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oathena11-writes · 2 years

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For the whump prompts, got one for 16) “You could have died! And I had to watch it happen!” with Quinlan and Fox from @thefireflyreader

Sorry it took a while, took me a bit to figure out what the scenario even could be and which one (if only one) would be the one to nearly die... and then it got very long on me. Am I going to bother posting it on AO3? Nope.

“This is why I don’t like taking clones on missions with me,” Quinlan muttered under his breath as they fought their way through canyon.

“You say something, sir?” Fox asked.

“Nothing important, Commander. Let’s just get through this now that the droids know we’re here.”

It was supposed to be a simple retrieve the artifact from the ‘small’ Sith Temple on a relatively unknown moon, but there was also supposed to be a Separatist base there. Which meant Quinlan was required to take a few squads of clones with him. If he had been alone, he was pretty sure he would have been in and out already.

He liked the Guard, and he did not like being the one responsible for their lives, responsible for making the right calls. He didn’t like bringing them into a situation where they might die, oftentimes for himself. Quinlan never liked anyone trying to protect him; he was supposed to be the protector, and it was far worse when it came to the clones. They felt like they didn’t have a choice, and he really, really did not like that.

They finally made it to the end of the canyon. Quinlan turned and counted all the troopers. He’d been blocking out all the deaths. He had to take a breath when he saw that they were down by ten troopers, and another ten were injured. Not good.

But, nestled at the end of the canyon was a small building, the Sith Temple they were looking for. That building was just the entry, the real Temple went throughout the ground.

Quinlan turned to the remaining troopers. “I need most of you to stay here. This is not a normal Sith Temple, but it’s still nothing like a Jedi Temple, and you don’t have the defenses to protect yourselves from it. Tend to the wounded, make plans, get ready to run as I’m not sure what’s going. to happen in here.”

“General, what are you even looking for?” Fox asked, worried but hiding it well.

“The same thing I’m looking for all the time. Anything that can give us an insight into the Sith. We thought they were gone, and so, we don’t know anything between the last reported Sith and ten years ago, we’re still trying to figure it all out. The last Temple I was at hinted at a holocron with records of their teachings, and we need that, anything else I can find is a bonus.” Quinlan didn’t mind being open with those on the mission with him; it wasn’t like they wouldn’t figure most of it out if they were smart.

Fox frowned. “And you don’t even know what you’re walking into?”

“I know what most Sith Temples are like. And anyways, walking in blind is like, half my job.”

“I don’t like it.” “Well, I’m taking you and Humerus in with me so you can not like it all you want in there.”

“Fine. Any one else?”

“No, I’m not risking the Dark side possessing anyone. You and Humerus I know have the strength of mind to not be taken in easily.”

“Well that’s ominous. I am ready when you are, sir.”

Quinlan nodded. “I am ready now, if we’re not needed here.”

“Humerus!” Fox called.

Humor looked irritated but joined them. “What is it?”

“You’ll have to leave the injuries to Lilo. You’re coming into the Temple with us.”

“Why?”

“You can handle it better than most, and there’s always the risk of injuries. Better to have a medic with us if we need one.” Quinlan pulled on gloves. He was already more clothed than usual, pants and sleeves, for once.

“Why the gloves, sir?” Humerus asked as they walked.

“Oh, you know about my psychometry. Imagine what’s that like with the Dark side. I’m not taking the risk of accidentally touching something. Learned that the hard way.” Quinlan sounded far too cheerful about that.

The Temple was really weird once they got into it. It wasn’t anything like the Jedi Temple, which felt light and airy. No, this felt a bit like the walls were closing in, and yet... weirdly cheerful.

Quinlan stopped at the first closed door and looked over the runes frowning. After a moment he took off a glove and ran his hand over it, then pushed the runes in a sequence.

“Well, I figured out what’s weird about this Temple. It started out as a Jedi Temple, then the Sith found it and took it for themselves. They haven’t been here near enough for the Dark side to really seep into everything.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yep. Means most of the Temple is going to be less dangerous than I thought.”

