#there’s some grey at the roots of his hair from the wither effect but I think the quality got destroyed

[rozugold]

We can never have nice things here

#here’s the second part ;; #hc that technoblades natural state is human #and that it takes energy to keep up his piggyness features #but when he’s relaxed (or this case sick) he’s human #there’s some grey at the roots of his hair from the wither effect but I think the quality got destroyed #so it’s hard to see #tw veins #tw eyestrain #mcyt #mcyt fanart #technoblade fanart #tommyinnit fanart #ask to tag #rozu art #rozoodles #WWHWI

[sirthisisa-wendys]

One Wall Over: Geto Suguru x Fem!Reader

synopsis: you’re new in the neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get a warm welcome from your duplex buddy. 

wc: 3k

tw: nsfw, smut, annoying noises at five am, the works 

a/n: ahhhhhhhhh! I am so excited to be taking part in this collab with @suna-reversed reversed for a super sexy jjk collab! Please check out the masterlist for the collab here and the other authors! SO EXCITED TO READ THE OTHERS! (The other title I had for this work is “First of All, How Dare You” because that’s literally me every time I see my hubby Suguru, but anywho!).

Moving in was a bitch. 

For the first time ever, you have no roommates, no parents, and no pets - just you and your meager belongings moving into the little, two-story duplex a friend allowed you to sublet. As you stare out of the window facing the sparse front lawn, you wonder what your neighbor is like. They hadn’t come to welcome you to the home, but you knew they existed by the sound of the bass through your shared wall at five am every morning. 

You assume they’re male or a couple, but you’ve never gotten a chance to see them with your own two eyes.  So you kept a lookout day after day. At exactly four p.m., you would sit across from the window with a book and keep watch, the sun streaming in and illuminating your figure and crossed legs anchored on the window sill. But day after day, you wouldn’t see anything. The neighbor’s car wouldn’t even move an inch from the previous day. Everything would remain the same until the next day when you took your perch by the window. 

It isn’t until you’re out on your front lawn, slaving over the flowers you maintained for a whole month - a new record - that the sleek Range Rover drives up to the garage on your neighbor’s side of the house. At first, you don’t notice it, your eyes firmly planted on the soil at the root of your orchid tree. But then you hear a car door slam, and you look up, watching for the person who would be exiting the vehicle. 

A tall, black haired man slides out of the truck and slams the door shut, his locks tucked into a half bun and a white towel resting around his rippling shoulders. He slides his keys into his gym shorts and turns to walk into the house, barely noticing you on the front lawn in an ill-fitting t-shirt and dirty yoga pants. 

He’s halfway to his front door when you find your voice and yell out, “Hey, neighbor!” You wave your hand at him in hopes that he would return the gesture, but you’re sorely disappointed when he only looks your way with disinterest and walks into the house without speaking. You frown at the encounter, hoping that he would return a little while later and explain his lack of manners, but he doesn’t, and you retreat into the house once more. 

______________________________________________________________________

“Unzzz, unzz, unzzzz…” Both eyes fly open at the sound of the bass on the other side of your bedroom wall, the sudden noise jarring you from your sleep. 

“Ugh…” Your eyes slide to the white numbers on the clock face, which politely remind you that it’s five-fifteen AM. Don’t confront him, don’t confront him. You wrap the pillow around your ears, hoping the gentle cushion would block out the sound. But for some reason, it gets even louder, and a groan escapes your lips. There were only two more hours for you to rest, but at this rate, you’d be up until it was time for you to wake and get ready for work. That just wouldn’t do. 

The grey sweatpants deposited on the floor the night before are quickly jerked on, and you pad to the front door, not caring about your appearance as you walk the length of the porch over to his front door. Inhaling, you find the will to bring your fist up and pound on the door, hoping the sound would be angrier than you actually felt. Fear ate at your nerves while you waited. A few agonizing moments later, the door is yanked open, music floods outside, and your neighbor stands before you in just a pair of black sweatpants. Nothing else. 

“What?” he gripes, sweat rolling down his forehead. As your eyes take in the full sight of him, you wonder what kind of sculpted god you had for a neighbor. You could even faintly see the v that would culminate in the bulge near the crotch area of the pants, which apparently is quite--

“Uh…” You had entirely forgotten what you had come over to his side of the house for, but as he leans on the doorframe and gives you a withering stare, you suddenly remember your complaint. “Your wall is next to my bedroom. Can you turn your music down?” You place a hand on your hip, trying to seem more inconvenienced than you actually were in that moment. 

“Yeah, sure.” He shuts the door in your face, and you trudge back over to your side of the house, hoping the music would soften. 

But for some reason, you swear he turns it up even louder. 

_______________________________________________________________________

“Why don’t you just call the landlord and make a noise complaint?” your friend wonders over the phone, the sound of a frying pan in the background slightly overshadowing her voice.

“But you said you didn’t have any problems with him, Mariela.” 

“Yeah, Geto was nice enough and didn’t bother me much. Not sure why he’s being such an ass now.” You hear an oh, shit on the other end, and Mariela hisses into the receiver, “Hey, y/n, I have to go; the risotto is burning. Call me back if you have any other issues, okay?” 

“Okay.” You hang up and toss your phone on your desk, trying to focus on the words in front of you but failing as the sound of the bass filters through the other side of the wall again. For the fourth day in a row, you’ve been subjected to the sound of pure noise coming through the other side. Tonight was absolutely not the night, mostly because you had a presentation that took you all night to finish, and the clamor was interrupting your prep work for the bright and early eight o’clock meeting. You feel like Squidward, subjecting yourself to the endless noises from the grunting to the bass to the sound of weights clanking back into place. 

It’s the sound of Geto’s groaning that sets you on edge the most. If it weren’t for the added noise of weights, you’d be convinced he was fucking someone. There was no way he could make so much noise and not know that he was disturbing your peace. Hadn’t he ever heard of headphones? 

You snatch up your set of earbuds on your desk, place them in your ears, and try to turn up lofi music as loud as it will go. But that doesn’t work. Even relocating to the living room didn’t seem to fare you well, and you wonder if he truly had cranked up the music higher than before just to annoy the hell out of you. Finally, you toss your earbuds down and slam your computer on your coffee table. 

You’d had enough. 

Stomping over to the front door, you fling it open and bang on Geto’s door, hoping he would answer it in a rage so you could let out your frustrations. But when the door flies open, he’s dressed in only a pair of gym shorts, this time the outline of his dick even more apparent. But you’re not focused on that. You point a finger at him and inhale to begin your tirade; sick and utterly over his shit.

“Hey! Can you fucking turn it down?” Geto stretches out a hand, and for a minute you think he’s going to grab you by the shirt, but he pulls you inside by the wrist, crushing you against his chest. “What the hell?” You push away from his sweaty chest, backing into the closed door harshly. 

“Lower your damn voice; the neighbors will hear,” he chastises, and turns away from you to grab the water bottle on the counter. The muscled man takes a long swig, then wipes his face with the towel right next to it. 

“I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but I’ve never been so disrespected in my li--” As you talk, he’s advancing on you, pushing back his long black hair back behind his ears and getting too close for comfort. Once he’s right up on you, you gulp hard, fully intimidated by his size and stature. The music suddenly stops, and you’re left in silence. 

“I’m listening,” he mutters, staring down at you. “Please, continue.” 

“I was saying…” your throat dries up. “What I meant was…” Your eyes travel from his chest to his navel, and then to the hand pressed against the doorframe.

“Uh huh…” He nods, squinting his black eyes at you. “You said you’ve ‘never been more disrespected in your’… life, right?” You don’t reply. Rather, you can’t reply. All of the words you could have ever said are now gone from your skull. “I highly doubt that, y/n.” 

“H-how…” 

“You’re Mariela’s friend. I’ve seen you quite a few times before you moved in here. Never thought I’d be living so close to you, though. Mariela’s subletting, isn’t she?” 

All of these questions. And you can’t reply to a single one because he’s practically squeezing you between the door and his rock-hard abs. Or are you pressing yourself against the door to get away from the heat emitting from his body - oh, fuck; you don’t know. 

“But I had to get your attention somehow.” The admission startles you so bad that you accidentally knock the back of your head against the door, touching the point of contact in pain and hissing slightly. Geto hums at your blunder, then pushes off of the wall to turn away from you. As he rotates, you catch a glimpse of his erection, now fully apparent in the atrocity that is his shorts. “The yard work wasn’t effective, the trips to the gym and back barely worked; shit, by now I would’ve thought you would throw yourself at me the first chance you got. I guess I had to make you mad enough to confront me.” 

“You literally looked at me and said nothing the first time I saw you!” you retort, throwing your hands up in the air. “Then you almost bit my head off the first time I came over to tell you the music was too loud.” 

“I didn’t expect you to come over the first time. Besides, I couldn’t figure out anything smooth enough in that short amount of time.” Geto shrugs, his shoulder muscles moving like water in the dim lighting of the living room. You look around at the furnishings, noting his impeccable taste in wood and red suede in conjunction with his minimal exercise equipment. “Coffee? You look like you’ve been up for a while.” He leans over a coffee-maker - one of those fancy ones that you’ve seen on TV - and slides a plain coffee cup into the holder. 

“Uh, no thanks.” You turn to the door and begin to open it, but Geto clicks his tongue thrice. 

“You’re just going to leave without getting what you came for?”

You pause for a moment, then turn back to look him over once. “Don’t you mean what you brought me over here for?” A lazy smile spreads across his face, and that’s when you realize that he’s charming, but not necessarily as suave as you first imagined. You shut the door and walk over to him, examining his physique as if you hadn’t just helped yourself to his tall, statuesque figure already. He allows you to look him over, eyes dedicatedly following you.

“Like what you see, doll?” You don’t get a chance to answer as he pulls you into his chest with a smooth movement, then presses his lips against yours. You instantly open your mouth so he can slide his tongue inside, and he does so without hesitation. Hands grasp at your flimsy night shirt, pulling it over your shoulders as he backs you up against the wall, hiking one leg up and wrapping the other around his waist. 

As both of your hands tangle in hair, fabric, sweat, you wonder how long - just how long - he’s wanted to do this. But your train of thought is rudely interrupted by his lips trailing kiss down your neck and to your collarbone, where he pauses for a second, catching his breath. Fingers dance through his locks and he peers up at you for a second, drinking in your flushed expression and breathy exhales. 

“Geto, please, I--” You’re silenced again by his lips, his thick fingers rolling past the waistband of your night shorts and right to your core, where he nestles them into your heat with ease. 

“Goddamn…” The rumbling of his voice vibrates against your chest, and you gasp, feeling every stroke of his fingers inside of you. “So fucking wet… just for me.” Your vision narrows in on the black eyes watching your every move, the angle of your face, the way you tilt your chin to the side and shakily exhale. Everything is perfect. Maybe even better than he imagined at first. But you don’t know that, and you really don’t care to know. All you want is release and for that release to be at Geto’s hands. When he removes his fingers and hoists you onto the suede couch, your first reaction is to cry out in shock. 

His hands roll your shorts down to your knees and then press your legs open, spreading you for him to examine. 

“You’re a mess down there… perhaps I should help you clean up.” 

“Huh?” The double entendre is completely lost on you in the heat of the moment. You watch as he leans down, then moves to lick your core with a flat tongue, stroking up before he goes down again and repeats his action twice. Your head finds the soft cushion of the pillow in ecstasy, and you let out a breath you didn’t realize you had been holding. 

Geto hums down below, fully appreciating your taste before sucking on your clit, hard. You yelp, shooting up, but his hand presses you back down, eyes still closed. Fingers make their way up to your breasts, tugging at your nipples leisurely before tightening and pulling with more tension. “Oh, god, please…” Your hands find his head, and at the sudden application of pressure, he grunts again. And you’re left there in agonizing pleasure, dangling between an orgasm and a build-up of pressure, one stroke away from tumbling into the cavern of blissful unawareness. 

Geto stops without warning, pulling back to watch you as he still tweaks your nipples with varying degrees of firmness. You tug at his shorts in a silent plea for him to discard them, and he waits a minute before sliding them off wordlessly. His length is impressive, you note, his cock springing free from his shorts and angled upwards a little. A condom is produced just as quickly, and he rolls it over himself before spreading you a little wider to accommodate his length. When he nudges his cock at your slit, you realise he’s a little breathless and shaking, but that all goes to the back of your mind when he slides inside of you with little resistance. 

“Fuck, doll, that’s--” He groans just as you moan, both of you relishing the expanding feeling. “God, that’s perfect.” You whimper at his praise and bring your hands to his shoulders, holding on for dear life as he begins to pump into you. Geto’s lips find your neck and he sucks a hickey on your left side, placing another one neatly below it while his hands cup your ass. 

“Does that feel good?” He whispers and you nod, completely at a loss for words. But soon, it’s not enough, and your fingers dig into his back. He’s fucking you slowly… too slowly. 

“M-more,” you whine, and he delivers his thrusts faster, pumping into you and moaning loudly. Your fingers find his face and angles it towards your raised head so you can kiss him on the lips. He offers you that mercy - a deep, languid kiss - while he plows into you with abandon. Pleasure is the only thing on your minds - you just so happen to have found it in each other’s arms - and your orgasm is just within reach.

“Geto, I’m close…” His response to your words is to lift your left leg a little higher so it practically hung off the couch and in the air, deeping his strokes until they settled against your cervix, like someone tapping a soft rhythm into your stomach. “Shit, like that.” 

“Yeah?” he exhales, looking at your face with a blissed-out expression, his cheeks reddening. You raise your hips to meet his with each thrust, hoping your orgasm would arrive before Geto came. There isn’t much you can do though, besides writhe beneath him and pull him closer to you, thereby making you and him almost inseparable. He’s merely rocking into your hips now, cock barely rolling out of you as before. And you can’t deny that it feels like heaven, not when you’ve been so frustrated for so long. 

“I’m gonna cum,” Geto hisses into your mouth, and you nod, constricting a little to urge him on. What you fail to realize is that the constriction was just what you need to tumble over into the abyss of thoughtlessness, and your mouth opens to let loose a guttural moan as Geto fucks you faster and faster, chasing his own orgasm on the heels of yours. “Oh, shit,” Your neighbor sinks into you one final time, shooting his cum into the condom, but pumping in stuttered strokes as if he were really letting loose inside of you. 

When you both fall from the heights of your sex-induced high, shoulders and heads are draped where there is comfort and space, little exhales from his mouth fanning across your breasts. Geto lifts off of your sweaty chest and looks you in the eyes before breathing: 

“Maybe I should start my days with this instead of a workout.”

#geto x reader #jjk geto #geto suguru #jujutsu kaisen getou #getou x reader #jujutsu kaisen geto #getou suguru #geto smut #getou smut #jjk smut #jujutsuhub collab

[gaiuswrites]

King of Cups || Chapter 7

Chapter 7: The Fool

Archive: ao3 | masterlist | six

Pairing: Din Djarin x fem!Reader

Summary: It all spills over.

Word count: 8.8k~

Rating: Explicit

Warnings/tags: SMUT (WE MADE IT FOLKS), thigh riding, fingering/hand job, very brief breathplay/choking, cum eating¿? Angst/emo shit (I'm so sorry i have no self control)

Notes: HI FRIENDS, wow it's been a minute. Sorry for the massive delay. For anyone wishing to start KOC, now would be the perfectly spicy chapter to do so! This chapter was Herculean. idk why. Love you guys, enjoy! x (gif credit : @djarinsgf)

“Maker,” you bemoan, shielding your face from the heavy beat of the suns.

You’ve known warmth—you were raised in warmth. This is beyond it.

It’s not just warm, it’s sweltering. The heat is oppressive, congealing the air to mist; you can barely see through it what with the sweat running into your eyes. Tall, craggy dunes line the valley of desert, trapping the planet’s hot pulse within their walls. Your steps crunch along the dry, pebbled earth as you swat at the gnats buzzing in ribbons around your head.

A muffled gurgle sounds from behind you and you slow to a halt, boots gritting into the cracked top soil.

“You doing alright back there, Munch?” you ask, craning your head to the child nestled into the carrier fashioned onto your back. A green ear pokes free from the top, and you can see the jewel of his black eyes peering at you through the gauzy cloth you draped over it. He grunts, and you give a small shrug—shifting the pack by the straps, eliciting a giggle out of him. “We can always turn back, okay? I’m not going to be mad.” Another noise, a happy coo this time, and you shimmy your shoulders again, jostling the bag playfully.

“Well, you just let me know.”

Your conversations usually unfold this way. They leave much to be desired, but you’d like to think you understand one another—in fact, you probably understand the kid more than you understand his dad.

You’ve grown close with him, you’ll be the first to admit it. You’re attached to each other. The little one has been your constant companion for these months and in some ways, you suppose he takes care of you just the same as you take care of him. The chamber of space can be lonely; it’s cold and unkindly reflective, stranding you to the echoed chain of your thoughts—but when he tugs at your hair or slobbers spittle down the front of him or crawls up into your lap to nestle into your tunic, it feels like you belong there—there on the Crest, streaming through the galaxy.

And maybe, simply, it feels good to do right by a child—as if you could make up for it somehow, within yourself. To do better than you were given.

Squinting, you raise your wrist to check the coordinates on your comm and shade a hand over the screen, blocking the glare cast onto the display. “Almost there,” you mumble, resuming your stride as you begin the last leg of the trek to the settlement you and Mando discussed that morning.

“What?” he asked, planted some paces away from you.

You hummed a curious note, glancing to him.

“What is it?”

You were trying to be small all morning—shrunken and shy, avoiding the thought and avoiding him all together. You quieted yourself, as if to not take up space, but the attempt was fruitless; of course he picked up on it – you get good at reading people on the job, he’d said – and of course he called you out on your behavior. You took a big gulp of your caf, gaze flickering down—increasingly more and more invested in the scuffs marked into the table you sat at.

“Dala,” he said pointedly, arms folding over the breadth of his chest.

Shit. Who did you think you were fooling? Playing possum with a Mandalorian?

Worrying your lip, you stood. You couldn’t bear to look up at him, just looming there across the table from you, so you paced around the deck as you rambled. “Okay, so you know how I’m still connected to the RRM channels? Well, I’ve been checking the message boards and I—there’s a settlement here out in the Wastes. It’s small and new and they’re looking for volunteers and—”

You whistled in a breath. Fuck it.

“And I want to help.”

Like the toggle of a switch, you went from having a career—having a purpose—to having nothing. And all your gratitude for the transport he’s offering couldn’t fill that empty lull that’s settled inside you.

“Would you be comfortable with letting me take the kid? I know I’m probably asking a lot—and I will fully respect whatever you decide—but I can keep him by me the whole time, I swear, I just—” You shook your head, pinching your eyes shut before sighing, “I need to be doing something. Anything.”

There was a long pause. You scratched at the torn skin around your cuticle, nervously searching the pitch of his wordless visor. He didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even twitch.

“That’s fine,” he finally remarked, graveled.

You blinked, taken aback at his agreement, and all at once your fidgeting ceased and a bright grin broke out over your features in its place.

It nearly brought him to his knees.

“Wait, seriously?” you asked, bouncing on the balls of your feet and he nodded, a subtle tilt to his helm. “Maker, thank you,” you exclaimed, and without thinking you flew towards him, flinging your arms around his neck and sealing yourself to his armored frame. His arms escaped out from his chest in surprise, suspended and stiff, before falling measuredly to his sides. You could’ve been imagining it, but you swore you heard the distinct grit of his teeth grinding together under his helmet.

“Really Mando,” you beamed, pulling back to lay your eyes on him, to let him see the earnest there: you have no idea how much this means to me. “Thank you.”

You gave his shoulders a squeeze, thumbs brushing along the scratchy fabric of his cape before tearing yourself away. Swiping up your mug of caf, you wound down the corridor - airy, buoyant - back to your makeshift quarters to prepare for your outing. It took him another minute just to get his damn feet to move from the spot on the durasteel you welded him to.

Din told you to be safe.

You smiled, and promised you would.

You left the Crest before him and it was strange, surreal. For the first time, you stood in each other’s shoes, leaving Din there on his own while you set off into the world. He watched you go—you and his boy—watched you walk away into some great unknown without him.

And he didn’t like it.

He soured, somewhere in the deep of him—within that pit he called a gut, he twisted sick.

Your feet hit the ramp, dull and tinny, and it sounded like goodbye—it sounded like you leaving. It’s what it will look like when time and fate touch, and inevitability catches up with him. It’s what it will look like when he takes you home. You’ll walk out of his life, down that same ramp, and your steps will echo those same beats. You won’t look back.

And Din, with all his strength, all his unshakeable resolve—Din will let you go.

///

The encampment is settled into the shadow of a cliffside, seeking respite there from the blazing suns, the taupe of the canvas shanties camouflaging into the arid landscape. Some crawl their gaze up as you enter the village, and you offer them smiles they do not return. Others do not acknowledge your presence at all— unstirred as your footsteps sound past, their heads bound heavy towards the earth. It’s not long before a decisive voice cuts through the hush that’s claimed the settlement.

“Are you with the RRM?”

You turn and are greeted by a woman ducking out of a tent—the grey of her woven tunic browned with sand, heat collecting in her black, coiled hair.

“Yes, I’m with the Movement.” It’s not a total lie. Sure, you’re on leave, but that doesn’t discount you completely. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

With a sharp exhale like a prayer of relief, she makes her way towards you. “Where’s the rest of your division?” Her eyes narrow discerningly, flitting behind you as if expecting to spot the rear of your party trickling in.

“It’s, uh—it’s just me,” you confess, pressing your lips together in a thin smile.

She rakes a hand over her hair, over her face. The skin around her knuckles is split, the beds of her nails chalked with days of unwashed grime. “Alright,” she concedes begrudgingly, without any better option presented. “And who is this?” She nods to the child, emerging from the pack and staring curiously at her.

“This is—” You take a moment to consider it—consider the secrecy around the child, the bounties, the life on the lam. Less is more, you decide. Again, it’s not a total lie. “I’m babysitting.”

The kid grunts an emphatic patu.

You both share a look—a quirk of her dark brow, an apologetic heft of your shoulder—and she sighs. “Well, I’ll take all the help I can get,” she quips dryly with a wave of her hand, leading you into the settlement.

///

She’s coarse, this woman—Arlaani, she told you—matronly and effective. She has a calculating gaze and powerful shoulders that she holds steady as she shows you through the camp. There are lines around her eyes, carved into the curves of her mouth. She knows what you know—what all women learn: sometimes you must be hard in order to keep others soft.

You walk shoulder to shoulder, matching her long strides with your own.

“The Black Sun has taken the southern hemisphere; their numbers have only grown since the Battle of Yavin. Pirates, mercenaries, spice runners—they’ve ransacked one half of the planet and have the officials of the other half in their pocket,” she scowls. “They have stolen our land, our homes—we’re moisture farmers, mechanics, mothers and fathers. We are simple people and we have been forgotten by our government—by those who vowed to represent us, protect us.” Arlaani draws in a long breath. “We’re on our own out here in the Wastes.”

You survey the area; the lifeless ocean of rock and sand, the few scattered trees that have died on their feet—roots withering bone dry in the suns. “Why settle here if it’s so uninhabitable?”

She huffs a humorless laugh. “Because, it’s uninhabitable,” Arlaani explains. “No one robs a beggar. There is nothing in the Wastes the Black Sun wants.”

There are no buildings, no structures; the whole area is undeveloped and raw. Tents are dotted sporadically in clusters, crates of supplies and water canteens stationed every other one. Children dawdle idly, tired and overheated, leaning against boxes and posts—their bellies distended and skin parched taut. Flies land on their shins, on their cheeks. They do not go to shoo them away.

“The Movement supplied those for us when we landed,” she comments, nodding to the crates. “That was two months ago.”

“No one has come back to check on you since?” you ask, brows notching together.

She shakes her head solemnly, jaw set rigid. “Our little ones go hungry, our elders are sick with red fever. We will run out of water before the week is through,” Arlaani says before she turns to you, holding your gaze—the seriousness evident in the stone of her eyes. “I thank the gods you are here.” She presses a palm to your shoulder. You feel the weight of it, the weight of her—of the lives she carries on her back.

“I thank the gods.”

///

You stop by each tent delivering what little food and medicine you brought with you from the Crest, and after each encounter—the people so grateful, so weary—your mind strays further and further to Mando.

Din, you scold yourself. Not Mando, Din. Din Djarin.

You still can’t bring yourself to say it.

He spent that whole fateful day nearly two weeks ago bristling at the very sight of you, going out of his way to limp to the other side of the ship just to ignore you better, only to do you in for one final head spin and give you his name.

Two weeks, and you still haven’t said it. There’s no other excuse: plainly - pitifully - you’re scared. You’re scared he regrets it.

Because how horrible of a truth would it be? To be offered something out of carelessness or guilt; to be the product of pity, or even worse, a mistake that cannot be unmade, cannot be rectified. He can’t take his name back, can’t unspeak it any more than you can unhear it, and this fear, picking at you like an old scab—it’s so painfully human, so terribly universal:

what if I’m not worth it?

And isn’t it easier to neglect the answer, then it is to ask the question.

