#sham sacrifice

[phantomrose96]

Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 2

(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1)

Chapter 2, because @ciestess voiced an idea that absolutely consumed my entire mind and I could not rest until I made this

...

Danny’s eyes tracked the swing of gunfire raining bullets across the horizon. Tucker reloaded, crouched, dodged left and pivoted, another blast of bullet confetti launched through a gaggle of zombie heads. He tossed the magazine and reloaded. Click. Ching. Danny flinched when a zombie smashed a hammer clean through Tucker’s head.

 “God. Fucking…” Tucker pulled out of his hunch. He unclamped his fingers from his controller like bug legs unfurling. He extended the controller to Danny, bouncing it in his grip. “Your turn.”

“Huh?” Danny asked, as if he hadn’t been watching Tucker’s game the whole time.

“You. You’re up. I died.”

Danny accepted the controller, reloaded the screen, and jogged about a hundred feet forward before the first horde of zombies took him out football-style from the left. The death screen rolled.

“Oops,” Danny said.

“Not your best work.” And Tucker took the controller back. Tucker shot a few spare glances to Danny while the level restart loaded in. “Is it Vlad?”

“No. Well, yes,” Danny answered, flopping back into his normal position on the Foley attic armchair. Tucker’s mom had planned to toss it ages ago, before it became Danny’s chair. “But at least he left when my parents went all zombie mode into the basement.” Danny picked absently at the scabs of leather flaking from the armrest. “It was just weird.”

“I don’t mean this as an insult, but it’s definitely not the first time your dad’s gotten some math wrong,” Tucker said. “He blows up like three things a week doesn’t he?”

“He does. But he doesn’t care when he gets that math wrong. This one was like I broke something important.” Danny’s expression soured, and he picked a leather flake clean off the chair. “Vlad did, I mean.”

“Does any of the math actually work?” Sam offered from Tucker’s desk. She leaned an elbow around the back of his chair, head tilted to Danny. A pencil dangled from her loose fingers, nib-half worn to the History of an Invention report she was actually working on. Tucker had half-assed his earlier in the day about the palm pilot. Danny had not done his. “Like, it’s all crackpot theory, right? Do ghosts even follow math?”

“I think they follow some math. It’s not magic that makes the ecto-bazookas work, or the Fenton-phones work, or—well the thermos DIDN’T work—until I made it work.”

The unspoken thing Danny had been not-quite-saying hung in the air. He said it this time.

“So I’m wondering if I did it. Like the Fenton thermos. And now maybe they’re gonna do the math all over and realize the missing piece of the equation is one half-ghost son.”

“Well the order is backwards, for starters,” Sam said. “Thermos worked because you pumped ghost-energy into it. How would you have done that to the portal? You were human when you walked in.”

“Sam’s right. What do you think you brought to the table exactly? Button-slapping abilities?” Tucker loaded up the next level. “It was their portal, and their math, and it worked. There’s a million-billion kinds of math and they probably just forgot one thing.”

Tucker took a headshot and died. Mechanically, he handed the controller back to Danny.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Ask Vlad. He’s got a portal.”

“Like Vlad’s gonna tell me.”

“Just promise to be his diligent little son minion or whatever. He’s easy. Wait, let me do the next level. You know I like the cyberpunk levels.”

“It’s not your turn,” Danny said, reeling the controller just out of Tucker’s wiggling grasp.

“I’ll let you do two in a row for your next turn.”

Danny knocked Tucker away, distracted just long enough for a zombie cyberbeam to launch from the horizon and take him out through the head.

The screen washed sepia. Danny stared at it. You died.

…

Danny hadn’t really meant to stay the night at Tucker’s place. They’d just gotten really far in Man vs. Zombie, and Sam had gone home, and Danny was just resting his eyes between his turns with the controller.

So when he woke to the bright strip of sunlight beaming into his eyes through the attic skylight, his first thought was Fuck.

He was awake, here, morning, school. Fuck he had not actually done his History of Invention report, despite the stupid amount of grief it had already caused him this weekend. He pulled his face out of the armrest, now pineapple-patterned from the decaying leather, and pawed for his phone fallen on the floor. If it was still early enough, he could maybe still afford to desperately half-ass something before sixth period science.

He flipped his phone open. A text from Jazz. “Don’t come home. Make up an excuse.”

“…Fuck,” Danny whispered, through the sensation of his heart launching itself into his throat.

He scrambled upright, whole body shaking at the mercy of adrenaline shock so soon after being pulled from dead sleep. His mouth was dry, teeth unbrushed, wearing his old clothes from yesterday, report not done, Don’t come home, Don’t come home, Don’t come home.

They knew. He’d fucked it up. Somehow they knew. The math. Something. And it had to be with guns blazing, because Jazz would not send that text if they’d taken the “We accept you” angle.

Were they coming for him? On their way here? Tracking by his phone? Did they like Mrs. Foley enough to not SWAT-slam her against the wall when she opened the door for them so they could come capture the ghost pretending to be their son?

Fuck.

Danny was upright. Danny was standing. Danny was shaking. Danny wasn’t actually sure what the next thing was he was supposed to do.

Tucker’s ball of blankets rustled from the couch. “Mmph?” he asked, articulately.

“I have to. Go deal with my parents, I think,” Danny said, because any plan felt a little better than no plan. “I think they know.”  

Danny was a ghost. Danny was gone. Tucker sat upright, alone, blinking himself awake. He was staring at the You Died sepia screen still displayed on monitor, now burnt into the plasma of the tv.

…

Danny paused with his human hand slick on the Fenton front door. The gears in his mind turned as his plan quickly unraveled into no-plan. He had no plan, right? What was his plan? Handle this Man vs Zombie style—open the front door ready to dodge wide, because both zombies and parents liked to camp behind closed doors with bazookas at the ready?

“—absolutely absurd, and entirely unscientific, with no probability of being true. It goes against everything we know about neurology.”

Oh, Jazz. Was Jazz enough of a bazooka-deterrent? Probably not. Knowing his parents.

Danny turned the knob. His heart hammered. If bazookas, dodge left.

The first thing he noticed was in fact the no-bazookas. It was what he was most looking for. And so it was Jazz’s expression he did not notice until second—whites of her eyes wide, snapped to Danny, with a look that would be accusatory if worry hadn’t won that battle. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair was unbrushed.

He noticed his parents third. Compulsively, he rocked back onto his right foot, still outside the doorway, still outside the threshold of the Fenton family household.

Seeing his parents tired was of absolutely no shock-value to Danny. It was at least a twice-per-month tradition to see them haul themselves up from the basement sweaty and glaze-eyed at 7am, babbling excitement about some new ecto-spectral-hoozy-whatsits whose concept had shimmed into their minds at 8pm and now existed, fully operational, 11 nonstop hours later.

So it wasn’t the exhaustion on their face. It wasn’t the stagnant smell of sweat or the paleness of their faces or the stains on their clothes.

It was the way they looked at him. Like their whole world had fallen apart with his foot passing over the doorstep.

“Danny,” Jazz said, choked, a break in the silence. “Things are…! A little weird here. So maybe, if you wanna just get to school, I’ll finish clearing up—there’s a misunderstanding Mom and Dad have with their math. I am state finalist in Math League and have been studying college-level calculus in preparation for school applications so I’ve offered to help them fix their math, or prove to them—”

“Danny,” Maddie said, an echo of Jazz, but it felt worse. Danny scanned her hands for anything pointed enough to be a weapon. They were empty. “Danny can I just ask you something honestly, just quickly? Jazz is right. I’m just trying to clear up an issue with our math. And I won’t be mad. Whatever the answer is, I won’t be mad. I just want an honest answer.”

She stepped closer. Danny fought the urge to match her with a step backwards. Her eyes roved over him in a starved way, looking for something.

“Were you there when the portal turned on?” she asked.

“No, I wasn’t,” Danny answered. He wasn’t sure what to do with his face to make it look convincing. “It just. It needed some time to boot up, or something, right? That’s what you two said.”

“That was our guess ,but we don’t really know. The security tapes are wiped. We tried to make them EMF-resilient but a very, very strong blast of EMF could still corrupt them.”

“Yeah. I mean the portal’s gonna do that, right? When it turned on? Ripping open the Ghost Zone that’s—gotta be huge EMF.” Danny’s focus bounced between his mother’s eyes. “Just a guess. I really don’t know. I was in bed, already, whenever the portal started working.”

Left eye. Right eye. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she was sad. Was this part a trick? Make Danny let his guard down, go hey Mom need a hug? and that’s when the bazooka-whipping starts? It made his ribs feel scratchy. Stop looking at me like that.

“Have you felt anything weird at all, since the portal started working? Any gaps in your memory? Any parts of you that don’t feel right? Is there any part of you that feels like it’s changed in a way you can’t explain?”

She reached a hand out. Danny instinctively recoiled.

“Uh, yeah. They taught us about this in health class. They call it ‘puberty’ there.”

“Danny,” Jack said, and his voice was scratchy from disuse, from a long and uncharacteristic amount of time spent not speaking. “Did you die in the machine?”

A beat. A moment. Like when the zombie sends a hammer through your head.

“I’M alive!” Danny declared with a crack in his voice, with hands slammed to his chest. “Look at me. What are you talking about?”

“It’s the only math that works,” Jack continued, his words like chalk, his voice too dead. He looked too much at Danny. “If one of you two walked into the portal, and died in it. And I don’t think it was Jazz.”

This was bad. This was weird. Danny had ghost powers, sure. ‘They can’t kill me I’m already dead,’ was a funny joke sometimes. But it was funny as a joke. He was a ghost sham, really. A faker, a LARPer, whatever Tucker had called it. He was a human who was just kind of a freak now. More of a freak than he already was. He looked dead, for someone who was super-duper still alive.

He’d buried that worry, already. They weren’t allowed to bring it back.

“Look… at me!” Danny continued, mouth dry. He threw his arms wide. “Look how super alive I am! I’m awake! Using energy! Eating food and sleeping with my human body. I’ve got flesh and blood and bones and stuff! I’m not a ghost-expert but ghosts don’t have that.”

This was weird. This made Danny feel like something was scratching to get free from inside his rib cage. It twisted his entrails. Sure Tucker and Sam had thought he was dead, for those first horrible few minutes, but then he changed back to a human and the nightmare ended there. Jazz never called him dead. The ghosts called him freak and halfa and whelp, but never ‘one of them.’ That was his whole thing: being different from the ghosts who became ghosts by something so normal as dying.

He was not dead.

“If you died in the portal, your ghost wouldn’t have been ripped out of your body. It would have been allowed to stay, and then you’d be…” Jack hesitated. “I don’t know what you’d be, but you wouldn’t be alive.”

“Dad,” Jazz said, and she stood herself bodily between Danny and Jack. “What an absolutely messed up out-of-line thing to say to your son! You don’t know that! Dad you’re tired, and just because you weren’t able to solve your math problem in one night doesn’t mean you get to treat Danny like this! I said I’d help you with your math! Now apologize to Danny.”

Jazz looked over her shoulder to Danny, her expression falling at the sight of Danny’s face.

Danny backed up over the door threshold. He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. This is weird. I’m gonna go to school now.”

“Danny, I promise they’re just—”

Danny turned on heel. No backpack, no change of clothes. He took to the street without a single school supply and moved, and moved.

It was supposed to be guns-blazing. Molecule by molecule. Headshot you died. He’d prepared for that this whole time, in the shower, in his dreams, in his daydreams in class. He’d duck and dodge and explain himself over and over until they understood him.

Danny wasn’t sure he was capable of explaining himself anymore.

…

Danny knocked the heavy iron knocker. He was in ghost form, as a threat. He wondered if he still smelled like yesterday’s sweat now that he wasn’t wearing yesterday’s clothes. Now he was wearing the clothes he died in.

No one answered the door. Danny phased himself in.

“Vlad!” he called, and his words echoed along the slope of the two elaborate winding staircases that twirled and met at the top like caduceus. Gold-plated banisters. A security camera buried somewhere in the ceiling, no doubt.

Danny phased into the library. His eyes roved the three stories of bookshelves wrapping the perimeter like a sheath. Gaudy. Audacious. Like Vlad would ever read that much. Danny racked his brain because some something in here was the secret to opening Vlad’s laboratory. Jazz had told him. Some gold something to be touched, and pressed down, or pushed up? Or it opened to a button. Or a keypad, maybe.