It still took them a long time to find anything. The holocron was paired with a Jedi holocron. Quinlan didn’t take them immediately, taking the time to look around the pedestal they were resting on. He sighed after a few minutes, spotting some signs.

“Well, this is going to suck. Get up here, and get ready to run.”

“Why?”

“As soon as I grab the holocrons, the Temple is going to collapse, and I can’t swap weights or anything, since the trigger is the fact that the pedestal can’t sense the Force anymore... and this is not a Jedi trap, it’s a Sith trap which means it’s going to get very dangerous.”

“...so that’s why you only took the two of us,” Fox muttered.

Quinlan grabbed the holocrons and tossed them into his bag. The Temple started shaking. He grabbed Fox and Humor before they could start running. “Wait, let’s see what the initial results are...” He then pulled them to the ground to avoid the trap swinging down from above. The way they came fell apart.

“What the kriff?” Fox stared.

“Yeah, this is pretty normal. Sith like their dramatic traps. Come on, I spotted the way out.”

They raced through the Temple, a different route than they came in by, Quinlan occasionally needing to help the two clones get through a trap he easily avoided with the Force. They finally reached the end, breathing hard, and then...

Quinlan opened the door. He immediately closed it. “The Separatist base is on the other side of the door.” He opened the door a crack to see what he could see, since there didn’t even seem to be a camera keeping an eye on them.

Fox stared at the rocks blocking their way back. “...the Sith did that on purpose.”

Quinlan nodded. “Probably. I think I can get us out.”

“Then do that.” Fox demanded.

“This is a tricky technique to use on myself, it’ll be tricker on you two, so I need you to run as soon as we’re free, I can’t lose my concentration worrying about you.” Quinlan waited until he got their nods of agreement, then placed his hands on Humerus, concentrating. He checked over his work and slipped the holocrons into Humerus’ bag without either of the clones noticing.

Then he did the same technique on Fox, then himself. “We’re now basically unnoticeable, shadows. Be careful, it’s not fool proof, but it should hold enough to get us out of here.”

What Quinlan didn’t tell them was it was also a very draining technique and it would barely get them out the doors, but he hoped by then they could run free while he collapsed. He was not losing anyone else today.

Quinlan lagged behind Fox and Humor as they hurried through the facility to the nearest exit they could find. Thankfully, the technique held up as they passed several groups of droids, and then Quinlan let out a breath as he saw them run out the door and take off.

He made it to the door himself almost a minute later. As he let go of the technique, the exhaustion hit him all at once and he gasped, holding onto the door for support. He looked out the door, and could see Humor already making his way back to their temporary, down in the canyon, Fox not far behind. Good. When he died, they’d get the holocrons back to Coruscant.

Quinlan’s vision swam and he let the door close, sinking to the ground. When the droids appeared seconds later, he had no energy to fight them as they dragged him off to see whoever was in charge of this base.

He dealt with the pain, the threats, and mostly just tried not to pass out from sheer exhaustion. Then the droids dragged him out to execute him as a Jedi who had ‘defiled the sacred Temple’, as the person in charge put it. Apparently that one was there for a reason.

He held his head high as they tied him to a pole. Even exhausted, he was not giving them the satisfaction of seeing him look defeated. He had done his job, the clones, led by his favorite commander, Fox, would do theirs. That was enough.

Of course though, the execution couldn’t be quick. Of course not. Just his luck. Quinlan maintained eye contact with the leader, the one ordering this, the entire time. Injuries to each limb. Quinlan held the tears of pain back, refusing to give any satisfaction.

And then they shoved him, pole and all, over the edge of the canyon, to die from the impacts or suffer slowly until he died. Still worth it. Quinlan had the Force, and it would stay with him until the end, when he became one with it.

Only, that’s not what happened. Sometime along the tumble down, the clones rescued him. He was unconscious by then.

Quinlan was very surprised to wake up in a medbay, squinting against the bright lights. Every part of him ached. “Ow...”

“About time you woke up, Vos,” Fox grumbled.

“What happened?” Quinlan asked, turning his head.