So you’ve buried his name for both of your sakes, keeping it somewhere secret and private, there to garner dust in the quiet of your mind.

You’re brushing through the draped entrance of a tent when you spot him: a small boy hiding behind a supply crate, the top of his dusted head poking out over the ledge. You catch him peering at you, and he ducks down shyly. A honeyed grin blooms across your face.

“I think we’re being watched Munch,” you coo. The little ball of robes blinks up at you from your arms, earning his nickname tenfold as he crams his mouth with a flakey cracker. “You want to say hi?” He hums in response and you crouch, letting him wiggle free from you to toddle over to the other child. With small steps, he eventually makes it over to the other and immediately, without hesitation or provocation, extends one of his crackers to him.

Your heart swells until it bursts, proud and beautiful in your chest.

Munch leads him out from behind the box, the two boys shuffling slowly through the dirt back to you. He can’t quite meet your eyes—his gaze lands somewhere around your chin, your collarbone, and you fold forward, bent at the knees to meet his height.

“Do you have a name, sweetheart?” you ask kindly.

He nods, nibbling quietly on the cracker, and you breathe out a chuckle. “Not much of a talker, huh? I can respect that,” you say, eyes crinkling fondly with a smile. “Well if you want to tell me, you can—or not. That’s okay, too.”

He nods again, and you fish out more salty treats from the sleeve in your pack, gently handing them to the other—a gesture he nervously accepts, dirty fingers trembling as he plucks them from your open palm. This boy is precious—sweet faced and cherubic, he must not be a cycle over the age of seven.

And the realization comes so suddenly that it blindsides you—struck by it, there between your lungs: Din was his age when it happened—when life happened to him. When this could have happened to him.

You can’t help but think of it—think of him and everything he told you that night he came bleeding through the Razor Crest. You can’t stop imagining him; Din as a little boy tucked away, his people—his parents—decimated overhead. He is a Mandalorian by proxy. Displaced from his home, from his past, saved by a sect with an affinity for orphans—to protect those who cannot protect themselves. The irony of it all is not lost on you:

Din is a refugee too.

You see him in this boy, and in all the faces here—in every set of eyes, young and old alike. Each are individual - idiosyncratic - but they each wear the same qualifiers. The same exhaustion. They each fight the same tired battle, leaving them with identical sets of marks.

Does Din? If you were to see him, truly see him, would you find them there? You’ve seen the scars he’s earned from being a Mandalorian.

You wonder if he has any from simply being a man.

Pushing yourself to stand upright, you cradle Munch back into your chest, his teensy claws riddling your shirt, and offer the boy your hand—outstretched in front of you.

He’s cautious. Too cautious for a boy so young, for a child who should know nothing but abundant love and fearless imagination. He shouldn’t have had to learn this lesson: that some hands should not be taken, that some people should not be trusted. He studies you, hesitant but hopeful, and you smile softly—cycles of hard-won patience and empathy curving the corners of your lips.

He lays his small hand in your own. You walk on together.

///

The day blows by like hot desert wind, chafing at your skin. Minutes have ripened to hours—morning has crawled to midday.

The three of you finish your rounds— distributing rations throughout the camp, pitching tents, taking stock of the dwindling supplies for you to relay to the Movement once you return to the Crest and have access to your holopad.

It’s then that you notice Arlaani again. She’s speaking in hushed tones with another man, the both of them hunched over a large carton. You see the concern ticked clearly along the man’s jaw, the dread grooved into her brow, her crossed arms. With a frown, you plop the child down onto a nearby petrified log and the other boy joins, hopping up next to him, all too happy to get off his feet. You tell them not to wander off— a kiss to Munch’s forehead, a ruffle of the boy’s hair— before making your way to the couple.

“Hey,” you call, jogging over. “Is everything alright?”

Arlaani wheels around as you approach. It hasn’t been long since you’ve seen her, but somehow she looks older. Hollowed, drained— like there’s less and less in her. “It’s the water,” she grits out, “sand mites have gotten to the crates, to the canteens.” She tosses you one of the flasks. It’s littered with holes, porous and leaking— the remnants of water splashing out of the orifices bitten into the sides.

Arlaani dives through the crate, rifling through the supplies. She’s tense, upset, her voice is rife with it. “They’re all like this. Ruined, fucking—” She heaves out a hissed exhale and props herself up on the edge of the box, neck bowed between her shoulder blades. “This was the last of it, and now—now…”

The man tries his best - how do you comfort marble? - as he places an arm around her, his thumb drawing patterns there, reassuring and calm but she wants nothing of it; she gruffly shrugs it off as if stung, weaseling out of his hold. “I can’t— I need to think,” Arlaani bristles, as she paces away from the settlement, receding deeper into the Wastes.

“I’m sorry,” he stutters, “I have- I have to—” His eyes follow her shrinking form, worry apparent in the shape of them. It’s so obvious. He’s terrified of that woman—probably loves her, too.

“Go,” you say, and with a knowing expression, he turns and trots after her.

Heavy footed, heavy hearted, you trudge back to find the children exactly where you left them. Once there, you collapse to the hard ground, dust and dirt puffing up as you recline onto the log. Your palms run over the earth—scooping up sand and rock and letting it slip through the cracks of your fingers, gaze trained out onto the encampment—the people milling about, the miasma of helplessness stifling the air.

This isn’t enough. You’re not doing enough— these impermanent little nothings, your measly good deeds. It’s not going to matter. They’ll be bones by the time the next wave of volunteers rolls through. They’ll be grain.

You need to do something that lasts, that outlives you when you leave.

You glance over to the kid and his new friend, their little legs swinging off the edge of the trunk, heels thumping against the old wood. They look to you, two pairs of big eyes—crackers in their tiny fists.

“You boys ever dig a well?”

///|||///

The suns roast into his beskar, blistering him from the inside out.

The day has been long and it’s only half over. It took him longer than it should have to gather himself— his fob, his rifle, his fucking head—and depart the Crest. Longer than it should have to hunt the bounty here—some marauder scum who’s number is up and luck has run out. Longer than it should have to set up his sniper’s nest, sculpted into the mountainside.

Din is distracted, has been all day— has been since you left.

He can’t stop feeling you. Your warmth pushing against his chest, your arms looping around his neck, the heat of your palms searing through his flight suit. Din can smell you on him still— like citrus and moss, you cling to his cowl from where you buried your head.

It’s intolerable. It feels like an infection with how it’s been building, how this has spread— slowly but surely rearing to an unignorable head. Serpentine and insidious as it crept through him, this growing affliction— this morbid curiosity that spoiled like rotting stonefruit into infatuation— slipping along his bones and organs, blemishing Din in faint little licks— imperceptible to the naked eye but there all the same.

How did this happen? How did he become this?

You’ve been more relaxed now, bolder in some ways. Transparent. Sometimes, you’ll touch his arm as you walk by him or sweep your hair from your neck when you sit by his side in the cockpit, star shine on your jaw. You’re quick with a laugh, lips pulling back into a pretty grin. He’s even caught you staring at him, there out of the corner of his eye—from where he steals those same glances under the safety of his helm.

He spied you once, just a glimpse of your backside, padding quietly away from the shower with only your underwear on, drops of water tracking down your spine. It was brief, you were fast—you must have forgotten your shirt in your bunk—but he had to lock himself in his quarters and fuck his hand before he could even think about piloting the Crest into the stratosphere.

Din is a lot of things, but he isn’t daft. A part of him knows. A part of him is aware that you are two very human people with very human needs—and that you’ve been ignoring these primal aches with premeditated dereliction for months now.

And you can only dance around each other so long before one of you snaps.

And Maker, he’s so desperate to be rid of you—to get you out of his fucking system; to let him sleep without dreaming of you, to let him wake without plunging into his briefs and jerking himself off. You are everywhere. In his ship, in his galley, in his thoughts. He has no privacy, he has no sanctity— he has no idea how you have managed to worm yourself so deep into every living part of him. Others have tried and they have failed, and you— you did it in your sleep. From that very first fucking night, curled up in his chair, gore and ash stained tunic rising with your slumbered breathing. You snored.

You fucking snored.

And now you’re killing him— just as the suns above, you are blistering him from the inside out.

His level-headedness has all but evaporated. He’s peeved. Not only is Din distracted, but he's angry— has been since he plodded up this damn hill, waiting for his quarry to pass through the ravine between the valley of mountains—because instead of performing his job, he’s consumed with you. All of you.

He kneels, flattening himself against the rocky sand— your hands, so small and soft against him— and unclips the rifle from the strap on his back—how good you’d feel on his skin—he aligns his sights— the weight of your breasts in his palms—

His helmeted head clunks to the ground and he loses his aim, a frustrated growl emanating out from him. Focus, Mando. Fucking focus.

Din reorients his crosshair, training it on the gang of pirates in the gorge below. They lean haphazardly over their speeders, their cargo nets packed full with different wares and spices, jeering loudly and chugging from the jugs of spotchka they undoubtedly looted earlier that afternoon. He inspects the rabble, searching for his target and—those pretty lips that smile so easy for him, stretched around his length.

Fuck. He pinches his eyes shut.

You whispering husky into his ear as you ride him, you bent over the pilot’s chair begging for his cock, you sprawled out over the deck while he laps at your sweet cunt.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck— he can’t do this. He can’t fucking do this. You’re everywhere everywhere everywhere— you buffer his vision, his senses, his sight. He’s blinded with you. You’re blinding him.

With an infuriated heave he shoves himself off the ridge of the dune, bounty-less, and reverses his course back to the Crest—heart beating furious and bloody against his ribs.

///

The settlers surround the trench, peering down at you as you work. Hours ago, when you originally proposed this idea to Arlaani, they insisted on helping— to which of course, you insisted they didn’t. And so they watch— the refugees, Din’s foundling, the nameless boy— mangling their hands restlessly, animated with an inkling of that all too lethal substance long sought after by those of all species and creeds: hope.

You sink the shovel into the dry earth and your muscles burn with the effort—the skin on your palms stings from the rough grate of the wooden dowel and the yawn of your back strains as you pitch forward.

You’ve missed this.

You’ve been so distracted. You’ve grown comfortable in your routines, you’ve let yourself go listless—living in blissful ignorance—all because of a metal man in his metal ship with the most impossible and darling child you’ve ever known. All because your body reacts at the very sight of him, all because your belly flips when he speaks, that modulated purr rumbling loose from his beskar, all because, because—

You like him.

You wish you didn’t—you hardly know why you do—but you’ve soaked your fingers enough times in your rack to realize that this thing residing within you burns.

You can’t even see his face, and you don’t have to. His presence alone— that raw, vacuous energy that surges from him—it’s addicting. It's engulfing. It makes you whimper into the night, massaging your pearled clit as your other hand muffles your moans and you come over and over and over again, chasing after the fantasy you so dangerously harbor for this man. The man who’s piloting you back to Coruscant—the man who sleeps just down the hall.

But that isn’t real. That’s not real life— that’s not your life. This is real—the fuchsia of the setting suns blazing through the horizon, the sweat on your brow. You’ve missed this— Maker, you need this. Working with your hands, making an impact. You’re wanted here and kriff, does that not feel so unabashedly right. To be wanted. To be important.

Your back groans, the sinew woven over your spine aching in protest and you know, without a doubt, you’ll feel this for the next week. Half of you dreads it—being cooped up and sore, lactic acid compacting your joints— while the other excites at the prospect; the memory of a good deed lasting long after it’s finished. That reminder always there, always present: see, there’s still hope in the galaxy. We can still do good. There’s goodness where you look for it.

You fling dirt over your shoulder as you burrow lower and lower. With each shove, the soil changes hue, changes density—the striations darker, more definitive. It’s less dry now, thicker too—turning from sand to clay the deeper you dig. Again, you drive the spade into the sod with a taxed grunt, when you hear a distinct, wet squish.

You pause, stilling your shovel in the dirt. Everything - everyone - freezes.

Adrenaline thrums through you as you drop to your knees, using your hands to brush away loose silt piled atop the loamy floor, excavating what lies beneath.

Prayers and hollers erupt above you and you lurch your focus up to the sound, a feverish grin plastered to your face. The little boy jostles the child excitedly, and his green talons rumple the other’s tattered tunic. Your head falls back, cushioned by the dirt wall and you laugh - gargled, relieved - as water begins to seep through the tired ground.

Bubbling up, bubbling up—unearthing.

///

The promise of ridding yourself of your soiled clothes was the singular thought that fueled your trek back to the Crest. Every inch of you was filthy, caked in dried mud and gritty sand and you wanted nothing more than to strip from those dirty layers and melt into your bedroll. The kid, that lucky little bugger, had passed right out; sun drunk from his long day, he’d slept the entirety of the return trip—stirring only once when you placed him in the hover pram and sealed it shut.

Your bones are worn. Your tissue, your tendons— every little scrap that keeps you stitched together craves sleep. You reckon you should feel miserable, what with the tell-tale stiffness already burdening your spine and the fresh callus from the shovel’s handle reddening your palm.

But you’re not miserable, not even close. No, you’re happy—you’re glowing; fulfilled and serene, humming as you wash your pants in the basin, kneading at the sopping fabric. You wring out the article, shaking free the excess droplets before draping it on a metal rung overhead. You peel off your shirt and bra band next, leaving you only in your underwear as you plop them into the bowl and begin to scrub at the stains, concentrating on a particularly dirty patch at the sleeve.

The grating mechanics of the Crest’s great jaw unhinging sends your stomach bounding frantic to your lungs.

Kriff—shit shit shit, he’s back early.

Clutching onto your modesty, you cover your breasts and scramble to your quarters, quickly shimming a loose tunic over your head. Its hem barely covers the curve of your ass and you tug long at the cloth before peeking cautiously from the doorway and tiptoeing out of your room.

“Hey,” you warble, rounding a corner as solid feet pound up the ramp—you can feel their reverberations in the floor under your own. You pad into the galley, pulling at your shirt as you go, to tidy up the washing you left unattended. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you so—”

You falter.

He’s there at the mouth of the ship, the ramp drawing slowly up behind him and he’s fuming; you can practically see the steam lifting from his armor and his breathing is labored—chest rising, plummeting violently. You both stand immobilized on opposite sides of the hull—you, bare-legged and exposed and Din, all but anonymous under the steeled fury of his armor. Finally, the sound dampens, ship shuddering as she seals shut—sealing you in—and the leather of his fist creaks in the silence hanging dense like smoke around you.

“Mando...?”

He doesn’t grace you with a response. Instead he begins to stalk forward, stripping weapon after weapon from himself with every thundering step—rifle, blaster, vibroblade—he sloughs it all, metal clanging against metal as they clatter to the deck.

“Hey, what’s wrong-”

He’s not stopping. Fuck, he’s getting closer and closer and instinctually you back up—staggering until you’re pressed against the bulkhead—his broad frame crowding you until all you see is the silver polish of his beskar. You jolt when his hands fly up and slam into the wall behind you, framing either side of your head, fencing you between his forearms. Your lips part, wide-eyed and confused, and you gulp around the nervous lump threatening your voice.

“Do you have any idea,” he seethes, “what you do to me?”

“W-What-” Your stammering is cut short as he slots his thigh between your legs and you have to tilt your chin to meet his visor, a gasp finding itself on your tongue.

“Strutting around my ship, putting your hands on me, that kriffing smile…” Din ruts his knee into your heat, and you’re practically hoisted onto your toes. Your core pulses against the blunt pressure, blood racing to the throb at your center.

Maker, you could fucking faint.

“Do you know how long I’ve thought about this—about you?” His voice is tar black—smooth like obsidian—and you succumb to it. You can’t speak; any and all language evaporating from the forefront of your mind, because he’s everywhere. He’s inescapable and smothering and his scent floods over you, intoxicatingly wild—like iron and sand and something dangerous. Something heady, carnal.

“Is this what you want?” he hisses.

You’ve gone dumb. You’ve imagined this, you’ve dreamt of this, but now it’s actually happening—here, in the flesh, it’s finally happening and you’re trembling with the reality of it. All you can muster is a shaky nod, tongue darting out over your lip.

“Tell me,” he orders, scanning your face behind the guise of his helm. You feel his gaze rove over your eyes, your cheek—fanning across your lips.

Your breath hitches.

“Yes,” you whisper, “yes I want this.“

It’s all it takes.

Din is rougher than he means to be. He wears this as he wears his armor, plating the soft parts of himself he doesn’t want anyone touching. He doesn’t know anything else. He doesn’t know how to be anyone else but this.

He grabs a handful of your waist, rooting you still as he rolls his thigh against you. You inhale an airy noise, grappling onto his other arm stationed by your head and you bite your lip, sucking it into your mouth. Your cunt spasms for him as he presses up into your mound, fightless against the groan that seeps through you.

“You like that?” he pants. ”You like fucking my thigh?”

Din manhandles your hips, his hold on you vicious as he rocks you back and forth on his plated leg, your clit catching on the cold edge of his thigh guard with each motion. It sends hot sparks down your spine and you trap a moan behind your teeth, letting the sound rumble there before you swallow it. His hand weaves up from your waist, the drag of his glove setting fire to your skin as he passes over the swell of your clothed breast, and you arch into his palm as he swipes a thumb over a nipple. “You want more?”

He splays his large hand, groping at your plump flesh, and pinches your nipple hard until it pebbles through your shirt. With each sharp twist, his intention becomes clearer: it won’t be enough to skate by on moans alone.

“I asked you a question.”

Din slides his other hand to the small of your back, drawing you flush to his front, and you can feel him— the outline of his firm length twitching under his flight suit against your hip. He cranes over you, intimidating and menacing and achingly devious. The panel of his visor has never looked darker.

“Use your words, dala,” he husks.

You should be embarrassed by this—by your need made evident through the soaked lining of your underwear—but you aren’t. The heat that stipples your cheeks isn’t born from shame, it’s sprung from lust—pure and primal—and you can’t afford to give it any further consideration because all there is is this man wrenching sounds from you like an animal— and he’s scarcely even touched you yet.

“Your fingers,” you whimper, “I want your hands."

He learned this lesson within those first weeks—relearns it every fucking day. You could ask him for anything - everything - and he would oblige.

He can’t say no to you.

He shifts out from between you, hooking into the elastic of your panties and tears them down your thighs to rest just above your knees, the spread of your legs keeping them from dropping to your ankles.

Patiently - tortuously - he scrapes up your legs, leaving embers in his wake as he trails higher  higher  higher to where you need him most. You’re shivering—nerve endings fried and frayed—and every atom inside you hums with anticipation, with unbridled impulse.

The orange tips of his gloves dimple your inner thighs - squeezing, massaging - before he tilts his helmet, angling himself to see you better, and paws your swollen lips apart.

Your pussy is drooling for him.

He moans something indecipherable— a curse in Mando’a—at the sight of you glistening for him under the dimmed lights like this, and immediately you buck your pelvis to him, hungry for his touch—and the pathetic noises babbling out of you prove too much for him to bear.

“Fuck this,” he snarls, ripping a glove off and tossing it aside, “I need to feel you.”

Your eyes have dilated with want, blackened as you watch Din retrace his bare hand—that gorgeous thing you’ve never seen, only ever fantasized about—back to your heat and slowly - so fucking slowly - pass a finger through your slit.

You throw your head back, knocking against the durasteel. The mewl that escapes you is inhuman.

He’s so warm. His tan skin is molten—it’s like he brought the sun in with him, as if he’s burning that star straight into your sex. You’re slippery with arousal; you can feel how glossed you are, you don’t have to look. You can hear it—hear the obscene squelches he’s stroking from your seam.

“Maker, you’re - shit - you’re wet,” he groans loudly, reveling in the way you pitch your hips—seeking his warmth, his friction. He’s been toying with you, drawing patterns along your pussy and playing with your puffy folds, but he hasn’t even come close to your clit. You know it’s no accident. Din is methodical in all things, he doesn’t make mistakes. This is a decision—it’s intentional. You think, perhaps, he’s looking to break you—some sort of retribution for these months you’ve spent swimming in circles around each other—and you think, perhaps, you’d let him.

That you’d like it.

When Din grants you mercy, finally gliding his index along your neglected bundle of nerves, reflexively you fist into his cowl, knuckles going pale.

“Stars-” you exclaim—just like that.

He handles your body like he does one of his pistols - practiced, unparalleled - encircling your clit with precision, his finger on your trigger—blinding, perfect agony swiveled into your sweet cleft.

When he pushes himself inside you, all the oxygen gets punched out of your lungs.

“Fuck, and so tight,” Din growls, bending at the knuckle to curl over that spongy spot of your walls that makes you gape, makes your brain go slack. Your arms scamper around his pauldrons, nails scraping sharp over beskar. The heel of his hand presses into your clit and you grind against him, each roll of your hips pleading a filthy please please please as you chase after the orgasm he’s baiting you with.

He responds to that, bourboned praise dripping smug from his smirk. “Fuck, look at you, so desperate—gonna cum for me already?”

You don’t have the wherewithal to formulate a response. He’s fit another finger into you, fucking up into you hard—fucking you exactly how you need him to. It feels like you are about to shatter right there on your feet. It’s almost unbearable, this mounting tension that’s climbing within you. You’ve been so starved for this, so deprived of a kind touch and a good fuck, and within no time at all he’s coaxing you to the ledge of your release.

“Mando,” you sob, entwining your fingers into his cape, grinding grinding grinding into his palm when suddenly, without warning, his ministrations cease—that burning coil abating to a simmer. You let out a rasped pant, collapsing forward onto his shoulder— your climax ripped away from you at the last, pivotal second.

Your eyes are screwed shut, you don’t see the movement—you can only feel it once it’s already there: the bounty hunter’s glove grating over your neck. You sputter out a gasp as he forces your jaw up to align with the chill of his visor, trapped in the unrelenting strength of his grasp. Your eyes clamber around the chrome boxing you in, gulping back the fear coalescing in your mouth.

“You say my name,” he gravels. “You say my name when I’m inside you.”

Your cunt spasms around the fingers still seated within you—aching for movement, aching to cum—and your lower lip quivers as he leers. “I gave it to you—say it,” he commands.

For a fleeting moment, in the remaining rational corner of your brain, it occurs to you that you’re terrified—that there may be no going back once you speak it. There’s no unmaking this choice. Like a door—a door that swings both ways—once it is cracked ajar, it cannot be closed again. Because you know yourself, you loathe to admit it, but you know his name will crumble you; that you will bend—that you will want to give and give and give to him— and still, despite, you lay onto the handle and fling that door wide open.

“Din.”

“Fuck,” he seethes. His reaction is visceral—the whole of him stiffens, leathered pads of his fingertips searing into your throat. “Again.”

“Din,” you whine as he rocks his fingers into your walls.

He moans, wanton and guttural, at the way his name tumbles from you like velvet. “Good girl—fuck, that’s good.”

He vanishes from your neck, bringing his hand down to cup his cock bulging painfully against the fabric there and your gaze snaps to it, saliva pooling in the well of your mouth. You slither your hand down his breast plate, over the paneling of his flight suit, trailing south until it lands on the hide of his glove. You stop, waiting there - breathless - until he nods curtly.

His hand falls away. You mold your palm to his length.

“Din,” you give freely, high-pitched and girly, and his cock brays under your hand. Fuck, he’s big—you can feel his mass through his pants and your pussy flutters around his fingers moving deliciously lazy inside you. Your eyes latch onto his, the brown of them hidden somewhere under the helm, and you can feel his own bore into you, weighing leaden there—

before you both simultaneously rupture.

Din’s fingers slip out of you to fiddle with the hem of his pants, unbuttoning in a clumsy flourish until he springs free with a groan of relief.

Maker.

He’s fucking divine—long and veined, with a patch of dark curls padding around the base of him. Din weeps for you already, frustrated and pent up from the confines of his restraints, beads of arousal dappling his head. He hisses as you swipe a digit over his cock, smearing his precum down the silken slope of him. You’re transfixed—the both of you staring as you wrap your hand around his shaft and he shudders, keening in to your touch.

“Mm, fuck you’re soft- kriff-”

Din dwarfs you—you barely fit around his girth—and he can’t help but buck into your palm as you begin to move in tandem. Din flicks at your clit, mirroring your pace as you get each other off. It’s awkward and lewd and perfect—both of you, a tapestry of woven limbs and sweat and you pump him harder and harder, choking his cock with your fist. You fuck him raw, the dry drag of your satin hand ripping curses from his mouth.

“Fuck, dala,” he pants, “I-I’m not—” I’m not gonna last. His words are snuffed out as you circle your wrist and brush a thumb over his leaking tip, forcing him to shiver. He doesn’t have to finish his thought, you understand plenty well. You’re dancing along that same precipice, flirting with the fall.

“Stars, yes,” you plead. Fuck, you want him to cum— you need him to. You need to make him feel good, to let him know that you’re here - you’re right here - and that he means more to you than you care to admit; that you want him—have since you first laid eyes on him, since he rescued you, since he took you back to the Crest and gave you the last of his bacta to heal all your splintered bits. That he deserves this—with all that he’s done for you, all that he’s doing for you—

with all that he his.

“Din—please.” Fuck, you don’t even know what you’re asking for—more of him, all of him—and a groan tears through his modulator at the sound of you begging his name—like he’s wounded, like it pains him to hear you say it.