Danny spat a curse. He was being stupid. He was frazzled. He wasn’t thinking straight.

He dove into the floor below. Intangibility was the only key he needed.

The sheetrock was cold, even when he wasn’t touching it. The darkness was so piercing it made static jump in his vision, some weird trick of the brain Jazz had explained where, in the absence of all light, the brain hallucinates its own. It came with a sensation of pressure against his eyeballs, and a complete disorientation of direction, and he simply just kept going down.

Danny emerged into a wash of cold air. Cold like metal was cold. The low lights of dials and clicking machines were bright to his eyes previously dunked into the pitchest nothing. He drank it in, eyes grateful for light no matter how little, inner ear grateful for orientation that had left his head swimming and his stomach tight.

His feet tapped down to the stone ground, and the air that breezed past him was chilled.

“Vlad!” Danny called again.

Nothing.

He moved by the floor lighting, which ran in trim along the perimeter of the laboratory rooms. It lit things from beneath, made machines gaunt and specimens into sharp geometries of darkness and flesh. It made the Fenton lab feel warm in a way Danny had never considered it warm.

His feet clacked. His breath puffed.

“Vlad!”

He followed light, followed a wash of green miasma percolating from some far room and catching on the particulate of water and dust that disturbed with the air currents. Danny disturbed it too, walking through, wearing its shade of green which his shadow robbed from the wall behind him.

“Vlad. I swear to god Vlad.”

He crossed the threshold of the portal room, where the dusting of green ambience became a medallion wash of golden-green coating, painting every surface of the room. The Fenton lab was one single expansive room, portal anchored into the far wall and facing all the dead and empty air in front of it. This was different. A much smaller room, walled on all sides save for the simple doorway, and each surface reflected the color back deeper and heavier. It was like a fishtank in the wall of an aquarium lit radiant aqua-blue by all the lights within, but green instead, pure ecto-green.

Danny approached the open portal. He stared into its placid swirls, mesmerized, and scared of it, in a way he hadn’t previously felt about the portal in the Fenton basement.

“Ah, seems the cat is a good mouser after all, it dragged you in my boy.” The words came sing-song. They came spine-shivering for Danny, who felt them like hot breath on his shoulder and reeled back, pivoted, fire crackling to life in his palms.

Vlad stood at the doorway, a solid 20 steps from Danny.

“Vlad.”

“So I’ve been hearing.”

“I need you to explain the portal.”

“Ah, I see you’ve spoken to your parents.” Vlad stepped in, washed in the ecto-green which muddied his ruby red eyes. He held his hands behind his back, cape trailing, a smirk on his fanged face. “Last I heard they weren’t taking the news very well.”

“What news. What did you tell them?”

“Me? Nothing. In fact, very kindly for your sake I even tried to drive them away from the answer but… We know how stubborn your parents can be.”

“What answer?”

“That you’re dead, Daniel.”

Shock washed like ice down Danny’s spine. It sent prickles like spider legs across his skin.

“Well, I suppose there’s still chance for some doubt. It could be Jazz. She could take the fall for you, if there’s any benefit to that at all.”

“I’m a halfa. We are halfas,” Danny said.

“A silly made up word by a silly child,” Vlad mused, and the light smile left his lips. “We are dead.”

“I’m not dead,” and Danny’s words were small, and they were childish.

“You are. I am. Embrace it. It’s nicer this way.” Vlad took a few steps closer, lionously tall in his saunter, feet clacking the ground. “It’s very freeing. After you’ve died already what is there left to fear?”

“I’m alive.”

“You’re a dead body with its soul still stuffed inside it like a Christmas goose. A lot of things in your body don’t work anymore, but ghosts don’t work right anyway and it is, for all its defiance of nature, a perfectly symbiotic relationship.” Vlad’s smile brushed his lips again, warm. “It’s nice to share this with you. Isn’t it nice to share things with people?”

Danny’s heart was beating too fast in his chest, and it was a human heart, a human beat. “I’m not dead,” he declared.

“Your wounds heal quickly because the ghost piloting you only needs to remember form. It stacks cells back into place and calls it good. You’ll endure fatal injuries as you no doubt have many times in your fights, but they’re trivial because physical trauma is not what kills a ghost. It’s what creates one. You’ll necrotize in places but it’s okay, because you’ll carry on, and it will bother you only if you let it bother you, if you’re too sentimental about the puppet you’re still inside.” Vlad closed in closer, neck craning to appraise Danny. “Ghosts love a facsimile of life so you will keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing. You’ll eat and you’ll sleep but you’ll find you won’t perish if you don’t. It just won’t be a good time if you want to keep occupying your flesh form. Take better care of it. You won’t get another.”

“You’re psychotic. And you’re wrong.”

“I have all the math to prove it.” Vlad leered from over Danny’s shoulder. He circled the boy, knocking Danny’s balance, who still on a hair trigger stood ready to fight. The light from the ghost portal painted Vlad’s face like the phases of the moon as he moved. “Did your parents explain that part to you properly?”

“No, because they didn’t get the math right.”

“Oh they’ve gotten it right. This time. It only took them two decades longer than it took me.” The portal rolled like static, and its fizzling pattern crashed like an ocean wave across Vlad’s cape. “No amount of man-made power is sufficient to drag the entire fabric of the Ghost Zone up against our own, tear a hole through it, and anchor it to a stable frame. It requires something with a pull on the Ghost Zone, a strong pull, and that thing is a human life at the moment of an extraordinarily violent death.”

Danny backed a step away from the portal, from Vlad, but the walls boxed him in. He swam in its green light.

“You stepped in and you turned the portal on, that’s what you thought, right, Daniel? Pressed a careless button on the inside and now here we are. Silly parents for not finding that button first.” Vlad’s face hardened. “No. Jack and Maddie knew about the button. Maddie explained it to me over the phone. What engineer designing and building their own portal would forget the location of the on button? They’d pressed it from the outside. It didn’t work. And so you pressing the button was not the important part. It was you dying to the electrocution that clicked everything right into place. And while your ghost should have been torn from your lifeless corpse and pulled to the Ghost Zone you instead pulled the Ghost Zone here. Your ghost got to stay put. You opened the portal. You became the undead freak you are. And now we’re here.”

Danny’s eyes bounced between Vlad’s. His cheeks felt hot, like he was enduring an accusation of wrongdoing. And he had none of the knowledge to refute what was being said.

“You’re messing with me. You’re wrong,” Danny shot back. He thrust an arm out, drenched in the fog of the portal. “If the portal needs a person to die in it then explain your portal! Are you so casual about it? You killed someone? You’re admitting to murder and you think I won’t do anything about it?”

Anger flashed like a storm across Vlad’s face. His aura swelled, pressing down with a pressure on Danny as Vlad halted and cast his shadow clear across Danny, coating the back wall. “The killing of other people with the wanton carelessness of half-baked machines is the domain of Jack and Jack alone. I’ve brought no such harm onto anyone else.”

“Then how do you have this portal?”

“This portal? This portal that I’ve had for 20 years? Which I opened when I solved the piece of Jack’s broken math that he was never able to solve until this morning?” Vlad stalked closer, hunched, imposing. Danny stepped back. “My boy Daniel you’ve had it so easy. You had it so simple. A truly clean break. So clean so lucky. A single lethal dose of electricity and it was already over. I’m jealous. You never even suffered.”

Vlad stepped closer, striking distance, arm extended. Danny flinched, but Vlad only swept his cape around, clenched in his fist, and pivoted to approach the portal.

“Put out of your misery before it even started.” Vlad slammed his fist against the portal rim, and the explosive metallic clang bounced through the rooms. His laugh belted out. “I should have been so lucky.”

19. Vlad Masters was 19. A sophomore in college. A man actively in the midst of sabotaging his social life to chase a woman who was already deeply in love with Vlad’s best friend who he hated more every day. He wasn’t sure what he ever enjoyed about Jack’s bumbling ineptitude, or his loudness, his brashness, his poor social skills, his bad breath, his mullet. Maybe Vlad had gravitated to Jack because deep down he loved how superior it made him feel to surround himself with the likes of Jack Fenton… And now, he hated how enraged it made him to watch Maddie’s eyes skip past his to focus on Jack Fucking Fenton again and again and again and again.

But surely there was hope still. Surely it was a matter of time before the rose-tinted glasses fell away and Maddie saw bumbling and inept and every such word in the basket when she looked at Jack. There’d come the day she tested the waters with Vlad to complain about one of Jack’s little quirks, and they’d find solace together in all the things Vlad was that Jack wasn’t, and all the things Vlad had that Jack didn’t. And he’d be gone, back to bumble elsewhere, and it would be just them.

The day didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. And maybe Vlad needed to change himself for Maddie. If he listened to her and Jack’s ghost ramblings, if he could put Jack in his place and solve the things Maddie couldn’t, it would show her. She’d understand.

Because that was the thing about Jack. His math was never right. Enduring Calculus 1 with Jack was all it took to prove this to Vlad. How many times he’d caught a single error on a single line for Jack, like a dropped stitch that would unravel the whole sweater. Every problem, without exception. Jack only passed on his homework grade with Vlad’s help. On his tests, he failed.

So Vlad was staring at Jack’s equation, full of bogus math, which Vlad knew was wrong because Jack had penned it, and Vlad had not yet fixed it himself.

“I’m telling you Jack, it won’t work.”

“Bogus V-man it totally will!”

It wouldn’t. But Vlad wouldn’t fix it for him. Not yet. Vlad would let Jack embarrass himself first, fully in front of Maddie, watching on, judging. Vlad would solve it for her. After. Once Jack had made a fool of himself for the hundredth time since college began.

He leaned in to study the portal frame. The gears were turning in his head already. He didn’t hear the whir of the power source catch.

…

19. Vlad Masters was 19. A tube ran down his nose and into his lungs, supplying oxygen for lungs which were failed by a diaphragm sloughing itself away. He was poisoned from the outside-in. Irradiated by ecto-energy none of the nurses or doctors could fully understand. It damaged his DNA. First obvious in the skin of his face where the blisters of his ecto-acne drained and sloughed. “Acne” was the wrong word. An unkind word. They were boils where the blast had cooked his skin, microwaved his cells. The skin on his body blackened over time. Organs decayed. Vlad Master read a lot about radiation sickness. He knew everything he had to expect.

Jack and Maddie had stopped visiting. They were dating now. It was on their last visit they’d told him, and Vlad hadn’t taken it well, and he’d perhaps burned a few bridges with the words he chose. It was deserved. Considering what Jack did to him.

He’d found the error in Jack’s math, by the way. Errors, but all the rest paled in impact compared to the lambda. The ecto-energy. The necessary ecto-potential to pull the Ghost Zone here. How stupid. How idiotic. For Vlad to die to a machine so botched in its construction.

When Vlad was released from the hospital, it was not because they’d cured him. It had been because there is a certain cruelty in making a 19-year-old live the last of his days bedded down in a white-walled room with just his books, his equations, and no one coming to visit anymore.

He was released with bedrest instructions. Vlad did not heed them. In his beater car, every cell of his body aching, he drove. At the materials lab, he disconnected his oxygen tank and moved through the lab space with the tube dangling loose from his nostril. No one was Vlad Masters’ friend. No one cared to stare long at his ugly boil-ridden face. No one stopped him as he hauled sheet metal, and supports, and bolts and wiring and resistors and power tools, checked out with a valid student ID, from the lab. The lab inventory room would not be seeing these back.

It was a prep bunker, buried beneath a vast lot of empty Wisconsin land, that Vlad hauled his materials. He and Jack had discovered it as freshmen. Poked through its bowels with flashlights and quipped and laughed over how eerie it was. Deep beneath the sheetrock, boxy rooms carved out of walls of stone. Shelf upon shelf of dusty canned foods, and shotguns sealed in cases fastened to the walls. The locks had rusted with water damage.

His arms ached until they throbbed, dragging beams of metal across the stone floor, scratching chalk-mark stains into the ground. His skin sloughed, inflamed, burning to the touch. Vlad didn’t bother to rest, because these injuries would never heal anyway. He hauled, and welded, and wired up his circuitry and resistors with a care and caution Jack would never have bothered to practice. He checked it against his math by flashlight. He took naps on the cold stone floor and woke with deep purple bruises on every part of his body that had pressed against the ground.