Fox looked at him, clearly angry. “They were executing you by tossing you into the canyon already injured, we barely got to you in time. Had to fight them off again, but made it off that rock.”

“Why did you come back for me?” Quinlan frowned.

“You could have died! And I had to watch it happen!” Fox threw his hands up. “Even if we were willing to leave you behind, they were doing it right where we could see everything happen!”

“I made my decision expecting to die,” Quinlan responded quietly. “I appreciate that you came back for me, but the mission was more important than my life.”

Fox stared at him. “Why are you so insistent on sacrificing yourself all the time? You’re not expendable, we are!”

Quinlan flinched, not just at his words, but at his anger. “You’re not expendable to me, and I am tired of death. I am tired of feeling each death, of feeling everyone’s grief. I can’t just let someone else die when I can do something about it. And anyways, if we’re talking expendable, shadows are the ones most likely to die on a mission anyways. I made my peace with that years ago. So long as the mission gets done, I don’t care if I live or die. No matter what you or anyone else thinks of me, I will do my job to protect everyone I can, as I always have.”

“And who protects you?”

Quinlan sighed. “Why do you care about this, of all things?”

“Why do I...?” Fox spluttered. He ran a hand through his hair, looked to see if anyone else was around, then he sighed. “Kriff it,” he muttered.

Fox straightened and made sure Quinlan was looking at him. “Because, Quinlan, I love you.”

Quinlan stared at him, then smiled. “Oh, really Fox? Well, I love you too, though I’m confused as to how you actually did fall in love with me.”

Fox moved closer. “Well... we have the same sense of humor, I just don’t show mine.”

When Humerus interrupted them to take care of Quinlan and talk about his injuries, Quinlan didn't take his eyes off of Fox who was pretending not to care. A big surprise, and yet, maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised at all. He had known Fox was the one who liked him the most.

And the mission was a success, so that was a great bonus too, even if he was stuck needing someone to do everything for him for a while. Fox volunteered and glared at anyone who commented on the fact that this meant he was feeding Quinlan himself and not leaving Quinlan’s side, even as he was working on paperwork.

#writing prompt #whump #star wars #fanfiction #quinlan vos #commander fox #quinlan vos x commander fox #My writing #Athena ramblings #posted without editing

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bumbleklee · 3 years

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windblume confession(s)

masterlist | 1k prompt masterlist | pregnancy series

request: (@illusory-torrent) can i ask the meaning behind your url?? just curious. and could i also please request some kaeya and albedo getting competitive over the reader? reader can be gender neutral, i just wanna see my two best bois being competitive haha. thank you!

pairings: albedo x gn!reader, kaeya x gn!reader (love triangle)

warnings: none! (1.5k words)

a/n: soooo the meaning behind my url - it’s not that special lol. i wanted to make a genshin pun (klee = bee) and this is the first thing i came up with. also bea/bee, bumblebea/bumblebee, yktv

During the Windblume Festival, bouquets of flowers and letters were spilling off of your desk everyday. Despite knowing that most of the gifts came from anonymous senders, your heart still skipped a beat.

Part of you wondered if any of them were a prank. You didn’t see yourself as anything special, you weren’t as feminine and pretty as Barbara or muscular like Wagner, yet quite a few patrons found you good enough to pine over.

You skimmed through the gifts one day to see if you recognized any of the names. There was a letter from Bennett that was clearly addressed to Fischl so you tucked away the special note in a drawer with promises to deliver it later. You also found a letter from one of the Knight’s on your squad - but he was much younger than you and, frankly, the letter sounded like puppy love. Two contrasting bouquets of flowers sat side-by-side on the edge of your desk so you reached for them.

The first bouquet was about a dozen calla lilies tied together with a blue ribbon and the second was cecilia’s in a glass vase. The flowers piqued your interest, your mind already forming an idea about where they came from, and you read the attached cards.

“Meet me in the library,” You read aloud, your fingers tracing the edges of the cardstock. It wasn’t signed by anyone. The second one has a similar message, “Find me in the library.”

