the SNL and the media, you always pictured like another obnoxious celebrity who was just high all the time and not interesting. When you met him through a friend at a party you realized that even though the part about him being high was true, the other part was not. He was actually down to earth and not superficial. He was deep and funy at the same time and you liked that a lot.
When your common friend introduce you to each other he noticed immediately how cute you were but also that you had put a distance between you, clearly showing that you weren’t not impressed by the fact that he was a celebrity and that was rather all the contrary. He found it kind of hard to have a decent conversation. However it was a defy he gladly took, he was willing to show you that your prejudices were not right and that he wasn’t not like you think he was. He definitely perceived you like a challenge
J = Joker: are they into pulling pranks?
Pulling pranks is not his thing but he is really funny, I mean he is one the SNL member for a reason. He always handles situation with humor and make you crack a smile even when you don’t feel at your best. Sometime in the middle of a conversation, he blankly states something in a funny crude way and you burst into laughter. He usually delivers a good punchlines at the right time.
K = Kisses: how do they kiss?
Since you are not the biggest fan of PDA you kiss discreetly in public, only a small peck on the lips, a loving kiss on the forehead… however when you are alone the kiss session tend to become rapidly heated make out session
 L = Love: who says I love you first?
Pete was having a bad day, he was feeling low when he woke up and it grew worse with the day. He felt like he was not worth it, that he couldn’t achieve anything. Those dark ideas prevent him from writing any good skit, he hadn’t had a single good funny idea. It was driving him mad and even more depressed. When he came back home you could see on his face that he was not feeling good. So, you did what you always do in those moments. You ran him a relaxing bath and put some music on. You soon joined him in the bathtub. He hugged you close to him and buried his head in your neck as you were running your hand on his tattoos to appease him. after few minutes you felt some tears rolled down his cheeks, you silently moved to put a hand on his face and your forehead against him. You waited for him to speak up his mind as he usually did. But he remained silent and that worried you a lot. You called his name and he looked at you with teary eyes and that broke your heart. “I don’t get it? why are you with me? I’m a mess, a loser, a failure, every decision I made was wrong, I did nothing good…” the more he was talking, the more he was crying. You wrapped tightly your arms around him, you hold him impossibly closer. You kissed him softly and you heard him mumbled again “Why? Just tell me why?” You revised the million reasons why you were with him trying to sum them up the best way when you simply whispered to him “Because I love you, I love you so much.” He looked kind of surprised and you smiled at him, showing how genuine you were. He brushed his last tears away and replied his voice still shaking because of the crying “I love you too, I have never loved someone this much”. You both remained silent enjoying each other company for few seconds before you heard Pete chuckled “That’s kind of suck I had planed for a while a romantic cute unforgettable way to say to you I love you but I guess it’s kind of ruined now”
M = Memory their favourite moment together
You had decided to make a time capsule that you would open fifteen years from the day you buried it. You are really fond of that memory because anytime you are thinking of it, it reminds you all the things you had put in the capsule and all the good moments they represent. In the capsule you can find the menu of the bar you went for your first date, the ticket of the movie you went to see and where you shared your first kiss, some Machine Gun Kelly’s concert tickets in memory of all the fun you had when you joined him on his tour, a stuffed animal he won during a carnival that was so ugly you both wanted it badly, a cute picture of you snapped during a party for John Mulaney’s birthday, a harry potter’s book and a DVD of one of the film because you couldn’t settle the debate of which support is the best, a soap for the first I love you in the bathtub, some Legos for that perfect house you never finish, a SpongeBob shirt that you usually steal from him, a old pair of sneakers for you first and dumb argument about which sneakers are the best…
N = Nickel do they spoil? do they buy the person they love everything?
You are both not material person, yeah not struggling with money is great but you do not care about material gift. When he gives you a necklace or something else you are happy and glad but whenever he mentions you during an interview with lovely eyes or during his stand up routine, or when he tries to bake you something, or crafts a adorable photo album or gives you a massage, you are happier. You prefer it because he invests not just money but also love and time to do it and it really shows his affection.
O = Orange what colour reminds them of their other half
Pastel pink reminds you of him since he doesn’t hesitate to wear pastel pink sweatshirt, jacket and all and that to your eyes it fits him well. Plus, it was a soft, calming, underrated color just like Pete.
Peacock blue was the color he associated with you. It was a symbol of patience, compassion, loyalty and love for exploration, he thinks that nothing could describe you in a better way.
P = Petnames what pet names do they use?
Not really, he would just use your nickname but sometimes he just feels like calling you by the cheesiest nickname he could find just to see your priceless reaction. He always laughs hard when he calls you peachy pie, cuddle cake, marshymallow, rum-rum and you just rolled playfully your eyes at him.
You always call him Pete and sometimes Peter. When you are annoyed by him you use his full name or last name and he knows he is in trouble. You also sometimes come up with stupid cheesy pet name because it was like a competition between you to who will find the worst nickname for the other. You are quite proud of your sun beam, heaven-sent, Fluffernutter, Snookums.
Q = Quaint what is their favourite non-modern thing?
After you moved together you went several time on flea markets to find original decorations for your house. Once you found an old jukebox from the 50’s that had belong to a small pub that had closed. You were not sure if the thing was still working but you really liked it, you just glanced at Pete to see his satisfied smile and knew he wanted it too. So, you bought it and as soon as you were back home, you installed it. Luckily it was still working, and you grinned at each other. You spent the rest of the day dancing like fools at the songs of the jukebox.
R = Rainy Day what do they like to do on a rainy day?
Pete doesn’t mind the rain for him it is an excuse to stay inside, cuddling with you, chilling together, watching movies, laughing like crazy, smoking, listening to music, watching silly videos on YouTube, discovering new artists on Soundcloud…
S = Sad how do they cheer themselves/each other up
Whenever he is sad you run him a bath and wait for him to talk about his problem. Confessing to you what was on his mind appeases him. you show him support by listening to him and discussing about his troubles with him, giving him an honest opinion and showing him love. plus, you cook him some comfort food
Pete when you are sad, shows you the same support. He listens to you no matter if you are grumbling about the same thing for the hundredth time. He cracks a joke or two just to see you smile a bit. If you are crying he hugs you and tells you how much he loves you, how amazing you are, comforting things until you feel a bit better. Usually he will stay awake most of the night if you had cried during the day to soothe you and check that you are not having nightmares or sleep troubles.
T = Talking what do they love to talk about?
He likes to talk about his day with you, what he did, who he met and all. For a lot of people, it can be seen as useless conversation but to him it is important to share his life with you, the happy moments, the sad ones and also the normal ones. He enjoys talking about music with you, he always ends up discovering new artist to add to his playlist.
U = Unencumbered What helps them relax?
Most certainly smoking weed. Pete has always been honest about him smoking and the effect it has on him. so yeah when he needs to relax, he likes to smoke and watch a movie. It drives his pain away.
V = Vaunt what do they like to show off? What are they proud of?
Pete is not self-confident, so he is not the type of guy to brag about his personal life, wealthy lifestyle or career. However, he is proud of his family and friends. Whenever he can he talks about his mum, sister or you, or gives a shout out to his homies.
W = Wedding when, how, where do they propose?
You didn’t want to rush thing and you took your time before the wedding. He proposed you at home. He had asked Colson to help him to write a proposal song. Colson also help with the instru when Pete recorded the song. One day after work he told you that he wanted to make you listen to a new song he had just discovered. You agreed and at first you were not fully understanding but when you turned yourself to Pete to ask him to explain and saw him on one knee with a simple and yet magnificent ring, you couldn’t contain the tears of happiness.
You got married during the last days of September to have a nice but no too warm weather. You got married in New York, only families and close friends were invited. Actually, it was a secret wedding, you didn’t want the paparazzi and media to ruin it and comment month in advance about it. you wanted to live fully the moment and enjoy it. the ceremony was emotional, and you had the time of your life during the party. Pete never felt happier and during the opening dance you thought that he would never let you go.
X = Xylophone What’s their song?
Soundtrack to my life by Kid Cudi. Pete loves Cudi, it is nothing new and he really relates to the lyrics.
Y = You the ___ to my ___ (e.g the cookies to my milk, the macaroni to my cheese)
You are the straw to my berry. This was quite of a lame joke between you but you both are really fond of it.