His appetite left him. His lungs filled with mucus. The boils on his face had spread down to his chest, his shoulders. The touch of his shirt chafed them, so he worked without one, a figure of skeletal rib ridges jutting from tight skin that bloomed with the projection of his shadow against stone walls.

He knew why Jack’s math was wrong.

A silly mistake. A stupid mistake. Anyone with half a mind for the paranormal should have realized the Ghost Zone was not so easily at your beck and call. Not without chumming the water with something it would rise to feast on.

And in that violent death, what would happen to the ghost? It would stay, wouldn’t it? If it successfully anchored the Ghost Zone to the portal it stood inside, then by definition the ghost would stay?

And was that death? Yes, in a way. But it was a death one would get to keep living. As opposed to the death Vlad was headed for, whose coldness and finality scared Vlad more than anything he could put to words.

He’d fixed the oxygen tank back to himself. He couldn’t work without it, hauling it about on a little dolly with him, back and forth, while he fetched and affixed the last of the plating he needed to craft the frame of his silent soulless portal.

He’d stolen a generator from the sports storage shed. It was meant to be enough to power the portable stadium lights they hauled onto the fields for late games, an absolute obelisk meant to cast light across an entire football field.

Surely, it contained enough power to kill one simple human.

Vlad fixed the last bolt in place. Jumper cables clamped generator to portal wiring. It was a pure skeleton. A paltry thing, like the bones of something already picked clean. Built in haste, sloppy, by a 19-year-old whose fingers were too inflamed to clutch a wrench any longer.

He could have asked Jack for help. Maddie. But he wouldn’t let them have this. They had to solve the portal on their own. They didn’t get to know his hard work. They did not get to save him.

Vlad would save himself.

A ghost anchored to a body. What was that? What monster was that?

Vlad moved. He coughed mucus from his lungs. It made it hard to breathe. So he moved slowly, and crouched, bony jutting angles, painted blotchy purple, all bruises and skin, sloughing away.

He crouched, because the portal he’d constructed was not large enough to hold him standing up. He bowed inside it, a small thing, a pathetic man of little life. He wheezed. He hurt. His eyes burned.

And he held in his hands the remote to flip the generator switch, and connect the circuit, and bring to life the math Vlad had so kindly corrected out from under Jack’s grip.

Vlad did not. Because throwing the switch would kill him.

Deep in his animal brain, his dying brain, he knew this intimately. It filled him with a drowning fear like paralysis. He did not want to die.

He would die if he did nothing.

It would be this one throwing of the switch which could save him. Which would burst the portal to life right through his heart. Electrocute it out of its rhythm, slaughter him like a pig on spot and… maybe… hopefully… drag the Ghost Zone here. And whatever he was, dead, would stay.

And whatever he was, dead, would be better than this.

Vlad held the remote in his clammy hands.

And from within the humming skeleton of his portal, his fingers caressed the on button.

…

The portal sung its happy contentment, mused in its healthy green aura, staining all the slabs of rock wall. Danny swiveled his head, recognizing now the bunker this had been before it had been a laboratory.

“I’ve harmed no one, Daniel,” Vlad concluded, his voice too measured for the horrors it had spilled forth. Too calm against the blossoming terror its words had wrought across Danny’s face. “I opened the portal to save myself. You’re lucky, Daniel. It was because of my fast thinking that your father is not a murderer. I took that honor from him.” Vlad’s head tilted to the side, suddenly sympathetic. “Although, you’ve maybe made the title whole for him.”

Vlad reached out, Danny shot away.

“Dad didn’t kill me,” he choked. “I did this to myself.”

“How lucky Jack is, to always dodge responsibility for his actions.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Of course you don’t. If you believed me, you’d have to accept you’re not wriggling out of this. There’s no denial you can bring home to your parents. If you believe me, then this is reality.” Vlad smiled, a playful glint to his fangs. “I suppose I should have more sympathy. I quite like being this way. It is so much nicer than wasting away to death, like I was. But you. You were healthy before this. This killed you, and it didn’t save you from anything.” Vlad cocked his head. “Such tragic fates, both of us, due to the carelessness of Jack Fenton.”

Danny shook his head. His heart beat—his human heart beat—all too fast in his throat. It made him sick. It made him feel like the walls were closing in around him. This was Vlad’s doing. Vlad’s trap. Vlad’s prison he’d been forced to join.

"That's not true. I'm not like you."

“Of course not,” Vlad said, sweetly. “How sweet denial is. Deny it if you like. Call me a liar. But if you ever want to come to terms with what your father did to you, consider coming to me. I understand you in a way no one else will.”

Danny gave no response. He gave no acknowledgement of Vlad’s words. He took to the air, phased himself up through the sheetrock that had been packed atop the doomsday prepper bunker. Up through the mansion, which had been built atop the portal beneath it, and not the other way around. Into the open sky, he breathed fresh air not stagnant and damp beneath the ground, bathed in light pure white from the sun and not tainted green like the bowels underneath him.

And he flew back toward the portal that made him, leaving Vlad with the portal from which he’d made himself.

...

(inspiration post from @ciestess)

#sham sacrifice #danny phantom #dp #dp fanfiction #vlad masters #danny fenton #YELLS AND THROWS THIS AT YOU #ive been spinning around like a top on this idea #tw: suicidal ideation

[lioncunt]

i have less than a hundred pages left in tva and im thinking about how all armand retained from his childhood after his trauma-induced memory loss was "not made by human hands". how he was reduced to his godliness, inhuman holiness in his painting, how suffering was purified for him in the caves, how from the start he was conditioned to be a vessel for others' whims to the point where even after undergoing unimaginable horror he remembered. he is not human. he is made for something greater, he is devout in his pain. and immediately upon remembering this. he throws up and passes out.

marius takes him and conditions him to something else, to his "perfected" image of a boy of the time, the glass of fashion mold of form etc. and this is the first time armand rebels, and attempts to forge his own path, attempts to understand the reasoning behind his idol's actions, but marius assaults him and it's again reinforced for armand that he is what others make of him. and if it will please them, he will do it. this monster is all he has, this is the sun shining upon him. this is god, and he is a vessel. not made by human hands. and then he's no longer human . (was he ever human to begin with. was he ever human to anyone.)

and the children of darkness come and force him once again in the opposite direction, once again traumatize him so severely there's almost nothing left except obedience and servitude and suffering as life.

and in the midst of that isolation and numbness he remembers his mother, the little gift she gave him, and he wonders if after these centuries it's still hidden in his forgotten coffin, abandoned when the coven came. her gift, the painted egg, his real self, his mother and father. is it still there. is it rotten and spoiled. is it dust. is it perfectly preserved and just waiting to be cracked open, waiting for the mess to be made.

and then lestat comes and cracks him open and makes the mess. your hands were always human.

what is he supposed to do with that? after 5 lifetimes of idolatry. how is he supposed to go on. you are a vessel for the one you love, the one you love is god, there is nothing else.

#armand #the vampire armand #interview with the vampire #this book is a 5 star read btw. if you even care #and then. not even getting into the confirmation of god. the sacrifice. #the internal battle of who he is. he was reading shakespeare when lestat called. and he came and in one night found that his life's mission #which was called a sham by this man. well it was tru e the wholee time. and now the man who was your savior from the darkness is telling yo #he was wrong and he's actually chosen instead of you.

[sweet-beezus]

You hear a creature creeping up behind

You're out of time

#sham's art #shamsbabs #iliana #currently experiencing michael jackson brainrot after watching mj the musical live #they staged thriller's musical number to be a battle with The Horrors (mj's trauma) #and it fundamentally changed my brain chemistry lmao #unfortunately i had to reflect that in yet another blorbo piece #but you see the concept was too cool to pass up so sacrifices had to be made #anyway i was picturing this in my head like a nightmare musical number dream sequence #as it feels right to do so nowadays #sometimes you gotta work together with your child self to avoid getting eaten by your inner demons y'know how it is #anyway moving on to other things before i wax to much poetic #kh oc #kingdom hearts oc #igni #master igni #forgot to tag her lmao anyways #khux oc #army of the roses #eyes tw

[vwrtlz]

Does mario rob the corpses of his enemies or does he stomp them so hard that the atoms of their body briefly experience pressures normally only found in the death throes of a giant star and fuse into a single metallic crystal

Follow-up question: are Mario's boots and overalls rated for ionizing radiation

#help #Mario #mario bros #super mario #nintendo #mario deep lore #forbidden secrets of the mushroom kingdom #bowser kidnaps peach in hopes of trapping mario and forcing him to slaughter thousands of living fuel pellets #there's so much energy released over level 1 through 7 that the reactor coolant glows red like lava and periodically vents explosive gases #mario wake up #you're being played #literally #it's all a sham #and princess peach is in on it #you think the citizens of the mushroom kingdom have infinite time for sports on accident? #no way. no way. #princess peach has harnessed an infinite energy source: italians #every cubic centimeter of her kingdom is built on the backs of mario and Luigi's dedication and sacrifice #they have died for her #and for her kingdom #over #and over

[my-burnt-city]

punchdrunk, i'm begging you, let your social media team see the show, these are NOT the way to do valentine's day

(except this one, obvs 🥰🥰🥰)

#the burnt city #burnt city #punchdrunk #punchdrunk theatre #immersive theatre #immersive #happy valentine's day! #bury your lesbians! #cheat on and/or prepare to murder your husband! #seduce a man in order to murder him! #involve your employees in dubiously consensual kink! #set your daughter up for a sham wedding that turns out to be a blood sacrifice! #thank the gods for hades and persephone #hades #persephone #perstephanie #otp

[secrets-i-whisper-to-the-moon]

Bilal Al-Shams, Sacrifice

#excerpts #writings #literature #prose #fragments #selections #words #quotes #typography #prose collection #dark academia #spilled words #spilled thoughts #dark aesthetic #text #book quotes #words words words #dark acadamia aesthetic #poet #poetry #dark academia aesthetic #academia aesthetic #chaotic academia #classic academia #light academia aesthetic #soft academia #romantic academia

[tendermimi]

Bilal Al-Shams, Sacrifice

#bilal al shams #poetry #poem #words #writings #excerpts #quotes #arabic poetry #arabic literature #sooo Agustín Gómez-Arcos

[atlantablack]

Bilal Al-Shams, Sacrifice

two sides of the same coin (Arthur version)

#bbc merlin #Merlin #merlin emrys #emrys #atlanta's edits #2023 advent calendar #geese tag

[luminouslotuses]

q!jaiden and the thin line between self-sacrifice and self-destruction

@cuppapoo // slimecicle goes on a murderous rampage… youtube stream // mossy cobblestone by bears in trees // qsmp the presidential debate youtube stream // 🥚 something is happening maybe 🥚 twitch stream // untitled (LBTTF002) by lisa brice // the unabridged journals of sylvia path by sylvia path // 🎉 BIRTHDAY!!! :D 🎉 twitch stream // 💕😊 QSMP FRIENDSHIP, BOLAS, & PURGATORY 👁💕 twitch stream // sacrifice by bilal al-shams // @smallest-turnip // 💕😊 QSMP FRIENDSHIP, BOLAS, & PURGATORY 👁💕 twitch stream // snow angel by reneé rapp // @specku-art // the oresteia by aeschylus // snow angel by reneé rapp

#guys. guys i miss qjaiden #blood tw #if anyone wants any other tws added let me know! #qsmp #q!jaiden #qsmp purgatory #(the last part of it lol) #web weaving #kaleidoscope #cliché

[medievalthymes]

fitzchivalry farseer // the wolf and the lamb

fool's assassin / peter recieved one of the animals on his knife - stanley berkeley / @ abhorarchive /fool's assassin /agnus - konstantin korobov / ink-the-artist / fool's errand / wonderland-mp3 / @ abhorarchive / solitary-sister / oscar wilde / bilal al-shams - sacrifice / anguish - august friedrich schenck / fool's fate / the wolf and the lamb - na

#rote #realm of the elderlings #fitzchivalry farseer #fitz and the fool #tawny man #tawny man trilogy #fitz and the fool spoilers #fitz and the fool trilogy #web weaving #this one hurt #ok last one for the day i'm going insane #this is how i'm healing from post rote brainrot #sarah reads rote #i have schoolwork i have to do now goodbye #also i know that lamb painting with the wolves is a meme idc i actually love it

[pinkhysteria]

I AM BOTH sacrifice - bilal al-shams

#tvd #bonnie bennett #bonniebennettedit #tvdedit #g*

[phantomrose96]

okay so i know that you probably get a lot of asks about sham sacrifice but like, how does vlad age? he's clearly not a 19 year old any more, and he's not rotting, otherwise it wouldn't result in facial hair and the muscle growth in his chest. the reason i ask is that his explanation of "the ghost stacks cells where they should be and keeps the heart beating despite not needing to in order to imitate it" doesn't quite mesh because by the logic employed his body should kinda just be rebuilding 19-yo vladdie.

plus, ya know, he changes color. seems to imply a physiological change

(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2)

So I talk about it here!!