You wondered if the flowers were sent by the same person. But then why wouldn’t they state that? The questions made you wonder, again, if this was a trap. Could the flowers be from someone who wanted to mess with you? But despite your doubts, you grabbed your things and headed down the stairs to the library.

When you pushed open the door to the library, you realized you had no idea who or what you were looking for. The library was decorated beautifully, ribbon and flowers displayed on tables or breaks between the bookcases. The room itself smelled fresh, too, unlike its usual dusty aroma. While you glanced around the library, you saw Lisa sitting behind her desk and went to see if she knew what was going on.

“Happy Windblume Festival,” You smiled warmly at your coworker, “You’re not going to believe what I received.”

Lisa stopped reading her book to look up at you, the ghost of a smirk on her lips, “Hello, there. So many love-birds flew into your office this morning, I can only imagine what they brought you.”

You rolled your eyes, “Too many unrequited confessions.” She laughed softly at your joke, “Besides that, I received two bouquets of flowers that both told me to meet them here. Isn’t that strange?”

Lisa covered her mouth with a gloved hand and giggled again, “I think there’s something downstairs who would love to see you.”

You raised an eyebrow at Lisa but thanked her and took off down the stairs, careful not to slip on the wooden steps. As soon as your foot touched the floor, your sight met two men who had stopped bickering less than a moment ago. Kaeya and Albedo stood in front of a table, trying to put themselves back together in your presence.

“What’s going on?” You asked, realizing they were probably waiting for you. “Were the flowers from both of you?”

Kaeya and Albedo looked between each other, seemingly glaring dangers at each other. “I don’t know why he’s here,” Kaeya sneered, motioning to Albedo.

“Well, I don’t know why you’re here,” Albedo parroted, crossing his arms. You had never heard either of the men sound as ticked off as they were now.

“You both told me to meet you in the library,” You explained, confused. “That wasn’t planned?”

“No!” They said in unison.

You rubbed your temples, knowing that this wasn’t going to end easily. “I’m sorry,” You mumbled, “But can someone explain what’s going on.”

“Mr. Alberich overheard me planning to surprise you during the Windblume Festival and decided to ruin my plans,” Albedo said. When he spoke Kaeya’s name, there was nothing but venom in his tone.

Kaeya shrugged sarcastically, “I had no prior knowledge.”

“You used Klee to eavesdrop.”

“Did I, now?”

Albedo ran a hand through his hair, aggravated and annoyed. He had never liked Kaeya and this only fueled that fire. Kaeya wasn’t fond of Albedo either. He thought he was overrated in Mondstadt and that his admirers could do better.

“I mean,” Kaeya continued, giving Albedo the side eye, “Was it supposed to be a secret? You were awfully careless with the news.”

“My deepest apologies, I wasn’t aware I needed to broadcast my confession to all of Mondstadt before telling Y/N.”

“Your confession?” You wondered, “So the flowers weren’t a joke?”

Albedo looked at you with curious, and confused, eyes. “A joke? Of course not,” He said. A faint blush crept onto his cheeks, something you had never seen before, and Albedo fiddled with his gloved fingers nervously.

“I wanted to do that first,” Kaeya interjected, frowning slightly.

Kaeya’s words caught you off guard as well. “You like me, too?” He nodded in response and the three of you stood still for a while. Your mind was racing and your heart was beating out of your chest. You couldn’t believe not one but two of your coworkers had a crush on you and were confessing to you. But then the nerve-wracking decision came crashing down on you.

You had to pick one of them, right? The whole point of confessions was to find a possible suitor and here you had two options in front of you. Of course, you could reject both of them and run away but was that how you truly felt?

Albedo was soft and genuine. He often painted portraits of you and took you up to Dragonspine so could have snowball fights with Klee. He paid for dinner for you and recommended new books for you to read during your days off. At that moment, they seemed like friendly gestures. But looking back, you realized they were probably acts to one up Kaeya.

Likewise, Kaeya had his own plans to win you over. He spent exciting nights with you at the tavern and never complained about taking you home when you drank too much. Instead of buying you food, Kaeya bought you gifts like jewelry or artifacts. He often accompanied you on commissions, too.