It’s a race now—the two of you hurdling headlong towards this terrible, messy collision. You’re both sloppy—wet sounds and slaps of skin—as you stumble closer to the brink of release. He’s been rendered incoherent, chiseled down to the basest of grunts and broken words you don’t recognize. His thumb finds a devastating pressure on your swollen nub and your legs begin to vibrate, nearly unable to stand on your own two feet with how fucking perfectly he’s working your pussy.

This thing inside you feels giant - monstrous - and that slow wave that’s been building and building and cresting is here, upon you. You’re trapped in the barrel of it, and it’s going to crash at any moment and sweep you out to sea. Drown you—happily, gladly. “I’m - oh fuck—"

“That’s it, good girl,” he praises, tightening his circles on your clit. “Cum for me, cum on my hand-”

A crack of lightening streaks up your middle, the whole of you shaking as your orgasm rushes through, a sputtering cry let loose into the ship. You feel yourself gush, dripping past his thickness stuffing you full, dripping down your inner thighs. Din pulls out from you and you whimper at the loss—his absence leaving you gaping, leaving you bereft. You’re siphoning down air, dizzy from your release, when he raises his hand, glistening with your fluids, and traces your bottom lip—asking for entrance.

Fuck.

You part for him, eager and pliant, and he snakes two fingers inside—tasting your own tang and the leather residue left there, stamped into the whirls of his fingerprints. Your tongue swirls around them, laving him clean, and you drag over the ridges of his shaft— still hard and throbbing and waiting in your grasp. He bobs his fingers in your mouth, matching you thrust for thrust, and you let out a depraved little moan, humming around him, and all Din can do is watch.

Watch as he disappears between your lips—his skin pulling and catching on your plush flesh— watch as you suck on them, watch as he practically fucks your throat. And Maker, you take him so fucking well, letting him do what he pleases with your all too supple body.

He can’t even begin to imagine what his cock would look like—what it would feel like nestled in the hot cavern of your mouth, hollowing your cheeks to suck him like hard candy. Din doesn’t let himself—can’t. If he did, fuck, that’d be it. He’d be done for. He knows he’d cum in a flash and he wants to make this last—to hold on to this - onto you - for as long as he can, allow himself this singular concession. The only time, he convinces himself, the last time.

He won’t think about you again.

He won’t think about you again.

He won’t think about you again.

You quicken your rhythm and Din bucks wildly into your palm, his seizing and twitching alerting you to how close he is. He slides from your mouth, a string of saliva trailing along after as he clasps onto the back of your neck.

“I’m gonna cum, I’m—” Din knots into your hair, gripping you rough, panting frantic. “Fuck. Fuck, dala— cyare-”

With a hoarse shout, he slams his gloved fist into the durasteel and spills over himself in hot, thick pumps, spurts shooting out to splatter on your tunic, on his flight suit, on your knuckles. You ease him through it, his cum glazing down his cock before you slow to a languid stroke, his seed sticky under your palm. You’re panting, the both of you, spent noises reverberating ugly and loud against the metal sidings.

Din sinks his helmet to your forehead while you catch your breath, his cold beskar kissing your flushed skin—the density of it comforting, grounding. Your eyes teeter shut and you let yourself lean into him, a dazed grin tugging at your wet lips. This is— nice; so much gentler than the pace he drove not minutes before. Head to head, his hand buried in your hair, your arm slung over his hulking shoulders; your fingers thread into the askew fabric behind his neck to discover a sliver of skin treasured away underneath. You trace there - lightly, whispered - earning a fizzle of static sent whirring through his vocoder.

“Fuck,” Din mumbles, before unweaving himself and separating from you. Your legs have gone useless and rubbery—you almost face plant forward without him there— and by the time you blink open, he’s already tucked himself into his pants and picked up his glove, slotting it over those skilled fingers that had just filled you to the brim. He turns back round to find you staring at him through the haze of your afterglow, eyes glassy and fucked out; your fluids dribbling down towards your underwear still bunched above your knees, hair tangled with sweat and saliva and cum—his and yours.

You look wrecked—disheveled. You’re so fucking pretty it makes Din want to scream.

He picks up a stray rag from a crate and offers it to you, before silently sliding your panties back up to your hips in one dexterous swipe. He lingers there but for a moment, savoring the touch of you—grazing a digit into the crease of your hip. You’re rendered mute— your brain can hardly string a sentence together— but finally you manage, your voice weak when you find it again.

“Thank you,” you croak, wiping away the traces of him off your knuckles, and you smile coquettish, delirious. “That was… that was, uhm—I really enjoyed that.”

A quiet beat slogs by.

And then, everything  shifts.

Din’s hand descends from your waist, holstering it to his side, and he moves away. He moves away from you.

You can feel it immediately—like a gust of chilled wind, the change in the air nips at you. Din’s armor is anything but warm—his presence, his aura, anything but inviting—but now, he seems farther from you than ever before, his visor tempered and steely.

You know him. You know this man. You’ve travelled with him, you’ve mended his ills, you’ve taken care of his son, you’ve spoken his name, you’ve laid prints on his skin and deeper still—

And here, before you, Din is white noise. Indiscernible. Unreadable.

Nervously, you twiddle with the frayed edge of the stained cloth, worrying your cheek. You swear, just for a second, that you see him inch towards you— you think you sense him, some part of him, breaching the chasm that’s formed between you. But it’s only a trick of the lowlight—a trick of your cruel heart, winged and errant beneath your ribs, misconstruing your thoughts to fancy.

Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t come to you like you want. He doesn’t touch you again, he doesn’t hold you like you need.

It feels like you’re withering—your legs too bare, your tunic too short, hair too mussed, eyes too bleary—everything feels wrong now, misplaced. “Din,” you start, you try—you try to keep attached to this tether, to this thin strand you’ve sewn between your bodies, but he shrinks back. He severs it. He is as you first met him. Rigid. Distant. A Mandalorian bounty hunter— the best in the parsec. He is as he was months ago, when you were strangers.

When you were nothing.

“I—” He silences himself, teeth clenching shut around the unspoken sentiment you so long to hear, and instead takes another step backwards. Farther away. Farther from you.

He stands straighter, impossibly taller, and you feel

small.

“Goodnight,” Din gives, his voice shrouded and cloaked by his modulator. He pivots on his heel, retreating into the depths of the Crest and leaves you there, the ghost of his hands on your neck, on your breasts, in your heat— still tingling from where they haunt you. Exhausted, you thud back into the bulkhead, unfocused and unseeing.

“Goodnight Din,” you murmur, but it falls upon deaf ears. He’s gone, and the empty hull swallows your words—burying them.

taggies:

@girlimjusttryingtoreadfanfics @pedros-mustache @miranhas-art @djarrex @bookloverfilmoholic @keeper0fthestars @misguidedandbeguiled @bookishofalder @helmet-comes-off @grumpymuffinmama @niiight-dreamerrrr @spideysimpossiblegirl @janebby @greatcircle79 @djarinsbeskar @sammysdaisy @whataperfectwasteoftime @mandobloggin @silver-streaked-wings

#din djarin x reader #din djarin x you #din djarin x fem!reader #mando x reader #mando x you #mando x fem!reader #din djarin #the mandalorian #pedro pascal #star wars fanfic #the mandalorian fanfic #king of cups #mandalorian smut

[void-adjacent-particles]

Content warnings: Death, gore, fire mentions, scars, murder, violence.

Totems of Undying are strange things. They’re warm, and will pulse in time to the heartbeat of whatever is holding them, emerald eyes glimmering even in the pure dark of the void’s absence of light. While Totems are made of gold, there is no malleability, they are as solid as bedrock. The emeralds and gold and magic have solidified into one unchangeable object until its use, and then it is gone.

They leave their mark on whatever uses them. For some this could be a prize, another thing to be proud of, because they survived the unsurvivable only through their own wits and forethought. To others it is a mark of shame, for ever having been in such a position to lose their life, even if it is only one of three.

On a specific server, there are those who have need for Totems in their long pasts, who have used them right before our eyes, and those who will surely use them in the future.

Technoblade was one such person to use one before our eyes. We saw him dragged from his home to a farce of a trial, facing justice on rigged scales for grievous cries nonetheless as he was pushed into a cage. The fall of the anvil, the crushing, crunching of a body that never seemed fragile until now when everyone witnessed its end. Then the sparkling cloud of green and yellow, bones clicking back in jigsaw puzzle pieces, the knitting of muscle and tendon and skin, and there is only a moment of paralyzing death before his heart skips a beat and he lives again. This is the prestige of his trick, no turn to raise suspense, and a pledge everyone who knew his name already was aware of, a promise and threat all in one that he always delivered on. Technoblade never dies, and he lives right now to kill again. Later he will be in his quaint cottage in the merciless tundra, and his own reflection will glitter strangely back at him, forcing him to examine himself instead of resting and trying to forget the lingering aches. He will stare as the night sky leaves the window more a mirror, lantern lights low, but the flashes catch his eyes anyway. His tusks, once white and bone, now seem to be fully made of gold. He taps one with his hoof, and feels the pressure reverberating subtly down into his jaws, as real as before. With a shrug, he moves his hoof away, only to watch as pink fur and skin split against the now razor sharp point of his tusks. Those tusks will remain as gilded as any enchanted apple, and as sharp as any netherite sword, until one day he will fail his audience, his pledge a battle cry he brings to one or more of his graves.

Quackity would covet a Totem in all of his paranoia, his fear of death and pain and losing even more than he already has. If he died, be it by pickaxe or nuke or strangling, desperate hands, the Totem would bring him back all the same. And all of his scars would ache in their newfound golden hue, shining and standing out even more as a testament to his inability to protect himself or what he loves. The scars would hurt, old and new, in warning of dangers to come. It only partly calms his paranoia, the fear ever present and simmering in the background of his mind, waiting to boil over and burn him.

When Tubbo or Tommy use their Totems of Undying they will appear unharmed. It is not until they bruise that it becomes obvious. A small bump against the corner of furniture, a tumble while out exploring the wild, a sharp elbow to the face, the blunt side of a weapon, they bruise the skin, blossoming into purples and dark indigos. They fade far too quickly, as if someone splashed healing potions on them. Yet then they stay at that disquieting green and yellow stage, where the next day it could appear as if they were never there, but they stay, shimmering slightly in the wrong lighting, still hurting as much as if they were fresh even weeks later. Only fading when forgotten about, and they have wonder if the bruise was ever there. If only they had Totems when they died before. Tubbo’s face would be a mess of bruised gold that would seep into the skin until only pink scar tissue remained, a starburst remnant of a festival’s fireworks, but he would still be alive, gasping for air and hunched over in that box, on that stage, but alive. Tommy would have handprint bruises around his neck, across the break in his nose, the imprint of a fist against his cheek that had whipped his head back too far, his neck slamming at the worst angle against the harsh obsidian walls. But he would have been alive, clawing his way back into life, latching his own hands around his killer’s throat, finishing the job, doing what should have been done instead of daring to imprison a dream.

George passes out if he uses a Totem. Instead of the rush of adrenaline, of life that floods the system of whatever uses one, it overwhelms to the point of just unconsciousness as his body repairs itself, fueled only by magic until his heart begins pumping and his lungs begin breathing again. Later when he wakes, maybe with cracked sunglasses, anyone who’s looking properly will see the dark bags under his eyes, a sheen of gold overlaying the dark purple of sleeplessness. When he sleeps it will be deeper, without dreams. Alarms and shaking won’t wake him. Nights will be sleepless as he examines the bags under his eyes, fretting over the burnt orange of the gold deepening, digging into his skin, around his eyes. He will continue to sleep, but days will pass, and when he wakes he wonders if next time he will simply be unlucky and sleep forever.

If Dream uses a Totem of Undying it will shatter him. He will feel every bone shake themselves into dust and back again, a glimpse of what everyone eventually returns to. His spine will burn with pain, arcing upwards to the base of his skull, spreading outwards like a deep set rot that always goes unnoticed until it is far too late and the structure crumbles. His mask shatters, likely from the final strike that killed him, but maybe just from his fall to the ground, a person one moment and a corpse the next, until the Totem brings him back. Gold lines every crack in the porcelain of his mask, across the monochrome of the glaze burned into it, bisecting an eye, a smile, a face. The green of him becomes so much more vibrant, deadly, similar to prey animals that evolve into their bright colors to indicate they are poisonous, saying if you kill me, I take you down with me.

If Niki ever uses a Totem, it would burn. She would feel it burning, more than the all encompassing pain of whatever killed her. Bright, sparking pain would race down her body, through every nerve, every blood vessel, until it was all she knew for that brief suspended moment on the precipice between life and death. She would grit her teeth through the pain, eyes narrowed as she reeled back from the magical force, only to march onward in doing whatever was necessary to achieve her goal. Later she would be looking at her hands, washing off blood real or metaphorical, and see that instead of chipping nail polish in whatever color of her choice, instead her nails would be intact, a brilliant gold. Nails that would make her appear vain, still absorbed with one final thing, or simply clinging to it. Nails that would sharpen into what some might call claws, digging into the fine wooden handles of her weapons, scoring lines that would never go away, even if the nails would upon her death.

If Hannah ever uses a Totem of Undying it will react strangely to her innate magic. Plants die off, withering away, leaving just the roots, the basis of their whole survival, to lie in wait underground until the rain falls again and the sun shines again. Any of her wounds will bloom with roses, the flowers ragged, shaped like bloodstains, but every leaf and petal will be edged with gold. The greenery of her roses’ vines will brighten and soak up sunshine more than ever, revitalizing her until her heart aches with it, until she finally lets fate claim the life stolen from it.

If Puffy ever uses a Totem of Undying, she wouldn’t notice side effects at first, aside from the usual anguish and pain from having died. The likely conflicts she had thrown herself into out of duty would capture her attention anyway, away from examining herself for any lingering problems. It wouldn’t be a problem anyway, not until she looked in the mirror and saw that all of her greying hairs from stress became gold, her mass of curls even heavier, no lock of hair without its reminder, its own thread of gold to weave into thick hair. Later, in a moment of true rest, when someone runs their hands through her hair, braiding it or simply trying to calm her, they would find that every golden thread burns and tries to tie itself around their hands, keeping them there, keeping them at her side where they could be safe.

If Antfrost or Fundy ever use a Totem, it settles on their skin like a weighted blanket, forcing their muscles to accommodate, forcing them to make room in their lives for the extra chance they stole. Later, when they rest, so much more tired with their aching bodies, they will curl up in the sunshine wherever they feel safest. When the sunlight catches just right, beige or burnt orange fur glimmers like a pelt of gold. Any breeze would be unable to rustle fur, their bodies motionless and unmovable as any statue, their breathing far shallower and subtler than ever before. If one wasn’t watching close enough, they’d assume there was a corpse just curled in the sunlight, begging for a final bit of warmth before letting go. They will start awake from nightmares with a hiss, and stretch out in the dying light to go pretend like they don’t feel that extra life weighing on them.

Phil only has one life to lose, and so he holds Totems close to his heart, always just one movement away from being clutched as the lifelines they are. When he’s killed holding one, wings splayed, feathers falling from the force of his death, mouth open and choking on last breaths, his death will hurt.  It will always hurt, the moment stretching through his lived centuries and snapping back into the present, so much life to flash before his eyes that they are rendered sightless and glassy, death clouding them greedily. Flashes of gold and emerald green dance on the sheen of inky feathers and glossy eyes as dead as a doll’s. When he lives again, his wings will no longer be the cape of shadows, the midnight extensions of self that they once were. His secondary feathers will be golden now, shining in the sun, always growing back that same shade. Those gilded feathers will just be another thing his murder of crows hoards, another shiny object, but to Phil it will be a permanent reminder of how he has always only had one life, and how fleeting it is.

If Wilbur got his hands on a Totem, he would never let it go. To die again and again and again, to suffer through the agony of an eternal listless limbo, to suffer again as he is replaced by a mockery of himself… he could not stand for it. So he never lets go of the Totem in hand, his thumb worrying over the facets of its emerald eyes when he thinks, nails breaking against the rigid golden effigy. There are many reasons he would die, several from his own actions, as it was before. If he did die, he would wake choking on blood and tears, hacking and wheezing and lacking all the grace and charm he once had. It wouldn’t be until he coughed once again into his hands that he would see his blood, no longer a dull red, now glimmering and golden. And he laughs, as he now resembles a god in all but the immortality, his blood turned to ichor in its molten sunlight, its deep dark shades of beauty and riches, and he keeps choking on his blood as the Totem works still to restore a body dead for the fourth time.

When Ranboo uses a Totem of Undying the magic will seep into his skin, counteracting strangely with his biology, trying to strengthen him, trying to mark him however it can. So the short black velvet of fur he received from enderman genetics will spread, the skin and fur stronger, in hopes of protecting him. It seeps like ink, a slow spread that burns as if trails of water settled on his skin. It hurts, and he hides for days, coming out with his green eye just a bit brighter, black crawling up the white side of his jaw like an outstretched hand. His own hand will reach out, and under the white skin on his forearm will be golden veins, burning with life stolen from a Totem. He forgets using Totems every time he does, the experience is so jarring and intense as it changes the fiber of his being, as with every use he appears more enderman than whatever else he is. One day, far in the future when he goes by another name, he will look in the mirror and see two emerald green eyes, his entire body the black void of fur his endermen kin have. 

Foolish is a being whose entire being had always been defined by death. Once, it was the carnage, the lives lost in droves, sent into Her embrace prematurely in their violent ends. Then Foolish changed and became a Totem of Undying himself, a god now more mortal than even he knew by resisting his domain. When he died the denial was almost too much to bear, the Egg trying to worm its way into his mind when it realized this weakness, a grief for what he lost. If he dies again, he will likely have a Totem in hand, maybe even one of his children, held close as he fears an end, selfishly cannibalizing the life force of one of his own in order to extend his last two lives. There will be no markings from the Totem. He is already one of them, eyes of gemstone and skin of metal, created and made of that space between life and death, the lull after a last heartbeat when the next is expected, the resting note in the song of life that he has conducted himself, has cut short himself, destroying all in his path without a single goal in mind in his times as a Totem of Death. There is no scar or blood or feathers or bruise to mark him, because he is a Totem. A Totem given sentience and life, given free will and thought, but at the end of the day a living doll, and the now lifeless, apathetically terrified look in Foolish’s emerald eyes is enough to show just what measures he took in order to survive another death.

#dreamsmp #dream smp #dsmp #technoblade #tommyinnit #tubbo #mcyt #wilbur soot #philza #nihachu #antfrost #fundy #dreamwastaken #foolish gamers #dreamsmp headcanons #headcanons #headcanon #hannahxxrose #georgenotfound #quackity #ranboo #ranboolive #foolishgamer #death tw

[mithrilwren]

For the Soulmate AU prompt thing: shadowgast & 15 or 2

This one really ran away from me - I meant to write a scene, and ended up with a whole finished one-shot! I’ll post it on Ao3 later, but here you go! Thank you for your patience, having some pining Essek in recompense :)

soulmate au prompts: the one where you have your soulmate’s name written on your body.

—

Essek expected, for most of his life, that the day of his marking would be a joyous one.

When the cloth was pulled away, he gazed without worry on the script beneath - four simple letters, curved in elegant gold - and felt a rush of excitement swelling in his chest. To be given something all his own… some piece apart from the rest, to cherish and to long for… a great hope, not for his people, but for himself. It was worth far more to him than he knew before that moment.

“Bren,” he whispered aloud. A soft sound, not biting or sharp like his own name. Masculine, he noted hopefully, and his happiness grew.

Then he looked up, and saw the look in the Umavi’s eyes - or Mother, as he’d been taught to say, not by her - and what excitement had kindled within him withered to ash.

“No,” she said, with cold finality. “You will not speak that name again.”

“Why?” he asked, still too young to be wary of posing the question. His curious spirit had not yet been driven into the darkest parts of himself. He still considered civil disagreement an achievable goal.

He still believed that whatever he asked, he would be heard.

“It is a name that does not belong to this country.” But it belongs to me, a small voice within Essek cried out. “You will not lay claim to it. You will not speak it.”

Don’t be so naive. Nothing belongs to you alone.

Essek fingered the split sleeves of his tunic, the flowing silk caught at the elbow with silver thread, the golden glimmer of those four letters just below the crook, not dimmed in the slightest by the sheer fabric. “But… how can I hide this?”

The Umavi - Mother, Mother, he reminded himself - stood and turned away. “You have tailors to spare, ready at your call. Cover your arms and be done with it.”

The others of the Den knew, of course, that this was to be his day. He was of the age for it. The whispers started the moment they returned to the manor house, a quiet clamour of well mannered gossip spreading through the halls. Only the boldest stepped forward to ask directly, and the Uma- Mother brushed them off with a grimace of practiced heartache.

“Nothing but a burn mark,” she said, in that special soft voice, the kind that was meant to carry. “Blackened, and unfresh. I’m afraid the lover must have died long ago.”

And perhaps, in a way, her words were true. Something had indeed died that day: the one last dwindling hope of the Umavi, for himself. That if he could not be the recipient of an honoured soul, perhaps he could have been the concubine of one.

“How unfortunate,” the askers simpered, looking at him sidelong all the while, with pity in their eyes.

How he would rather have been called ‘unlucky’.

From that day on, Essek wrapped his arms in long mantles and dark sleeves, and scoured books for the word he dared not speak aloud. In all his searching, he found nothing. No historical figures, no linguistic root, no cause for the disgust in the Umavi’s - in Mother’s - eyes.

He asked his tutor, weeks later, and now desperate enough to set aside caution. The question was set under the guise of parsing some obscure tome, and he received a single word in reply, before the conversation faded into a disgusted silence.

“Zemnian.”

It was a disgust he couldn’t bring himself to share, though he knew in his marrow, without being told, that he should.

Looking back he suspected that conversation, in what was soon to be a schism between him and his community as wide as the Ashkeepers themselves, was the first crack.

—

There was a man, a new man, by the Martinet’s side at their second meeting. Dark black hair, fading to grey at the roots, and a cruel smile. No names were supplied, and none taken in return. That was expected. Essek still believed, at that time, that his anonymity was secure. He still considered his safety a guarded condition of the arrangement.

Still, the new man’s accent was strange, and though every oiled word he spoke oozed uneasiness into Essek’s throat, curiousity overrode courteousness by the end of the negotiation.

“I must ask,” he said, the arcanist’s chalk already slipped from his long sleeve, shadows of familiar circles and equations rendered dizzyingly mundane with the promise of more illicit knowledge to come. “Your way of speaking is… unfamiliar to me. Where do you call home?”

The man’s smile turned up and widened, so like a desert snake whose jaw unhinges to swallow its prey whole. “I am surprised you do not know it; an accomplished practitioner of magic such as yourself. My accent is Zemnian.”

For a moment, Essek’s heart seized in terror quite beyond the apprehension he already felt at the nature of the meeting. “I see,” he said softly, turning away before the tension in his jaw could betray him.

“Sir Thelyss… Essek,” came the accented voice again, “why do you ask?” And the fear grew, and grew, for if this man knew his name, and hadn’t been told…

But surely, then, the Martinet must have told him-

“I merely prefer to know a little of the men I do business with,” Essek said, “Mr. -?”

The Martinet regarded him sharply. Questioning was not part of his allowance of freedom, not at home, and not here. But Essek ignored the look and focused only on the other man, willing his hands not to tremble. If he did not ask, he could not know, and if he did not know, then how could he plan his escape?

“Ikithon,” said the man. “Trent Ikithon.” His smile widened all the more, and Essek smiled weakly in return, both relieved beyond measure, and deeply ashamed at his own foolishness.

Essek derided himself later that night, in the comfort of his own house. What a childish fear it had been: to believe that this man could have been his promised lover, in a sea of thousands.

But better that the lover really had died, as the Umavi claimed to her court, than to be bound to a man like that. Against all odds, to find the one he was meant for, and discover that person to be as heartless and cold-eyed as himself? What a pointedly cruel irony that would be.

Not that it mattered, truly. Essek was already quite comfortable in the knowledge that he would spend this life alone. Preferred the idea, in fact, over fate’s whim deciding his state of companionship.

It did not do to think too long on what had already been decided for him, and by who.

—

Essek met more with that accent, of course, over the years. As his position within the Dynasty expanded, so too did the breadth of his pool of liasons within the Empire. He spoke with many Zemnians, men and women and those without gender, but none bearing the name ‘Bren’.

Essek no longer hoped to find the one promised to him, though the mark had not faded from his skin, mocking him in the brief moments of bathing and undressing where he dared to bare his arms. Its presence meant the person was still alive, somewhere in the world. But again, it mattered little. His work was the only goal worth striving toward. Love was far from his mind.

Through his work, he also learned more of the customs and cultures outside the Dynasty. Premierely, that the soulmate mark was a peculiarity of the Beacons’ influence, and not an inherent biological process as he’d once assumed. No other races experienced the process, at least not naturally. Instead, they found their love willingly, without presumption or prescription in the choosing. It seemed to Essek a less orderly, but perhaps more romantic, way of doing things.