It's not stated (yet) (in fic) (oops part 3), but Sham Sacrifice employs one of my long-time beloved headcanons which is that a ghost's appearance is psychosomatic. It's an ectoplasmic projection built on their sense-of-self. It's my headcanon that Vlad's original ghost form looked much like his human form (similar to Phantom/Fenton) but as Vlad keyed in on this aspect of ghost physicality, he used it to design his Plasmius self (boy you do NOT have vampire fangs naturally).

But also it's not a free-for-all character designer screen. It takes a genuine belief in your sense of self. It takes strong confidence and conviction to coax it to change from its steady state. Most ghosts can't employ this on a whim. It's buried in a sense of self they can't easily or readily change. Vlad is uniquely strong-willed.

Sham Sacrifice takes this headcanon a step further because, if halfas are full ghosts that never split from their physical dead bodies which the ghost is in control of building, shaping, and maintaining, then it is both ghost form AND human form which are sculpted out of this sense of self.

This has been fine for Danny "I'm not actually dead I'm just half ghost" Fenton, whose human form has passively maintained its form from when he was alive. It's his belief and sense of self. It reconstructs itself accordingly.

Vlad, on the other hand, in the same effort he put into sculpting his ghost form, ALSO put that effort into sculpting his human form. NOT a sickly, ailing 19-year-old at death's front door. He recreated and maintains himself as alive, healthy, strong.

And actively, intentionally aging.

Which is not something Danny has been doing.

And maybe Danny's passively done some aging of his human form, because his sense of self is still "I'm an alive 14-year-old and I'm getting older." But is this as much as he should have actively been changing and aging? Maybe. But probably not. (And now, that he knows he's dead...?)

Vlad was intentional every step of the way with what he did, and what's happened to him. His physical aging and maturing has been a self-driven process.

...And it leaves open some challenging questions. Is Vlad a dead 19-year-old who's been just manually changing his physical appearance for the last 2 decades? Is that dismissive of the life he's lived to act like he's just 19 because that happens to be the age he died? What does it mean to grow up if you're a ghost who's been ripped away from your natural biological processes?

And "at least" Vlad was an adult. Young. 19 is still young. But an adult. How much harder is this all when you're only 14...?

#dp #sham sacrifice #danny phantom

[raisunii]

C!Tommy - A Web Weave

Sacrifice, Bilal Al-Shams / Persona a Persona, Duane Michals / sainticide on Twitter / The Sacrificial Lamb, Josef de Ayala / Cassandra, Florence & the Machine / Half-Light, Frank Bidart / The Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Bryullov / Hamilton's Theseus

#tommyinnit #tom simons #mcyt #dsmp #dreamsmp #dream smp #c!tommy #web weave #web weaving #words #crimeboys #inniter #webweave #webweaving

[flowerandblood]

Robbed and gifted (1/6)

[ arranged marriage • modern!Aemond x female ]

[ warnings: sex content, angst, smut, violence ]

[description: (Anon Request) She and Aemond are faced with a situation, where they must form a fictitious marriage. They are complete strangers to each other, who cannot find themselves in a new reality. When his wife stands up for him at a family dinner, something changes between them. Smut, angst and a lot of sexual tension.]

* English is not my first language. Please, do not repost. Enjoy! *

Previous and next chapters: Masterlist

_____

She had only signed a few sheets of paper, but she felt as if she had sold herself to a slave market. She despised herself and her uncle. His proposal. She despised her husband and his father. That they made a deal with each other over their heads, making their artificial marriage a route to easy cash flow and money laundering.

She was surprised when her uncle, Arthur, her mother's brother, called her with the proposal. When he offered to pay for her college and financially support her parents, who were in debt because of her father's gambling addiction, she thought he must be crazy.

Then he began to mention a family with whom he had close ties. About the young man who was their son. About how she could help him a lot, and with this favor ensure her future and safety.

“We would need this marriage for about a year, maximum two, so that our money would be filtered through your bank accounts in several tranches. Your community of property will make things easier for us - and then you can divorce." He said as they sat in a small restaurant where he had invited her.

She was about to take a piece of spaghetti in her mouth but she put the cutlery on the plate, staring at him with her mouth open. She didn't believe what she just heard.

"You want to sell me?" She asked, feeling her whole body tense, cold sweat running down her neck. Her uncle laughed, taking a sip of wine from his glass.

"Of course not. You are only to make appearances. Of course, we wouldn't want the rest of the family to know about this deal, so you'd have to live in the same apartment in case someone came to visit you, and show up at family events once in a while. What you do privately is up to you. It is as if you have been given an assignment and a mission for a certain period of time for which you will both be handsomely paid.” He said with a calmness and serenity that terrified her. She wondered how he could talk about such things so lightly.

"Are you proposing me a sham marriage to a stranger for money?" She asked, pale, her eyes wide, her hands trembling slightly. Her uncle smiled warmly at her.

“I offer to take care of your future, for your small favor and sacrifice. Think about this." He said, putting some bills on the table, definitely more than their dinner was worth and left, leaving her with disbelief written on her face.

She came home angry and distraught. She felt that her uncle treated her like garbage, like a bargaining chip, an item that he could put up for auction. She felt an unpleasant lump in her pit as she saw that her father was gone again.

She walked over to her mom who was just lying on the couch watching TV, bored. She stood for a moment in the doorway of the room, pursed her lips.

"Where is dad?" She asked quietly. Her mother shrugged.

"Probably where he always is." She murmured, taking a sip of tea from a large mug. She felt a tightness in her pit at her words. She went to her room without asking for anything else.

In the night, she heard the sound of a door opening, followed by a loud thud and a scream. She saw the hallway light was on and peeked through the door, opening it slightly. Her mother was standing over her father who lay slumped against the wall, drunk, his vision completely blurred.

"How do you look? How much have you lost on those fucking slot machines again today?" She asked low, angry.

She saw her mother kick her father in the stomach. She cringed, as if she felt the pain too. Her father was only moaning, what she might call gibberish. Her mother began to sob and continued to yell at him. She slipped into her room, closing the door, feeling her whole hands tremble.

The next day she called her uncle, saying that she agreed to his proposal.

She just wanted him to take her away.

Then everything went fast. She had to appear at the Registry Office to sign the documents, together with her fictitious husband. She saw him for the first time and this was not how she had imagined him.

The fact that he was dressed all in black made him look very pale. His blindfold made her think that he was some kind of character in a movie, not a real person. As if it was all some kind of theater in which she played one of the main roles. She thought, looking down at her short, flowing black dress that they were both dressed as if they were going to a funeral.

When everything was settled, Aemond, as it turned out was her current husband's name, simply left the room without saying even a polite farewell. She looked down at her feet, pursed her lips, and decided that he owed her nothing. Neither she to him.

She wasn't going to take her frustrations out on him.

Her parents were privy to the whole thing. They were furious at first, but when her uncle gave them the exact numbers that they would get for it and the payment of their father's debts, they both calmed down and decided that two years wasn't that long after all.

She stared blankly at them, wondering who these people were at all. They seemed alien and distant to her as never before.

In accordance with her uncle's demands, she had to move into her husband's apartment. She had wanted to vomit just thinking about it for most of the morning. She felt like a puppet controlled by someone else. As if she sold her life for a few bills. She thought that maybe she wasn't so different from her parents after all, and the thought hit her hard.

She came with a moving team. Aemond showed them a room to set up her bookshelf, desk, and any other furniture she wanted to take. It was obvious to her that they would sleep separately, almost as if they were roommates. Aemond didn't say a word to her as the men brought in everything and she paced the apartment, looking around.

The apartment was large and had huge windows, the walls were white, so it seemed very bright and pleasant inside. She saw a lot of old oak furniture and plants.

She thought she liked it here.

That whoever her husband was, he had good taste.

She heard the door close suddenly and then there was silence. She felt her heart start pounding.

She turned towards him. He stood in the corridor and looked at her dispassionately, as if she were an intruder, a whore greedy for money, someone empty and worthless. She felt it in every cell of her body, but she couldn't be mad at him.

Part of her wanted him to treat her that way.

"I have someone." He spoke calmly, coolly, empty. "So I don't want you asking me who and where I'm going out with. I hope that's clear."

He said it in such a way that she felt, as if he had slapped her in the face. She swallowed hard, looking away. For some reason she wanted to cry, her hands were shaking. After a moment she forced herself to choke something out.

"I wouldn't dare to expect that. I'm sorry." She said, although she did not know for what.

She saw something change in his eyesight, his pupil narrowed, his mouth tightened. She thought his expression looked almost sympathetic for a moment. He nodded.

"Make yourself comfortable." He finally said a little softer and turned away, opening one of the rooms and locking himself in. Only then did she allow tears to run down her face.

For the next few days he wasn't in the apartment. It didn't bother her, she felt more at ease then, she wasn't afraid to go to the kitchen or the living room. She didn't go into his office or bedroom, thinking it was impolite.

She spent her days filling out college papers and buying books. The thought that she would actually go to medical school cheered her up.

One night, lying in bed, she heard a soft turn of the lock, and then saw that someone had turned on the light in the corridor. Her heart pounded at the thought that he was back.

She thought that he must have forgotten something or had come for some clean clothes and was about to leave again, but he hadn't. She heard him turn off the light in the hall and lock himself in his office. Her throat tightened.

She spent the rest of the night spinning around, unable to sleep a wink. She got up at dawn, unable to bear it any longer, and went to the kitchen. There was practically nothing in the fridge.

She thought then that they might live apart, but that didn't mean that they had to dislike each other. She decided to go shopping and make them breakfast.

Lighten up the atmosphere somehow.

She quickly went to the store for fresh rolls and vegetables, eggs, cheese and ham. When she returned, she decided to make sandwiches with fresh lettuce, radish, tomato and chives with a delicious sauce, and casseroles, which she put in the oven in the meantime.

She flinched as she heard the sound of the door opening. She heard Aemond enter the bathroom. She felt her hands tremble.

After a while he left the room and went into the kitchen. He measured the large plate on the table where she had placed her sandwiches. He headed for the coffee machine and she plucked up the courage to say something.

"I made us breakfast." She said and cut him off quickly, seeing that he wanted to tell her to give up her efforts because it wouldn't work anyway.

“It will be hard for two years to pretend we don't see each other. Can't we just be roommates like in college? Who sometimes meet in between and talk?" She asked quietly with a warm smile. She felt him tense as he stared at her, his face set to stone.

"You mean college like the one that you're going to, that was paid for with my money?" He asked suddenly, and she looked at him, shocked. She opened her mouth, feeling her entire stomach clench, shaking her head.

"I…my uncle told me…" She stammered, but he didn't let her finish.

“Your uncle is just a venal pig. Just like your whole family, apparently." He said it so calmly and dispassionately, that she felt tears welling up in her eyes. She stared at the bun that she had just sliced and put the knife aside, her lips pressed together.

"I didn't know." She whispered. He chuckled at her words, but it was ironic, aloof, incredulous laugh.

"Right. You women never know. Everything around you happens by itself.” He hissed as he took his coffee mug and left the kitchen, locking himself in his office.

She took several sandwitches in her hand, breathing raggedly, wiping her tears and nose, as she wrapped them in cling film for him. She knew that he'd be leaving for work soon, so she wanted to at least give them to him for lunch.

When she got home after going to the college she saw, that what she had left at his door, wrapped in a cardboard box, he had thrown into the bin.