“I need time to think this over,” You finally said. “Please, just agree not to kill each other in the meantime.”

Kaeya grumbled something under his breath, “Fine.”

“Why do you like me?” You asked, looking at Kaeya. “If you’re going to confess, then confess fully.”

The taller man thought for a moment before sending you his classic, cheeky grin. “I like having a challenge and you, my dear, proved to be that challenge.”

“What?” You asked, slightly offended.

“You play hard to get,” Kaeya continued, using his hands to accentuate his words, “I spoiled you for months and you still acted like we were nothing more than friends. Do friends buy each other gold necklaces in hopes they’ll realize you’ve fallen for them? You even have the necklace on to this day.” Instinctively, your fingers coiled around the dainty necklace around your neck that Kaeya had gifted to you weeks ago. When he gave it to you, you recognized it was a peculiar gift but played it off as Kaeya being extravagant. He sharpened his eyes, “Need I mention you’re the most exquisite looking person in Teyvat?”

Your voice caught in your throat and your cheeks burned with the compliment. You nervously played with the hem of your shirt and looked at Albedo for his answer.

“I just think you’re different,” He said simply, “You’re easy to get along with and I enjoy spending time with you. I feel like we’re compatible puzzle pieces.”

If possible, you blushed harder. Both men were darling and you felt like the luckiest person alive by being adored by both of them. As you glanced between the men, your stomach did a backflip. They were both looking at you with such intent and charisma, as if trying to enchant you. The idea of being with either of them made you feel butterflies.

But they are so drastically different, which made the decision that much harder. If you choose Kaeya, your relationship would be fiery and brand new all the time. He was full of adventure and flirting, favoring nightlife and excitement. And with Albedo, it would be calm and joyous. Your days would be spent in flower fields and underneath trees. Both sounded like a dream to you.

“I don’t know who to pick,” You admitted, holding back a sigh of defeat. “I never thought multiple people would like me at once, let alone you two. I just need more time.”

And with that, you turned on your heel and walked back up the stairs. Your head felt light and your mind was clouded with a million different scenarios. You felt guilty for leaving the men alone but until you could come up with a definite answer, they could wait.

#genshin x reader #albedo x reader #kaeya x reader #genshin impact #genshin writing #genshin x you #genshin x gn reader #albedo x gn reader #kaeya x gn reader #genshin love triangle #i love how this came out #butterfly divider is by hinaolgy #genshin impact x reader #genshin kaeya

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teletraan-meets-jarvis · 3 years

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What I Want - Part 2

AO3 Link

Chapter Title: What I Need

Pairing: Crosshair x fem!Jedi Reader

Summary: Following the awkwardness of the night before, you go to an old friend to try and process your feelings for Crosshair.

Click here for Part 1

Warnings: 18+, a bit more frisky business but not full on so rated 18 just to be safe. Swearing.

Word Count: 2.6k

Author’s Notes: You ask, you get!! Thanks so much for all the support and love for part 1 ❤️. As a thank you, I bring you part 2, I hope you enjoy! If this one takes off a bit as well, I do have an idea for a little bonus chapter around the Bad Batches' reaction. As always, feedback/comments are massively appreciated along with reblogs. Fic is below the cut off, thanks for reading!!

Taglist: @aerynwrites @shannon-lynn-21 @saltywintersoldat @tired-night-owl @wille-zarr

A comm alarm beeped softly, slowly pulling you out your slumber. Giving the device a sleepy glare, you shut it off and huffed back onto your bunk. Wrecker’s snores were echoing off the small ship barracks, you rolled your eyes at his sleeping form across the room as you swung your legs over the side of your top bunk. Below you, Tech slept soundly, he managed to fall asleep with his goggles on which were now sitting wonky on his relaxed face. He also had a datapad clutched to his chest, almost like a teddy bear, which made you chuckle to yourself.