None within the Dynasty would ever receive a mark again. His own actions had seen to that. It was a side effect he hadn’t anticipated, too lost in the promise of all he could gain to truly grasp the implications of the Beacons’ absence.

He chose to believe it a blessing, once he had the presence of mind to consider the matter rationally. It was one more restriction of the state religion, gone. Freedom to choose, when there was none before. No more children made to feel ashamed of the shape of the letters seared into their skin - of something they could only hide, and not change.

Progress.

They said now that the only children who would receive a mark were the lost ones. That their first calling home would be the letters inscribed in their inner arms, where there had been none before: a badge to prove their right to belong to someone, somewhere. And now they belonged to a country as well, one that would welcome them home with open arms, regardless of the name they bore.

How times had changed since he was young.

Essek was loath to label the feeling in his chest when he thought of those children as ‘jealousy’, but it burned all the same.

The past is not important, he reminded himself, again and again, only the future, and put the thought out of his mind.

—

The red-haired human spoke with a familiar voice, as he held Essek’s very life in his hands, unknowingly offering up the means of his destruction in a soft accent Essek had once associated with hope.

Essek had no hope now. As the stranger held the Beacon aloft, Essek watched the foundations of his lie crumble from beneath him. Did this man - dressed in slave’s garb but standing so tall - did he know? He was of the Empire, or so he claimed. Was he sent by the Martinet?

This wouldn’t have been the first time in the last decade that things had shifted so dramatically without Essek being told. It seemed that all the promises the Empire had made to him were built on quicksand, and perhaps this was to be his final test. How much more was Essek willing to endure?

Anything, it turned out, for the Bright Queen named him as their chaperone, and he endured that indignity without protest, gathering favours all the while in the vain hope that it could save him when this all turned sideways. He stayed close, as close as he dared, and closest still to the man who spoke with Ikithon’s accent, and waited to see if his words held the echo of the Martinet’s voice as well.

Caleb.

It had not occurred to Essek to seek for Bren in decades, and so there was no disappointment in learning the name, and in learning more of him besides. An apt pupil, brilliant and eager, and even after weeks, Essek could suss no trace of the Assembly’s influence over his new charge.

The other things he learned of Caleb were far less important, and somehow, far more. That he didn’t shrink back from a challenge. That his hair often pulled from its tie in a most endearing way when his hands grew too restless. That he was braver than Essek by far, for Caleb no longer felt the need to cover his arms as he did when he arrived in Rosohna, to hide the shame etched into his skin. His scars, caught in brief glimpses over spellbooks and offered drinks, were horrific, and telling, and Essek wanted to learn more, share more, be more when he was with him. He had never wanted something like that in his life.

But there was something about the man, something Essek could not tear himself away from.

If this were another reality, he might have believed himself in love. But the name ‘Caleb’ did not belong to him. He could not bring himself to forget that. It assaulted him in his weakest moments: the knowledge that even if all he had done could be overlooked, even if every barrier between them was removed, it meant nothing. Caleb was out of reach, while Bren was alive.

That certainty was not an intellectual one, but emotional. It was born of years of smothered hope and longing. It belonged to the narrative of Essek’s life - inextricable, even if logic dictated that he’d made no bargain, signed no devil’s deal that prevented him from being with Caleb in a meaningful way. He had lived for so long in the knowledge that Bren was lost to him, and that that meant he would be alone, that to imagine anything else was impossible.

And still…

And still, Jester lent him a book, a month or so into their acquaintance, and insisted he must read it. He didn’t have time for such diversions, truthfully, but he read it all the same, because he found he could not say no to her. First in snatches, then with voracious abandon, by the end he was up till all hours turning the pages, so fast they might have caught fire. The prose was sparse, the descriptions obvious, but the story gripped him in a way he had never been gripped by fiction before.

The Courting of the Crick. An offensive title, hiding a more offensive story within. Ostensibly, a propaganda piece, condemning the bloodthirsty regime of the Dynasty while extolling the saving grace of the civilized Empire. Beneath, the tale of a Kryn woman, who dared to choose a life with the Dwendalian man she loved. She made no mention of the mark on her arm other than to say that she cared not for the name given to her, or the man who owned it. She elected not to be bound by tradition, or country, but by her own heart.

He had not realized, until reading that story, that there were others who might once have felt the same ache as him.

—

The first time Caleb showed Essek his scars properly was a week or so after the Nein had returned to Rosohna, following the peace talks. With no assassins at their door or cultists to quell, they could all collectively take a breath, and begin to sort out the shattered fragments of their former relationship.

Caleb arrived at his house alone, which was surprising to Essek. He could only conclude that the rest of the Nein didn’t know he’d come, because he did not believe Beau would have allowed him to without argument.

They stood in silence for a long moment, facing each other over the dining table where he’d once served cheese and crackers in a paltry imitation of good manners, to a group of people who had still trusted him, foolishly-

No, not foolishly. Hopefully. There was a difference. He had learned it the hard way. Destroying the hope of someone he cared for, it turned out, hurt immeasurably more than any other pain he’d caused in his life.

“I want to show you, so you understand,” Caleb said, as he removed his clothes. First his scarf, then his coat. The hostlers, the tunic, until only a thin undershirt remained. His arms fell loosely at his sides. No close examination was needed - Essek could see the precise lines very clearly from this distance, cuts so deep that neither time nor magic would ever heal the wounds.

“I gave everything of myself to Ikithon, willingly, without reservation, but when my usefulness to him waned, he found a new purpose for me. My body became an experiment, and it was more than I could bear. That was the first time I fought him, but it did not matter. He had my friends hold me down, and they did what he told them without question, because none of us dared refuse a single thing he asked of us. All the power was in his hands, always.” Caleb paused. “Do you understand?”

Essek wanted to nod, but he couldn’t stop staring at the lines - delivered by the despicable man he had worked for without coercion, solely for his own benefit. What was there to say?

When he didn’t respond, Caleb continued.

“You are in his clutches now. His hold over you remains as long as he is alive, and I think you know that. So I will warn you, Essek. There will come a time when he will ask something of you, and you will think that you cannot refuse. You will believe there is no other option. And you will be wrong. There is always another choice.”

“Even if that choice leads to my death?” Essek said.

“Yes,” Caleb answered, without hesitation, and began to pull his tunic back over his head. As his arms raised up, Essek caught the faintest glimmer of silver just below the elbow. Other lines, broken by scars, and so dim that one without eyes attuned to seeing in the darkness would likely have missed it, but-

All other thoughts flew away as Caleb stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Essek’s shoulders, pulling him close to his chest.

“Don’t let it come to that,” he murmured, and Essek shivered in his arms. “The world would not be made better by your death. And I- I would not be better.”

Then Caleb was gone, and Essek sat at the table alone, and thought in darkness, for many, many hours.

—

Months went by. The world changed, and didn’t. The Nein came and went, pastries were gifted, messages sent, fragile trust rebuilt. Essek stumbled, and pulled himself back up, and through it all Caleb was there to show him the way forward.

And through it all, Essek began to understand how to care for him as well.

Caleb returned with new magic to share, and Essek shared his time, and his mind, and his passion, and together they built a great many things - not hidden in secrecy and solitude, but eagerly shared. He learned how to make Caleb laugh, and counted that his greatest success of all.

And still…

And still, Essek counted himself blessed to be held in his esteem at all, and asked for nothing more. Deserved nothing more.

But, of course, Caleb’s impatience outgrew his own.

He had never kissed another soul in his life, but to be kissed was a magic of a new kind.

There was a twinge of guilt in the afterglow, but it swiftly faded in the too-short days before the Nein left Xhorhas again. Caleb bid him goodbye with a soft press of lips, and Essek couldn’t find it in himself to care about the name on his arm, when at last there was something real in the world to long for, a hope without equal despair: a love he had chosen, without being told.

The group returned a week later with their prize: the final Beacon, wrested from the grasp of the Assembly at last. Essek had known it was the purpose of their visit, and expected a summons to the chamber of the Bright Queen on their return, to share in the spoils and adulation heaped upon their shoulders. Heroes of the Dynasty, well and truly. Their reward would be immeasurably rich.

What he did not expect was Caleb’s bedraggled form appearing on his doorstep near to midnight. He was sopping wet from the evening downpour, and smiling happily. “Hello,” Caleb said, in that soft tone that never failed to make Essek’s ears warm, and let himself in.

He dripped rainwater all the way up to Essek’s laboratory, and Essek followed in his footprints, so accustomed to walking in Caleb’s presence now that he almost forgot there was a solution to his wet socks until they’d nearly reached the stairs. Shaking his head as he realized his error, he floated the rest of the way up, and avoided the last of the puddles.

Once settled, Caleb shrugged off his coat and threw it across a chair before pulling out five damp pieces of amber from his pocket. “I have something to show you,” he said, almost mischievous, and Essek leaned in closer as Caleb whispered a single word. A lead box appeared on the table before them. Carefully, Caleb drew back the lid, and Essek’s eyes widened.

There, in all its glory, was the final Beacon, the only one he knew of that remained untouched by the Dynasty’s hands. A true relic, steeped in the mysteries of the Age of Arcanum: all he had ever wanted. He started to reach out, but stalled his hand, turning his eyes instead to Caleb.

“Is this…?” he asked.

“I know the Cerberus Assembly did not uphold their end of the bargain, and you paid their price in full. It seems only fair that you should have the first crack at it.”

It was a kindness Caleb didn’t have to give, that Essek would never have expected after all he’d done, and for the first time in his life, Essek was the one to extend his arms. “Thank you,” he whispered, as Caleb stepped into them without hesitation, and didn’t mind the cold water seeping through his robes at all.

The next number of minutes were lost in the exhilaration of discovery, as he sunk his consciousness into the Beacon’s pull and was transported to a universe of possibilities he had never considered. Pasts and futures beyond his understanding floated through his mind, and by the time he emerged, Essek was giddy with excitement. By that time too, Caleb had shucked the last of his soaked clothing and stood by the table with arms and shoulders bare, the fond look in his blue eyes reflecting back the light of the crystal between them.

Another flicker caught Essek’s gaze. He frowned, staring at the inside of Caleb’s forearm that was currently braced on the table’s edge. A faint light was shining there beneath the skin, growing brighter and brighter with each passing second, until even Caleb took notice of the change. He glanced down, following Essek’s eyes to the spot of brilliance. “What on earth…”

Essek spun around the table, taking Caleb’s hand and turning his palm up, until they could both see the full length of the inscription: silver lines flowering from where the Beacon’s light fell, blooming to form five elegant letters.

“Essek…” Caleb said, reading and asking in the same breath. Essek shook his head, scarcely daring to breathe himself.

“Caleb,” he said, so quietly that no spy or sparrow could have heard him speak. “What does the name ‘Bren’ mean to you?”

Caleb didn’t answer, but his hand, still entwined with Essek’s, started to tremble as much as his own.

Fingers shaking, Essek reached up with his other hand, and began to undo the buttons on his cloak.

#critical role #shadowgast #essek thelyss #my writing #metaphors for being in the closet? in MY writing? #it's more likely than you think #i had SO much fun writing this omg

[ikuyeah]

The Dawn Rises

Summary: Sukehiro Aki won’t lie. She’s thought about what it would be like being romantically involved with William. But not even her wildest dreams could have prepared her for what his courtship would entail.

(Part Two of the Attract Light Series)

Click here for Part 1

A/N: FUN FACTS!!! This one had some flowers and plant symbolism in it so if you encounter one of them go to the end notes. I've added some fun flower facts to make you even more emo.

Six Years Prior…

“Hey Will.” Aki called out to him, perched atop one of the branches of his world tree. Below, ensnarled in its roots, were the members of the gang they’d apprehended for a string of petty theft at the local markets.

“Yes, Aki?” He hopped down from a higher branch, sitting next to her.

“Can you grow a tree for me?” She asked, turning so she was sitting criss cross facing him. The ease with which she manoeuvred and the belief she wouldn’t fall endearing to him.

William dug into his pocket with his free hand and asked. “What kind?”

“The kind that can make me brave.” She answered, raising her head to the sky.

Within him, he could hear Patri snorting at the sentiment. Nevertheless, he settled on one of the flowering trees, watching Aki as her eyes glittered and mouth opened in awe. The Magnolia tree unfurled, the flowers blooming pure white with its petals breaking off, floating on the wind.

“What tree is this, Will?” Aki asked, snatching a petal from the air.

“It’s a Magnolia.”

Aki laughed softly, voice a little hoarse from the cold night. “That’s kind of a boring name for the tree that can make me brave.” Shivering, she pulled her Grey Deer robe tighter around herself.

Throwing his red coat around her, they watched in silence as more magnolias bloomed in dark red. “Right, let’s call it Faith.” He suggested.

“Alright, Faith.” Aki nodded, swinging her legs to the side so she could tilt over and catch some more flowers, never mind that she could just ask him for one. William couldn’t help but marvel at the amount of faith she had in him and in his power, faith she didn’t seem to have in her own.

Finally catching a flower in her hand, Aki passed it to him. “Faith is a good name.”

“So you’ve finally accepted Captain Shiny’s feelings for you, huh?” Yami wiggled his eyebrows at her over the bouquet of white, pink, and red camellias she’d carefully been spraying with water. It was maybe the third batch of flowers he’d sent her. The first caused a stir among the Black Bulls who hadn’t known about her friendship with William. But as time passed, it became a common variable of the team’s banter.

Aki continued spraying at the flowers, frowning when she spotted a few drooping petals. She could only keep them alive for so long but she loved them, loved how pretty and alive they were against the dark tones of the Black Bull base.

Idly, she thought, it was that kind of parallel that drew her to William in the first place. The stark beauty of his magic, his ideals, and his kindness drew a stunning parallel to her own dark magic. One of the petals, a red one, fluttered down until it rested against the tabletop.

For some reason, it reminded her of his heart, his bleeding heart for anyone in need.

“Oi, are you so out of it that you can’t even hear me talking to you?” Yami’s voice cut through her musings and she stared at him, unimpressed.

“I haven’t.”

“Huh? That’s kind of rude of you, keeping a man waiting like that.” Yami grinned. “I couldn’t be more proud.”

Aki snorted. “Of course you are.”

Vanessa’s voice echoed from the halls, sweetly calling out to them. “Captain! Captain Vangeance is here to see you!”

Aki could feel her heartbeat hasten in her chest before making an effort to calm it. By the time she’d gotten her feelings under control, Yami had stood up and made his way out the door.

“Aren’t you coming?” He asked.

“Why?” She retorted, grey eyes meeting grey.

With a shrug, Yami answered. “I don’t know. To say hi to your suitor or whatever?”

Aki rolled her eyes at him. She’d known how unconventional he was as a Captain. But, for the sake of good camaraderie, she’d always been the one who had to whack him back in his place when Finral and the others couldn’t.

“He’s here to see you for work, isn’t he? Will’s very professional. Unlike another Captain I know.” She snickered, sweeping the fallen petals into her palm and then throwing them out the window.

From the corner of her eye, she could see several members of the Golden Dawn in their uniforms. She wondered what she would have looked like wearing it, what she’d have looked like if she accepted his offer years ago to be his Vice-Captain.

‘Then I wouldn’t have grown this much.’ She thought, going back to arranging today’s training regimen in her head.

“Besides, I have to plan with everything the Heart Kingdom is teaching Asta and the rest in mind. If you can get it through your muscle-filled head, remember to ask Will if we can have an official sparring match so we can schedule it into our training.” She waved her brother off, already cursing that she’d forgotten to get back to Mereonleona on their own joint training venture. It was a miracle the woman hadn’t broken their door down again .

Yami watched his sister, clearly spiralling into a panic from overthinking, and sighed. “Suit yourself. Don’t think too hard.”

“Wow, maybe you should think a little harder to compensate for once.”

-

“Sorry. My lazy brat of a sister didn’t want to come out and say hi.”

William raised a brow at Yami when his fellow Captain finally deigned to come out of his base. “Why would she? This is a business visit. I’d appreciate it if we can attempt to be professional, Yami.” He said, posture relaxing slightly in the company of his friend.

“Look, I didn’t ask to be verbally attacked by you two.” Yami raised a brow back at him in disbelief. “You’re not even in a relationship yet and you’re reading each other’s minds.” He murmured.

Refusing to comment on the subject, William returned to the purpose of his visit. “I’m here for news about a member of my squad, Mimosa Vermillion. Your Spacial Mage, Roulacase, said he would be prepared to give a verbal report today.” He informed, tone cordial but expression bemused.

“Well, as you can see, the useless lump isn’t here.” Yami inhaled deeply, the cigarette between his teeth losing its effect. “Stop standing around out here. You might as well wait inside.”

William opened his mouth to protest but the older man had already turned, gesturing for him to follow.

“Very well.” He surrendered, Alecdora and Letoile taking cues from their own Captain and entering close behind him.

“Well, well. It’s the Golden Dawn!” A scantily clad pink haired woman, Vanessa, approached them with a bottle of alcohol in hand. “Welcome to our humble home.”

“Sober up before you embarrass us.” Yami waved her away as if she were some kind of fly.

William averted his eyes from her, watching as a shorter girl walked up to him with a cupcake. She offered it up to him with a dazed expression. “How about something to eat, la?”

Before Alecdora could protest, William raised a hand to indicate that it was alright.

Kneeling down to meet her at eye-level, William stared at the treat and accepted it with a small bow. “Thank you.”

The girl smiled widely. “As expected from the Captain of my Meal-Saving Prince.” She hummed. “I made it special from ingredients in the Heart Kingdom. It’s really yummy.”

William looked at her and then at the cupcake, small and pink and unassuming. “Have you been training in the Heart Kingdom?” He asked.

“Oh yeah, Charmy. If you’re here then Finral must have brought you back with him. Where is he?” Yami asked, staring down impatiently at his subordinate.

“Don’t know, la.” She shrugged.

Yami clicked his tongue in annoyance. “What a pain. Henry, can you bring that useless lump here?”

The base rumbled to life, some of the walls and floor panels shifting until a room which looked like a supply room emerged with the Spacial Mage handing a box of something vaguely fruit shaped to a surprised Sukehiro Aki.

“You know Nii-chan, it’s one thing to use Finral to send you to the bathroom and it’s another to use Henry to drag us wherever you want without consent.” Aki leveled a withering look at her brother.

“It’s his fault for setting an appointment with Captain Shiny and then being late. You’re giving others a bad impression of us.” Yami scolded.

“Since when have you cared about that kind of thing?” All the Black Bulls seemed to murmur in unison.

“Ah, my apologies, Captain Vangeance. I did bring back some correspondences, reports from Mimosa and letters from her to her family.” Finral approached the Captain, sheepishly offering up the bundle of envelopes.

“Come to think of it, isn’t it kind of strange that the Captain himself would come to collect a report?” Vanessa said with a knowing smirk causing a blue haired girl to stutter that she shouldn’t say things like that in front of a Captain.

Aki shrugged. “He’s just kind like that.” She explained softly.

Professionalism aside, William couldn’t help but smile a little.

“You should show more respect if you know who it is you’re answering to.” Alecdora sneered from behind William who looked otherwise unbothered by his offended subordinate.

“Is their training progressing well?” William asked, trying to gauge how prepared they were for their joint defense against the Spade Kingdom in several months.

“Princess Loropechika has taken to training with Mimosa and Noelle personally. By their ranking, Mimosa’s been able to reach Stage 2 with Loropechika’s assistance. They plan to use this as part of their strategy.” Finral explained.

“I see. Regardless, that’s a great leap in her growth. Thank you, we appreciate your effort in keeping us informed.” William bowed his head and gave Finral a kind smile.

“Y-You’re welcome, Captain Vangeance.” Finral responded, unsure how to react to the man. “Is there anything else we can help you with?”

“You’ve done more than enough. As I said, you have our thanks.”

The Black Bulls looked at each other and then at their Captain, sharing a thought. ‘Is this what it’s like to have a normal Captain?’  

“Since your business here is over, would you mind if I had something to say?” Aki piped up, garnering the attention of everyone in the room.

“That’s pretty brave, Aki.” Vanessa murmured, sobering at the tension building.

“Oi, whatever happened to that professionalism thing you were going on and on about earlier?” Yami teased.

Aki rolled her eyes, snuffing out his cigarette with her magic. “You forgot to ask about joint training, Captain .”

“We can make time for it.” William agreed, ignoring the incredulous look on Alecdora’s face. “It will be a good opportunity to test what my squad has been developing as well.”

“What kind of technique are you trying?” Aki leaned forward, intrigued. If it was something they could incorporate into their own training she’d want to know. She’d always been a very responsible Vice-Captain. William had known she would be exceptional at it which was one of the reasons he’d offered the position to her years ago.

“Some of us still feel the effects of the elves’ power. Despite how we might feel about the matter, right now it’s an asset we can leverage on to get stronger.” He explained. His openness in sharing the information put Alecdora and Letoile on edge. He understood that his squad members, specifically those who were under the effects of the reincarnation, were uneasy exposing themselves and their supposed weakness this way. But the Black Bulls were undoubtedly strong and had unique abilities. They would need to work together to win this war.

“If that’s true then there’s merit in including whatever measures you’ve adjusted in your training to Gauche’s training and maybe even Luck’s though he’s hard at work learning Mana Method already.” Aki responded with a nod. “We’d appreciate any information you can share on the topic as well.”

“Fortunately, this concludes our duties for today.” William smiled but it was good natured this time, as though he’d shed the role of Golden Dawn’s Captain for a moment. “I’ve heard tell that dinner at our Headquarters this evening will be the talk of the town.”

Alecdora and Letoile shared a look and nodded in assent to their Captain. “We can arrange to seat their party for tonight.” They pulled out communication devices, no doubt having alerted the entire headquarters of their arrival.

“Food from my Meal-Saving Prince’s Squad. I wonder what it will be like?” Charmy drooled just thinking about it.

“We have to get you back to the Heart Kingdom for your training…” Finral said weakly, knowing a lost fight when he sees one. “But, maybe Langris will be there.”

“Forget the food, what kind of booze would the Golden Dawn have? They’re pretty straight-laced.” Vanessa interjected, pondering the merits of wine.

“Free food is free food, I guess.” Yami shrugged, instructing Finral not to drink so he could transport everyone there and back.

Aki hid her laugh behind the palm of her hand. Having drifted to William’s side in the commotion, she only had to lean a little so that he could hear her. “At this rate, you will monopolize every dinner vacancy I’ll have for the rest of my life.” She mused as the rest of the Black Bulls celebrated their free dinner. Being next to him again settled her nerves if only for a little. She’d seen him several times after his proposal of courtship but they hadn’t had the chance to talk like this.

“You of all people know that it would be my pleasure to.” William leaned down a little, though at the volume everyone else was speaking only she could hear whatever he had to say. The proximity only made her face heat up.

“ Professionalism , Captain.” She shot back, satisfied when William blinked thrice rapidly, the only outward sign that he was flustered as well.

“This matter is of a very Professional nature.” He retorted.

Aki considered going with the flow of their conversation, of the new dynamic their mutual attraction brought to it. But then she remembered how earnestly he’d asked to court her and she pulled away.

It was only fair for her to give him a proper and honest answer.

“About that dinner, it’s been a while. We should make a day of it so we have more time to tell each other everything, don’t you think?” She proposed with a small but hopeful smile. “After all, I don’t think you could tell me about your secrets and your fears and stuff over a single meal.” She continued, finding herself rambling in the same way she used to when she was afraid he’d find her a boring conversationalist.

“Would tomorrow be amenable?” William asked, his eyes shining with what she hoped was elation.

Taken aback, it took Aki several seconds to think of a halfway decent reply. “You have nothing better to do, Captain?” She sputtered.

“Nothing which offers better company than yours, my friend.” He responded. And there he was, the kindest man in the world. Even in the face of this opportunity, he makes certain to reiterate the importance of their friendship. Aki doesn’t know sometimes what she did to deserve a friend like him. She could feel affection so deep and warm that it burst through the seams flooding her with a fuzzy sensation.

In the face of it all, Aki couldn’t help but beam at him.

“Sounds like a plan, then.”

-

Aki looked around at the terrace filled with tables. The candle-lit dining area was much more refined in a way that made it seem like a different universe compared to the Black Bull’s base. Nevertheless, the base was their home. It didn’t hurt to indulge in a little luxury every now and then. “I wish Henry could be here to see it-” Aki thought aloud.

“Aki-chan.” A slow drawl caught her ears and she turned to find Henry boxed into a small portable looking room with one window. “I’m here too!”

“Henry! I’m glad you could come with us after all!” Aki cheered, patting the top of the portable room. “It looks like a fun time, doesn’t it?”

Looking out at the dining area, he could see Vanessa at one of the tables challenging all manner of older men to a drinking contest. Finral was valiantly trying not to flirt with anyone, seated beside his brother Langris and chatting amicably at him though the younger only responded with single or double syllable responses. Gauche was sitting in a corner, showing Marie the view from the terrace through his mirror. Charmy was rolling around, butterfly net in hand murmuring about cooking that spirit while Grey and Gordon made many valiant attempts to stop her.

And at one of the middle tables, Yami and William were conversing with two Golden Dawn members.

“And look.” Slowly pointing ahead. “Asta-kun’s friend Yuno is at the Captains’ table.”