She gave up trying to make contact with him. It made her cry often, feeling like an intruder and knowing what he thought of her. She started classes but she wasn't proud of it at all. She was convinced that she was like a parasite that clung to him. She wasn't surprised that he couldn't look at her.

He tried to pretend that she didn't exist.

One day, he surprised her by knocking on her bedroom door. Since their exchange she ate alone, not in the dining room. She opened the door. He didn't even look at her when he was talking to her.

"Get ready. We're going to my parents' house in an hour. My family wants to meet you." He said indifferently and turned away, disappearing back into the living room. She felt as if someone had poured ice cubes into her body.

She felt like she was about to die.

She put on a pretty, blue, girlish dress with tiny flowers and let her hair down. She decided that she couldn't embarrass him and had to present herself as best as she could.

She left the room and told him that she was ready. She saw him look her up and down as if to see, if she looked acceptable, then nodded and they both left the apartment.

They rode in complete silence, listening to the radio. She flinched when she heard his voice.

“We met by chance at one of the business events. You were there with your uncle. We fell in love right away. We kept our relationship a secret for a year. Do you understand?” He asked with emphasis on the last words, his voice as cold as ice. She swallowed loudly.

"Yes."

As they entered his house, she smiled widely. She decided to play her role as best as she could. His mother, Alicent, hugged her tightly. It seemed to her, that she knew nothing about what was really going on between them.

Their house was huge, modern, terrifyingly opulent. She felt uncomfortable there, as if something was missing. She sat down at the table in the indicated place and she was immediately bombarded with questions.

Aemond sat next to her, crossing his legs and placing his hand on her thigh. She looked at him in surprise, and he didn't even glance at her. She thought that he was trying to pretend, just like she was.

At the table were his father, mother, and siblings, but also his sister from his father's second marriage, Rhaenyra, with her children and now-husband, Daemon. From what she understood, they were all in the big family banking business.

They talked to her about things that she didn't understand at all, but she nodded and talked to them about nothing. If there was one thing she was good at it was simple, warm chatting. People opened up to her easily because she created a comfortable field for them to discuss.

Wine was poured with dinner. So many dishes were placed before them, that she did not know where to look. She saw a lot of cutlery in front of her and thought that she felt like in that movie, where they sit some worker at the table with the nobility and make him guess which fork is for what. She shuddered, snapped out of her thoughts when she heard her husband's voice in her ear.

"I don't advise you to take soup or roast, because everyone will be looking at you." He said indifferently, serving himself the soup. Apparently, what he meant was that his family for some reason cared a lot about how someone ate. She asked what he could offer her.

"Everything but roasts and soups." He said dryly and she rolled her eyes, impatient with his behavior. She saw him purse his lips at the sight, displeased, his hand tightening on the skin of her thigh.

"Don't make faces like that." He whispered through clenched teeth, looking at her sharply. She looked at him expectantly.

"Decide for me, husband. Let your will be done." She whispered, leaning over him, her moist lips slightly parted.

She saw his gaze flit from her eyes to her lips, then back to her eyes. He tapped his finger against her knee, as if he was thinking hard about something.

"Careful." He said low and she shivered.

After a moment he looked away, leaning over the table, reaching for a salad. Pretending, that nothing had happened she poured some of it on her plate and began to eat. She hasn't had anything in her mouth since morning.

Suddenly, Viserys and Daemon went from light subjects and stories to business topics. Although Alicent tried to add a funny anecdote, Daemon interrupted her, continuing his thought.

"I mean, if you don't have anyone to give it all to, what's the point of all this?" He asked, spreading his hands.

"I think Jace would be a better fit." He said, several people moved uneasily on their seats.

She saw Aemond reach for the glass of wine in front of him and take a swig from it, taut as a string, in his eye a fury and madness that she had never seen in another human being. After a while his father spoke up.

"Well, that's a bit of an unfair assessment on your part. However, I agree that Aemond is not as dedicated to the company as I would like.” He said. Her husband put his glass down loudly on the table, so that everyone turned their eyes to him.

"Are you fucking serious? I am not sacrificing enough for the company?” He hissed, she could feel him boiling. His hand on her thigh was clenched into a fist.

She swallowed hard, looking from him to his father. His father shifted uneasily in his seat, knowing what he was implying.

“What can I say, math is absolute. Your results could be better." He said, spreading his hands, speaking lightly as if it didn't really matter. "But of course everyone can have a bad time, it's natural."

Aemond leaned back against the back of the chair, his mouth slightly parted, his chest heaving and restless. She had seen, going to the bathroom at night, that the light was on in his office late into the night. That if he wasn't with his woman, he was still working. For some reason her heart clenched tight.

“My husband works from morning to night. Even when I'm asleep he's still doing reports. Are the results he is supposed to strive for even achievable?” She blurted out suddenly, frowning, causing silence at the table.

Feeling a cold sweat on her back, she glanced quickly at Aemond, fearing that he would kill her for the outburst. But he just stared at her, his gaze expressing disbelief, his mouth slightly parted.

He cleared his throat, taking a glass in his hand and taking another sip of wine, several people at the table looked at each other. His father smiled knowingly at her.

"It's nice to see such a loving and devoted married couple." He spoke calmly and she felt a lump in her throat.

She knew that he was the only one in the party who understood what their marriage really was, and he was mocking her. She flinched as Aemond abruptly got up from the table, throwing his napkin on it.

"We're leaving." He said dryly to her as he headed for the hallway. She stood up quickly, following him, terrified. His mother tried to stop them, but he didn't even look at her.

"He humiliated me and you didn't fucking say anything, as usual." He said coldly to his mother, slamming the car door behind him.

She humbly sat in the passenger side, fastening her seatbelts and closing the door behind her. He took off with a squeal of tires, causing her to be pinned to the seat for a moment.

He didn't even turn on the radio, lost in his thoughts, running his free hand over his chin and mouth. She thought, looking at him closely, that he was a really handsome man.

She smiled slightly at the thought and he looked at her suddenly. She swallowed hard and looked away.

They entered the apartment without a word. She thought that he was going to lock himself in his office as usual, but he didn't. He went to the living room and started rummaging in the bar. She stood in the corridor, not knowing what to do. She wanted to go to her bedroom, but his voice stopped her.

"Would you like a drink?" He asked indifferently, looking at her from a distance. She swallowed hard, feeling her whole body tremble. She thought that maybe this was the moment.

That maybe they will get closer to each other.

She nodded, and he took the other glass from his bar without a word. She entered the living room hesitantly, watching as he poured himself a drink. He looked at her expectantly.

"What are you drinking? Wine?" He asked, but she shook her head.

"Vodka. Vodka with orange juice." She said softly, the corner of her mouth turning up into a slight smile.

She saw the surprise in his eye, and then something like amusement flashed across his face. He made the drink she asked for and gave it to her.

He walked around the couch and sat on it, sighing heavily, covering his face with his hand. She sat down next to him at a safe distance, pulling her legs under her buttocks, making herself comfortable. For a while they just drank their drinks in silence, not even looking at each other.

“My mother in twenty-eight years of my life never stood up for me, and a strange girl did. Funny, don't you think?" He chuckled lowly, but he didn't sound like he was enjoying it at all. She dropped her gaze, sighing softly.

"I'm sorry. All my life I watched my mother humiliate my father. I tried to defend him, but one day he told me not to do it." She said, pressing her lips together, inhaling loudly.

She realized that she had never said that out loud to anyone. She was afraid to look at his reaction. After a moment, she turned to face him. He looked at her thoughtfully, his expression unreadable.

"Your father is a gambler." He said low, more stating than asking. She nodded, embarrassed, looking down, taking a swig of her drink, fiddling with the glass in her hand.

"Did your mother ever hit you?" He asked suddenly, and she looked at him in surprise.

She didn't want to tell him about it, in fact, she'd rather forget about it altogether. She looked away, pursed her lips, her body trembling. For a moment she was unable to utter a word.

“When she was angry with me, she pretended I didn't exist. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week. She didn't anserw me when I spoke to her, she didn't look at me, she didn't make me breakfast for school or lunch, she didn't drive me to school. As if she didn't have a child." She said and pursed her lips, feeling tears welling up.

"That's why I can't stand it, when you pretend I don't live here." She said with a shrug, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her lower lip trembled slightly.

"I have no intention of imposing on you and I swear, I didn't know my uncle would take my college money from you." She spoke honestly, truthfully. She was having a little trouble breathing normally, her body shaking slightly.

A strong, violent shudder went through her, as she felt his large hand on her thigh. She wasn't able to move as he rode her higher, to her hips, then lower again, to her knee. She thought it was the alcohol, that they both didn't know what they were doing, but she felt wetness between her thighs.

"Look at me." He said softly, almost mildly for the way he usually spoke. She was unable to comply with his request, her body froze completely, trembling slightly.

Her lips parted slightly as she felt his hand slowly move to her hips again, but this time it slipped between her thighs. Her breath caught in her throat.

She shifted and twisted as she felt him massage her there with slow, gentle strokes. She felt her nipples harden and thought it must have showed through the thin fabric of her dress.

She thought that she needed this. She desperately needed someone's closeness, relaxation, pleasure, acceptance. Everything at once.

She didn't flinch as his thumb pushed the fabric of her panties aside and his fingers ran over her wet, throbbing, hot entrance. She heard him draw in a whistling breath, her hand set her glass lightly on the table next to her, her breathing ragged and quick.

"Do you want me to stop?" He asked so quietly and uncertainly that she shivered.

She parted her shiny, swollen lips slightly, his fingers pressing steadily against her, teasing her clit. She couldn't stop her hips from moving towards his hand, a wonderful warmth spreading over her lower abdomen every time he rubbed her.

“No.” She whispered and he jumped up suddenly.

In one swift motion, he placed her on her side, laying down behind her back. She heard the sound of her belt being unfastened and shivered all over, her wetness running down her thighs. She didn't look at him, her chest heaving fast. She wondered what they were doing.

She squealed softly as he pulled her against him, feeling the material of his shirt against her back, his hot breath, his mouth against her ear, his nose teasing her cheek.

"How about we get to know each other better now? For the sake of our common, platonic acquaintance." He hummed, she heard him undo his pants, his throbbing, hard manhood hitting her buttocks hidden under her dress. She felt a tickling heat run through her body at the sensation.

"Y-yes, I guess, that's a good idea" She mumbled softly, it seemed to her that everything around her was hazy, her head was spinning with lust and desire. She thought it was pathetic, but all she wanted was to feel him inside her.

A soft moan escaped her lips as she felt him slide her panties off her thighs in one, swift motion, his large hands pulling up the fabric of her dress so that she could feel him now, hard and swollen.

She involuntarily lifted her thigh, allowing him to slip in, rubbing against her hot juices. She heard him inhale loudly at the sensation, snuggling her closer to his chest. They both sobbed as the tip of his cock began to press against her, pushing a little into her throbbing, fleshy inside.

"I'll just slide him in for a moment." He whispered, panting with her, their bodies shivering as he thrust deeper into her, pushing her hot walls to the limit.

"Mhm" It was all she could muster.

She moaned sweetly as he slid all the way into her, then began to move inside her suddenly, imposing an intense, fast pace, his thighs slapping wetly against her buttocks, soaked in her juices. They both gasped loudly and groaned alternately, her hand tightening on his arm which wrapped around her waist.

"Jesus Christ" He panted, feeling how tight she was, clenching around him, all hot and wet.

He sped up even more, thrusting into her more aggressively, his cock digging in with a loud slap, stretching her throbbing, swollen muscles, they both felt surprisingly close to fullfilment. He tightened his hand on her thigh which he held slightly up, allowing himself to thrust even deeper.

She sobbed loudly, as she felt his cock rubbing her exactly where she needed to, building up unbearable tension in her. She could feel his hot, quick breath on her cheek, she knew he needed it as much as she did.

If she could think coldly at that moment, she would wonder why he didn't go to his woman, but right now all she wanted was to be fulfilled.

"I'll stop soon, I promise" He whispered in her ear, and she felt such a strong shiver at his words, that she just came. She sobbed loudly, her eyebrows twisted in pain, her mouth parted in a silent moan. She heard him groan low, feeling her walls begin to tighten on him, his thrusts quick, brutal and sure.