Z = Zebra: if they wanted a pet, what pet would they get?
Pete is not against the idea of having a pet but he is allergic to some so to not risked anything you never adopt any. However there is always food and water in the garden your shared house for lost and abandon animals.
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The Not-So-Amazing Mary Jane Part 26: AMJ #2.2
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Previous Part
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Master Post
It’s a little pointless giving you context for this post. We are picking up where we left off last time so simply read the prior instalment.
On the next page we get into yet more problems. MJ states to ‘Cage’ (whom she refers to as ‘Quentin’) that the potential investors see them as a major risk.  She comments that it’s better for them to find the right  investor who believes in the project, as opposed to what ‘Cage’ did before. Namely, lying about the project in order to attain funding.
MJ is then taken aback when Beck proceeds to drop the Cage McKnight façade and reveal himself as Mysterio on the street. As Mysterio he unleashes some of his trademark smoke upon which he projects huge images of MJ and Spidey villains (presumably from the film) on the attack. This sends people scattering in fear believing the villains are on a rampage. People abandon their cars, run in the streets and on the roads, car horns honk away.
Mysterio rants that he couldn’t stand selling his film to ‘philistines’. However, he hoped that they would understand/appreciate it once they saw it. Once they saw what they’d accomplished, the success it’d be, the awards it’d win, etc.
MJ approaches a sad looking Beck and tries to empathise with him. Specifically she deduces that Beck (at least on some level) hoped that in seeing his life on screen that they’d forgive him. This acknowledgement prompts Beck to reveal his real face.
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These pages are a double-edged sword.
For starters, they contradict issue #1. There Beck’s given reasons for making the movie had nothing to do with earning forgiveness. He wanted to do right by a woman he felt he wronged, and to make something good for the world at large.
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However, they once again demonstrates MJ’s people skills and their ability to reign Beck in. She’s talked him around to obtaining money less dishonestly than before (but still not actually honestly). She’s able to make him halt his tantrum and avoid scaring or harming people. And she’s established more trust between them, which in theory will make keeping him in check easier.
It also is wonderfully on point characterization for Beck himself. It displays a vulnerability and sadness within him. It plays him as what he’s always been, an artist craving attention and to be understood. The duality of this is played well in the scene. His words play him up as sad and sympathetic (from a certain point of view). But his actions make him less sympathetic, much like a child he’s throwing a tantrum because he can’t appropriately deal with his feelings and wants attention.
It’s genuinely magnificent Mysterio writing, a beautiful microcosm of his character.
So again, Williams proves she can deliver great characterization. But she’s also once more doing it within a crappy context.
The whole scene is confusing and incredibly damning MJ’s character and motivations.
In addition to pretending to be McKnight, Beck also  pitched a different movie from the one he was actually making..
This is baffling. Neither Nick Spencer’s issues setting up this mini-series and AMJ #1 absolutely didn’t put forward that idea. Those issues made it clear that this was always a Mysterio biopic and was always going to be sympathetic towards him. The only contradiction to that idea was at the end of AMJ #1 when MJ spoke to Peter (see part 6).
Is Williams implying that the later is what Beck also pitched to the investors? It’s really not clear. None of this is clear in fact.
Are we to presume Beck is now pitching the movie as he actually intends to make it?
If so why not just lie again?
Maybe it’s because MJ is encouraging him to be honest but she  might’ve been lying about it to Peter last issue. And even if she wasn’t, she was complicit in the deceit of the original investors. It wasn’t as though she was telling them what the actual movie was like.
If MJ was encouraging Beck to be more honest about the movie, isn’t that aggressively hypocritical considering she’s not encouraging him to stop using Cage McKnight’s identity!
It’s all a big mess!
Playing Devil’s Advocate, let’s say the intention was something more simple. Maybe the lies Williams was referring to was simply about Beck pretending to be McKnight. But that doesn’t quite make sense. Even if the movie was got more funding that deception would remain the same.
No matter what interpretation you pick it doesn’t add up. And either way, it further proves MJ is complicit in Beck’s crimes and is being a royal hypocrite. She’s even trying to help him commit more of the same crimes, just to a lesser degree  than he had before.
On top of the damage already wrought to McKnight’s reputation, he’s now someone who’s actively sold studios on one movie and delivered another one. An extremely controversial and difficult to sell one at that. Imagine if a director promised investors ‘The Dark Knight’ but delivered 2019’s ‘Joker’ instead. They’d lose their goddam minds!
And for this, this extremely risky artistic vision by a terrible person, Mary Jane is risking the lives and livelihoods of herself and other civilians.*
Unless they’ve explicitly consented to it, no film is worth someone being seriously injured.
More importantly the scene should be a deal breaker for Mary Jane’s trust of Beck.
So far he’s assaulted one of his staff. He’s flipped over a table. He’s been arguably verbally abusive to someone. And now caused a serious public disturbance.
He’s just terrorised people right in front of her for no reason other than he was sad and angry.
He’s potentially caused people to be injured as they run away.
He’s potentially caused vulnerable people to have anxiety, panic or even heart attacks.**
He’s potentially caused people to abandon their vehicles or other property. This leaves them vulnerable to any carjacker, any one who might run into a building and steal from it.
And all because he having a tantrum.
Does this convince Mary Jane that Beck is too dangerous to be left unchecked? That there is no reason to believe he couldn’t have another, maybe even worse, tantrum later?
Does it convince her that at best she can hope to minimize any harm he might cause? That she should contact the authorities to hopefully mitigate or at least further  minimize any more damage he might cause?
No.
It causes her to connect with him even more.
What the fuck is this characterization?
To make matters worse Beck’s dialogue clearly reveals how the project wasn’t altruistic. It’s a total vanity project. He’s doing this in the hopes that his movie will be so award winning that people will forgive him for his crimes. Call me nuts but wouldn’t apologising to/ helping his victims or their loved ones be a more useful or sincere effort to attain forgiveness?
Wouldn’t MJ feel that way too? She began to forgive herself for her past sins when she helped her sister in ASM #292
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And her lover has (at least arguably) spent his life helping others to balance the scales for his indirect  role in his uncle’s death.
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Yet here, MJ feels sympathy for a man trying to earn forgiveness by making others see how sympathetic he  is? A man who ha unapologetically victimized people, including herself, her friends and family. A man who is actively victimizing an innocent man right now by wearing his face. A man who is terrifying people right in front of MJ because he’s throwing a tantrum.
Shit like this is why all the good work Williams does ultimately doesn’t matter. This is character assassinating stuff.
On a side note by the way, I like the acknowledgment of Doc Ock’s return. It’s the first time it was acknowledged since the end of Superior Spider-Man volume 2.
Moving on, MJ gently informs Beck that he’s scaring people. He reveals no one can see him (addressing why dropping his guise was no big deal). MJ snorts and prompts him to dial it back a bit. She argues that they’d want to avoid spoilers. Beck agrees and claims that the disturbance will be rationalized as a flash mob once the smoke clears.
MJ confirms that the reason the investors pulled the money was specifically because ‘McKnight’ was delivering a different product to the one pitched. See above for my comments on that mess. As they get into their car MJ also speculates that ‘Cage’s’ abrupt personality change scared them away too.
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For the most part this page is just more of the same. We do get a hint though that MJ is knowingly playing Beck, as her comments about ‘spoilers’ can be read as an attempt to slyly protect people.
Nevertheless, it makes matters worse in several ways.
For starters we see a woman practically falling out of her chair in response to Beck’s illusions. Even if she wasn’t physically hurt there is no guarantee there aren’t similar or worse instances of that going on. It’s a tiny concern next to more serious injuries, but it exemplifies how more serious injuries are a very real possibility where Beck is concerned.
But MJ doesn’t seem to care too much. She’s even snorting in the scene implying she finds something funny.
Weirdly Williams’ dialogue tries to addresses why outside observers of the incident wouldn’t get suspicious. This is stupid because what about the eye-witnesses? What about security cameras?
There is no reason at all the incident would just be hand waved as an ambitious street performance. Even if it were it misses the more essential point that Beck potentially caused physical or mental harm to civilians!