“Eh? Wow, I didn’t expect Asta’s childhood friend to be Vice Captain of the Golden Dawn.” Aki tilted her head, walking to the table to take her place between Henry and her brother. “Did I miss anything?”

Yami shrugged. “Just a conversation between men.”

Aki raised a brow at him, trying to imagine what they could have been talking about. “I have a feeling your definition of a man is very different from theirs.” She jibed.

William’s lips twitched in amusement.

Ever the responsible knight, he started identifying areas that improved due to the elves’ residual power. They’d discovered an increased magic power as well as some other physical enhancements.

The bespectacled man, Klaus, chimed in every now and then. His tone was much friendlier than Alecdora’s but still cordial. Aki wouldn’t be surprised if he was on the younger side.

Aki took it all in, asking situational questions that gave rise to other possible tactics they can pursue in the fight to come.

“Have you tried any kind of Union Magic between people possessed by particularly strong elves?” She asked.

“In practice, our squad has been more successful in joint defensive maneuvers. We would appreciate any assistance in bolstering our own offensive attacks.” William responded, Klaus taking notes and murmuring to Yuno what they would need to prepare to make it happen. The raven haired wind mage continued to stare out towards the view, uninterested in the lot of them.

“What the hell is going on?” Yami lit another cigarette, watching his sister making plans with his ex-rival and friend.  

“This must be what-” Henry said in that slow drawl of his. “A conversation between men sounds like.” He joked.

Yami felt a strong urge to throw him out the terrace but remembered how frail Henry still was despite his renewed mobility.

“Sukehiro-san.” Klaus called to Aki who had stopped talking for a while to get some food in her stomach.

“Yeah, Klaus was it?” He nodded and she gestured for him to continue with her fork. “Aki’s fine, after all there’s two of us Sukehiros at the table and I’m not a Captain.”

“Aki-san, if I’m not mistaken you wield Dark Magic similar to Captain Yami’s. May I ask how it is similar or different to that of the Captain’s?” He asked earnestly. It seemed that the topic was one most of the Golden Dawn were curious about given the way most turned slightly towards them. Even unbothered Yuno looked like he was listening.

“I wield Moon Magic.” She clarified. “It’s dark magic but its power is amplified depending on my proximity to the moon. Like now, for example, I have considerably more mana than I would if it were late in the afternoon tomorrow.”

“I see, that must be a hindrance.” Klaus nodded in understanding.

“It used to be. It was why many of my missions were those requiring the cover of night. The only times I worked with anyone during the day were with your Captain and several others.” She said, setting aside her empty plate and utensils.

“Indeed, many covert operations were made infinitely simpler with your assistance.” William complimented.

Aki waved to a server, thanking them when they took the plate and utensils away before addressing the table. “Oh hah, Will was a big help. I learned a lot of offensive applications to my magic from him so it’s strange that you’re stumped by it when it comes to your squad members.”

“I never instructed you in offensive application, only in the control of your mana.” William clarified, the nostalgia of it all bringing an air of comfort to the duo.

“Hm, makes sense. I don’t think anyone can out-offense my meathead brother.” Aki bumped her fist against one of Yami’s arm muscles as if to prove it.

Opening his mouth to scoff at her, he thought that maybe there was a way out of his own responsibilities in this joint venture and shifted gears. “Don’t be modest. Your Akatsuki has improved a lot these days.”

Catching on to what he was doing, Aki quickly retorted. “You must be proud, since I borrowed a little of your own Dimension Slash technique to improve it.”

Unaware of their unspoken bout, William had recognised the name and asked. “Your dawn attack has been perfected?”

“That’s the one.” Aki responded, unsurprised but still touched that he’d remembered. “As I was saying, much of my magic is very support and capture oriented so Yami would be the best candidate to maximise your team’s offensive capabilities-”

“What kind of support magic?”

Aki’s eyes widened a little, surprised to find Yuno’s eyes on her. “I can take away mana. I’ve learned to reverse the flow as well. I’ve learned to halt the mana even inside of another person’s body.” She reached out a hand and closed her eyes, her white Grimoire floating up and turning its pages.

“ Blue Moon’s Blessing. ”

Klaus marveled at the way mana was sucked from the surroundings and joined the overflowing pool of Yuno’s mana.

“And to halt it…” Aki opened her eyes, her irises glowing blue for a moment. “ Blue Moon’s Wrath. ”

Yuno gasped, feeling all the magic inside him seizing up. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink. He stared at Aki in confusion.

The girl put her hand down, closing the Grimoire and releasing Yuno from her spell. “The moon’s pretty close tonight, so it must have been stronger than I expected. Sorry about that. If you had enough willpower, you could probably have broken through it.” She explained, trying to take away the befuddlement in the younger man’s gaze.

“That level of control over mana is incredible, Aki-san.” Klaus complimented.

“It’s nothing Mereonleona couldn’t do in a heartbeat.” Aki shrugged. Both Sukehiro’s shivered at the mention of the woman. “I learned a lot of my control from dungeons Mereonleona has recommended to me but my fundamentals were all your Captain’s effort.”

The Golden Dawn members approached the table, drawn to this seemingly normal Black Bulls member and asking all manner of questions to improve themselves. Aki did her best to field all of their questions, asking each of them their names and their magic before doling out any advice or fun facts.

“Ah, she’s gone and done it again.” Yami rolled his eyes, the uncharacteristically childish action drawing William’s attention. “The Black Bulls’ Golden Girl indeed.”

“We don’t…” Henry raised a hand to the window of his little room. “Make it hard… Since we’re all… Weird.”

“Good point.” Yami breathed out, smoke rising and dissipating into the air. “But she still has class.”

William watched as she continued to get along with his squad members, shaking hands and patting shoulders with everyone he’s been working with and fighting beside as if she were a part of them. “What a marvel you are, Aki.”

-

“So were you planning on letting me know tomorrow morning or were you going to go on your date with the Captain of the Golden Dawn dressed like you normally are?” Vanessa strolled into Aki’s room, looking for all intents and purposes like it was her own.

Aki crossed her arms, hiding the identical yellow top and black skirt she’d hung up to wear tomorrow. “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

“Nothing, you’re just always wearing them.” Vanessa shook her head.

Aki smirked, seeing a chance for mischief and taking it. “Ah, your clothing choices make so much sense now. You see, in our society, we always wear clothes, Vanessa.” She snickered.

“You know what I mean, you little menace.” Vanessa threw a pillow at her before complaining exasperatedly. “You should spruce up a little. It pays to go on these things feeling pretty, Aki.”

In the back of her mind, Aki heard the muttering and moaning of nobles and of women. An amalgamation of all the jeers and scoffs formed a symphony of doubt that bombarded her each time she’d thought about following her heart, about possibly maybe accepting.

“Well, you can have at it. I doubt I’ll feel pretty no matter what you do.” She murmured, the voices finally dying down.

Vanessa sat next to her, troubled but still eager to help. “I don’t think this has anything to do with your outfit, then. But come on, let’s talk about it while we decide on one.” She gestured for her to scoot over so they were closer to each other.

Aki sighed, dragging herself across her bed with her pillow in hand. She didn’t want to delve into her psyche right now, but it looked like this was happening either way. And honestly, she wanted to feel good about herself too. “Alright.” She threw her closet open. “What should I talk about first?”

“For starters, why don’t you think you’re pretty?” Vanessa waved her fingers across the air, pulling all of her clothes across her thread for inspection. “And do you have a preference apart from yellow and black? You’re a walking Black Bull advert.”

Pointing to the small selection of white and red clothes in the bottom row of the closet, Aki began to consider how she could word her feelings on the matter. “I don’t think I’m ugly or anything. It’s just… it’s more the way Will is that intimidates me? It’s always been like that. The murmurs of people saying things about how we don’t match don’t particularly bother me anymore, it’s what they represent to me.” She struggled through her explanation, her eyes catching a nice red summer dress she forgot she owned. The pattern reminded her of the camellias William had sent. “That one.”

Vanessa’s eyes lit up when she’d spotted the dress. “Good eye.” She started putting everything back and fixing some of the stitching. “How do you feel about the Captain? Are you interested in accepting his courtship?”

“I mean, of course. He’s… he’s Will . Being loved by him no matter what the context is the most incredible thing that could ever happen to me.” Aki said in a burst of honesty that surprised even her. “If I could describe him in two words it’s painfully kind. He’s so… so down on himself. He doesn’t allow himself to be kind towards himself sometimes. Which is painful because he has unending patience for absolutely everyone. And-”

Aki stopped for a while, shooting her arms through the dress so that Vanessa could check the fit.

“And he’s the most accepting person even with how shunned he was. He’s never turned his back on anyone, not even the pettiest and most shallow people. He listens to everyone and remembers everything you say. He makes you feel like… like you’re the only person in the world.” Her voice which was loud grew quieter with every uttered proof of her admiration.

“And his magic is…” Aki breathed in, surprised to find that her nose was runny. “Will’s magic is seriously incredible. It’s probably the most amazing and beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in the world. As expected from the most amazing and beautiful person in the world.” She touched her cheek, numbly staring at the wetness that clung to her fingertips.

“I’m nothing… nothing like him.” She felt a pain constrict in her heart, her tears turning to quiet heaving sobs. “How am I supposed to just accept that someone like that has feelings for me?”

Vanessa wrapped her arms around the younger knight, waiting until she could breathe again before speaking.

“I can’t tell you what he feels or why he feels that way.” Vanessa’s voice was low, like something whispered into the air and lost forever.

“You can only find out if you ask.”

-

William had left the Golden Dawn headquarters alone, much to Alecdora’s chagrin, outfitted in his most casual clothes which were a variant of his uniform in all white aside from his red cape and black boots. Any other changes to his appearance would draw attention from his squad members. As it was, many stares followed him when he emerged from his quarters without his Golden Dawn robes. His mask stayed on which would make it hard to remain unnoticed by the public but he hoped people would understand by his state of dress that he was off duty.

The closer he got to the Black Bulls’ base, the more uncertain he was about his clothes. Aki wouldn’t mind it, he was sure. But part of him also wanted to be presentable, to be seen as attractive in the same way he was attracted to her.

Speaking of the girl, Aki emerged from the mishmash of a building in a red floral summer dress, her hair down with a red ribbon tying up any strands that could obscure her face.

Descending on his broom, William greeted his friend with a smile. “You look stunning, Aki.”

“Thank you. You clean up well, as usual.” Aki reached out, startling him by wrapping her arms around him in a warm hug. “Ah sorry, I missed you a lot. I’ve wanted to do that for a while.” She murmured.

“And I you, my friend.” He returned the hug, squeezing lightly, pleased at how neatly she fit in his arms.

Yami appeared next to them, frowning. “Break it up and get going already.” He grumbled, pulling at Finral’s collar so that he could transport them away faster. “Remove them from here before they make us all hurl.”

Aki pulled back, rolling her eyes at her brother. “Whatever you say, Captain.” She saluted, her arm slotting through William’s comfortably. “If you would be so kind.” Aki nodded to Finral in thanks.

“Of course, Aki.” Finral waved in a gesture that it was fine before opening a portal.

Aki looked up at her companion curiously. “Do you have a preference, Will?”

“I’m open to suggestions.” He shrugged lightly.

With a smile, Aki pulled him through the portal and to what looked like the main streets of the Capital. “I promise I’m not trying to remind you of work.” She laughed, entertained by the confused look on his face. “While we did those patrols, I loved taking these morning shifts because of all the fresh food you could get. I’m trying to see if they still have the stuff from before.” She explained, already waving back to an older lady who offered her a muffin all the while welcoming her back after so long.

The lady turned her gaze from Aki to William, her dimples deepening in affection. “Captain Vangeance, I see your little lady has returned to you.” She cooed, chortling when Aki blushed the same shade as her dress. “I remember all of the burglars you two caught around here. You were always so proud of each other and happy to see each other. No one ever believes an old crone like me when I say you have your heart set on someone. I was concerned when the Magic Parliament got their hands on you dear!” She walked around the storefront and started loading various muffins and bread and snacks into a basket.

“I did endanger a whole bunch of people.” Aki pointed out nervously.

“Hush hush. If you meant to do something like that this darling wouldn’t be here with you. He’s got a good eye, this boy. Your Golden Dawn lads and lasses are very good to us.” She flapped an arm to silence Aki and then patted William’s arm, smoothly draping the basket’s handle over it.

Aki grabbed the lady’s hand in thanks, slipping the payment into her palm and then pulling William away. “Thank you, he… he’s really very kind to me. As you have been. We’ll be on our way now!” She waved to her and then continued down the street with William keeping step next to her.

“Not exactly what I had in mind, but she makes good food.” Aki said with a sigh, reaching into the basket, letting out an elated yip when she found a cookie.

“She’s right.” William patted a hand against the arm Aki had wrapped around his reassuringly. “I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to say so, but I know you never did anything wrong. Not intentionally.”

“I know, it’s…” Aki agreed, munching on the cookie so she could find the words. “Now that my control is much better, I feel better about it. About making those mistakes. My intentions were to protect her, Freese’s daughter, and my dedication towards protecting the kingdom hasn't changed.”  

“I had no doubt that they would remain that way.” William smiled, taking some bread crumbs from the basket and spreading them across the ground for the birds to peck at.

Aki watched as William continued to do that every few steps, the birds chirping louder now that they’d caught on to the benevolence of their benefactor. “How?” She asked, laughing when William reached into the basket and began to point to the bread crumbs at the bottom. “I mean how are you so sure? How do you have so much faith?” She asked, her voice softening to a whisper in embarrassment. “In me, I mean.”

William’s mouth dropped open, scrambling to correct her perspective. “Aki, I don’t think you understand how much your friendship… how much your care meant to me. You may have looked up to me but I found comfort in you in every moment we spent together. Your time and your honesty, the determination you had in pursuing a friendship with me. I had never felt more seen than I did when I was with you.” He cleared his throat, a little shy but knowing how important it was to be honest with her as she had always been with him. “I felt like I could live another day just to see you again.”

“Will.” Aki said breathlessly, smiling like a fool when he ushered her to sit at a bench to catch her breath. “Y-Yeah, let’s sit down. Honestly, how could you sweep me off my feet like this?” She stuttered, brushing her fingers against each other to stop them from shaking.

“I promised to return your care a hundred fold. I would think you’d be responsible enough to prepare yourself since you were forewarned.” He, William Vangeance, teased. Aki knew about his wicked sense of humor but he really wasn’t holding anything back anymore.

“What I would have given to see you joking around like this back then.” She mused, swinging her legs side to side. “I would have given you the world.”

“I felt the same.” William said, eyes never straying from her face. “I would still.”

“I want to let you.”

William’s eyes widened in shock.

“You really rattled me, I don’t think I can quite…” Aki breathed in and out deeply, eyes glassy when she finally looked back at him. “Could you catch me up a little? Just for now?” She asked.

William nodded, elaborating on the events of the years she’d been gone, about the rise of the Golden Dawn, about their achievements. While he was in the middle of a retelling of Yuno gaining the power of the Wind Spirit, they’d cleared the basket of food and wandered around to get lunch. William made it a point to pay this time claiming that she paid for “breakfast”.

Several vendors recognised William and they waved away offers of free items and food once again. Thankfully, not many nobles were around in this area of the Capital. From the corner of his eye, William could have sworn he caught sight of a red cat or a flash of light ricocheting off a steel surface.

They brought their lunch to a nearby park and under the shade of a tree, William talked about Patri and the elves, about his squad members’ struggle against the Eye of the Midnight Sun, and about the truth behind the story of the Wizard King.

“You-” Aki’s eyes fluttered, the motion fascinating William for a second. “You almost died. He almost stole your body.” She shook her head.

“He was and still is my friend.” He retorted, watching Aki’s awe and annoyance and interest swirling in the grey of her irises.

“You’re so kind.” She leaned forward, the top of her head bumping against his chest. “You’re way too kind. I can’t believe you.” She continued to bump her head against him.

William placed a hand on the back of her head to stop her. “I can’t say I regret anything apart from doubting our Wizard King.” He admitted.

“I know you don’t.” Aki sighed, breathing deeply until she had the courage to look up at him and smile. “After all, your kindness is what I love most about you.”

William let go of her, letting the girl take his hands in hers. He could feel her palms shaking even through the fabric of his gloves and he shook them off so that the warmth of his hands could calm her. “You can take your time.” He reassured.

“I’m okay, better than okay.” She giggled, his favorite kind, the kind that fluttered uncontrollably in a giddy way, one that meant she was thrilled though she was embarrassed. “I might just be an intermediate wizard, and a foreign peasant. I might not be in control of myself all the time. And I might have times when being around other people makes me so nervous I can’t speak. But I’m through with hiding behind all of that. Even if I’m not strong enough yet, I want to become the person who stands next to you.”

“Aki-” William watched as her eyes turned glassy with happy tears, tears of triumph over her obstacles. He couldn’t be prouder, he couldn’t be more in love. “Are you-”

And then, with all her courage and honesty, she answered.

“Yes.”

Aki surged forward, wrapping her arms around his neck. “Yes, please court me.” She continued, laughing loudly enough for everyone in the clearing to hear if there were people, her whole body shaking from the force of it. “And for the love of Clover if you don’t kiss me right now I will knock you out.” She said, hiding her flaming blush against his cheek.

And William remembered.

“Wait. I-” He eased her back into a sitting position, his hands slowly reaching up to his mask. “I need to do something first.”

Aki’s face contorted in surprise, her hands softly caressing his. “Will, you don’t have to-”

“I want to.” He said adamantly, his voice softening as her expression turned to concern. She was always an open book to him. “It’s only fair that you know who it is you’re standing next to.” He reasoned, if only to console her.

Slowly, with one hand holding hers and another on his mask, he revealed himself to her with both eyes open.

And her tears began to fall but her smile remained radiant, as bright and pure white as Magnolias on a cold night six years ago. “Thank you. I-I don’t know how to show you but I trust you too.” She said, cupping his cheek and gasping at the warmth and softness of his face, at the piercing intensity of his eyes as he looked back at her.

“You don’t have to. I know you do.” William smiled, his eyes creasing from the fondness and joy. “It’s what I love most about you.” He responded, a little proud of himself for the comeback.

Aki snorted, too happy to be embarrassed about it. “Wow, credit me at least.”

“Sorry, love.” He gave in, pressing his lips to her forehead, thumbing away the damp lines left by her tears. “Originally quoted by Sukehiro Aki, the love of my life.”

“Say that again.” Aki said, breathless once again.

Instead of saying it, from his pocket he’d produced a familiar seed unfurling next to them and stretching over them with bunches of white flowers.

“What tree is this, Will?” Aki grinned, picking at the white petals that fell onto his hair and running her fingers through it lightly.

“A tree that can make me brave.” William whispered back, like a secret.

“Is your Faith back then?” She asked, gasping as he leaned closer, her breath caressing his face, the face he was afraid to show, the face he trusted her to see.

“She is.”

And against her lips, he mouthed an answer.

“And I still love her. And I always will.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: FUN FLOWER FACTS!!

Magnolias:

Magnolias are supposed to have existed since the beginning of time.

It represents longevity and perseverance which is pretty apt since Aki asks for something to make her brave. - But it also resonates with William’s own story, the traits that made him brave.

It also means a love of nature and kind of a feminine charm, both traits William sees in her.

More ironically, it also means nobility and dignity. Things William sees in her that she doesn’t see in herself.

If they’re white, they also symbolise the moon.

Camellias:

Camellias are more common in Japanese culture. I like to think William asked Yami for advice on this, wanting to get flowers that remind her of home or to symbolise his acceptance of her foreign roots.

In China, it represents a long lasting bond. See this excerpt from ftd by Design...

“The delicately layered petals represent the woman, and the calyx (the green leafy part of the stem that holds the petals together) represents the man who protects her. The two components are joined together, even after death. Typically when the petals of a flower fall off, the calyx will stay intact. With camellias however, the calyx and petals fall away together, which is why the camellia also represents eternal love or long-lasting devotion.”

The colors mean:

White: Adoration and is given to someone who is well-liked. Pink: A longing for someone and is given to someone who is missed. Red: Love, passion, and deep desire.

Originally, I chose the Camellias just for the Japanese connection but it ended up being really apt for how William feels.

#william vangeance #william vangeance x reader #kind of #idek anymore #probably kinda oocprobably a little cheesy #black clover #black clover imagines

[hyacinthetic]

[p5/FOREVERDUMPED WIP] you should know i’m temporary.

shuake loveless-flavoured fantasy au. dumping this here in its unpolished glory because my god, i’ve got to focus, i am so close to having an actual finished multichapter on the internet, GET THEE BEHIND ME, BEGUILING NEW-OLD FANDOMS.

"I'm sorry," the Academy boy says. His gloves whisper, gaunt under the silence. "Someone should have come for you much sooner. Sacrifices aren't permitted to meet the fighters before the day of selection, but—I trusted in the system. I should have known better."

There's a story in his words, an invitation, a point like the barb of a fish-hook. Akira keeps watching. The cold flush of his lips. His bowed and shining head. The arch of his outstretched hands, neat as porcelain, neat as paint, lit by the pixellated glow of the chamber like a projection of mercy.

"Do you," the boy says, "still remember your name?"

*

He's drowning when his sacrifice comes.

Hands haul him out of the dark water. Impact, sensation, impact. Light spatters his vision. The cold carves through him with a stroke that should split him open to bone. He's all limbs, all hurt; his heartbeat's thrashing in his ribs, veins roaring, whole body singing like iron under flame—

"What have you done—?"

He twists. Hits the floor. The fall punches through him. His body judders, coughing, gasping; his shoulder pulses in dying flares. Through the tiles, he can feel the simmer of footsteps, outrage, a voice cleaving down like a season.

"—didn't know that the Academy had resorted to human offerings in order to win the war."

"Partner-select Akechi. There is no need to shout. Arrangements for your fighter are as you—"

"My fighter. Please. Let me assure you: if he'd been mine from the beginning, it never would have come to this. Do you need further instruction? Well, then. Help him up, you trepanned tool."

A new voice; the snarl of it remakes the air. Everything before it was darkness; everything in its wake is a star. Steps flurry around him. He's wrenched to his knees. A servitor's cold hand glosses his cheek and throat, taking his pulse like an instrument.

When Akira opens his eyes, there's a boy crouched before him.

"Are you all right?"

His throat works. He is looking at an Academy creature: red-eyed and sleek, dressed in the crisp black suit of a senior student, all arrow-flight movements and a body as slight as mystery. Akira shifts. Water's still coiling around his wrists, dripping manacles. Its taste clumps in his teeth like resin, clinging. He holds the stranger's gaze, and waits.

"I'm sorry," the Academy boy says. His gloves whisper, gaunt under the silence. "Someone should have come for you much sooner. Sacrifices aren't permitted to meet the fighters before the day of selection, but—I trusted in the system. I should have known better."

There's a story in his words, an invitation, a point like the barb of a fish-hook. Akira keeps watching. The cold flush of his lips. His bowed and shining head. The arch of his outstretched hands, neat as porcelain, neat as paint, lit by the pixellated glow of the chamber like a projection of mercy.

"Do you," the boy says, "still remember your name?"

Water flickers in his ears: a whisper, an itch. For a moment, he thinks of saying so; but the faceless servitors have stopped across the floor, props scattered across the stage of this new clockwork quiet.

Everything's waiting on them.

His knuckles grind tile. Cold traces the curves of his bones. "Kurusu Akira," he says.

"Kurusu. Akira." The name cracks between them like a shell. "I'm afraid we don't have time for much more, as far as pleasantries go. My name is Akechi Goro. You're going to be my fighter, if you'll have me. The bond-title that I offer is Chainless. Do you accept it?"

Akira bites back a sound—tastes salt, adrenaline, a thickening bruise, the echoes of a snarl. There are moments that aren't scenes—moments that exist as a cluster of heartbeats and coincidences. This is not one of them. The question has a constellation of answers, but only one's been scripted for him.

He understands, then: no one in this room is dying. There's a reason for that.

His pulse churns. His damp hair prickles his skin. Breath after breath rasps between them in a slow, shackling line.

"Do I have a choice?" Akira says, and feels his sacrifice stiffen. A grin splits his mouth, stark as a stage-light.

*

By night, the Academy's deserted.

He follows Akechi across the grounds. Their footsteps overlap like whispers, trailing through courtyards and grainy corridors. The night lies icy and still; the halls have been scratched down to cold constellations. Only the wards are awake: a thrum in the shadows, a sense of something teeming along the spidering grey walkways, fishbone stitches and silken eyes.

"Don't test your boundaries too soon," Akechi says, two steps ahead. "Memory implants aren't uncommon in the final preparations before the fighter's awakened. If you have them, they may take some time to come to rest."

May. Akira opens his mouth, then stops. His reflection keeps going, head slung low, body set in steering lines, a ghost in the vindictaglass windows. "I know this place. I've been here before."

"I see," Akechi says. There's still a smile in his voice. "Do you remember the name of the room where they were keeping you?"

Memory jolts through his spine. He wants to answer the question—feels wanting with the clarity of hunger, honey glittering on his tongue. Akira tugs the lock between his brows. "The battle-chamber," he says. "It's where bonded pairs go for battle training at the Academy during their final year."