"Oh, fuck, yes" He gasped loudly and came hard, moving for a moment longer, his cum flowing in waves inside her. They were both panting, trembling in disbelief, his terrified voice rousing her.

"You're taking pills, right?" He asked as if the pleasure had taken away his common sense. She just nodded, not having the strength to say anything.

She heard his loud exhale of relief, then his nose buried in her hair. They lay there, trying to calm down, she felt his chest rise and fall steadily, his soft cock still throbbing inside her.

She felt that both of them realized what they had done. He slid out of her suddenly, and she covered her buttocks with the dress, swallowing loudly.

She could feel his cum flowing out of her straight onto the couch. He saw it as he got up, zipping up his pants. He swallowed hard, looking at her with black eye. He got up from the couch, obviously not knowing what to say for a moment. In the end he managed only two words as he headed towards his bedroom.

"Good night."

_____

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[familyvideostevie]

living high until that fatal day

a/n: i never do this. literally, never. when i'm not here i'm writing stuff that's not x reader for ao3 and this is a fic i posted over there. it's a time loop story about joel and ellie. @bageldaddy told me i had to post it here. without her this fic would not exist. thank you so much, bea. so, here we go. if you read it, thank you. let me know what you think. joel miller & ellie williams gen fic. 7.5k words warnings: Time Loop, Fluff and Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, kind of???, it resolves, Suicide, only in one of the loops!, Canon-Typical Violence, joel gets stuck and has to figure it out, Father-Daughter Relationship, thoughts about sacrifice and love, POV Joel, mostly, this one is kind of intense folks, major character death tag is cause well the loop ends one way or another, gonna diverge at the end, but it ends well!!! i promise, also this is pretty firmly game but hbo folks should be okay!

summary: joel finds himself stuck in a time loop of that day in salt lake city.

Joel lies to her. 

He's got dried blood under his fingernails and his shoulder aches from the kick of the rifle and he's so, so tired. 

But he lies to her. 

If he was a smarter man he'd have thought of something better. Told her that the hospital got raided or they had a FEDRA mole, how the whole thing was a sham from the start. He doesn't know if she was awake for any of it. If the last thing she remembers is him reaching for her and failing to save her. If she remembers what it feels like to drown. 

It's hard to look at her in the mirror but he manages. Just keep driving, hands tight on the wheel. Don't white knuckle, don't spook her. She's in the car. She's safe. He did it. 

"We found the Fireflies," he says. She doesn't look at him. "Turns out there's a...a whole lot more like you, Ellie. People that're immune. It's dozens, actually." 

There's a strange pull in his gut, a pull that he's felt a few times before in the moments before everything went south. When the soldier pointed his gun by the river, when Tess looked at him on her last day, when he fell off the ledge in Colorado. But he ignores it. 

"Ain't done a damn bit of good, either. They've actually st--" Ellie closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. She doesn't look at him. "They've stopped looking for a cure. I'm takin' us home. I'm sorry."

She turns her back to him and the pull becomes a burn, becomes a black hole under his ribcage taking everything with him. He blinks once, twice, wonders if he got shot and didn't notice, if he cracked a rib and it punctured his lung, if --

The road in front of him disappears. 

He can't see a damn thing -- not like the lights went out, like there is nothing to see. There is nothing in front of him at all.

Then, Joel wakes up yesterday. 

___ 

He jolts awake with a strangled yell. Ellie kneels over him, the rifle he taught her to hold slung over her shoulder. It's just past dawn based on the color of the sky and how he can make out most of her face, her withdrawing hand and her unimpressed but slightly concerned frown. 

"You were talking again," Ellie says. "Nightmares?" 

Joel tears his eyes from her and thunks his head back down on his crumpled up jacket. The trees stretch high above him and he tries to get it together so he doesn't spook her. 

They’re camped within sight of the highway. Salt Lake City has been looming for days now and Joel doesn't want to take any chances. The ring-road is almost clear, dotted here and there with cars and a fair amount of supplies, enough that Joel suspects people haven't been here for some time. If this is another Colorado State situation, he's going to have to put Ellie in a car and take them back to Jackson before she does something stupid.

She's fine. Well, no, not quite. Things aren't the same and they never will be but he can tell she's doing her best and he won't ask more than that. Their pace has slowed this week and he's having a hard time figuring out if she's sliding back into some sort of post-Colorado haze or if she's nervous about actually arriving in Salt Lake. 

God knows he's nervous as hell.

But every day she'll walk as far as he tells her to and won't complain. He knows she wants to get there. They have to get there and it has to work -- because he doesn't know what they're going to do otherwise. 

She asked him a question. Nightmares. Joel sits up and drags his hand down his face.

"Somethin' like that."

Ellie shrugs and starts to clean up their camp now that he's awake. He still hates letting her take watch, but she needs to feel in control of things, so they split it most nights. She hums a little bit as she works and he has hopes that today might be a good day.

But that dream... It comes back in flashes: the giraffes, the tunnel. Ellie hanging from the side of the bus because she jumped to save him, her small frame sinking slowly, just out of reach. The crack of her ribs underneath his hands. The hospital. The Fireflies.

Joel gets up, rolls his shoulder at a phantom pain and looks down at his hands. Crusted with dirt and nothing more. 

Jesus Christ. He's losing it. 

They set off. 

The blue hospital sign seems to shine in the spring sun all too soon.

"This is where we get off. Let's go, kiddo."

Joel talks even though he knows she's not listening. He talks to take his mind off of the echo that sits at the base of his neck with every step. Has he told her he'll teach her guitar before? He's been thinking it for months. 

Ellie trails behind him, kicking rocks and half-heartedly searching cars when he asks her to. She heads for a faded blue sedan but he stops her. 

"Blue one won't open, don't bother." 

The look she gives him makes him think about what he just said. "How do you know that?"

He blinks. How does he know that? Before he can explain it, Ellie shrugs and keeps walking. 

The disinterest is new and it doesn't sit well with him. She's been through a lot, more than any kid deserves, and they're almost there. He figures it's worse today because of that. 

"I dreamt about flying the other night."

Joel's stomach twists. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Go on, tell me about it."

She tells him about her dream, about how it felt to fly and then fall, and he is dizzy with deja vu. 

"I've never been on a plane." Ellie looks at him like he can tell her what it means. Like he has any damn answers at all. "Isn't that weird?"

Joel hums and swallows the lump in his throat. The bus terminal. Ellie, drowning. Firefly after Firefly in his path. His hands flex around a gun that isn't there. 

"Well, you know. Dreams are weird." It tastes like a lie in his mouth but he can't figure out why. 

It gets worse when they find the bus station, when she runs off in search of something that's got her smiling. Her small hand reaches for the giraffe, her eyes bright, but Joel feels like he's watching it through a fog. He knows what she's going to say before she says it. 

"So fucking cool."

Joel has seen a lot of weird shit in his life but whatever is happening here is leagues above the rest. It bumps up against something in his brain, like the answer is just out of reach but he can't fucking get there. Always a step behind when it counts. 

Ellie hands him a picture of his dead daughter and something in him comes dangerously close to snapping. Instead of gratitude or sorrow or anything that would make sense, he's terrified. 

He's fucking terrified because this happened. Which means he knows what comes next. 

But there's no time to worry about it. They pick their way through the tunnel, through the runners and the clickers and the fucking bloaters. The pressure on his neck gets heavier, gets almost unbearable. He's strung tighter than he's been in years, like the walls are closing in on him and there's a timer he can't see. 

When they get to the rapids, he waits for Ellie to get to the other side of the bus until he jumps on it but it dislodges. The dam in his head breaks and he yells, screams at her to run, to leave him, but she jumps on the bus anyway. 

She drowns.

Joel doesn't doubt that the Fireflies are coming -- he hears them --  but he doesn't take his eyes off of her, doesn't stop the chest compressions until he's knocked out.

The rest of it is a blur, his sense of reality already warped by his need to get to the operating room. To save her. 

Joel picks them off one by one, floor by floor, hardly taking note of how familiar it all feels. He doesn't even give the surgeon a chance to speak before he's dead, a bullet between the eyes. He knows they'll make it to the elevator. He kills Marlene. He drives them away.

He lies. 

He wakes up yesterday again.

___

It takes a few days before Joel purposely deviates from what he's thinking of as the script. His head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds when he wakes in the clearing, Ellie's eyes on him.

He thinks about it as they pack up camp. Can he get them out of here? Would that be allowed? The rules of this aren't clear to him but he figures it can't hurt to try. They could turn around right now and make it back to Jackson in a week or so. 

He watches Ellie carefully arrange her things in her bag, watches her stop to admire a butterfly in the branches above. He watches her and tries to see her alive and not pale on an operating table. 

"Ellie," he says. "I got a bad feelin' about this."

She loves to tell him he's overreacting but today she crosses her arms and sits back on her heels. "What do you mean?"

Her scream as she falls into the water. Her ribs cracking beneath his hands. The piercing alarm in the hospital, her body warm but limp in his arms.

"What if we waited?" She frowns but he keeps going. "Went back to Jackson, rested up. Took a break. Come back in a few months with a bit of a crew. Tommy'll give us some guys, hell, I bet he'll come with if you want --"

"No," Ellie says sharply. There's an edge to her voice he hasn't heard in a long time. "Joel, shut up."

"Ellie --"

She stands abruptly, takes a few steps back. "I said no."  The look on her face tells Joel he's already lost. "Are you -- are you fucking kidding me? You want to go back? Now?"

He sighs. "Just to rest up. We don't know what we're walking into --"

Ellie throws her hands around in disbelief. Her eyes look wet. Christ, he's made her cry again. He promised himself he wouldn't do that. 

"We don't know if they'll still be there."

"We don't know if they are there."

"And we won't find out if we fucking run away like cowards!"

Joel stands. "I don't want another Colorado State situation, Ellie --" Her face shutters. Mistake. 

"Don't bring up Colorado," she growls. "You don't know what that was like." 

Damn right he doesn't. He knows by now what happened but he'll never know how hard it was for her to survive when he was busy dying on that mattress. But he has to try something or they'll just end up here again tomorrow. Yesterday. Whatever. 

The idea of her suffering makes his hackles rise, makes his blood run cold

. 

"Can I finish a god damned sentence?" he snaps. Ellie is undeterred and snaps back.

"Not if it's going to be about leaving. We-- I -- we're not fucking leaving. Not after everything. We can't."

Joel sighs and drags a hand down his face. This girl. He's trying to save her and she can't see it. There's no way to make her see it and it's his fault. She should know by now that he'd do anything, anything, for her. He lost that battle a long time ago, probably longer ago than he'd like to admit. 

"I know," he tells her. "Just...if you want to give it all up, to go back, we can. We don't have to go through with this."

Ellie's eyes are blazing and her tone is disappointed. It cuts deep. "Yes we do. I thought you'd understand that, Joel."

He follows her this time as she stalks down the highway towards the hospital. No mention of six strings, no dreams about planes. They catch the giraffes but she doesn't stick around to watch them for as long. It's a different kind of loss to be without her smile, her laughter. Joel wishes he'd never opened his god damned mouth. 

"I'm sorry," he says. "For earlier." Ellie pauses on the stairs and half turns to look up at him. "I know it's important to you."

She sighs. "I know you mean well." Joel closes his eyes. He knows what comes next. "But there's no halfway with this. Once we're done, we'll go wherever you want, okay?"

He plays his part for the rest of the day, just to get it over with. 

___

Next time, Joel waits until they're watching the giraffes to try something different. 

"So," he says. "This everything you were hoping for?"

Ellie gives him her half-smile. "It's got its ups and downs, but...you can't deny that view, though."

He seizes his chance. "Wanna go down there?" 

She perks up. "Really? Do you think they'll let us get close?"

"They might. Let's try." 

They manage to backtrack a little bit and end up on the field. It smells like a zoo but Ellie is thrilled to be so close so they post up on the roof of a rusty FEDRA Jeep. Two of the giraffes end up eating out of the tree right above them. Ellie holds her breath. 

"They just...don't care, do they?" she whispers. "How long do you think they've been here?"

She leans into his side and cranes her neck to watch one of them use its tongue. 

"Don't know," he says. "Big ones could've been from before. But the tiny one s'probably younger than you."