Also, we get explicit acknowledgment that Beck’s disguise is negatively impacting the real McKnight’s reputation. Beck is such a douchebag he doesn’t even consider this possibility.
But that’s nothing next to what happens on the following pages.
MJ shows Beck a news video depicting his assault of the crewmember from issue #1. The title even acknowledges this is abuse. She follows up by mentioning that the real Cage used to have a reputation for being calm and quiet. They arrive at an auto and body and MJ proceeds to give ‘Cage’ a makeover.
Giving him her sunglasses she ‘rebrands’ Cage to be more in line with his ‘new personality’. Rather than a meek cinephile nerd, MJ declares him a Hollywood bad boy. An eccentric genius who runs hot. An auteur who won’t compromise his artistic vision.
Beck gets into the spirit of things causing MJ to giggle smile with delight.
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This is yet another double-edged sword situation.
On a conceptual level, MJ and Beck ‘playing’ together through their mutual knowledge/love of acting is an interesting, even organic, idea. Or it would be if MJ had little idea of who Beck was or what he’d done.
Furthermore, MJ using her acting, social and fashion skills in this way is a stroke of genius. She is in a sense creating a façade for Beck, much the same way she formed one for herself for so many years.
It’s exemplary of Williams’ ability to accentuate realistic strengths of a normal person who lacks fantastical abilities. In other words it’s a brilliant way of framing MJ kind of like a super hero without her actually being one.
Stuff like this is a proof of concept for how an ongoing MJ solo-title absolutely could work creatively.
For that Williams should be commended.
But alas, she should be condemned because of that oh so pesky context again.
It was bad enough that MJ was simply allowing Beck to joyride McKnight’s life. It was bad enough that has resulted in him being depicted as abusive in the news, of being emotionally unstable.
But now MJ  is actively  interfering herself.
Does Mary Jane simply doesn’t care much about Cage McKnight’s reputation? Or does she/Leah Williams have some kind of long-game plan to ensure all damage done to Cage’s reputation? If so, then you know a little hint of that  would be nice. You know, just to make sure MJ doesn’t come off as selfish or stupidly out of character.
I mean honestly. Mary Jane has all this sympathy for a goddam murderous criminal, but none for an innocent man’s career and reputation?
Who the FUCK is Mary Jane to play with another person’s identity, their reputation, their career, like this?
The real McKnight hasn’t given her his consent to do that. He doesn’t even know her! 
It is especially damning when we consider MJ’s own acting career. For years she struggled against unfair labels and assumptions born from her looks and modelling career.
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Mary Jane isn’t even rebranding McKnight for the greater good. This doesn’t protect innocent people or their property or herself or Peter.
In fact it does the opposite as it makes it easier  for Beck to impersonate McKnight. To those who knew him only by reputation or merely as an acquaintance, MJ has just helped make his abrupt personality change more believable. She’s just made it harder for anyone to become suspicious of McKnight and therefore to bring Beck to justice.
This is immensely illegal to say the least. But at least MJ is having some fun  whilst she uses someone’s identity as a dress up doll.
It also doesn’t really make sense given Beck’s skills as an actor. In ASM v5 #25 Kindred himself accuses Beck of going ‘method’.
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I’m not suggesting Beck had to go method for McKnight. But is he really so incompetent as to have not considered that his behaviour would raise suspicions? Would he really have not accounted for those inevitable suspicions? Would it really take someone else  to think of that?
I will remind you, this guy figured out how to fool Daredevil, the guy who has an in-built lie-detector as a super power!
Alright, maybe he didn’t have all that much time to prepare to become McKnight. But there is no indication of that in the story. And even if there was it doesn’t address why he wouldn’t realise his behaviour would arouse suspicion.
Finally, I should also mention that Gomez is on fire on this page. He utterly nails  MJ’s personality.
Anyway, MJ takes Mysterio to their last shot at getting cash for the movie. The investor isn’t all that wealthy but he is a film buff. Once again MJ and ‘McKnight’ are juxtaposed as she is open and social, whilst he’s once again aggressive.
The investor is sceptical because he sees the project as lacking ‘art’. This prompts ‘Cage’ to go into a passionate speech about the nature of art. This convinces the investor who gives them a quarter of what they had before. ‘McKnight’ begins to argue but MJ grips his neck to keep him under control.
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Once more MJ’s strengths are on display here.
Once more Gomez’s art makes her shine.
Once more Williams displays some of the greatest Mysterio writing of all time!
And once more this is toxic to MJ’s characterization because she just helped con this man out of his money and possibly endanger both his business and his life.
She can’t be sure Beck’s ‘passion’ won’t somehow turn dangerous (as it did mere pages ago) and be directed at this man. She can’t be sure that the reputation of Cage McKnight wasn’t a factor in this man’s investment. She can’t be sure she can keep Beck under control. Notice how she just used physical contact to reign him in, an escalation from her words and charm.
She can’t be sure of a lot of things, but I guess the risk is worth it because Beck would just be that  sad if he didn’t make his movie.
Later, Noah returns the equipment to the film set whilst MJ and Beck chat about being an indie film. MJ says she feels good about the project. It’s nice that she feels happy about conning an innocent person. It’s nice she feels good about continuing to be complicit in several crimes. It’s nice she’s buddying around with the man who nearly killed her lover less than a few months ago.
They are so chummy in fact that Mary Jane sings ‘McKnight’s praises to Mallorie.
Whilst trying to find Ken (the actor cat as Mysterio), they discover he’s leaving the movie. With less funding he’s breaking contract, but is nice enough to offer ‘McKnight’ a place at a rehab centre. This is yet more proof of how Beck has damaged McKnight’s reputation, now he’s considered to be on drugs.
‘McKnight’ is distraught over losing their lead but MJ suggests he simply play Mysterio.
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Do I even need to explain this one?
Mary Jane is actively interfering with McKnight’s reputation and career again! There is no evidence that McKnight was ever an actor. Even if Mysterio pulls it off it will be an expectation the real McKnight might have to deal with later in his career. And that’s if the audience accepts his performance at all.
Once again, she has no right to do any of this with someone else’s identity.
On the next page MJ refers to Cage as a megastar. This again muddies the waters from the last issue as Cage’s indie status shouldn’t make him a megastar of anything.
Mallorie encourages ‘Cage’. She comments that since since he isn’t really Quentin Beck this is hardly a vanity reel. With MJ’s help Beck agrees and thanks MJ for believing in him.
They then hear a crash and scream and discover it’s Vulture’s Savage Six. They’ve attacked the set and crew, prompting Kangaroo  to retaliate. Vulture threatens to kill the actor playing him before spotting McKnight.
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Mallorie’s dialogue is rather ambiguous. It’s not clear if she (or anyone other than MJ) are aware that ‘McKnight’ is really Beck. That is certainly not the impression I got. Accepting that interpretation, Williams’ attempt at irony here is too blunt to work and further hurts her narrative.
It further confirms that  the movies is  a vanity project. This would mean that Williams is aware  Beck is actually being selfish, and thus that MJ is aware of that too. So why  is she writing MJ as so sympathetic towards Beck? Why is she pretending a vanity project like this is at all an opportunity for Beck to make amends?
Can Williams honestly not recognize that a criminal (a murderer no less) making a vanity project is not a legitimate means of making amends?
It’s a legitimate question because she’s further deepening MJ’s friendship with a guy who has tried to murder her lover multiple times!
And as for the Savage Six…I actually don’t have much to say about them.
Unless issue #3 makes a big reveal, they don’t seem to know Beck is McKnight. If that is the case, then they’d have attacked regardless so MJ can’t be blamed for that at all.
Really all I have to say is Kangaroo is way out of his league, especially since he’s going head-to-head with Rhino of all people.
With that we’ve completed issue #2 and the results are not good.
Williams continued and further exacerbated the problems she created in the first issue. That leaves me with little confidence that she has a master plan to sow everything up neatly in the future.
*And she was doing that in the hope the studios would accept getting a different movie from the one they asked for.
**You know, people similar to Aunt May!
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diyunho · 7 years
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The Joker x Reader -“Obsession”
The Joker has an obsession: you. He doesn’t really need another one added to the pile but…anyway, here it is. Brace yourself  you lucky girl - you’re in for a treat. 