In memory, the room opens with a sense of endless vertigo. His throat turns against the taste of preservatives and spellwater. He remembers sickly light on flagstones; needle-slick silhouettes; the testing hollows, narrow as coffins, crossed with cage-bars. Nothing like the chamber that he'd left, moving towards the doors with Akechi's steady grip bracing him up. Rows of bodies suspended in a nameless, timeless dream. 

"Hold on," Akira says, and feels a pang when Akechi stops. The heft of his own voice seems unreal. "What's happening outside?"

"You mean in the provinces. If it's news you're interested in, we can call a bell-runner in the morning."

His voice shivers down the hall, a wind before rain. The lamp-flames bow; the wards murmur a warning chorus. Akira ignores them. "There's been a war going for the last seventy years," he says, hooking fingers in a pocket. "Did you fix it while I was out?"

"Unfortunately not. The war goes on." But the question seems to settle something. Akechi's shoulders sink. He moves forward. "But if you have particular people that you're concerned about, I can arrange to have a few messages sent by bell in our name."

"Messages," Akira says; Akechi's inflection is clear as a spotlight. "Seniors sure get a lot of privileges at the Academy."

"The fortunate ones do."

"Is that all you are."

Akechi tilts his head. "I've done my best to earn my place," he says. "In terms of skill, I'm a little worse than my betters, and a little better than everyone else. Labels are difficult to apply beyond that. Drawn spellwork tends to be more precise in its effect, but spoken spells offer speed and opportunity for improvisation. Some students choose a style, then make up for its inherent flaws with their choice of school—the Kanshori system offers the opportunity for grounded shorthand spells, and there's a theory being passed around the Kanshoshi scholastic community in terms of honing verbal accuracy…"

It's clear that he could go until morning. His voice is a trained curve, answers swaying without root or end. Akira closes his eyes. Beneath his eyelids, he sees the gleam of a fish-hook again: bait and shaped steel, drifting over an unruly tide. There's a conversation that they should be having, a script as old as wanting; but he's already given the wrong answer once.

Inside the Academy walls, he knows, language is a blade and a mirror. Each word carries a double-meaning. A true student of the arts would say fallible, and mean trap.

He's fallible. It's unforgivable.

Akira picks at his damp trousers. "Can you show me?" he says.

Silence flinches down Akechi's stilled back. "It's fairly late to be practising spells."

"I don't see anywhere to sleep yet."

"We're nearly at the dorms, Kurusu. Are you truly so impatient? Or is this an issue with your endurance?"

There's an easy retort to that—but it's meant to be easy. He swallows, and feels the pull of Akechi's voice scathing across skin. "Whether or not I'm your fighter," Akira says instead. "You're gonna have to show me sometime."

One by one, every echo withers between them.

Akechi turns. His gaze is a phalanx, armoured in light and fury, a spell to core the heart out of anything it touches. "Your hand, then," he says. "Please."

Something crackles through him—livid, starving, magnetised. He doesn't mean to move. It's the only thing that he means. Akira stirs, and Akechi catches his hand before it strays too far. His fingertips lock against bone; he yanks and Akira pitches towards him, clean as a breaking fever.

A gloved hand catches his arm. 

Akechi's brows have snapped down; his lips are parted, reddening. Akira breathes in. His lungs are heavy, cloying with the sweetness of cologne and worked wool. The heat of a breath drawn between them like a blade.

Akechi's grip clenches. Without looking, he sketches a line across Akira's palm: delicate, intricate, a circle that tangles then unravels again. "An elementary restraint," he says, as Akira shifts on his heels. "You'll have to tell me if I go too far."

He's moving in a faultless rhythm, mapping patterns across Akira's skin. Loops into lilies, a sine-wave, a tide of stars, a name on the cusp of sound. His heartbeat's thinning in his teeth. He knows this touch, this sense of gravity; his body's unraveling beneath the airless weight of it. If he shuts his eyes, he could follow the memory down.

All he has to do's shut his eyes.

Akira blinks. The walls sway around him, shimmering with hungry lights. "Huh," he says, and hears himself as if through spellwater. "It's taking a while."

"I did warn you," Akechi says. "In theory, it's possible for the presence of a fighter to stabilise the sacrifice's focus, and minimise the weaknesses of their spellwork. Unfortunately, I've yet to see those results for myself."

His voice's unraveling. Akira tenses, or means to—but he's gone. The spell's eating through his vision. Everything's blackening, fading, lost. All that's left is a memory: shape after shape flashing where his pulse had lain. A gamepiece, a constellation, the shudder of a ship's anchor tearing loose from its home shore. A spell like winter: terror, longing, grief crystallising into every breath.

He knows this ache. He knows its name.

Akira's shoulders flex. Through the cold, he reaches up. His hand hooks over Akechi's glove. Light prisms beneath his eyelids. 

The spell shatters.

Everything comes flooding back: grey floors, white sills, shadows long as drowning. The lamps leap in their sconces; the hallways glow like bone. Only Akechi's still looking at him, fox-eyed, wordless, mouth clipped sharp as steel. His grip digs in. Akira feels every point of his fingers like a heartbeat.

"Better keep watching, then," Akira says.

*

Akechi lives in a modest space—pale walls with skeletal furniture, mendasilk sheets and a scholar's table, every surface as glossy as a shogi piece. The windows frame a spectral winter, towers and stripped black trees prickling through the white like ancient bone. From the threshold, it's almost impossible to see where the snow ends and the walls begin.

"Taking my bond-title," Akechi says, as Akira's stare swings from corner to corner, "means that you're assigned to my room by default. We won't be able to occupy separate beds until we've graduated."

"Do you cast a lot of spells in your sleep?"

"Supposedly it's a matter of adjustment," Akechi says as Akira crosses the floor. "Fighters aren't always comfortable with the thaumaturgical weight of the bond at first. Keeping the sacrifice close to the fighter seems to increase the rate of improvement."

He sinks onto the bed. His gaze drifts back to Akechi, still perched by the doorway. "Well," Akira says, rolling his head back. "Where do you want me?"

The distance beats between them, a spell on the tip of the tongue.

"It's strange for you," Akechi says. "Isn't it. I didn't know that a fighter could remember so much of their history after awakening."

"I don't need sympathy."

"No." It cracks in the air, sparks from flint; Akechi's mouth curls with a slow, brimming light. "I see that. Still, there must be something I can do to make you comfortable."

Akira looks at him: tense and coal-eyed, body drawn against the door like the string of a bow. But Akira isn't a sacrifice, and so he knows: there are no words that'll get him what he wants.

He waits.

In a certain light, silence is its own kind of spellwork. Akechi's frame tightens under the weight of it. His hands drop; his lashes sweep down. Step by step, Akechi trails over to him. His fingers slide under Akira's jaw; Akira tilts his head up with the touch.

"You're my sacrifice," he says, low, to the flicker in Akechi's shuttered eyes. "You tell me."

It's a guess, a goad, the kind of answer that's no answer at all. Whatever the Academy'd meant to make of him, they hadn't etched their commands deep enough. Sacrifice and fighter are only words, shrapnel that could scatter with a sigh. He doesn't owe anything to Akechi Goro; he has that lesson branded across his skin.

But it's Akechi who moves first. His hand drops. He turns with a gesture. "You'll find a change of clothes in the first drawer," he says over a shoulder, "when you're ready. Treat my rooms as your own."

Akira touches his own cheek. The ghost of pressure beats through his fingertips.

"Thanks," he says to the empty air.

He dresses in the baths. Sleeve by sleeve, the shirt settles over him, sure as fate. Like something measured and made for him.

Akira goes out. The lamps are drooping down to silhouettes. In the dark, there's only the floor, the bed, the curve of Akechi's spine under thin sheets, sketched in pearling light. He doesn't make a sound as Akira crawls in; but the last of the candle-flames dip, and then there's only night.

"You're taking all of this very well," Akechi says.

There's an edge to his voice under the shadows, loose and jagged as a puzzle-piece. Someone else might be able to feel out its place—but not him. Akira tugs the pillow. "You haven't killed me yet."

"I wouldn't."

"Right. You don't kill."

A laugh feathers across his lips. "I've been waiting for my fighter since the day I turned fifteen," Akechi says, with drowsy sweetness. "Much like any other sacrifice, I suppose."

Akira shifts. "Do you ever stop?"

"Hm. Talking?"

Akira closes his eyes. Visions are racing through every nerve: Akechi's fingers on the curve of Akira's palm. The last bitter throb of a spell, collapsing. All the words he's holding aloft between them in the dark. "No," Akira says.

The quiet sways in the air.

"Even if you trust nothing else in this place," Akechi says at last, "trust that you will never be an acceptable loss to me."

There's no good answer to that.

But he's awake long after the echoes of Akechi's husky murmuring melt into dreams. One night in, and he knows too much. The hard slope of Akechi's cheek, the star of his hand over the pillow, the haze of his body heat. Every line of him's a memory, a regret, a signal-fire burning on some promised shore.

Soundless, unseeing, Akira reaches out. His palm drapes over Akechi's knuckles; their fingers interleave. He knows better than this. Of course he knows. But it's this shape that follows him into dreaming: hand over hand, bodies curled like reflections. Fitted together, simple as a heartbeat.

*

It's different, walking the Academy as a bonded fighter.

For the first week, Akira does nothing but wander. He walks the circuit of its battlements; he counts the click of his footsteps through a deserted hall. Whatever scholars had laid the foundation for the Academy, their parchment hopes had been overwritten a long time ago, caged in towers, in stone worked with vindictasteel, in sigils scrawled across the bronze of the archive domes. The Academy's a garden for sacrifices now, coaxing them to bow, to bloom, to bleed themselves into spellwork. Anything else that lives in it's an afterthought, numberless as soil or light. He can speak, and be answered; he can move without drawing a single glance.

Invisible, knowledgeable, alive. It's a good combination.

They go on, apart and together. In the mornings, Akechi vanishes to study. Akira loiters in the bone-pale stairs, listening. Every powerful institution thrives on gossip; the Academy's no exception. Passing students argue over spell translations, new territories fallen to the Council's Own, the nature of the lingering sentience in the faceless servitors. They whisper over old flames and new romances, the sour young wines delivered to the Academy as a yearly tithe.

They tell stories about Akechi Goro, too. 

Akechi Goro's an orphan. He's the secret heir of a Councilman, sent out under a false name to protect him. In his first year, he shattered an instructor's shields with a single ballista spell. He once foiled an assassination plot on the Academy's chancellor. No student's marks have ever come close to his since he entered the school. The head of the Demiurgic Council broke off treaty negotiations with the Suzhen Isles last year for the chance to offer him the school's first-rank prize in the spring ceremonies.

"They say he joined the Academy to keep his promise to his childhood love! Once he's covered in glory, worthy of our republic, he'll go back home and be married." "Well, I heard that he's a compendium project—like the servitors, you know, only sane. He comes from a long line of spellworkers. His whole family planted memories of their specialisations in his head before he ever set foot on Academy grounds." "And I know for a fact that he's a long-lost descendant of the old Emperor, smuggled out before the war, come to restore the old order—"

It's gossip, a nest of mysteries and fantasies without root or colour to them; but Akira collects them all the same.

He wants to know it all.

"You think he's going to trade out his bond-title soon? It's not like he's gonna get anywhere as is. Everybody knows the Council hasn't promoted a Chainless pair outta the advisory unit in, what, thirty years?" "Who knows how Chainless thinks. But I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. Half the senior class's titled and qualified for partner-select by now. There can't be much choice left in the archives." "Oh, be fair! Chainless's much too noble to turn against his allies." "He better not stay that noble once he graduates. You ever see him in a match? Even Kingless'd be hard-pressed to touch him. Put those two together, and they could end the whole war." "Well, if he's interested in taking someone else's name, he'll have to handle it while he's at school. Stripping the bond-title from another student's nothing compared to what they'd do to him for violating the thaumaturgical autonomy of one of the Council's Own." "Execution, you mean?" A round of laughter, ringing slim as porcelain. "Please. As if Kingless would ever let the Council waste a sacrifice. Worst come to worst—all they'll do's execute the fighter."

The days wing through. Lean winter starves down to spring. In the quiet, Akira listens, and waits.

*

"Oh. Welcome home."

Classes aren't over for the day; but partners-select aren't bound by the schedules of ordinary students. Now and then, he forgets that—Akechi splits his hours between the Winter Archive and the parlour rooms of the Academy; he comes back to the room late in the night, smelling of parchment and sweet, wasting smoke. But this isn't Akechi the scholar, or Akechi the society boy. His shoulders are braced hard against his chair. Sunset's tangling through his hair—a fever's halo, fire glimmering in the hollow of his throat, as easy as a touch.

Akira presses the door shut; its click snaps through the walls like a shot. "Thanks, honey," he says. "Long day?"

"If you needed a more extensive tour of the Academy," Akechi says, "you could have let me know."

"I'm not getting lost."

"I assumed that much," Akechi says as Akira heads towards him. "I have some faith in your abilities."

Spring's settling over the Academy, but not in any hurry. The bones of the school have barely started to thaw; its grounds are a riot of stinging winds and crumbling, icy drifts, a landscape bruised in stone and snow. Kneeling at the foot of the desk, Akira feels through the carpet for the points where the warming alchemy run thickest. "You're not afraid I'll get lost," he says. "So what are you afraid I'm going to find?"

A hand brushes his cheek. Akira turns, and lets Akechi tilt up his chin. 

"You have a skill for drawing trouble," Akechi says, iron-eyed, with a voice that's all veneer. "In case you've missed it, I'd prefer not to see you hurt."

Akira closes fingers around his wrist. A wire of tension thrums into his grip, then goes still. "A lot of people in the school're talking about your bond-title," he says.

"They're uneasy," Akechi says. "They have a right to be. After all, my progress hasn't been following the standard timeline."

With Akechi, the best hook is always silence. Akira shifts in place, and waits.

"Twenty years ago," Akechi says, with a thin twist to his mouth, "the Kingless sacrifice simplified the Academy's steps for graduation. Every partner-select chooses a fighter at the beginning of the year. Generally speaking, fighters will manifest the marks of the bond-title somewhere on their bodies within a few months of the pact. It's then recorded in the Academy archives with all of its pertinent details. Whether the mark was ink, scarring, or ethereal. If it was located in approximately the same area as the sacrifice's mark. The predecessors who've held the title, and any pattern in their achievements. It's meant to guarantee that we'll have as a grace period—providing the bonded pairs with a chance to prepare for their initiation trial into the Council's Own."

"It's spring now," Akira says.

"And," says Akechi, "here you are."

He hasn't looked away. In the rusting light, his gaze is stark as coal. A look like a question—a look like burning. Akira swallows. "What would happen," he says, "if a sacrifice tried to take a bond-title someone else already had?"

The hand withdraws; Akechi settles in his chair. "That's precisely what the archives are intended to prevent. Every student's expected to have researched their bond-title, and to have it recorded within a few weeks of beginning their final year. But," he adds, all rue and unfaltering gold, "to answer your actual question: the original pair would notice over time. There's a sense of violation—a displacement. Paranoia, recklessness, and instability aren't unheard of—in both the usurper as well as the original claimant. Your title is your destiny. A destiny can't be shared."

"And your destiny's being 'Chainless'."

It hasn't been a season yet since he'd swallowed blood and spellwater, and bowed his head to a new name. But some things need less than a season. Akechi leans on a knuckle. The flex of his throat rolls through Akira's nerves like sparks. "I wonder," Akechi says, "what brought that question to your mind."

"You know why," Akira says. "Everyone sees what you can do. But no one who's taken the name Chainless has been sent out into the field for decades."

The room rings: empty, empty.

"Every sacrifice has secrets," Akechi says at last. His fingers skim the arch of a glove, restless as a spell. "It's our nature. I understand that mine may feel somewhat heavier than most. And if you can't live with that knowledge, I'm afraid the bond between us won't last for very long."

Less than a season together, Akira thinks—but he knows Akechi Goro. The uneasy prickle of his lashes when he's dreaming. The fall and rise of his voice working through a new translation. His hands at work, sweeping through line after vicious, perfect line: engraving patterns, chemical patterns, patterns taking shape like—

"That's not much of a threat," Akira says.

Akechi laughs. "Is that how it sounded?" he says—husky, startled. "Well, then. Let me be more clear. Fighters are used as amplifiers and vessels. No fighter should be able to overturn a sacrifice's spellwork on his own. You're a comet in a closed system. Whoever holds you at the end of next year will rewrite the story of the republic." His knuckle digs against his mouth; his shadow trembles like the fringe of a flame. "You understand, don't you. The bond-title hasn't manifested for you yet. You still have some time."

The pattern unravels. The world shivers into place. 

I wasn't aware that a fighter could remember so much of their history after awakening, he'd said. 

There must be something I can do to make you comfortable.

I've been waiting for my fighter since the day I turned fifteen.

Akira blinks, sharp and clearing. His heartbeat's pounding between his ribs, gutting, roaring, electric as a storm. "I thought a title was destiny," he says.

"If destiny doesn't bend to our choices," Akechi says, "I don't see how it's worth anything to us."

There's a mystery about Akechi Goro. It's written into his skills and mannerisms, scrawled like poison down to his roots. How a boy who entertains visitors in the Academy parlors every week could have drawn so few allies over four years. The way his voice turns with every word, clarity to knives, cynicism to certainty. What it is about Chainless that had drawn him—this boy bound by every title and grace that the Academy could grant him.

How he could have waited years for his fighter, and offer to give him up at a word.

Akira leans onto a knee. His hand clasps Akechi's; he ignores its stutter beneath his palm.

You will never be an acceptable loss to me.

"So," Akira says. "I'm choosing now."

Akechi stares at him; but he's learned by now. The flex of his hand; the way his fingers curl against Akira's palm. The triumphant surge of his smile, unsteady but pristine, like a blade drawn from the forge. Every touch a heartbeat, rising.

*

#real procrastination and fake prose

[elm-lawrence]

MUTANT: THE BEGINNING // Chapter One: The News

Stephanie stifled a yawn as a customer walked to her register. This was her first customer in hours which, she mused, was the side-effect of working at a twenty-four-hour corner shop. As she rung up the sale and exchanged pleasantries with the middle-aged women, she glanced at the clock and groaned inwardly when it only read 2:23am. Only an hour and a half left  

she thought to herself in an effort to lift her own spirits, but only succeeded in driving them lower than they were before.  

She handed the lady her change, bid her a good night and then watched her wander slowly out the door. A blast of chilled wind snuck its way into the shop, for the brief moment the door was open. Stephanie shivered, and tried not the think about her walk home. Having had enough of standing still, and seeing no more customers, she decided to go for a stroll around the isles. As she walked, she made mental notes of what needed restocking, all while very conscious of the fact she would never remember them all.

She heard movement behind her and turned. Jed, the only other staff member working this late on a Thursday, was struggling with a heavy box at the door to the stock room. She ran to help him.

“I’ve told you before, J, it’s bad for your back to lift these on your own!” Jed was a 40-something year old man with tanned skin, dark hair and the bushiest eye-brows Stephanie had ever seen. He had been off with a bad back no less than 6 months ago and had come back with strict instructions from his doctor to take it easy but seemed to take this more as a suggestion than an order.

“I’m fine, Steph! It’s not even that heavy!” He said, huffing slightly, once they’d set it down.

“Really? So, the hyperventilating is just, what, your normal reaction to movement?” She said, fixing him with her best withering stare. She got a playful glare in response.

“You ought to learn to respect your elders, young lady. You’re, what, 20? 21?”

“23.”

“23! That’s still a baby, if you ask me. Far too young to have such an attitude.”

“And you’re far too old to be lifting heavy boxes by yourself, clearly.” She teased back, enjoying the only source of entertainment she had.

“Why, you cheeky-” He cut himself off when the bell over the door rang out, signalling someone entering the shop.  

“Go on, run along now.” He gestured at her dismissively as he pulled out his box cutter and began stocking cans onto the shelves beside him. She sighed and hurried back to her post, smiling as she passed the customer but got no acknowledgement in response. Stephanie frowned as she moved to her counter and continued to keep an eye on the man. He was around 25-ish, dressed in black jeans, a dark blue sweater and a grey beanie. He seemed dazed and unfocused as he searched the shelves. As she inspected him, she could see sweat on his skin despite the cool March night temperatures and the shops general lack of insulation. Stephanie almost classed him as suspicious but having worked the night shift so many times over her year and a half of employment, it took a lot more than knitted headwear and unseasonal sweat to peak her interested. Afterall, most who did their shopping at corner shops at 3am where not what one would consider ‘average.’

He approached the counter with a few bags of crisps, a fizzy drink and some painkillers. She rung him up, keeping an eye on his. For his part, his own eyes were rapidly darting back and forth, seemingly unable to focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds.  

“That’ll be £5.40, please.” She said, watching him warily now. The neighbourhood the shop was based in had a bad reputation which, in her opinion, was not completely true, but the occasionally unsavoury character found their way through. The man did not seem to hear her, his eyes fixated now on something just over her left shoulder. She fought the urge to turn and remained her composure.

“Sir?” His eyes focused on her now, seeming to realise for the first time that she was there, waiting for his response.  

“Huh?” He asked, and even from this she could tell he would slur his words if he was able for form any sort of coherent sentence.

“That will be £5.40, please.” She repeated, gesturing to the items on the counter.

“Oh! Yeah, yeah.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled £10 note and dropped it on the counter. “Keep the change.” He said and gathered his things in his arms before unsteadily stumbled out into the street, the bell chiming his exit. Stephanie put the money in the till and glanced up as Jed walked over.

“He was a strange one.”

“Looked like he was high on something. And he got sweat on my counter.” She grimaced at the droplets and fished around under the desk for the disinfectant and cloth she kept there. She was no stranger to strange people, and she did not particularly mind most of them so long as they kept their strange off her counter.

“What time you here till?” Jed asked her as she swept the cloth over the counter.

“Four am, almost home time. You?” Jed scowled at the glass window looking out onto the dark empty streets, as if blaming his work life on the night-time sky.

“Six. Josh said he couldn’t start any earlier so Bossman's got me pulling his weight.” Stephanie shook her head.

“Typical.” She sighed.

#

The clock struck 4:00 as she clocked out, yelling her goodbye and good luck to Jed, she shrugged her coat on and shivered when she stepped into the cool night air. Stephanie lived relatively close to her work which, when her boss seemed to have sealed her fate to work until stupid hours of the morning until her death, was a blessing.  

Pulling the coat tighter around her and shoving her hands in her pockets, she walked quickly through the streets, which already had the beginnings of a frost settling upon them. She turned the corner, sped up the streets and reached her apartment building in no more than ten minutes. She took her keys from her pocket, freezing night air immediately seizing her skin in its icy grip, unlocked the door, shut it heavily behind her and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. She stopped outside apartment 130 and unlocked the door before hurrying inside.

Once safely inside her home, she shed her coat and jumper, cranked up the heating a tad, and sat heavily on her sofa with a sigh of relief.

“God this sofa has never felt so good,” she murmured, flicking the TV onto the late-night news channel. After allowing the news to sufficiently scare her about the current state of the world, Stephanie decided food would make her feel better again and muted the TV as she moved to her kitchen. Unfortunately, she discovered, for someone who worked somewhere people buy food from, she was horrendously understocked.  

“What a terrible excuse for an adult I am.” She scolded herself, slipping some partially stale bread in the toaster and plunging it down as she rooted the butter out of the fridge. She quickly got changed, slipping her pyjama shorts on just as the toaster popped. She sat back down, having completed her gourmet meal, and glanced back at the TV. The presenter was the same as before; a middle-age white man with greying hair, slicked back to give the illusion of volume. This time, however, he looked worried. His eyes held uncertainty as they moved across the page, and his mouth was moving quickly. Stephanie frowned, then unmuted the TV while she ate and his words flooded the room, like a tidal wave of bad news.

“-urging people to stay in their homes. The illness seems to spread via contact with body fluids, however nothing is confirmed. As of yet, the illness seems to be confined to Russia, with their borders being shut down and any and all British personnel of importance transported via private airways back to the safety of the United Kingdom. These officials are being closely monitored and quarantined for clinical signs. Any updates will be broadcast as soon as we have them.” With that, the broadcast cut off abruptly and adverts began rolling across her screen.

Stephanie muted the TV again and sat back, crunching into her last slice of toast. Just then, a clattering from her bedroom, and movement towards her sofa.

“Bout time you woke up!” She called light-heartedly, as her Siamese cat hopped up onto the back of her sofa, mewing and purring. She moved the plate on her lap to the coffee table and picked him up, cuddling him into her body.  

“Good morning handsome boy, I take it you enjoyed your time alone? No parties while I was gone?” Her purred in response, rubbing up against her. Technically speaking, Sye was not her cat per say, rather one that seemed to invade her home every few days for a nap while she was at work. Stephanie assumed he lived somewhere in the building, probably a loud apartment with annoying kids, and her bed was more his nap pad than anything else. When she first saw him in the halls, he’d followed her back to her flat and even since then Sye would show up, completely randomly and out-of-the-blue like the terrible house guest he was.