"So cool," she says again. "They're from a zoo, right? I wonder if anything else lives in the city."

They've been sitting here long enough that the sun has started to set. Joel allows himself to hope. 

"Might be. What do you say we spend the night here and look on the way to the hospital tomorrow? Daylight'll do us better."

Ellie chews on his suggestion. "I guess," she says. "Are we safe here?"

"Should be." Joel has no idea, frankly. He sure as hell wants them to wake up here in the morning. He wants to make good on this idea, wants to show her something else that'll make her smile. He wants this to be a bizarre, unexplainable day that he'll forget about with time.

"I'll keep watch."

They set up camp crowded against the fence so Joel can see the whole field. The giraffes leave them alone and Ellie falls asleep quickly after they eat.

In the quiet open air the dread in his gut returns full-force and he knows he's wrong. Again.

A branch cracks and he whirls around, rifle in hand to find three men pointing their guns at him through the wire. They might be wearing Firefly jackets but he can't tell. He doesn't care. Joel dares to look at Ellie for a second and sees she's still asleep. 

It's a mistake.

One of them follows his gaze and his eyes widen.

"Holy shit," he whispers. "She looks like who Marlene said --"

"Shut up," the second one hisses. "On the ground, old man."

"How are you gonna get around that fence, hotshot?" he says. "Ellie. Ellie, wake up."

She blinks a few times and sees his stance. scrambling to her feet with her knife in hand.

"Holy shit. What the fuck?"

"Get behind me."

One of the soldiers points his gun at her. 

"Don't move."

It's chaos after that. The guys shout at each other. 

"Don't point it at her! Don't you remember the fucking briefing?"

"You hadn't even joined when we got here, you don't know. We've been looking for her for months --"

"If you shoot her we're all dead --"

Joel locks eyes with Ellie.

"When I say run, you run. Okay?" 

The fear in her eyes turns to determination. Brave girl, he thinks. I'm sorry. He waits for the idiot pointing at her to look away and takes a deep breath. What's one more day?

"Run!"

Joel doesn't check to see if she obeys before firing through the fence. The rifle is incredibly powerful at such a short range and where there was once a head there's only mist. Joel clears the chamber as fast as he can and gets the second one in the shoulder but he's not fast enough for a third and before he realizes it he's on his back in the grass. 

The Firefly's assault rifle litters Joel's chest with bullets but he doesn't feel it until he tries to take a breath and nothing comes. It's like he's underwater.

At least he didn't make her cry this time.

__

Joel isn't much of a believer in anything but he decides fairly quickly that he's in Hell or something close. God knows he deserves it. 

His sins are countless, his ledger dripping with red just like his hands. They will never be clean. What he can't figure out is how he got here. Did he die somewhere in St. Mary's? Is the real world somewhere else beyond his reach, now? If he died then what happened to Ellie?

He tries to make tallies in the bark of a tree on the edge of camp but they disappear every time he wakes up. He makes do with his own slowly unspooling brain. Two, five, ten.

Ellie is much the same every time but somewhere around day twenty she asks him about it. "How do you know where everything is?"

They're in the bus depot before the tunnel. He's taking them quickly around the tents, putting off Ellie handing him a photo of his dead daughter. It's muscle memory at this point. A pair of pliers here, some rags there. A half-empty but uncracked bottle of hooch behind that blood-stained bed, some bullets under that overturned partition. 

"Just payin' attention."

"I pay attention!"

Joel uses the excuse to grin at her. It's hard sometimes to remember that she has no idea what's coming, that he can and should be good to her every chance he gets. The violence has already started to blur together in his mind. Killing everyone in the hospital is by far the easiest part of this fucking loop. These parts are harder. 

"Didn't say you don't."

"I feel like that was a double negative."

She's still energized from the giraffes and he knows she's working up the courage to talk about Sarah, but right now he wants to spend time with her. He spots the Firefly medal tangled in the shattered floodlight and points it out. 

"Ellie," he says. She's at his side in seconds, looking up at him with eyes brighter than he's seen in weeks. "Wanna get that down?"

She gives him her classic why are you like this look. "Are you going to be weird and pick it up?"

Joel shrugs and leans on the rotting tank nearby. "Just want to check your aim."

"My aim is really fucking good and you know it!" Even so, she picks up a brick from her feet and palms it, eyeing the silver circle before winding her arm back and hurling the brick towards it. 

She misses. Maybe three hundred miles and a trail of dead bodies ago she'd have stormed off, embarrassed and pissed. But she just makes a face at the still-swinging medal and then looks at him. "How did I miss that?"

He pushes off the tank and scoops up a glass bottle. "Sun s'probably in your eyes." Joel stands next to her and eyes the target, trying to compensate in his mind for her height. "Stand here." Ellie moves over in front of him and he hovers his arm over her. "Can I?"

She nods. Joel presses the bottle into her hand and she takes it as he maneuvers her with a hand on her elbow until she's got the trajectory he thinks will work. 

"Now?" she asks. "Feels pretty fucking similar to what I was doing."

"Just trust me. Throw a little lighter than last time. And higher."

Ellie sighs, but once he steps back she does as he says and nails the medal hard enough that it drops to the ground. She whoops and turns around, hands high in the air and a wide smile on her face. Joel tries to breathe through how easily she puts her faith in him. 

"Fuck yeah! Did you see that?" She holds both hands out for a high five and he obliges. 

"Sure did. Nice job, kiddo."

When Ellie hands him the picture of Sarah, he pulls her in for a hug. He half expects her to shove him off but instead she allows it, twisting her hands in his shirt as he cups the back of her head. 

"Thank you," Joel says quietly, thickly. 

Later, when he finds her on the operating table, he presses his lips to her forehead for an extra moment before picking her up and heading for the elevator. 

__

He messes with the order of things a little bit. Tries to make their morning last longer, tries to stay watching the giraffes for an hour or so. 

Sometimes it works. 

Sometimes it doesn't. 

Watching Ellie drown over and over fucks with his head more than the hospital does because he can't stop it. At least while he's leaving behind corpse after corpse he knows that she's asleep upstairs, waiting for him. In the tunnel, he knows that the only way out is through, but she has to fucking drown first. 

He gets sloppy. 

He forgets about the runners in the side rooms when he ducks in to avoid a clicker and takes a step too close. Ellie is behind him as always and he shoves her back blindly as three runners slam him against the metal railing of the stairs before he can reach for his gun. He's too surprised to feel anything, but their breath smells like rotting meat and something worse, something that makes his eyes water. 

Joel searches the room for her and finds her -- pale-faced and terrified, already reaching for her knife. He tries to say her name but it comes out as a scream when one of the runners goes for his shoulder, jagged teeth ripping through his shirt in an instant. 

"Ellie -- run, Ellie -- GO --" He begs her to leave him but his voice stops working as his throat is ripped out. The last thing he sees is her horrified face as she raises her pistol.

And then he wakes up yesterday. 

___

It occurs to him on day 30 -- if he's keeping track accurately -- that he's got one of the smartest people he knows at his disposal. Kid's got an encyclopedic knowledge of space as well as science fiction stories. He asks her while they're still on the highway, stalling though he can see the blue H sign from here.

"Y'ever read stuff about time?" No reply. "Ellie?" She's staring at that deer again. "Ellie."

"What?" 

"You read any stories about time back in school?"

"Uh, sure," she says. She tugs her sleeves over her hands and catches up to him, eyes on the ground. "Why?"

"Saw a weird movie 'bout it once. Somethin' reminded me of it this mornin'. Guy gets stuck in a...shit, what did they call it?" Joel peeks inside an RV and smells rot so he leaves it be. "He lives the same day over and over."

"A time loop!" Ellie sounds more excited about this than anything they've talked about for days. "Those are so fucking cool. Scary, though. I feel like I'd go crazy."

Joel drags a hand down his face. "Yeah," he says. "How do you think you get outta one?"

"Well, how did the guy in the movie do it?"

"He stopped bein' an asshole," he says. Ellie laughs. 

"Well, we know that's not possible for you. Guess you're fucked."

"Guess so," he mutters. 

The H sign is close enough that she'll see it any minute. He wishes for the hundredth time that they could just stay out here all day, just talking. If he had a guitar he'd play for her. If he had a fucking car he'd put her in it and turn around, even though it wouldn't do any good. They'd just end up right back here because he can't fucking figure out how to get out of this. 

"I think you just have to change, right?" Ellie says. She's looking at the photo of an airplane on the bus. This time she doesn't tell him about her dream. Is he losing pieces of her, already? "I guess it doesn't have to be about yourself. Maybe something you do, or something you say. It's the universe telling you to make a different choice, right?"

That's the fucking thing. The choice isn't an option. It's not even a choice. 

The one thing he hasn't tried and will not try is leaving the hospital when Marlene tells him to. He'd rather die a thousand times, rather live this shit show over and over for the rest of eternity than let them cut her brain out. They will not touch her while there is still breath in his body. 

He'd do it all over again. He will.

__

Joel tries a hundred things and they don't work. 

After his conversation with Ellie he decides to really fuck with the day. Doesn't matter, right? So long as she's not put in any extra danger he considers it. He begs her to walk away, get on his knees and pleads with her throughout the day. Doesn't work. She just gets pissed at him like that first time and he doesn't push it because he can't bear to see her cry. He lengthens their morning in the clearing, fakes sick or says the rifle is jammed and needs cleaning. That goes south, too, when a pack of runners wanders through the woods and straight into them. They make it to the highway and have to miss the giraffes because they're running. 

One time Joel spends all day zig-zagging them around the city to avoid the tunnel. The Fireflies find them much the same way except they shoot him on sight and grab Ellie right out of his arms as he bleeds out on the cracked asphalt, her screams echoing in his ears. 

Another time, he ties them together in the tunnel with some fraying rope and they both drown. 

Killing Marlene early gets him a bullet in the head and not killing her at all gets him back where he started, no change. 

Joel even begs the doctor to run more tests first, to try blood, to try anything, but it takes too long and the alarm sounds and he's cornered in the operating room before he can grab Ellie and go. 

Nothing fucking works. 

But what is there left to change?

__

His mind starts to fray. He loses count of the loops and it becomes hard to detach himself from the slaughter. Not even the good moments -- Ellie's laughter, the awe in her face when she sees the giraffes, her jokes and her muted but still sharp sarcasm -- keep him afloat. He's lost, adrift in a sea of blood and bullets and it starts to eat away any humanity that was left in him. 

The blood of hundreds, thousands maybe, is on his hands and he feels nothing.

Once and only once does he get there too late. Everything else goes like it always does but maybe he took too long on the first floor, maybe he took too long picking the guys one by one instead of using the assault rifle, maybe maybe maybe. 

When Joel gets to the pediatric ward he knows something is different -- he can hear a buzzing sound, something loud and unnatural. The stale air is thick with something metallic, tinged with death. The buzzing stops and he finds his feet glued to the floor outside the operating room. Voices on the other side of it, murmuring and the clink of metal on a tray. Joel's hand shakes when he reaches for the knob because he knows whatever he finds on the other side is going to kill him. 

But he opens it because he has to. The doctor is at the sink this time, the nurses nowhere to be found. Ellie's body is covered in a sheet, blood seeping through the fabric. Joel looks away. He just stands there, his heartbeat loud in his ears as the world ends. 

The first time his daughter died, Joel thought he could will it not to be so. He held her as long as he could, whispered her name with her blood drying on his hands until Tommy begged him to get moving. 

This time, he knows it's true and he knows there's only one ending. 

He raises his gun at the doctor who is now leaning on the edge of the sink. The door swings open and the nurses return, eyes wide and vibrating with the energy of a job well done. He swings over to them and kills them both with quick headshots. The doctor has barely turned around when he's dead, too.

Joel breathes, ears ringing. He manages one step closer to the operating table but his knees buckle and he goes down hard on the cool tile. His vision is blurry. Is he crying?

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm so fucking sorry, baby." He angles himself so he won't get any blood on her and then presses the barrel of his gun to his temple and pulls the trigger. 

__

If Joel was on the edge of losing his mind before, now he's laser focused. He doesn't pull any more shit. He settles back into the loop, savoring Ellie's laughter with the giraffe and gunning down every sorry motherfucker in his way at the hospital. He will not get there late ever again. 