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Related to this: http://diyunho.tumblr.com/post/162770482096/the-joker-x-reader-yuki
– He keeps on dropping things on purpose so you can pick them up, this way he can stare at your butt.
You know, for being the Joker, your boyfriend is pretty clumsy: he keeps on dropping stuff all the time. Like, right now, he just dropped his pen and you are fast to bend over and get it for him.
Intense purring immediately follows.
– J took you shopping and you were so excited when you smelled “Gucci Guilty” for men. You thought it’s a divine scent and he got 10 bottles without you knowing, replacing his current cologne with the Gucci one. He has those stashed all over the place while he still keeps in sight his usual fragrance: Clive Christian - “No.1” .
You have a feeling he smells like “Gucci Guilty”.
“Are you wearing Gucci Guilty?” you sniff the air around him with a huge smile on your face.
“Nope,” The Joker keeps on piling up money in boxes, trying to ignore you.
“Are you sure?” the insistent question pops up because you got a vibe you’re onto something here.
“I think I know since I’m the one that put it on, hm? Stop pestering me!!!” he barks your way and you just turn around, biting on your lip, stricken with fascination: your boyfriend does smell like GG, no point in denying it. Where is the damn bottle? (Well… bottles, but you have no clue there are 10 of them).
– You love knives; they are your favorite weapons. Mister J believes it’s classy as hell: in a world of guns, his girl is sooo stylish using sharp blades. You don’t know yet, but he ordered 50 personalized gold plated knives with your initials on them. He plans to give them to you for your 2 year anniversary.
* J totally loves it when you use him as target practice: such a turn on when the blades shriek by him, he gets very impatient.
“Don’t move, baby, I wouldn’t wanna cut something you might need to use later, hm?” you always wink at him, teasing even more just because you can.
Your boyfriend loves guns. So you will surprise him for you 2 year anniversary with a special gift: you will order 20 personalized guns for him from the place that all Gotham’s underworld knows about. Upfront they sell jewelry but the basement it’s a different story.
“I want to order 20 customized guns: half green, half purple background, gold plated,” you start your order.
“Sure, may I ask who they’re for? We can personalize even more,” the guy offers, pointing towards the multitude of catalogues lying around.
“Daddy,” you reply, absent minded since some fancy grenades caught your eye.
“How old?”
“Ummm…Probably… around 39,” you debate, deep in thought.
“Oohhh, OK,” the seller finally understands.”Got’cha!”
You smack your lips and it clicks for the person.
“Hold on, is the order for Mister J ?”
“Of course it’s for him, who else?!” you frown, irritated by the question.
“Oh my God, so sorry, I didn’t recognized you with this purple hair!”
“Whatever!” you grumble, grouchy he needed so many hints to figure it out.
“Would you also like to add his logo on all the guns?”
You roll your eyes, exasperated:
“Well, duh, HE IS The Joker, isn’t he???!!!!”
“Such a Goddam temper,” he thinks, aiming not to annoy you since you are famous for your short fuse.
* You totally love it when J uses you as target practice: such a torn on when the bullets shriek by your ears, you get very impatient.
“Don’t move, Pumpkin, I wouldn’t want to shoot something you might need later, yes?” and he always takes his shirt off, teasing even more just because he can.
– He likes to watch you sleep. Sometimes The Joker spends hours just staring at you. One night he cut off a small strand of your hair and hid it in the nob of his favorite cane since it’s hollow, this way he always has a piece of you with him. He detests being so infatuated but he can’t help it.
You like to watch your boyfriend sleep; you spend hours just staring at him. One night you cut off a strand of his hair and hid it in the pendant he gave you last year and never part with, this way you always have a piece of him with you. You hate it that you are so infatuated but can’t help it.
And you love his hands. When he’s asleep, you just like to look at his fingers, pressing your palm against his, caressing the soft skin. Sometimes he wakes up.
“What are you doing, Princess?” he opens just one eye, not knowing what’s going on.
“Nothing,” you are fast to reply, kissing his knuckles and keeping one of his hands prisoner for the rest of the night.
– Once every 3 months or so, your boyfriend is in a good mood so you try to take advantage of the rare occurrence. This time, for example, you convinced J to let you put makeup on him because you want to have an idea on how he looked like before the “Ace Chemicals” incident. A little bit of foundation to cover the scars and tattoos, bringing the skin and lips to a natural tone plus a dark blonde wig with a similar haircut to cover the toxic green locks.
“Wow, you were so gorgeous before too!” you gasp, admiring your work and how flawless The Joker seems. In your opinion, of course; Batsy wouldn’t share the same belief.“So this is how you looked like before?!”
“More or less,” he smirks, loving to see you so worked up about the whole thing. “Can’t argue with that statement though, I am a very good looking guy.”
You take a picture of him like that and set it up as your new screensaver, gulping when he gets up all shirtless, taking the wig off, being done with the experiment. A miracle doesn’t last for long - just like his patience.
“I’m gonna go and wash this stuff off,” he stretches and heads towards the bathroom when you block his way.
“Noooot so fast, handsome. I was kind of thinking to have a one night stand with this stranger I’ve just met,” you lock your arms around his neck, determined to have fun with him like that.
“Well, this stranger’s services are very expensive. I come with a high price. Still interested?” The Joker grumbles in your ear because he doesn’t want to say no to some crazy stuff for sure.
You just snicker and push him on the couch, starting to undress.
* Later you both go to one of your clubs to enjoy a night out. While you change your dress in the VIP room upstairs, one of the waitresses brings J his drink, thinking she can finally get you in trouble with your man. She despises you but you wouldn’t know since you never pay attention to those girls.
“E-hem, Mister J?…” she clears her throat, getting ready to talk crap.
“What?” he snarls, watching over the club from behind the smoky windows.
“Sir, I’m sorry to bring the bad news, but I think your girlfriend is cheating on you,” she blurs out and he lifts his chin up to finally look at her.
“Is she?”
“Yes, Mister J, I saw it with my own eyes. Y/N keeps on glaring at the screen saver she has on her phone; definitely not your picture sir. I caught her kissing the image and she turned off the cell right away, pretending nothing happened.”
He sighs, tapping his cane on the floor.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir, I swear!” a smile appears on her face, happy you are probably a goner now.
“That woman! How dares she?!” J huffs and pushes her away, then strolls upstairs while she silently follows.
He barges in the VIP room, slamming the silver door behind him.
“Almost done, baby,” you cheerfully announce, putting on another coat of mascara.
“Who is that asshole on your phone?” he raises his voice and the waitress bites on her nails, enticed at your misfortune.
“Umm…My boyfriend?” you giggle and turn to face him, wondering if you’re playing roles again.
“Boyfriend?! How dare you sleeping with somebody else behind my back, huh?” and he tosses the cane to the floor with all his strength, making the woman jump on the other side of the door.
Oh, she’s gonna get it ! she victoriously chuckles to herself, silently clapping.
You are going to get it, but not in the way she thinks.
“I couldn’t help it,” you play along, not having a clue about what’s going on but if he wants to go this way, heeeeyy, works for you.
“You are so paying for this, nobody cheats on me!!!!” J yells, starting to rip your dress off while you do the same with his shirt.
She’s going to pay for it ! I hope he kills her, the woman gets all excited, waiting for the bad turn she is responsible for.
You are going to pay for it, but not in the way she thinks.
She hears a loud thud, your scream and The Joker grunting, then …moans?!
What the hell is going on?!  she wonders, baffled, still listening at the door for a few more moments before leaving.
Needless to say nobody saw her again after that night. Who knows what happened? People disappear all the time, right?
– You can fix things and J goes insane for it. He breaks shit on purpose. “Doll, we have a water leak under the kitchen sink !” he shouts and places his elbows on the table, waiting for you.
“Again?!” you reply from the balcony, but go and get the tool box so you can take a look. You get under the sink and begin to work on the problem.
Intense purring immediately follows.
You don’t know how, but something always breaks around the penthouse. It’s a mystery since everything is the best quality money can buy. Like, why do you have another water leak under the sink?! You just had one two days ago. And The Joker is purring so loud. Why is he all excited about?!  