“You hungry?” She asked him, and he meowed loudly at her, jumping onto the arm of the chair and flicking his tail.

“An enthusiastic yes, then!” She pushed herself up, shoved some cat food onto a plate and put it on the kitchen floor. While Sye inhaled his food, she went to her bedroom and flicked the lights on, sighing at the phone charger that was now on the floor.  

“I invite you into my home, feed you, keep you warm, let you nap… and this is how you repay me?” She muttered, picking it up and placing it back on her nightstand. “Typical.”

She grabbed her laptop, plopped down on her bed and opened it up. She noted dully that it was nearly 5am.  

As she settled into her nightly routine of aimless scrolling, she heard a loud meow followed by the faint sounds of claws on her rug.

“Hey!” She yelled as she cast her laptop aside and ran to her front door. “We will have none of that in this home, sir.” She scolded Sye, as he sat down in front of her doors, eyes wide and expecting.

“I do hope you behave better for your real family. Go on, shoo.” She opened her door and he meowed once before strolling slowing down the hallway towards the stairs. Shaking her head, she flicked the sound back up on the TV.  

“A press release from Government officials has been released.” Stated the white-haired news caster. “Much like earlier, people are being urged to stay in their homes, however those in the centre of heavily populated areas are being urged to find refuge in less densely populated areas if it is safe to do so. Public transport may be affected. It has been released that this new pandemic can turn people violent. There have been reports of random attacks on strangers, wives attacking husbands, even children attacking parents. I will reiterate at this point to stay inside. The virus is spread through contact with those already infected. Research into this new virus is being conducted, but due to the large number of people reporting symptoms the work is moving slowly. Please, if anyone near you is presenting symptoms, restrain them for their own safety, until medical officials can reach you. Do not take them to the hospitals yourself, for your own safety. Be safe.”

And with that, the broadcaster disappeared off screen and was replaced not by the usual music, by but a black screen. Stephanie stood still, staring at the dark TV screen, giving herself a few more moments to properly absorb the story.

Suddenly, from outside there came the sound of squealing tires and metal scraping.

She ran to the window, broken from her fear by the thundering noise, peering outside into the streets. This early in the morning, the run-down area was relatively quiet, with the occasional noise of traffic from the nearby main roads. With the sun rising over the city, casting it in an eerie early morning shadow, Stephanie saw a car on the pavement, a lamppost bent over the dented bonnet. She watched for any movement, reaching blindly for her phone to dial for an ambulance, when someone stepped out from the wreckage.  

As she called for an ambulance, someone emerged from the building opposite hers, rushing towards the accident. The driver was leaning against their car, head slumped with a hand over their chest. The concerned stranger reached them, reached out a hand, before the driver’s head snapped up. Stephanie could not see the expression on either face from her vantage point, however she got a bad feeling about the exchange by the way the stranger froze a few feet from the driver. She fought the irrational urge to go outside and see if he was okay.

The phone was still ringing. She had been so wrapped up in watching the scene unfold she’d forgotten she was calling the ambulance. Why was it still ringing? She’d dialled minutes ago, how long did the emergency services take to answer the phone?  

Then the ringing stopped, and she took her eyes off the scene before her to frown at her phone, checking if she still had power. She did. The call had dropped, her signal had dropped. She heard a scream and looked back to see the driver running after the stranger, arms outstretched and movements wild like a starved predator. Even from her room, she heard his growling, like a rabid animal. Eyes wide, heart racing, she drew the curtains.

#i love zombies #zombie #zombie fiction #zombie book #lgbt zombie #lgbtq #lgbtqiia+ #new books #new author #author #writing #lgbt writing #wlw #wlwoc #wlw representation #lgbt representation #lgbt relationship #apocalypse #zombie apocolypse au #apocolypse fiction

[lazaraes-a]

𝐁. 𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐄𝐍𝐄 : 𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐓 𝐁𝐔𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐓

𝐏𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐀𝐋 𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒 : self harm, mental instability, mentions of attempted sexual assault

the girl was dying.

               is dying.

               whatever.

               in all honesty, she should not be able to trace the path of the bullet as it moves within head, feel fractures along back of skull before it is blasted apart. should not hear metal casing as it hits linoleum tile &&should not feel herself falling. but she does. entire world focused ‘pon these impossible sensations, keeping her tethered when everything else has left, flowed out of the hole in her head.

               they say, when you die your life flashes before your eyes. she doesn’t get that, not really. sure, there are flashes of syrupy georgian summers && familial laughter heard through open doors, open windows but it was less memories of the past && more what would go missed.

               seeing her sister again, seeing all of them. reconfirming belief clung to so desperately that they were all alive out there, somewhere. being together again, mismatched people forging mismatched family&&, damn it, she is strong && she would have shown them all. lifting daryls crossbow && taking down walkers with unflinching ease never before attributed to her. no, not her, not little beth greene. maggie or michonne or carol, yes. not her. except it was now.

               she sees things that will never be as bullet bite through flesh && bone && she falls like she weighs nothing at all, as insubstantial as a dream.

               she sees herself surviving.

               death is sluggish && purgatory grey. stifling with heat && rolling with nausea inducting waves. hazy&& foggy && above all silent. all the sound in the world sucked away leaving absolutely nothing. an oppressive silence !! screams && the sound is swallowed before leaving throat. lifts hands && claws, rends strips of flesh && muscles from neck in ancient sense of desperation && doesn’t stop even as burning, boiling blood coats hands, pools ‘round feet. does nothing but claw at own skin && silently scream.

               this is a place where people go mad !! she can feel it latching, this madness, this insanity. rips herself apart && soundlessly cries out for clarity, for sanity, for sound. maggie && daddy && mama but   …   mama is dead && daddy is dead &&maggie, maggie cant be dead, she’s always been the strongest.( blinks her eyes && knows she’s dead too. they all are. whole family wiped out. )

               going / going / gone !!

               just screams && tears herself apart.

               opens her eyes && it’s white.

               && silent.

               until it’s not.

               beeping     /     beeping     /     beeping

               turns her head && finds the source just as burst of pain blooms between brows.

               the walls are bleeding   !!     dripping, pooling, covering everything. everything is red with blood, red with fire              

               (     let’s burn it down     )

                              && it drags her under again.

               opens her eyes && she’s not alone. calls himself a doctor && seems unsurprised when she doesn’t remember. speaks a thousand words a minute but she can only grab hold of a few before they, too, fade away.

               family     /     dawn     /     shot    

               acts like she should understand. speaks calmly, softly && something in her screams against it. do not trust him. curls her hands ‘round ears, digs her nails in && pulls.

         he tries again the next day && she responds a little better. waits a little longer to start clawing against the voice that calls him     untrustworthy     /     dangerous     /     vile     !!     gets told everyday the events that transpired in attempts to jog memory but it’s no use                   entire day forgotten, misplaced, erased from memory && she does not know whether to be frustrated or relieved to not know what she did what she did. so be spared faulty decision process.

               regains her voice && it’s hoarse from all that silent screaming. recalls his name && what he did, what so many of them inside hospital did.     (     when she remembers gorman she empties stomach over the edge of the bed && claws at her sides. feels his hands again && wants them gone.     )    

               do you remember what you did     ??

                   stabbed dawn.

               do you remember why     ??

                   she wanted noah back.

               why did that upset you so much     ??

                   we were friends. he wanted to go home. i didn’t want to leave him here.

               what exactly made you do it     ??     they were going to fight for him.

                   i              

               ’     the exchange had been made but dawn was     …     well     …     dawn. she needed the upper hand, needed to appear in charge. demanded noah back && he was going to do it but you didn’t like it. walked on over && pulled out these surgery scissors&& stabbed her. instinct probably. ended up shooting you. didn’t mean it. the one with the vest, he shot her almost immediately after. he carried you out.

               they were going to take you but rotters came && they had to leave you.     ‘

               they had to leave you.

               in a practical sense she understands. walkers && a body with a head wound are not an ideal combination. knows it would not have been an easy decision. that they had intended to take her means there would have been a burial && that, surely, would have meant her death.

               on another, more personal, level, it is akin to any one of them slipping a knife up between her ribs&& into too soft, too giving heart of hers.

               they left her.

               the first time she sees the damage she cries so hard she gets a headache that almost knocks her out cold right there in the little cubicle bath attached to her room.

               blacks eyes     /     bruised nose     /     shorn hair

               a bullet wound ‘pon brow.

               she cries && rakes her nails down one cheek, adding to her wreck of a face.

               he tells her that she had been in a medically induced coma for a month. her wound had clotted early preventing fatal blood loss but there had been an infection alongside minor swelling that had eventually receded. they had not known whether she would make it, but they had tried.

               she’s surprised. figures it’s some sick sense of guilt that had them allowing such a thing. guilt from the new management, a lady in a uniform that had visited not long after edwards. can’t remember her name, doesn’t care.

               but it’s a month of laying prone &&unconscious, another couple of weeks of limited mobility. sees her muscles     withering     /     dying     !!

               begins walking, first with an iv stand at her side && then she’s running. up && down the hallways, steadfast avoiding the one where her blood had been bleached away. she gets headaches. edwards says they’re side effects from the bullet && sometimes she can run through the pain. sometimes. other times she can do nothing but curl up && try not to vomit.

               or, at least, try not to get an on the floor.

               she eats her fill for the first time since she left her home, sitting in a truck with lori && t-dog wearing fear && grief like a second skin.

               lifts curve of chin && dares someone to say something.

               they don’t.

               her hair grows     /     she gains weight     /     she rebuilds muscle.

               her memory still has gaps && headaches still blast without warning.

               she doesn’t claw at her own skin anymore.

               they don’t understand why she wants to leave.

               it’s safe here. she’s told that by the one in charge. shepard. the safest place there is.

               she has nothing to say to that                   can say nothing to that. remembers that old disney movie with the line from the rabbit about not saying anything at all && simply stares. enjoys the way the officer blanches. attempts to back pedal.

               for the safest place in the world, she lasted a hell of a lot less in here than she did out there.

               is she sure     ??

                   absolutely.

              asks for a gun && a car && gas. has them turn the place upside down for her knife but they turn up empty handed.

               good enough. not the best, but it’ll do.

               she doesn’t say goodbye to any of them.

               the car doesn’t take her far before it breaks down && she’s stuck walking the rest of the way to richmond. remembers being told by noah about where he came from. hopes he got there, that he might know where her family went if they haven’t stayed with him. hopes && hopes && hopes.

               sticks to the woods as opposed to the road&& feels better than she has in a long time. open air, wide space && knowledge from a hunter rattling around her head. stays away from the trees && waits for them to take root within her.

               slinks into an abandoned town. crawls through the broken window of a camping supply store &&weaves through the isles, arms outstretched && fingers trailing along the dusty merchandise. leaving proof that she was there. that she’s still here.

               catches sight of crossbows hanging on the wall.     hesitates     /     steps closer     /     moves away. too large, on par with his                   barely been able to draw that one without assistance. continues on her search.

               leaves with a new backpack filled with supplies, more than a few knives strapped to her person. ready for anything. ready to not be caught off guard again.

                   hopes     /     hopes     /     hopes.

               reaches richmond && finds it in ruins. wants to weep && ends up with a little man banging a sledgehammer against the inside of her skull.

               she leaves empty handed     /     empty headed     /     empty hearted.

               to be alone is a terrible thing. no noah means no lead && all at once she feels so utterly alone. there are no trees frowing within her but rather pressing in on her.     hollow chested     !!     as if someone reached in && gutted her                   pulled out heart&& lungs, intestines && stomach && all the rest of her leaving her empty save gaping rib cage.

               imagines fire licking at their curves. burning her from the inside out.

               sometimes it’s maggots && worms. decay. all of a sudden she’s a dead girl walking. can feel them taking rot, becoming more taint, more death, than girl.

                   starts clawing again.

               gets found by a small herd about a week later. spends the night up in a tree, biting her slip so hard teeth almost go through && through in attempts not to cry out as wave after wave of poison flows out from the hole in her head, searing nerve endings like napalm.

               sometimes she hears voices through the trees but never gets close. tried once but felt phantom hands sliding && hard plastic crashing, tasted artificial green apple ‘pon tongue && had to scramble away.

               there are still good people. she knows this. there has to be. the world cannot be composed of gormans && governors                   the good has to exist out there somewhere.     has too     &&

               && so she tries again.

               peers through the brush in time to see a woman shot down, babe in her arms crying - crying - crying.

                   runs until she throws up.

               she remembers the spoon.

              washington     /     washington     /     washington.

               it’s where the president is               was. has to be safe. has to have people even if they’re not hers. worth a try, can’t be alone anymore.

               figures out where she is in the next few days && changes course from aimless wandering to the capital tries not to think about who she may be leaving behind in doing so.

               but it’s okay because they left her behind first.

                   but that was out of necessity. she knows that. has to remind herself sometimes.

             she finally stops clawing at herself when things get bad && let’s flowers grow to fill breast cavity. refuses to be just another dead girl.

#b. greene. #this is ??? so old lmao #mental instability tw #self harm tw #queue.

[obsidianonslaught]

E.X.O.D.U.S.

Time had not been kind to him, eating his heart out, leaving dust in his hair. He’d stand at the cliffs rising up from the Forest and breathe in the frigid mountain air, and looking at a changing world, golden leaves, a blackened sky, empty lines on his fingers that bled late at night, with his teeth pressed together and his body so stiff he might shatter. Expecting the wind to push him over the edge, to the river bends, the shadows that snuck up in hoards like an army and pulled at small spaces of tree bark and stone. And it was quiet--thrillingly quiet--with his pulse racing in his wrists and in his throat, a great plume of patience and fire, waiting for the sun to show and the hour to turn, so that he could stare the horizon face-to-face and curse his own sins of the past.

He stood motionless there, for hours to come, statuesque save for stray pieces of hair that swept about, dark in color, in a rising, icy wind. His face solemn, and starved for peace. Only the Lord Gale stayed by his side, overlooking the hills and the stars settled up in the sky, and he too was still, and silhouetted black against the inky clouds and alpine peaks. Watching everything fade away, while winter crept closer, just as expected, and choking to death the faint of heart.

That morning, the light fell too late on their brows and Burton narrowed his eyes, deep and grey, as if to scout out something unsettling, stepped back from the border. Silent footsteps, a lowered head, he descended the stretch of the uneven slopes into the open arms of the Forest, familiar and sheltering and scented of intimacy and earth. The dragon followed, their shadows aligned, taking strange shapes across the leaf litter, and tinted curious shades of rust and gold.

‘Shouldn’t you sleep, Jed?’ said Lollygag across their connection. He leaned over his human so that their noses nearly touched, and Burton stopped before the burly, knotted branches of two very old trees on the path.

‘I can’t,’ he blinked, his lids heavy, and lips dry. For he’d been avoiding the nightmares that shook him so terribly that he would thrash and scream and wake with cold sweat on his brow. Filled with dark, forsaken things, a sucking void, the visage of some giant serpent-creature that sought to poison his mind with demands and lies and a toxin that stopped his lungs from working. So that he suffocated slowly, all alone, and torn by fear and failure with blood crusted over his throat and collarbone. His own blood, spilled and wasted, and with it what was left of his dignity.

Sometimes the nightmare-creature would curl its jowls about his ankles and bite him there, beat him to his knees with wire-frame wings, drag him about through a desolate grave of rotting nails and broken bones, til he weakened with pain and alarm and he could no longer struggle against the tide of its scales. Then it would toss him away, into a bottomless pit, where he fell in a loop and choked on his own bile and the smell of the venom spreading in his veins and weighing him down... down... and forced to remember everything he’d done wrong while he died and forgot his own name.

Lollygag would wake him from these visions and take him out into the Forest where he could see the stars and make up songs to fill the empty space in his chest. But the dreams came more frequently now, so that he avoided sleep and kept himself busy, translating different texts at his apartment desk well past midnight and crying to keep his eyes from closing shut. Then when he nodded off, the sequences would start again, and he’d race over the shadow-spun fields with the monster drooling at the back of his neck and reaching for him, and when it tripped him with its tail he saw their faces were the same in the reflection of its blood-coated armor.

He’d gone deep into the middle of the mountain chains to ask Omega what it meant, but the god had only laughed at him, called him foolish, said he was infected with a kind of fear that only he could overcome.

“This isn’t one of your tricks, is it?” he frowned as the Seismos shifted zir massive legs somewhere near the center of the cavern. All dimly lit by the virus-green glow of zir eyes.

“You dare accuse me?“ Omega had dipped zir jaw down toward him and Lollygag, and shook with a thunderous sneer. “I thought you wiser than that, Jed.”

“Just suspicious,” said Burton, bluntly, carefully, the muscles in his shoulders tense. “I have asked you not to mess with my head.”

The Seismos scraped at the walls with zir tail, leaving faint marks like streaks of snow in the stone. “And I have since honored your request,” ze said. And then laughed at him again, shaking the roof of the caverns so fiercely that he thought for a moment the whole mountain would crumble. But it never did--the great god would study him carefully from the summer-leaf patterns of zir unblinking eyes, methodical, and said at last, “You are afraid, but you are not alone. Remember that.”

So with those words he left the Seismosaurus and returned outside to stare into the night sky, Lollygag still at his side and humming gently at him, very soft, very troubled, for the air was cold and thin, and the wind as violent as ever. And Burton had not rested for such a long, long time--time lost to the creature that would come in the night and kill him in his dreams.

‘It’ll be alright, Lolly,‘ he leaned his head against the Gale’s snout.

Lollygag whimpered in reply, his scanners busily surveying the area, all the dips in the dark where they could not see, the hidden secrets of a slumbering forest... ‘You need to sleep,’ he tipped his giant, amber wings to shelter them both from the wind. It bellowed roughly from the chasms below and rushed north, sudden and swift, and unrivaled in colorless power. ‘You can’t continue on like this.’

‘I know.’ But he couldn’t lie down, couldn’t rest, couldn’t stand to see the nightmare-beast or have to die again and bleed out all alone in a tunnel of pain. When the sun rose, he climbed slowly into the Lord Gale’s cockpit and they made their way down into the heart of the Forest, where the trees were dropping their leaves and preparing for the grip of winter. Beneath the shadow of Omega’s mountains, they wound through makeshift paths while the canopy glittered with withering gold.

Lollygag told him again to sleep, but Burton could not, watching the world die around him, the cold cache the ground and the clouds. When the mountain slopes and the valley below and the roads towards Blue City would be stiffened with blankets of thick, scentless ice. When the wind cursed him and he shivered at the thought of the nightmare-creature with his face and venomous spit that sent him into euthanasia from which he’d never wake again. The leaves danced around them like freshly-fallen snow.

On, the Gale walked for many more miles, a steady maze of tangled branches above him trying to catch the sun. Over roots and streams and sloping earth. Over dead trees left from last year’s freeze. And the hymn of rushing wind as it swelled and conquered.

They came to a clearing by a slow, steady brook and Lolly sat among the stones. The sound of the water rippling through cracks in the ice just beyond the reach of his claws and making its way downhill, where it would feed into the sea so far, far away, mixed with earth and salt as it had for centuries. There was a soft ping on the radar, that faded as quickly as it came, and Burton stared at the screens in such a state of delirium that could make no sense of the direction. Unwillingly, fighting the whole way, he fell into a brackish sleep while the Gale scanned the Forest, but there was nothing.

In his sleep, he cried out and fled from the creature with claws and wings and saw it was joined at his own two feet--his shadow, growing and consuming him, pulling him down by the ankles as he died with poison in his blood and mind. And this time the shadow spoke--in his voice, coiled up around his throat and ear, “I found...” Over and over again, never able to complete the sentence. Flickering volume, sometimes muted, sometimes moaning dreadfully, half-choked with laughter.

He could never form words in these dreams, only scream and shriek, but never in any language. It was Lolly’s pleading that brought him back to consciousness and he bolted forward in his seat, the harness snagging both shoulders. He panted and wiped the tears and sweat from his face while the Gale whined softly.

‘I’m fine,’ he insisted, but Lollygag knew better, and continued to croon at him.

In the distance, something spoke over the rough calls of water and wind, inaudible at first. Then steadily louder, thunder coming closer, bringing spells of the old world into the even older Forest.

Lollygag stood up and crept back into cover, away from the small, silver stream, and fell silent. Again, the same wraith-sound from beyond the trees, neither human, nor animal, and still so faint that it lacked any meaning.

Then it rose once more:

‘I... found-’

And vanished abruptly back into nothingness.

Burton shuddered and took the controls; the same sudden ping went off on the radar. But nothing stirred in the rust-gold shadows--only the whisper of dead leaves on the wind.

Anxious, the Gale began to recalibrate the settings, strengthening sensors, increasing the effective range. Burton’s breaths were scattered and uneasy. Answered only by the same, crackling words:

‘I... found-’

It was a voice, a frequency, that neither he nor Lollygag could recognize, warped with excitement. And a very frail and crooked kind of joy.

‘... I found-’

Again, through the wind-steered air like an enemy current, filling his lungs, his ears, his tired, troubled mind. The blip on the radar reappeared, then changed course all of a sudden and doubled in speed, barreling in their direction from somewhere in the valleys below. The Gale snarled and bristled, turning towards the signal with both arms raised and ready to strike the first blow.

But a bolt of hot, burning energy shot out from beneath the branches, and struck him in the chest, stunning him in place; a shockwave of static and his startled screams locked the cockpit controls. Then something followed the loose string of fire, something large and black that rocketed around in the air, silent, sudden movements, jerking its head back and forth, pumping down with a pair of great wire-like wings....

‘I found you--!’

It circled them, making sharp, sporadic turns, then stopped inches from the cockpit, staring down straight through the glass, the jaws parted in a labored, ecstatic smile, showing off its forward, serpent-fangs.

Burton took the throttles in his shaking hands and tried to ease them forward, and Lollygag screeched, then pitched to the side. Dazed, every joint aching with an overdose of electrical energy, difficult to find his footing, and find the lines of code to lift his claws together and arm his weapon systems. He did so suddenly, as the big, black creature lunged at them and laughed. An iron, rasping laugh, tearing at the trees with its claws and great, dark shadow.

It was twice Lolly’s length from snout to tail at least, and formed entirely of metal--a Zoid, a model Burton had never seen before, nor read of in any military database. It was heavily armored, but moved swiftly and suddenly, and hung in the autumn air like a great, polished statue, staring directly at them with savage green eyes. There was no pilot in its cockpit.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ His thoughts and the Gale’s were blended together. It could hear them, for it answered not on the channel, but in Burton’s mind, drowning out the surrounding sounds, of rotting leaf litter and tree limbs in the breeze.

‘I am the System. I am E.X.O.D.U.S. I am the Dekalt Dragon.’ It raised its golden-crowned head and matching wings, drawing closer, closer, catching shafts of cold sunlight in its teeth. On its polished armor, Burton saw his own panicked reflection, and it seemed to rile at that, exuberant, expectant, hunching its head between raised shoulders and gnashing its finely formed jaws.

‘... I am going to kill you.’

And it dove at them again, lightning-quick, with a deafening roar and lashing of its wings and talons, black and gold and blood-colored and blurred. Lollygag was fast enough to avoid it, counter back as he took to the air and aimed a blow with the Magnesser Spear--but by then, the Dekalt was hovering above the tree-line and studying them again. A flickering golden, flame erupting from between its jaws. It was laughing, laughing down at them, now touching its foreclaws together, both plated shoulders hunched.

Burton shuddered quietly, recoiling to the bitter taste of blood and iron in his mouth.

Both dragons trembled, and then shot for the sun, weeping terribly and ripping at each other with their splayed talons. The wind took them southward towards the snow-capped mountain chains, where they fought from summit to summit, leaving footprints over the snow, where no one would ever find them. Beating light, beating wings, their voices raised and angry and echoing for miles beyond, becoming rain. They thundered, downslope, and the Gale pinned the Dekalt and the Dekalt struck the Gale and found its footing on the ridgeline, and then they stood stiffly, facing each other in a stalemate, and seething in collective rage.

‘Can you Project over it, Lolly?’  Burton tried not to dwell on the rusted taste between his teeth.

The Gale shook himself from side to side, ‘No... It’s- different. Not like the Chimera units, not like the Wild Zoids from the Forest. Other channels, other frequencies, foreign code...’

Exodus interrupted them both, bellowing over ice and snow, ‘You would run from me in the Dream, Jed... Precious child. Powerless child!’ Gripping at the frozen earth underneath. ‘You are tired, aren’t you? Sleep- Sleep where you can run from me, and run from your pain and your suffering- and you shall never wake again. I’ll rid the world of you; I’ll bury you-’

Lollygag cried out in retort and lunged; his jaws closed around the Dekalt’s forearm, trying to cleave metal with metal. They tore into each other, fangs, flames, ferocity, the sheer force of their blows as they slashed at the spaces between their pitch-black armor. Then broke off again into the sky, silhouetted by light and the cold grip of violence as it feeds.

And Burton’s mind was the wreckage of a whirlpool, battered by Exodus’ heavy blows and a lasting lack of sleep, shaken, drifting off and then back. Back to where? Back again, back again... Completely sporadic. Unable now to distinguish between his dreams and his wakened state, for the Dekalt was always there, sneering at him, reaching to trap him between the ravines of many bladed fangs. Lolly would have to Evolt, he thought, if they were to survive--and the Gale seemed to sense this.