So when Marlene says something different the next time around and he almost misses it.

Ellie is dead weight in his arms but she's warm and he can see the rise and fall of her chest. The hospital was messier than usual because he rushed this time, cutting down the Fireflies like it was his last stand. There's blood in his hair and crusted under his fingernails and his shirt is beyond ruined. 

"Are you going to tell her what happened here?" Marlene presses her hand into her side, blood leaking from around her crimson palm. "Are you going to tell her what you did?"

He lies to her.

Every time.

It's never occurred to him to try something else. Even though he's changed almost everything about this damn day except that. 

Because Joel knows what happens if he tells the truth. He knows what that will cost him.

And he doesn't know if he'll survive it.

He's afraid. Joel doesn't want to lose her and if that makes him selfish then so be it. He wants to take her back to Jackson and give her a bedroom of her own and as many stupid comics as she wants and three meals a day for the rest of her long, peaceful life. He wants her to grow up and grow old. 

He'd kill a thousand more Fireflies to make it happen.

He'd damn the whole world. 

Because he loves her and it fucking hurts. 

This girl and her puns and her comics and her god damned bravery and her bleeding heart. He doesn't want to lose her. 

But is this, whatever this endless hell is, is it fair to her? 

If it's breakable, if he has the ability to get them to tomorrow, to get them to Jackson, to get them home, shouldn't he? If he loves her shouldn't he give her a life even if he's not in it?

Joel gently arranges Ellie in the backseat and shoots Marlene in the head. 

__

For a few seconds Ellie thinks she's in the car on the way into Pittsburgh. The hum of the old engine, the rocking motion of the truck. But -- wait. She's lying down. The car smells...musty. And she's cold like she's wearing a dress and --

"What the hell am I wearing?"

She flutters her eyes open. Different truck. Backseat. Is she in a...hospital gown? What the fuck? Where is she?

"Just take it easy," Joel says. Okay, so she's with Joel. Something in her chest settles. She must be safe. "Drugs are still wearin' off."

Drugs? Ellie pushes back into her memory and tries to find something, anything that'll give her a clue as to what's going on here. They were in the bus tunnel. The water was rushing, Joel jumped on the bus and it started moving and she...fell into the water? 

It's a blur after that. More of a blank, really. Did they get to the hospital? Did they find the Fireflies? Based on her weird fucking outfit it sure seems like it.

"What happened?"

Joel's eyes flick up in the rearview mirror to look at her. "Let's get you into some clothes, first. Then we'll take a break and I'll tell you everythin'."

He sounds tired. More tired than he's ever sounded, frankly, but she can't imagine why. And he can't seem to stop looking at her like she's going to disappear. Like he hasn't seen her in ages. 

"Okay," she says slowly. "Where the hell are we going to get those?" 

"Your bag is on the floor by your feet." Joel veers off the highway down an exit ramp and Ellie sits up. Her head feels light for a second and then really heavy so she braces her hands on the seat in front of her and takes a few deep breaths. "You okay, kiddo?"

"Yeah. Fucking...drugs, I guess. What'd they do that for?"

"They ran some tests. We'll talk about it."

Normally she'd push him but something feels off. Ellie tries to get a good look at his face but she can't, not from this angle, and not with her head fucking pounding like it is. She's missing so much time. It makes her skin crawl, makes her heart race. Joel is here, she tells herself. He wouldn't let anything bad happen to her. 

He parks them at the edge of a cemetery and gets out of the car to stand guard while she changes out of the gown. Her last pair of jeans, apparently, and a grey t-shirt with a few holes in the collar. She wishes she had a sweatshirt or something to wrap around herself, to pull over her hands and feel covered. But beggars can't be choosers. At least someone put her shoes in her backpack. 

Joel doesn't turn around when she opens the door but she sees him stiffen. 

"I'm done." He looks back at her and she finally sees his face. "Jesus Christ, Joel, what happened to you?"

It's not just the blood. Sure, he's got dried streaks of it on his neck and in his hair. Ellie glances at his hands and sees it crusted under his fingernails, too. But he looks wrecked. Older, somehow. He looks like something terrible happened, the way she remembers his face when he fell from the balcony in Colorado, when he found her in the burning restaurant. But somehow it's worse. 

He's looking at her like he can't believe she's real. 

"Alright." Joel lowers the rifle and ignores her question, clearly. "Didn't see anythin'. Should be fine to sit here for a bit."

"Are you going to tell me what the fuck happened?"

He moves like he's going to drag a hand down his face but thinks better of it. "Yeah," he says. "I am." 

Ellie swings her legs so they're hanging out the door. Joel leans the rifle against the truck and crosses his arms. "You're making me kind of nervous, man."

"Just...promise me you'll hear me out to the end."

Yeah, something is going on. She doesn't like it. 

"Uh, sure."

"What do you remember?" 

Good fucking question. "The tunnel. The bus and -- water. I fell in, right?"

Joel nods, clears his throat. "Jumpin' on the bus was dumb. Don't do that again." 

She snorts. "Yeah, okay. Point taken. But I was afraid you were going to drown!"

"You did." He delivers the news in a flat tone she doesn't like. She drowned?

"Are you serious?"

"I got us out of the water and tried to get you breathin' again." Ellie realizes her chest is sore. She imagines Joel doing compressions like they showered her in school, imagines his panicked face, his hoarse voice calling her name. Fuck.

"Did it work?"

"No," he says. "Fireflies found us first and knocked me out." 

"That doesn't make sense." She frowns. "They knocked you out?"

Joel shrugs. "Just tellin' you what happened."

This isn't how she imagined it would go. She never told Joel, but for weeks she's been thinking about waltzing up to the hospital and telling them who she is. She pictured Joel telling her jokes while she got her blood drawn, pictured him staring down nurses and doctors while they made the cure. She figured it would take a few days, maybe a week, and then they'd be on their way back to Jackson. She had hoped Marlene might be there, too. She has so many questions about her mom. 

"What did they do with me?"

Joel looks troubled. "I...don't exactly know. It was a while before I saw you again."

It makes her skin crawl. He must be able to tell because he keeps talking. "I'm sure they just ran some tests while you were out. They brought you back, made sure you were breathin' okay."

"Tests?"

"I'm gettin' there." She feels like he's having a hard time looking at her. Something close to but not quiet dread sits heavy in her stomach. What happened?

"Joel..."

"I woke up inside the hospital. Marlene was there. Told me they didn't know it was us, that they'd been waiting." He pauses, drags a hand down his face. "You didn't wake up or nothin'? You sure?"

Ellie shakes her head. She doesn't remember anything after the tunnel. 

"Well, she told me they could do it. They had a doctor who could make the cure."

The air rushes out of Ellie all at once. "Are you fucking serious?"

"And then she said..." Joel chews on his words and looks away from her. He looks angry. 

"What did she say?"

"Makin' a vaccine...would've killed you."

The bottom drops out of Ellie's world. It's like a hundred doors in her brain open at once. 

It would have killed her? Are they sure? Did they do enough tests? Were they going to? Why didn't they wake her up? Were they going to ask her? How did they get out?

She swallows them all and manages just one in a broken whisper. "What did you do?"

Joel looks right at her. "I stopped them."

If Ellie wasn’t already sitting down she thinks her legs would give out. She knows that Joel meant what he said to her in Silver Lake. Knows that he'd do anything for her.

But this?

"What do you mean?" He shakes his head. "Joel. What do you mean, you stopped them?"

His shoulders slump. "They told me to leave and I refused. And I made sure no one can follow us to try again."

Static builds in her ears. She can read between the lines. She speaks Joel now. He killed them all, that much is clear to her. He killed them all, Marlene, too, probably, because she was supposed to die to save the world. Hot tears sting her nose and gather at the corner of her eyes. 

"But I -- but we -- I was supposed to...I'm the cure!"

"You're a person. You're a kid. Don't matter what's in your brain, you ain't dyin' for --"

Ellie pushes out of the truck and to her feet. Joel steps back to give her room but she knows he probably wants to touch her, to reassure her. The anger fills her, makes her face hot and her heart race. 

"Who said you get to make that choice? If they said I had to die maybe I should have? Then it would mean something --"

"Your immunity ain't the thing that matters most. You are. So I picked you," Joel yells.

She's really crying now, huge heaving sobs that make it hard to talk, make it hard to convey how angry she is. "Well, you picked wrong, asshole."

"I ain't gonna apologize for it. I'd do it all over again, the exact same way. Every time." Joel's expression is as serious as it gets. He used to look this way all the time. No nonsense, no room for argument. 

She tries to find the words anyway but they don't come.

"Now, you've got some options here," he says. "I think the best one is for us to go back to Jackson. I know Tommy'll take you in, and --

She laughs, or tries to. 

It sounds like something bitter and awful to her own ears. First he tells her she was supposed to die today and now he wants to leave her?

"Are you fucking serious, Joel? You want to leave me again?" 

Joel's brows pinch together. He looks pained. Good. It feels like her chest is caving in, like her lungs aren't working right anymore. This must be what it felt like to drown in the bus terminal, to sink slowly, to fade away entirely. She read once that drowning was supposed to be peaceful. This hurts. 

"I want you to be safe," he says. "Jackson is the best place for that. I don't have to be there if you don't want me there --"

"I didn't fucking say that!" she yells. "I -- Jesus, give me a fucking second, okay?"

He stands by the door as she paces back and forth, tugging her hands through her hair. 

She was supposed to die. But she didn't. There's no cure. And it sure fucking sounds like Joel didn't leave any option to try again. 

He traded saving the world for her. 

It's too much.

"What do you want, Ellie?" Joel sounds like he's been awake for days. Like he's in pain, like he's being hollowed out. He sounds like how she feels. 

She digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. 

"I want none of this to have happened! I want us to go back to this morning and I want us to not have gone into the bus tunnel and I want you to have asked for tests first, I want them to try something else. I want Marlene to tell me why they didn't wake me up. I want to do it again but differently, I want things to be different, I --"

Her words break off into a sob. "Ellie..." She opens her eyes and finds him reaching for her. His shirt is stained with dried blood but she steps into his hold and his arm wraps around her. 

"I don't know what to do, now," she whispers.

Joel exhales a shaky breath. "I know you wish things were different. I wish things were different. But they ain't."

They stand there, his hand dragging up and down her back. She listens to his heartbeat and remembers those nights in the basement when she thought it would stop any minute. 

"Fuck," she whispers, then pulls away. He lets her go. "Fuck, Joel."

He sighs. "Yeah, kiddo. Fuck."

He told her the truth and that means something. It hurts, it hurts so bad, and it doesn't absolve him of anything, but that matters. 

"I'm so angry with you," she says. "I don't know how to forgive you for...for...saving me." 

It sounds stupid as she says it but Joel nods solemnly. 

"That's alright." 

"But I..." She wants to get this part right. "Let's go back. To Jackson. We'll figure it out there. But you...you have to swear to tell me the truth. Just like this. We have to be honest with each other."

Joel meets her gaze without blinking. "I swear."

Ellie takes a deep breath. The anger, the horror, the disbelief at what he's done settle a little bit. She has no clue what comes next, but this is a start. 

"Okay."

__

Joel wakes up. 

His back hurts and his shoulder aches. It's dark, darker than it should be, darker than it's been for hundreds of days.

Ellie is asleep in the backseat of the truck. 

It's tomorrow. 

thank you for reading. let me know what you thought!

#the last of us fanfiction #i dont know how to tag this #the last of us #bea this is your fault!

[maracllea]

A crusade. In my name. My name. That’s the future. It’s coming.

dune: part two (2024), dir. denis villeneuve / s. osborn, blasphemies at the 5th street station / @gyazo / dune (2021), dir. denis villeneuve / @resonancereverie / bilal al-shams, sacrifice / dune (2021), dir. denis villeneuve / roberto ferri, fallen angel (2011) / the creation of man, michelangelo | savages, marina / dune: part two (2024), dir. denis villeneuve / animal fear, marika hackman

#the voices ... still #paul atreides #dune #dune part 2 #duneedit #dune comparatives #comparatives #dune 2021 #dune 2024 #dune part two #timothee chalamet #timothee chamalet #fallen angel #poetry #moodboard #aesthetic #m1ne #house atreides #kwisatz haderach #lisan al gaib #the voice from the outer world