– You love huskies so J got you a puppy. Best present ever! Since you love Japanese names, you named the fur ball Yuki. The first trick you taught your doggie makes you melt when you watch it in action:
“Yuki, go bite Daddy!” The puppy jumps from your lap and charges at your boyfriend, grabbs his shoelace and pulls on it while growling up a storm:
“Grrrrrrr!!! Grrrrr!!! Grrrrrr!!!!”
J would love to break its neck, but how can you kill something that kind of growls like you?!
“Cut it out, mutt !” he threatens but bends over to pet the puppy. He hears you whistling with admiration.
“Wow, nice ass baby!”
* The puppy likes to sleep on your tummy. You are watching a movie with J and it’s boring so you need something more interesting to see.
“Yuki, go bite Daddy!”  The doggie’s ears go straight up and he rushes to get the enemy, pulling on the t-shirt he didn’t take off yet.
“Grrrrrr!!!! Grrrrr!!!! Grrrrrr!!!!!!!!!”
“So annoying!” The Joker complains, but caresses the fluffy pest and as a response he gets licked all over his face. And barked at too, in between.
You are absolutely and utterly thrilled.
“Now I have two sets of blue eyes I adore,” you grin with admiration, and your boyfriend doesn’t like that.
“I’m the only one you adore. Period,” and he starts growling.
Yuki’s tail wiggles with eagerness while jumping up and down by The Joker.
“Grrrr!!! Grrrrrr!!! Grrrrr!!”
J growls some more; Yuki is stunned and continues to growl also.
“Are you two having a contest?” you start laughing, reaching over to separate the two feisty males. The puppy cuddles in your arms, barking at his other owner.
When The Joker’s arm reaches towards you, Yuki hops on it, keeping it in place, not having any of it.
“Stop it, mutt ! I need my girl!”
His fingers are softly getting chewed on and more growling follows.
“Seriously?! I want to have sex with my woman, get lost!” and Yuki gets lift up and locked outside the master bedroom, but not before it gets more petting and squeezing. His intention was to break the puppy’s neck, but how can you kill something that kind of growls like you?!
– J hopes you are not going to notice how much he’s obsessed with you. It will get to your head and he already spoils you too much.
You hope that your boyfriend won’t notice how obsessed you are with him. It will get to his head and you already indulge his every whim. Even if he is soooo clumsy. Like, right now, J just dropped his gun and you are quick to bend over and get it for him.
Intense purring immediately follows.
Also read: MASTERLIST
http://diyunho(dot)tumblr(dot)com/post/153664676321/joker-x-reader-masterlist
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thegolftragedy · 7 years
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Tiger’s new world
Google Tiger Woods today and the lead image that comes up is the mug shot from his May 29 arrest for driving under the influence. Not donning a green jacket. Not fist-pumping after a clutch putt or earth-shaking hole-out. Not hoisting the Wanamaker Trophy. Not hugging his dad. Not flashing that multimillion-dollar smile. We gasped. We gawked. We continue to gasp and gawk at the image of a giant laid low. But by what? Pain, mainly. There was no alcohol in his system. There were painkillers: Vicodin and Dilaudid. There was the antianxiety drug Xanax. There was the sleeping drug Ambien. All legal, all legally prescribed. There was a trace of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, not yet legal in most states. Add it up and it’s a dangerous, terrifying cocktail, one that mirrors America’s opioid addiction nightmare. 
One could say Tiger’s use of painkillers was hard-earned. Four back operations, a host of knee surgeries, elbow injuries, Achillies’ strains, even glute issues. Tiger destroyed his body in the quest to best Nicklaus. The collateral beauty of all the sacrifice was the decades of unprecedented thrills and entertainment he has bestowed on the golf world. That’s worth pondering once again as Tiger prepares to take up a headset and a golf cart and, for the second straight international team competition, the position of captain’s assistant, a role generally reserved for PGA lifers, grinders with affable personalities and perhaps a handful of career tour wins. But this is where Tiger is now, as waits to see if his body will ever recover enough to deal with the fearful symmetry of his explosive golf swing. (At last report, Tiger was hitting 60-yard wedge shots.)  Inside the ropes at the Presidents Cup, Tiger may also find some peace of mind in the heat of competition as he absorbs the latest in a Jobian string of indignities: having the PGA drop his signature tournament for lack of a sponsor. 
***
There is no asterisk on any of Tiger’s achievements. Sure, he philandered. Rock stars, professional athletes, presidents, politicians, businessmen, your next door neighbor, they philander. Tiger has paid dearly for those transgressions. And he certainly shouldn’t have been behind the wheel on May 29. Fortunately, no one was injured. Tiger is paying his debt to society for that too. Beyond that, what has he done to draw judgment?
Well, there is the 2013 Masters, when he took an illegal drop on the 15th hole in the second round. He admitted as much later on and probably should have disqualified himself from the tournament. Or he should have been DQ’d for signing an incorrect scorecard. He did cross the golf gods there. But even this unfortunate episode reflected Tiger’s greatness in a couple of ways. 
First, the Masters brass, and CBS, were probably aware on that Friday night that the honorable thing to do, for the good of the game and to maintain its pristine adherence to the rules, was disqualify Tiger. But obviously that would have taken the thunder out of the tournament and killed the ratings. So instead they assigned Tiger a two-stroke penalty on the hole.
Ah, well, rules, schmules. What’s amazing about the whole mess is why Tiger had to drop in the first place. His wedge in off the slope was dialed in on the hole like a guided drone. It squared the stick about a foot up on its descent and spun back into the pond. It could just as easily have dropped in the hole for an eagle, and the sordid affair would never come about. Tiger finished the tourney four strokes behind the winner, Adam Scott. A three on the hole instead of an eight and, well … goddam golf gods. Nonetheless, Tiger won five tournaments and tour player of the year honors for 2013. The Masters would have been six wins. Last Sunday Justin Thomas nearly capped off his own phenomenal season with a sixth win at the Tour Championship in addition to his FedEx Cup championship. One of the commentators pointed out that Thomas would be just the fourth player to win at least six times in a season since 1990: Presidents Cup international team captain Nick Price (1994) and Vijay Singh (2004, nine wins!) did it once each, and Tiger did it six times.
This weekend, as Tiger drives a golf cart around Liberty National Golf, fist-bumping young stars whose path to substantial riches he paved, we can only hope that sometime in the future he will be back on the course with a club in his hand. For now let’s at least get that gnarly mug shot out of our minds and replace it with a few illustrations of the superhuman Tiger at the top of his game.
Tiger and Ali The list of athletes whose faces were the most recognizable in the whole world is very short. Probably just these two. Worldwide fame is one thing they share. Another thing they have in common: their epic battles with overachieving underdogs. When Ali was fighting the likes of Chuck Wepner, Jerry Quarry, and Ernie Shavers, you always kind of rooted for the challenger, knowing that somehow Ali would prevail. Tiger also took the best shots from a series of grinders transcending their limits at a major — Chris DiMarco, Rocco Mediate, Bob May — and he was always the one standing at the end, in the jacket, with the trophy. (Sure, Ali finally lost to Leon Spinks and Y.E. Yang outlasted Tiger at that PGA, but that’s life.)
They don’t play Tiger’s brand of golf anymore These days it seems like the guys who find the top of the leaderboard on the weekend are bombing drives center-cut, then sticking greens with wedges on 500-yard par 4s, and never finding any trouble. Very impressive but often less than dramatic. We rightly think of Phil as the great escape artist, but as Tiger was amassing his 79 wins, a lot of the time he couldn’t drive the ball straight to save his life. But whether he was in the trees, behind a courtesy tent or buried under the lip of a bunker, he refused to take a bogey. All those scrambling pars were as much a part of winning as birdies, and had to be demoralizing to the competition. It was certainly compelling to watch. Tiger’s a cutup As intense and intimidating as he was on the course, Tiger could be funny and self-deprecating too — after a “lucky” hole-out, in interviews. And he had pretty decent comic timing. Once in a while, he gave you the sense that, but for the burden of extreme greatness, he could be almost a regular guy, a goofball, a joker, a mere mortal even.
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hypnoticwinter · 3 years
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Down the Rabbit Hole part 23
“Erica,” I ask her, “what the fuck are you doing?”