He changed in a heartbeat, a flashing light, a curdling scream. He struck the Dekalt at the flank and sent it reeling back into the ice. There was a shower of light and bullets, the sound of metal against the surface of snow, and the two dragons chased their shadows round the summits, trying to catch the other in their jaws. They snapped and screamed, and met each other over the peaks, raking their throats with great, golden talons. The wind everywhere around them.

Then they flew to the west, riding the currents, diving between mountain tops and the subtle glare of the sun. Burton bit his lip and trembled, pained and tired--they could not keep this form for long, he was too weak, he needed sleep and darkness and the infinite void of undisturbed silence.

But the dragons battled with the rage and the might of explosive old stars, scattering, reforming, bursts of sudden light and fire as they tried to reach the other’s core. To extinguish. To kill.

Exodus shivered and slowed for a moment, staying at a distance. Studying them, the way children study shapes and colors and names. And then everything was still and dark, and their shadows lengthened on their claws and faces. For a long while, they stared across an empty space, distances marked by withered remains of autumn and rain.

It was a time of dying. They descend into the dirt and stared across the Forest floor, different pairs of eyes burning softly. ‘Go back to where you came from,’ Lollygag’s transmissions were soft but stern, a warning. ‘Leave this place. Leave us alone.’

The Dekalt shook its crowned-jewel head, the serpent fangs barred at them hideously. ‘You know who sent me, don’t you?’

Lollygag could only bow his head down--he would not say the name.

‘You... you and your human have upset the Scale; you have forgotten your place, the sense of your existence. So you must both be punished.’ Exodus hissed, and hunched it shoulders, crouching at them. ‘I was made to hunt, I was Assembled to destroy--that is my purpose, that is my place. I have come to claim you, your lives, your names, your blood and dream-world spaces.'

'How can you talk of taking so much? As if it was owed to you? As if you own it?’

‘That’s what power is, Gale.’

They stood apart in the dirt. Dirty, dented creatures. Calling back and forth, two dragons with their gleaming scales and eyes and coiling tails and mud and rotting leaves and melting ice sticking to their flanks where they had thrown each other on the surface. The light around them died slowly.

‘Your power,’ said Lollygag. ‘But not my power.’ His head was low still, like a budding branch bent over, like a cresting wave over emerald ocean.

A sneer. ‘What is your power, then?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lollygag, in his very honest way. ‘I am learning still, I think.’

The Forest spoke steadily to them, but Exodus did not hear. In a whirl of teeth and anger, it lunged forward, and the two Zoids were tangled in their shadows again while the trees moaned and shuddered and leaned away. Lollygag broke from the mess of lashing claws, his wings raised, rising. They steered away from each other again and went racing in between the trees. A steady breeze bellowed across the blue and black horizon.

Burton still could not tell the difference between his dreams while he was rattled and shaken and dragged in and out of states of sleep. Seconds apart, everything a crooked blur. The mountains were below and then beside them, and he knew that somehow he was pulling on the controls and that Lollygag had chased the Dekalt and then the Dekalt had chased them up the steep, unyielding slopes. They went quickly, rushing on their armored wings, while the land around them held its breath...

And then they were struck out of the sky, screaming, soundless; they fell like a comet, and lost consciousness. It was no use, they thought, for they had fought and fought, and now they could not fight. They drowned, reaching out for each other, in blindness and fear and the silent chokehold of pain that had pulled them both into some starless place. There they flailed a while longer, their eyes open and unseeing, and covered at every corner with darkness. Bodies unbound, full of flickering movements, fading. At last their voices bled through, following one another, scared and shrill. They were lost. The blackness was completely boundless.

Burton shuddered and started rapidly to die, tears on his face, scars in his mind, great dark scars, swords and caverns, and dried clots of blood. He could feel the Gale with him, the both of them helpless, both tumbling, plummeting, into a terrible, terrible, forbidden silence. The void opened, stared, surrounding them whole and ready to devour. They wept as the nothingness closed in around them.

But the shadows were blown into smoke by a great, heavy voice, of death and of power. They were no longer falling. The void no longer pressed with the weight of an ocean on their chests.

“Rise.” Omega snarled into them. From the earth. From darkness.

‘How..?’ Burton thought, and Lolly thought, their pain and emptiness interconnected, extensive together. ‘I cannot-’

"You will.”

They saw the world again. The god had broken through from the heart of the mountain, zir head impossibly high in the sky, shrouded in the dark. Staring down, zir tail was coiled carefully around the Gale, holding onto dear life.

Exodus tumbled, shrieked, recoiled, circled back and around and could not escape Omega’s giant, pressing shadow. Once or twice it jolted towards zem, only to reel back again, always being watched, always knowing there was nothing to be done.

“Do not test me.” Omega thundered over everything, with the might of a toppling empire. And the Dekalt, head hunched, overpowered, retreated into the lengthening spell of cold and forest secrets.

The Seismosaurus spread zir toes into the soil and watched. Ze craned zir neck and looked beyond to the where the continent collided into space and where Exodus had fled. “This is what it’s like,” ze said, “to again see starlight on the Surface.” Ze released Lollygag, who had reverted to his usual state, and let him take wing above the treeline.

Burton cursed under his breath using the language he’d spoken in the place he was born and sank down against the dashboard. Death was not so terrible, yet he had been afraid, he was still in so much pain. It was now that he could see the forest floor was cleaved with deep and terrible scars, where the dragons had fought, and where bits of mountain had come shattering down. Still the wind went whispering in its indifferent way, healing words, patient words, words formed in darkness.

He could not see very well; he thought of sleep and whispered his thanks while trying to make out the pattern. There was something different about the way it was woven. Omega’s face was longer and sharper and ringed by wisps of smoke and fire, but he could not make sense of it right now.

The stars stopped for no one as they skidded in silence across a sloping sky. Bloodied bands and blemishes lay below them in the trees.

There will be more blood, and more death, Burton thought, having been carried back from that place, the pain of it still in his eyes. Darkness seeping from every wound, darkness repairing itself. The sounds of the Forest growing deeper. The Dekalt would come for him again--but he would be ready then. He and his dragon, who hummed and drifted on the wind like a leaf. He must rest now, he must dream.

He said softly, “Surely Alpha will know now of your survival. Your location.”

“Good,” said the god. “I have grown tired of waiting.” For this was a time of great change.

#burton's logbook #e.x.o.d.u.s. #Re:Connected

[mooncookee]

QUIVER

You see the soul drips low down where the dirt holds and lip licks upside trees and rubs it's scent up in the leaves so every bee passin' flags its tale. In frets and waggles, tails a kites lets                                                     or a dragonfly drags, they sing out in trails of Halle-lu-jah stretches up, up to heaven' but the land; sees it. Land, it never forgets. No, see? The land never forgets.

It breathes in frequencies sometimes only wolves can bear. Now and then a cat or two might howl but hounds, they just too house broke, cozy, may a' bit too lazy for caring. Some ground just stares; some rumbles like mountain claws strummin' on drum skins. Some been rubbed too much.

 I'm told it growls like that at Shiloh and Antietam, And Vietnam's a locomotive hauling coal down where they stokin' Hell. So they tell. Well it's that kinda hum across the tracks as Quiver Lane backs up to Bayou Self.

Once it crossed there but Betsy or Audrey washed it out; maybe was a hurricane

way 'fore storms got names. No one cared to build it back or cared not to. True that.                                                                        

When Emmalite Petit came to name it Quivers for the way the silver willows shiver in the silver light of night everything changed.

Tragedy and Misery, ain't they so the loudest, overstaying cousins? And seems we never see the sunshine when they visit.   Poor Lita (her prayer given greeting) lived beneath a concrete cloud of loud and overstayin' cousins. They raved a regular hoedown, throw-down, hootenanny, fais do do with a neon rainbow and a disco ball. And I mean cousins, uncles et al. Damn Murder, Curser, Fever and Famine fired it up and washed it blue down there with Deluge.                                                                                        

First her Baby, gone. Her Daddy then her ‘nother Baby, husband, husband, baby, Mama; all lost quick as windblown sand.

 Some say Curser was first to sup. Before Choctaw pushed the Houmas through, before people were more than The People, angels and demons had drama there. In that, I'm told, can't be a winner. Seems Quiver Lane began to quiver long fore Lil’ Lita came for dinner or every time.                                                              

She came like plagues o' Moses. "Note-he-damn-us" speculated they's a Moses lain in every sack of sins.

So said, Lita lived as one or all those "Horsemen," well “Horse-folk,” that head banger gang, jammin' down till the World chokes, spokes broke in sections docking the earth in kinda pocky way clips. Cousin, you catch my crazy pills; lauded Lord seen the Devil’s daughter in a bonnet livin’ as the Mistress of the Quivers. I can't say. Maybe she's the lucky millionth shopper

straggled up, she, falling out the sack; register ding, clang and drawer slip, clap; balloons fell, politicians kissing black beauty baby hexes like bubble blowers whistling.

lucky Medusa, heaving chest, epistles of perdition Panavision in her sweat.                                                          

 Y’all know evil needs a witness, accepting victims’ just objects, directly. God knows Narcissus always came as the main idea. Ain't nobody plays that sorrow fiddle like him.

Maybe Emmalite's his sister?

 Lil' Lita came from Texas by the Sabine Pass. Her folk ran a trawl fleet, had plenty grass for cattle and passe blanc, they say. No verifiable pedigree, a Gypsy privateer, a Mescalita bruja here and here. Clearly an Andalusian heiress in that tree, more than half Moor-ish. She was Venus, trapper by trade so they say.

  (II)

 Down from Paradis a way the Old Spanish Trail snakes through the Texaco Woods. Inertia notwithstanding, curves are angular where that old road bends by the tracks and bends back a time or four. Man, DAMN, that was one alive drive. No, don't try those moves at Big Bear, no. Ask me how I know?

 So, the first knee coming from Paradis, Lita’s mausoleum gloats 'neath an oak grove.

Mère Brigit de Saint Asile, splayed in headstones, snaggle-toothed from the shiny rails, with a ditch mote, a throat bouquet of cattails and poison ivy commanded, a dead man's curve from any poet's axis. A swamp hugged close, old road to tracks that smacked blood wet, stains sustained since skirmishes of Yank incursions shucked, ghost rehearsals from Boutte to Des Allemands.

Older ground, this mound raised by the hand of man, built by bodies gone to mulch, a human humus mushed under hundreds on hundreds of autumn's silts. Floods sipped slippin' the baser stones to tilt in neglect, 'cept lichen love. Yet seldom did molesters linger. Centuries of cypress centurions, elders, priests and voodoiennes spit blasted blasphemous echoes and imminent offenders bent on infecting this umbilical age where souls are directed, selected and nakedly effected and tweaked past sec by the Conscious Constant Conscience Collective till they caress the nexus of perfection. Poor Lita‘s cache was stashed in a crypt like only city seen. Marble Venus reigning supreme over meager crosses, slaves and Cajun tenants, protestants, names scratched unless a body was a veteran.

 The black top ridge the bridge to Quiver Lane crossed tracks at are maintained by Santa Fe Railways on the civil side. The bayou banks can't be tamed. To its own travail, alone it wanes. It assimilates, ate by relentless quest of the prevailing Green to digest, jail and swallow every life, not sailing pass a snail's pace past the veil of tales.

 Some places birth a craving for belonging. I belong there. I learned to swear there,                                                                

was snared by the noose tobacco set. My first drunken crash there after Uncle read me Lovecraft there. I woke wet. We skipped for crawfishing on pretty new spring days, lunch meat and Bunny Bread, that pink mayo pickle spread, four finger bag of weed and a six o’ Dixie. What a day made; laying nets in a knee deep maze up to the first grave. Voo was a swamp "Fred Astaire." I was a true Scooby Doo.

 I felt connected. My first love was laid there.                                                        

We buried my Colinda in the Mom Brigit's breast. No other love tested more than a genuflecting peasant maid weighing fragrances passed in wake of her Queen's carriage. Stressing, up she peeked, a speck in shadows of divinity. That old road led me out on, a life of asphalt sped, gone, minstrel vagabond so long it's all I ever did since I turned back on this compost heap, love's keep, womb of every torch song.

 My class of '81 summoned, thirty-five years running but for them I come. I wonder why, true though, I never could deny our passion. When we took life in shots, chased with pitchers at Tolano’s. We had a world to make.

 Me, I just careened from ditch to ditch like it's me buried by the Quivers. No I deliver as I wither juke to honkey tonk, useless bitch of windy whispers. Till I listed, sunk and sprawled, depraved raving “kinda been” kissing the base of my true love’s grave. I bowed my gaze prostrate so to evade her name engraved by chisel. A blitz of banshees pulling train, crumbled by the strain, I crawled scratching three X's by the gate on Lita's marble vault pleading she would put me down, already nothing wasting air, better fare prepared as mushroom food or maybe that's too good.

 I should… I would but once I promised not to "should" myself. Still, shame laid lame, gasping breaths between grass roots. I wept. "Why me's" pelted till my ears burned red. I quivered in prayers to who knows who.

 "Madame Petit accept my humble suffering as sacrifice. By gluttony, greed and lust, I'm pinned by sin, an empty wraith in waiting, a soulless puppet painted live. I pray my worthless carcass lay a worthy crust to feed the inevitable Green lacing the gates of your Everlasting After.”

 Shotguns slam on Heaven's tin walls, clap of Atlas shaking this world off. Tossed by the blast wave reality whiplashed!

 Peace of the morning, peace of the dawn, peace of the dusk, trust is cruel quiet.

 I wasn't crying anymore, standing more or less, I smelled the musk of Bayou Self.

An ass drawn wagon crossed the bridge carrying six oyster sacks, a six pack of field hands

and six kindling stacks of dried fig twigs. A sickly girl’s grey pony led three chomping keen colts: a big red, an ice white and onyx black sweat gleaming fiery beast. Two tuniced, kilted dudes duked; blue steels, shields whacking, shrieks of deep dread jolts “blue screen” hacked my psyche. Pangs of fresh grief vigorously split me.

 A jug of berry sherry beckoned swig. My sweet Colinda, cherry plucker lolled, bent butt against the trestle rail. My first kiss again conjured up in home sewed halter and faded cutoffs

baring all I knew of truth. I sighed. Honey haired, hazel eyed, mine, giggling on the Quivers side. I knew I had died and raced embracing her with no step took, track jumped or cross tie straddled.

My Colinda, swarthy now calico long dress in bonnet, brunette, black eyes, pupils fire.

Love as always a puny liar.

           "Allons danser." Lil Lita grabbed me. We two stepped. A death of quiet                                                                        

only broke by creaking wood and creosote stink.

 Come to think, I never two stepped. Pickers never learn to dance. Sixties Cajun kids were forbidden, so I was not blessed to know her French addresses. Fancy me this dead man's chance.

We parleyed and danced and dance.

 Bless you; Ma'am Petit you be? Life for me was tired and old. If I’d be so bold

Please bestow me once more to hold my Colinda? Then to dust or mold or as you'd have me.

 "Chere," she said. "Colinda's me. No simple peace and death’s not free

Chere, we have scores and prophecies. A thousand first loves you and me span.

I was Lilith to your Adam.

 A hundred thousand maids you ruined. Who could ever love as I do? Spun out countless loves found tombs, dead in the womb as I sang lullabies. I brewed my fear beer. Stirred you here

Through waste and wander savoring every maid you plundered. Hate begets a viral Eden. Evil needs no truth to seed. Fear and hunger, pain and greed ripened drips in misery.

 Hero here alas you settle, finally, quite a hefty debt. Here you left, Colinda bled, red washed dress on a slave girl grave. Sweating fatherhood for fame let your name escape her blame. At last my final pica’s set my Casanova minstrel, convinced, sorry victim in your head, sped millennia and parried any collar, cross or retiarius’ net.

 But see this land, it never forgets. It pressed a bed of want in you that blooms like sumac in the rain. You came. Your only bet was plain. But here the game is mine, you swine

and markers called. You’re out of time. I'd feed a million trillion flies on your flesh and spread your soul like chewy tricks as treats on chilly demon children’s Halloween.

 But see, my pride, I got to ride. These fine three anxious steeded knights and I have deals to seal and seals to peel while you here feel the pain of every death since you've eluded me.” She chuckled, eyes blazing licked her lips. “But that too was your dream I guess. You always were my favorite pet and here see, this land don't forget."  

                                                                     (III)

Black is white to where she left me. Agony a soothing choice. Infinity times three;

tormenting claws and jaws forever stripping, split my atoms, sip and spit me. Buckets left to catch my wet screams. Seamless, moving troubadour’s tool ghoul re-jeweled to phantom’s whispering shrill banzai Mojave dry.

 Sorry now I'm such a bummer. I'm just a strummer not your savior but if you care for your creator make your peace cause Lita's coming.  

https://www.reverbnation.com/dwaynestromain/song/30163760-quiver-rvbntn

#fiction #poetry #ghosts #horror #spoken word

[ricardiasdubious-blog]

EARTH IN PERIL FINAL (THE TREES PART 2: DR. EDDIE BONDO)

           Edward Bondo would become responsible for the death of billions as well as his own. It started out innocent enough, like most of the problems man had created. The world was growing and wouldn’t stop. The natural world needed to be controlled. The mass experimentation became so abundant kids could splice tomatoes and apples with take home kits you bought from the toy store. The creations weren’t meant to last more than a couple of hours after splicing was finished. The never did, the abominations would be inedible in their short lifespans and would mold within the first hour even with refrigeration. That is how Edward Bondo was introduced to science and the wonderful world of gene manipulation. He was a tall, lanky boy, sullen blueish grey eyes, and a small cropping of black hair on his head. Although, what really stood out was his intelligence and ingenuity. He was able to start splicing and creating things, far more complicated. Frogs with bugs was one of his first living splices. He kept up with the latest in the splicing industry. It was when he was in high school he was introduced to chemicals and splicing them to create new chemical concoctions. Edward was the type of kid in any of his classes that question everything. It was his chemistry class he questioned in the most.

“Mr. Rand, what made you get into chemistry.” Edward asked his aging teacher.

“Bill Nye of all things actually, but I fell in love with the research aspect of it.” Mr. Rand replied.

“Mr. Rand, how did splicing become so mainstream?”

“It was corporations pushing their limits to find the cheapest most effective way to make something, splicing things, eventually, made things cheaper and more effective.”

“Mr. Rand what do you mean by eventually, were their failures?”

“Of course, Edward there were failures in everything, chickens not being able to lay eggs because of a new steroid. Tomatoes would ripen so much they would explode when being cut. It was really hectic for a while.”

“Who made it non-hectic?”

“The Crafters Corporation, that’s enough questions Edward. Class is about to start.”

           Edward couldn’t focus for the rest of class. He was on his phone researching everything he could about The Crafters, the slogan being, “Making A Better World, Literally”, catchy and simple. Their website was full of some of their crowning achievements, such as a chicken that was able to function and live properly with double of everything. Four legs, four breasts, four wings, they even had two heads.  The description said that they mixed the DNA of a chicken, octopus and cows in order to achieve it. Another one was a cream that de-aged people’s skin, it had some spinal/brain fluid from a turtle and a little bit of horseshoe crab blood spliced into it. Truly and incredibly fascinating how far the limits of nature can be pushed. Edward was enthralled and felt like a little boy shopping at a toy store with the science he was staring at. One of the last tabs Edward was able to look at before Mr. Rand caught him being distracted was the internships offered at The Crafters Corporation “to help develop the brains of tomorrow”

           Edward finished at the top of his class at Canon high school, although opted out of giving a valedictorian speech because he had a fear of public speaking. He already had several offers from gene manipulation schools, his senior capstone dissertation on “The Future of Gene Manipulation: Man’s Destiny to Rule” was published in a couple of academic journals. Edward went to the best of them all, C.I.G.M. or the California Institute of Gene Manipulation. It was there that he found a true passion with the chemical side of manipulation by splicing man-made chemicals with the genes from plants and animals. In some of his first courses he was introduced to the world of pesticide manipulation. Naturally the pesticides they studied were ones that would kill weeds and invasive species while not bringing harm to the plants people wanted. While intriguing it wasn’t exactly what Edward wanted. He wanted to not only kill weeds and keep the nice plants safe but improve them with the pesticide. Edward experimented on everything from bushes to trees, flytraps and tulips. He was attempting to find the correct combination of plant DNA because at the Institute they gave limitations. His professor stated that they were to replicate the pesticides currently on the market, and they were only allowed to splice lifeforms that used photosynthesis as a food source.

Edward was successful by using a base weed-killer and splcing it with the Sorcratea exorrihiza, a walking palm tree from Ecuador. He passed the class and earned the jealousy from his classmates for finding such a curious and strange tree. He was able to find the correct balance between the weed-killer and the ‘walking palm’. His pesticide was able to travel from plant to plant and notice the key genes that made a bio-form as a weed or a wanted plant. He found continued success with the trees of the world in his other classes as well. Edward also noticed in his History of Gene Manipulation class that only a few scientists have messed with the genes of trees. Edward always being the questioner, started his research on tree gene manipulation. His interests eventually turned into his doctorates dissertation. After, his graduation and another speech being avoided he started his internship at The Crafters Corporation. He started as a low-level aide to Dr. Adam Crake, head of the pesticide division. Edward made himself stand-out with his work just as he had in high school and college. He started, like all interns at Crafters, running for coffee, cleaning labs/equipment after use and listening to every word the doctors and scientists employed by The Crafters Corporation.

Dr. Crake was portly man, with a doorknob like chin and small spectacles and always wore a very colorful bowtie, he told the class on the first day that he got his bowties specially ordered. The bowties were spliced with cuttlefish DNA and it would change color depending on the tone of his voice. Edward returned to his work from college, except taking his pesticide to improve and protect trees instead of suburban garden flowers. He took his base weed-killer and started to explore in his free-time as well as when they allowed the interns lab time to work on their projects. The ones with the most effective pesticides would be hired. The rest of the interns would be sent along their way to future endeavors but were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements under penalty of being black-balled and sued. What Edward was able to do was astounding, he spliced the Sorcratea exorrihiza, “walking palm”, with that of a polar bear, tiger, and spore-dispersing fungi so the pesticide could travel by air. He took his new pesticide which he called Detoxinate Harm 23, or DH-23 to an air tight testing area within the Crafters Corporation compound because he wouldn’t want the pesticide to get out if its effect had been detrimental rather than helpful towards the trees. The 23 in DH-23 were the 23 lifeforms deemed the most destructible or harmful towards any give tree species. Edward’s primary targets were various species of bark beetle and poison ivy vines. In the testing area, he had five species of tree, two of each.

           One would have bark beetles in it and the other with poison ivy vines on it. He applies his pesticide to the roots, bark, branches and leaves of each tree, then monitored the health of the tree as well as the beetles and vines. After two days of monitoring, recording, and sleeplessness, the beetles appeared outside of the tree and had fallen around its base, dead. The vines had withered and fallen just like the beetles, at the base of the tree. Edward smiled with excitement and emailed his bosses about his success. The next day, after he caught up on his sleep. They celebrated his success and cracking open a bottle of champagne. After all of the trials and testing other above him had to do, the pesticide was put on the market after about two months. It began to be sprayed onto the devastated Yellowstone trees, the titan-like Redwoods in the northeast, and the forests throughout the world to protect them from killer beetle or vine species.

           When all the testing was finished, the trees Edward used were planted around the Craftsmen Compound as a living trophy to his accomplishment. Although, his trophies would soon become his killers. The trees began to move out of their planted positions, but people didn’t notice until their roots began to break apart the concrete. Their spores had been released and had attached to all the trees in the area. Eventually, the trees surrounded the Craftsmen Compound and it was when the people were inside that they began to attack. The redwoods came crashing down onto the labs and raised back up by the other trees. The branches of the cedars and poplars and oaks began to reach through the holes the redwoods had created and take people through them. Edward saw Dr. Crake taken into the branches, they reached under his skin until he was dead from the trauma. Then the trees kept him there as blood leaked out of him and dripped into the tree itself. Others were being taken by the roots, dragged underground to be buried alive or worse. Edward stood in horror as more and more people suffered the same fate as Dr. Crake, all the while the redwoods crashing down on different areas of the compound. Edward and a few others tried to run but anyway out was blocked by a wall of trees. The screams went on into the night and continued as the trees slowly encircled Edward and those who remained. After all the food ran out in the compound and the water fountains sprouted branches people became frantic. One by one they were taken into the branches or down to the ground, they were helpless to stop them. A janitor told Edward and the others he tried to call the cops, but he was told they were getting thousands of calls about the same problem. Eventually, it was just Edward left and after two weeks of no food or water, the trees roots encapsulated his lifeless body and pulled it under. There were no screams or cries for help, just the rustle of leaves as the wind blew.

(Thank you Dr. Battista and my Earth in Peril classmates for wonderful discussion, plus the depressing talks on the end of the world. Also, Battista as a dystopic leader of an ecological cult.)

#ILS2215BattistaWinter2018 #thetrees #horror