“Shut up,” she tells me, glancing behind her. I hear movement and then Marcus comes into view. He has a slim pistol gripped in his hand and casts a wary glance around the interior of the Cord before his eyes fall on the Sergeant’s prone form, laying just ahead of us.
“Is he dead?” he asks.
Erica prods at him with her foot gently. The Sergeant doesn’t move. I glance over at Elena; she is staring at his dead body with an unmistakable look of horror. I’ve never seen her look scared before.
Erica’s gun is still trained loosely on us but without it pointing directly at me I begin to relax a little. Her hand, I notice, is shaking a little.
My heart is still pounding and there is a heavy, queasy sensation whenever I look at the Sergeant’s body, but I shut it out, don’t even begin to process it. I can see the golden gleam of the other bullets in the revolver’s cylinder, pointed at me, blunt and shark-nosed. I can feel myself trembling lightly, adrenaline and exhaustion and grief all welling up inside of me.
“You aren’t going to get away with this,” Elena says, and Erica rolls her eyes.
“Can we have a little less from the peanut gallery?” she asks. “Hand over the crystal and nobody else is going to get hurt.”
There is a moment of frozen silence before Elena and I both blurt out our responses to this ludicrous request at the same time. “The crystal?” I ask. “You know about the crystal?”
“Nobody else?” Elena asks. I can feel her fists clench next to me and I have to resist the urge to reach over and hold her back. “Nobody else?” she repeats. “You didn’t have to fucking shoot him!”
“I’m not here to get in a goddam argument,” Erica growls, prodding the barrel of the revolver into Elena’s chest. I eye Marcus warily; our eyes meet for a moment and he looks away, glancing over at Erica, but his pistol remains trained on me.
I can see Elena thinking about it, as she looks down at the pistol. Erica has committed one of the cardinal sins of holding someone at gunpoint – you never actually touch them with the gun. Or touch them at all, really, if you can help it. Every point of contact between them and you is a conduit for information – they’ll be able to tell the way you’re moving, how distracted you are, might even be able to guess how willing you are to actually pull that trigger if you try something.
And it can be a point of attack. During my Karate years in Oklahoma we did a section on realistic encounters – what to do if someone pulls a knife on you, pulls a gun on you, and so on. If they’re holding it close to you and you are very, very quick, you can snap your hands down from where you’re holding them up and empty-palmed and jerk the gun away, maybe even get it into your hands. I don’t know what hand-to-hand training in the Coast Guard or in the park ranger service was like, but if even I know the technique Elena probably knows something similar.
And she will also know that it isn’t something you can ever realistically pull off. The person with the gun has to be distracted, or possibly just disabled, not to be able to react in time. There’s a reason Ali always told us in class, very seriously, that if someone was holding us up to mug us, to just give them what they wanted. “You are not,” he said, “going to be faster than someone’s index finger moving a couple of centimeters. You will die, unless you are very lucky. If they want something, give it to them. If they’re going to kill you, though,” he said, waggling his finger at us, flashing that brilliant smile, “it’ll be better than nothing.” Then we practiced headlocks and sleeper chokes.
So even though I can see Elena’s hands flexing with an unconscious urge to rip and choke and get us out of this situation, she doesn’t move a muscle. I see her glance over at me, just a flicker, like checking a pulse, making sure I’m still here, I’m not panicking.
“Hand it over,” Erica repeats, glancing between us. I am very curious to find out how she expects us to just give her a crystal that’s roughly the weight and shape of a refrigerator, but maybe she doesn’t know how big it is. How the hell does she even know about it to begin with?
Makado. Somehow I know it must have been through Makado, one way or another. If she was willing to tell me, she’d potentially be willing to tell someone else, someone even more of a security risk than I am.
I remember Peter telling me, what feels like ages ago now, that the cult was harmless. Just a bunch of broken people trying to get by.
“We don’t have it,” I tell Erica. “It was a mess down there, an ambush. If you want it, go get it.”
Erica’s eyes are very cold. I can practically see the gears working as she measures what I’ve said. Elena edges slightly closer to me and the feeling of her there at my side is a comfort, but I am just praying that Erica isn’t cold-blooded enough to just shoot the two of us right now that she knows we don’t have the crystal.
Erica finally tells Marcus to search us, and he does so, tossing all of our various tools and gear into a small pile on the floor. I hear the lens of my camera shatter when he drops it and I can’t help but wince. He doesn’t pat us down very proficiently besides searching our pockets and our bags, which makes me reassess my initial assumptions – maybe this isn’t something that had a lot of planning put into it? Or at least she definitely couldn’t have been expecting to run into us here.
I look Erica over, head to toe. She’s dressed in hiking gear, but loosely – long shirt, long pants, but fairly thin. Without a climate controlled suit the humidity would be the real danger. Marcus is dressed similarly; I can’t tell for sure but I think he must have changed clothes at some point after he got into the Pit, changed into something more suitable for a long stay. And there must have been – well, what would he have eaten? Just – carved out bits from the walls? No way. Even if you were a certified card-carrying badass on a mission you’d have brought your own food. And Marcus does not strike me as the disgruntled ex-Army-Ranger type. Even just the way his hands traced over me with extreme delicacy and hesitation when he’d searched me made me think that taking captives must be an entirely new experience for him, and not one he’s comfortable with.
No, Erica is improvising. Which makes her more dangerous, especially if she gets desperate.
So let’s not make her get desperate.
“We’ll take you back down to get it,” I suggest. Erica looks over from her huddle with Marcus. Well, half a huddle, both still turned towards us, watching cautiously, guns still aimed at us but fingers off the triggers now. Elena nudges me and looks at me like I’m crazy but I shoot her a look that I hope says ‘trust me.’
“I thought you said it was an ambush?” Erica asks. “Down in the barrows?”
“Well, yes, but –“
“What, do you want us to go down there just to get eaten by copepods?”
“Do you want the crystal or not?” I shrug. “Doesn’t bother me none.”
She looks at Marcus. His face is tight and unreadable. “We’ll go down and check,” she says, nodding. “We’ve come all this way, it’d be stupid not to.”
“What about them?” he asks.
“Look,” Elena says urgently, “the Sergeant had a tracker PDA in his bag. It’ll show you exactly where the crystal is. Just take it and follow it and we’ll leave and pretend we never saw you.”
I resist the urge to bury my face in my hands. Elena’s got plenty of strengths but negotiation isn’t one of them.
Erica laughs at that suggestion and informs us that she has a better idea.
“Why don’t I,” she asks, rummaging through the pile of gear and coming up with a short length of rope, “tie you two up, and then you’ll lead us down to get the crystal? Or,” she says, brightening, “how about I get rid of one of you first –“
Elena stiffens next to me, but all I can feel is a cold hard knife-edged anger slicing at me. I look at Erica, really look at her, force her to look at me, cram all of the casual hate I can into my gaze and throw it at her. “You’ll have to kill both of us, then,” I tell her. “Because if you kill her, I’m going to do the best I can to lead all of us straight into a copepod’s mouth. And if you kill me –“
Elena picks up where I left off, a little more bloody-minded: “and if you kill her,” she finishes, glancing over at me, “I’m going to do whatever I have to do to tear your throat out with my teeth before you put me down too.”
I have to stop myself from smiling when I hear her say that; I content myself with nudging a little closer to her as well so that our hips touch. That will have to be enough for now.
Erica has faltered a little. Even though she’s still got the gun, hell, she’s got two guns on her side, she isn’t certain. You can see it in her eyes. She draws back, then tries to save face. Predictable. “I was just – I wasn’t going to actually do it,” she says.
There is something very strange going on here. This is too disorganized to be a real attempt to – to what, steal the crystal from us on the way back up? No way. Even if she’d brought the material and equipment needed to actually transport it without the use of Joker, she’d still have to contend with what should have been a full squad of combat-trained rangers, plus two useless hangers-on (me and Euler). She’d have had to have brought enough people to outgun us, and even then it’d be dicey in tight quarters like these, especially if the people she brought weren’t familiar with the Pit.
This – her and Marcus – can’t be it. It simply can’t. Even if she thinks that the crystal could fit in her pocket she would still have to take it from us. This is something opportunistic, something important to her for some reason, important enough to throw her entire life away for a shot at, for a crazy shot at, for a Hail Mary at the buzzer.
I turn and look down the Cord, at the sparking depths of it, at the rows and rows of spiral-staircase encasing it. I wonder where Fumi is, what Fumi’s doing, whether he’s okay. Maybe it was cowardly for him to run but I’m glad that he did, I’m glad that at least he got out of this okay. For the moment anyway.
She’s going to make us go back down. There’s no way around it. I can feel myself sagging at the thought of it, at the thought of going back down there and seeing with fresh eyes all the death that’s waiting down there. I had kept it together admirably well up until now but I can feel myself clenching, I can feel myself freezing up, shying away from even thinking about it like if I don’t it won’t be able to touch me. I want to close my eyes and cry, for Euler, for the Sergeant, for Ellis, for Slate and Crookshank and all the others that are down there even still, I want to just heave out sobs until I can’t any more and I’ll be empty. Being empty sounds good right now but I’m not and I can’t be.
I wonder for a brief moment whether this is what PTSD is, whether I’ve been damaged somehow, and then my lip curls without any conscious effort and I can feel myself tighten, drag myself back upwards like chains ratcheting along my spine.
“Fuck it,” I say. Everyone looks round at me and I realize that I’ve said it a little louder than I meant to. Ordinarily I’d shrink and get embarrassed but I have gone through so much shit lately that I feel an uncharacteristic willingness to take up space, to be violent. I am tired.
I look at Erica again. “If this crystal is so fucking important we’ll go back down and you can look at it and admit that it was a stupid idea to go down there and then we can come back up. Alright? But don’t you ever point that fucking gun at her,” I say, pointing to Elena. “No, fucking look at me, I’m serious. I don’t give a shit. You don’t know this terrain, you don’t know this area, and even if you’ve been here before you don’t know the lay of the land right now. You need us, both of us, so give us a little fucking respect. We’ll fucking guide you down there but treat us like fucking human beings, you bitch.”
Erica’s eyes are very wide, and it is very, very quiet as my voice fades into the dull, thick air. Then her eyes go slatey and hard and she strikes me across the face. I see it coming and could have blocked it but I stopped myself, which is a little harder than it sounds, because the instinct when you can see a blow like that is to either dodge it or put your hands up, but she’s still got the gun.
I can feel the butt of the revolver smack into my cheekbone and there’s a starburst of pain there. I stagger back a little, bumping into Elena, and then she is holding me. I can hear her growling at Erica, calling her a bitch, but Marcus points his gun at her and she quiets a little. Then Erica hauls me to my feet. Her nails are digging into my shoulder painfully and I cry out softly. She digs the barrel of the gun into my gut and the feeling of it is like icewater. My hands are shaking and no matter how hard I try I can’t stop them.
I begin to realize that I may have made a mistake.
“No,” Erica snarls, “you listen to me, you little shit. You are in no position to make any fucking demands. You’re going to lead us down there and thank us profusely if we decide not to end your miserable lives once we’ve got the damn crystal. You understand?”
Her hand tightens further around my throat – when did she start choking me? – and I croak something out, but I am too busy panicking to realize whether or not I actually meant to form words or if I just let out a mindless squeak of fear.
One thing karate in a dojo will not teach you is how to handle imminent mortality. Nobody who learns karate expects to ever actually need to use it. Karate isn’t even a real way of fighting – it’s more of a sport, something for lazy dojo tigers to pad around showing off, sparring for points. The grabs and chokes and defenses I know are more MMA than anything else. What’ll karate, pure karate, do to help in a real fight? Are you going to throw a spin kick at somebody? Please.
I can’t breathe. I bat ineffectually at Erica’s face and her shoulders but she doesn’t even bother to stop me. Finally, after what seems like forever, she lets go and I fall to the ground in a huddle, coughing and gasping. Elena is there, curled over me protectively, glaring daggers at Erica, and even Marcus is eyeing her a little warily.
“You could have fucking killed her!” Elena spits, and a little of that uncertainty returns to Erica’s eyes, or at least I think it does – mine are still a little bleary. When I can blink the tears from them and look at her again she seems utterly unruffled.
“Tie their hands,” she says to Marcus, and after only a moment of hesitation he does so, and then we are making our slow, awkward, armless way down the Cord, back towards the barrows.
 * * *
 “We need a break,” Elena points out again, and again Erica does nothing but click her tongue and urge us onward, gesturing with the barrel of the revolver. Not only has Marcus bound our hands but he’s also tied us together, making it so that Elena and I are linked by only a couple feet of paracord. It’s been biting roughly into my wrists for the last couple of hours and if this keeps up I’m going to have ugly welts because of it. Erica and Marcus have both relaxed a little, especially since they’ve gotten rid of all of our gear. She got Elena to show her how to work the Sergeant’s tracker, and I almost cried when they had to flip him over in order to take it from his bag. The look of stunned surprise frozen on his face was so gentle and unlike him that it almost made him look like a different person entirely.
I don’t even know why I was crying – he was an asshole, for sure, but there was something, I don’t know, something meaningful to him that made me think that there were reasons. And of course there are always reasons that people end up acting like that but sometimes people end up being so crabbed and gnarled and nasty that you don’t want to find reasons to unpeel them from themselves and look at the kind of person they are really. The Sergeant I would have liked to have sat down and had a drink with and gotten to know, just for pure raw opportunistic curiosity.
I didn’t even have the luxury of closing his eyes for him, because as soon as Erica had retrieved the PDA and browbeat Elena into showing her how to work it – oh, how my blood boiled as she called Elena a bitch and a cunt and worst of all fucking stupid just because she kept fumbling with the login screen and getting her account on the PDA to track the crystal as well – we were off and marching, leaving the Sergeant sprawled there, staring up dead and empty at the cold metal-capped ceiling.
I don’t have it in me to feel angry, I don’t have it in me to hate. That will come later. Right now I’m too tired. I am too damn sour at myself for reading Erica wrong. I thought I could cow her, I thought that even though she had the gun she’d back down. At the very least we wouldn’t be tied up, even if we were marching all the way back down to the barrows on a pointless errand that might get us killed.
Once we’re down at our stop on the Cord and out and walking down the long, damp path down to the barrows, Elena turns around, fixes Erica with a glare. I can still see a cold light of hatred burning somewhere deep down inside of her cool grey eyes and for a moment I feel frightened for her, I feel momentarily terrified that she’s going to try something and get herself shot and I – I –
“What’s this crystal to you?” she asks Erica, and I swallow hard and glance back at Erica as well, waiting to see what she’ll say, if she’ll even give us a straight answer. I look at her and those dark eyes stare back at us. She is – I will give her this, she’s determined. She has set her mind to doing this, whatever the hell this is, and she’s going to be willing to throw us all away if she has to. You can see it in the set of her jaw, in the way her eyes rake us like an eagle’s claws. “What’s the point of all this?” Elena continues. Erica’s nose wrinkles lightly. I wonder if she’ll even bother trying to win us over, whether she’ll figure that her having shot the Sergeant will have turned us against her permanently.
Erica nods to Marcus and he unties us and we all huddle there for a while against the side of the corridor, sit down in the sopping squelch of it, too tired to care. Erica leans against the ribbed wall of the vent and looks down along its depths towards the barrows. She’s still holding the revolver but at least it isn’t pointed at us.
Elena leans in to me and rests her head on my shoulder and I kiss the top of her head, and I feel her smile faintly, but it vanishes fast. This isn’t going how I wanted at all. I want to say something to her, I want to kiss her and tell her it’s going to be okay. She’s so tough but she’s so scared, I can tell she’s scared, and I want to show her that I can be tough too. That I am more than an anchor. But doing that in front of Erica and Marcus would feel – dirty, somehow. Uncomfortable. I itch at the thought of it. So instead I sit there very still and let her rest her head on me and let that be enough.
“My husband was there four years ago,” Erica says, and we both look up at her. Marcus doesn’t look interested, clearly he knows this story, he’s heard it before. “At the disaster,” Erica clarifies.
She waits for a moment, maybe to see whether or not we’ve got any response. Elena and I stay quiet, no ‘oh really’ or ‘no way.’ If she wants us to be buddy-buddy with her she’s straight out of luck.
“You know what that crystal is, don’t you?” she asks, and Elena snorts. I would as well but the welt on my cheek from where she got me with the butt of the revolver hurts too much whenever I move my nose.
“I do,” Elena says. “Do you?”
Erica laughs. There isn’t much humor in it. “I don’t think you do. I think I know much better than you do.”
“Explain it to us, then,” Elena tells her, and I nod in agreement. The longer we can keep her talking, hopefully, the longer we’ll be able to rest.
“My husband Burt,” Erica says, “was a ranger here at the park. And he was here in 2007. But he wasn’t the ordinary type of ranger, he worked at the one place in this park that required a security clearance.”
Elena frowns. “I don’t know what –“
“You see,” Erica continues, “when they found the Pit back in the 70s, they found ritual grounds too. Old places, places that the indigenous tribes had been using for centuries to commune with the Pit. This place,” Erica gestures widely, “is alive. It feels and reacts. It thinks.”
Elena snorts again, a little softer this time. “In the ritual grounds there were crystals exactly like the one you were sent down to find, only carved and shaped so that if someone who knew what they were doing hit them with a strike in just the right way, they’d resonate. And that resonance could influence the Pit. Make it calm down if it were starting to wake up, make it wake if it were sleeping. Calm the wildlife, make it possible to live down here without any danger. Or send them into a frenzy.”
“Sounds like magic,” I murmur, but without much conviction. Makado, in that hurried briefing after Slate had died, had said something a little similar. I look at Erica, meet her eyes. “Did your husband work on the – the contingency plan?”
That catches Erica up for a moment, but she nods, glancing over at me. Her eyes, I notice, linger for a moment on the swollen mark on my cheek. “Yes,” she says finally. “Yes, he did. And he was there when they broke the crystals. See, I figure someone, Veret probably, told you about the crystal and why they want it. But nobody would have told you about what exactly the crystal did when it was broken.”
“Well, it – it put the Pit to sleep.”
“Yes,” Erica nods. “Yes, it did. But did they tell you what it did to the people there? Some of them, at least.”
Elena frowns. She starts to say something but I nod. “Peter told me,” I say. Elena is giving me a very confused look. “Not all of it,” I add, “but enough to piece together the parts. I hadn’t known it was breaking the crystal that had done it, but I could guess.”
“What - ?” Elena starts.
“It’s a – when they shattered the crystals it caused something like a contagious psychic plague,” I tell her, glancing at Erica. “From what Peter told me it sounded like it would gradually erode your self-control and make you want to come to the Pit, to come down into the Pit and, well, I don’t know what happened to them once they got in. I don’t think Peter did either. And if you weren’t able to get to the Pit you’d get to a point where you’d be spreading it to everybody you were near just – just mentally, I guess. I know it sounds like bullshit but it’s true, I swear it’s true.”
“But if that’s true why was Peter smuggling people in? It must have been people with that – with that disease,” Elena says. “Why didn’t he try to help them? I mean, Christ, people without any preparation, sick people, down here in the Pit, they wouldn’t last a fucking day. That’s –“
“Because the cure,” I tell her, “has a good chance of completely wiping out your personality,” I tell her, and she quiets. She believes me, I think, she has to believe me. Or if she doesn’t believe me she trusts me, at least. I don’t give myself time to feel warm and fuzzy about it. “That’s what Peter told me, anyway. He was one of the lucky ones.”
“He had this disease?” she asks, glancing over at me.
“Yes,” Erica says. “He did. Roan’s pretty much right about the details. Peter was lucky.”
“So he and Makado decided it would be better to just smuggle people in? Let them go down there to die?”
I can tell by the look on her face that Elena thinks this would be just as bad. I shrug. I can feel the exhaustion in the weight of my shoulders. “Peter told me that there’s a point where it becomes contagious, right before you die of it. But if you’re in the Pit, that doesn’t happen, there’s no contagiousness. That’s why they were letting them in.”
“That seems awfully convenient,” Elena remarks, and I shrug.
“I don’t know if it’s true,” I say, “that’s just what Peter told me.”
“Surely there would have been a better way -“
“Peace,” Erica says quietly. “All that’s over now, now that Peter’s – well, is he dead?”
I think about it. “I didn’t see him die,” I tell her. “But he must have. I don’t know how anybody else could have lived down there. It was awful.”
“It was stupid,” she says, “going down to the barrows to try and get it.”
“Makado was desperate,” Elena says. “She was afraid that the Pit was going to wake up sometime soon and without another crystal to break to send it back to sleep, they wouldn’t be able to contain it.”
“Well,” Erica says, running a hand through her hair, “you can see the logic in it, can’t you? But I think she’s being played. And in turn she’s playing you, all the rangers in the team that went down. How many were there?”
“Eight,” I say. “Plus me and one other.”
Erica nods. “See, the problem with breaking the crystals is that, yeah, it’s an immediate solution. But did you ever think why they found those thousand-year-old crystals carved and perfect and intact? Not cracked to pieces?”
“Why?” Elena asks. She still has an ugly sullen undertone to her voice but she’s listening, she’s evaluating. I don’t think Erica is necessarily going to lie to us but I think whatever information she’s operating off of must be flawed if she’s come down here herself.
“Because,” Erica says, giving us a little mirthless smile, “cracking one of those crystals is like knocking the Pit out, rather than easing it into a natural sleep like you supposedly can do if you strike it the right way. It’ll wake up sooner and angrier and hungrier than it would otherwise. I don’t think they meant to crack it but I don’t think they’ve done their research, they haven’t even tried to reach out to some of the native communities around here that might still have had a little knowledge about how these things work. They fucked everything up in the 70s, made a lot of people very mad at them. I don’t think they know how bad they’ve made things. If they get their hands on that crystal and end up cracking it again, it’ll –“
“Alright,” Elena says. “I get the picture.”
“What happened to Burt?” I ask, and Erica sighs.
“Well,” she says, “they told me he was dead. Wasn’t true for a couple months after, though. They shipped him off to a lab somewhere, I have no idea where, and used him and a bunch of other people from the park who were suffering the worst to try and develop some kind of treatment. I only found out because he was able to sneak out and call me from a pay phone someplace outside wherever they were keeping him. He told me everything and ever since then –“
She can’t go on, her voice cuts off in a sudden choke.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and Elena looks at me sharply. I meet her gaze evenly, then turn back to Erica. “I’m sorry that that happened, because you nor him deserved it. But coming down here, killing the Sergeant, with no plan, not even the –“
“If I don’t at least try to do something to stop everything from happening all over again,” Erica tells me, “I’d never forgive myself.” She pauses for a moment, starts to say something, then thinks better of it. Her voice is like broken glass. “Maybe I’m making a mistake but I’m going to do the right thing.”
There is a brief, brief silence that passes between us. Elena reaches over and hugs me, but while her lips are pressed close to my ear, she hisses to me that this isn’t our fucking fight and to follow her lead when she makes us get moving again, and as she says it I feel a looming terror break over me like a riptide and I look at her as she pulls away and want so terribly to tell her not to, whatever she’s thinking about doing to just not, don’t do anything stupid, if I lost her I – I –
And then Erica is gesturing at us with the gun to get up, saying that it’s time to get a move on, and as Marcus comes over, his slim little automatic clutched loosely in his hand, aimed at us but from the hip, and offers Elena a hand, she takes it wordlessly and pulls herself up, her hand leaving mine with only a tight, brief squeeze. Then once she’s up she shoves Marcus off-balance and before he can even think to do anything other than reach out reflexively to catch himself she’s got both hands on the gun and is struggling with him for it. “Elena!” I croak, starting to rise, just as Erica screams at her to stop, legs spread wide in a shooter’s stance, trying to get a clear shot at her. Marcus’s gun is pointing straight at me and I scream and throw myself to the side just a moment before it goes off and a bullet shrieks past and buries itself in the fleshy wall of the corridor behind me, just where I had been standing. While I try to scramble to my feet amid the dirt and muck on the floor I hear another gunshot, and then a body falls next to me face-down and starts writhing, and when I see Marcus staggering to his feet and realize who has fallen heavily, a string of curses bubbling from her blood-flecked lips, I scream Elena’s name over and over again, pressing my hands over the streaming hole in her side with desperation born of utter futility.
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