You’d barely slept after getting back from the mission but being a General stopping over on Coruscant meant rest would be a pipe dream. Your alarm was set to get you out of bed and ready for the first of what you were sure would be a hundred and ten briefings today. You were always happy to shoulder the politics for the team, removing that burden from Hunter so they could keep to themselves. But today, you could really do without it.

You looked over at Hunter and Crosshair’s bunks, the former sleeping up top with an arm over his eyes. Probably to block out the few small coloured lights on the ship that shone from critical systems, preventing the room from being truly pitch black. You didn’t envy Hunter’s enhanced senses, they seemed to cause him quite a bit of discomfort when they weren’t on missions. You should probably pick him up an eye mask one of these days.

Below him, Crosshair slept with his back to the open room. One of the few times you ever saw his body relaxed was when he slept. You cringed as you remembered yesterday’s awkwardness with the sniper and mentally cursed at yourself for causing, what was, an easily avoidable situation.

Shaking your head you jumped silently off of your bunk, mindful to not wake any of the batch. You gently removed Tech’s goggles, placing them in their usual spot before moving over to grab some fresh robes and head for the fresher. Today was going to be a real drag.

—————————————————

“Hey! Look what the Lothcat dragged in” someone called after you as you trudged up the steps to the GAR Headquarters. You turned around to see none other than Anakin Skywalker jogging up behind you.

“Nice to see you too Skyguy” he chuckled at the nickname as he threw an arm around your shoulders.

You fell into companionable chatter as you made your way to your first meeting, the dark halls of the military headquarters looking indistinguishable as you attempted to find the correct room. Members of the Coruscant Guard patrolled the halls, nodding politely to you both as you strolled past.

Eventually you found the room where Mace, Plo and Luminara were waiting, along with some clone and human high command. You stood outside the door for a moment, readying yourself to seal your fate of being talked at for a solid eight standard hours.

Eventually you caved, mostly as you were on the verge of being late if you debated standing outside any longer. Begrudgingly, you sat through briefing after briefing. All the voices and different rooms blending into one grey blur as you tried to take in what information you could, but your tired and stressed mind was having none of it.

While it was nice to catch up with some of the other Jedi, you always felt a bit out of place among the perfect members of the council. More so now than ever.

You ended up wandering back to the temple with Anakin where you both retired to his room and you flopped down onto his simple bed with a whine.

“Okay, what’s going on? You’ve been off all day” Anakin was the closest thing you had to a brother, you trained as Padawans together and due to your similar age you became fast friends. You knew about his marriage to Padme and decided that if you could offload your dilemma on anyone, it’d be him.

“I fucked up” you groaned out from behind your hands.

“What’d you do?” Anakin replied in a playful tone.

“I might’ve got a bit hot and heavy with one of the clones in my squad, led him on and then cut it off” Anakin raised an eyebrow at your confession. “And now he’s pissed at me”

“Why?” You weren’t entirely sure which part of that entire thing he was questioning.

“Because I started the whole thing, I wanted it. Then all of a sudden I did that whole guilty Jedi, must follow every word of the order thing, gave him some pathetic look which said really sorry I can’t have attachments mate, hope you understand. He called me out on it before I could even utter the banthashit excuse and then he stomped off and hasn’t spoken to me since.”

“In his defence, seems like he was probably wound a little tight” Anakin replied with a chuckle which you just groaned at.

“He has every right to be pissed. Hells, I would be if the roles were reversed. Whats with this whole self-righteous act us Jedi have going on?”

“Look, it’s hard being a Jedi at the best of times. It takes an inhumane amount of self-control, which is why its not a path for the weak. But being a Jedi while at war… it’s a lot. You’re emotions are running high, you’re forming bonds with soldiers on the battlefield that you shouldn’t be, but none of us can help it because it’s uncharted territory. Maker knows I’d hunt down anyone who hurt Obi-Wan or my Captain. Yes, It’s not the Jedi way, but neither is fighting a grand-scale war.” Anakin’s eyes were alive with emotion as he spoke, be he quickly caught himself and then it was gone.

“My point is, don’t beat yourself up so much. No one is getting kicked out the order or in his case reconditioned if that’s what you’re worried about. Figure out what it is you want, and then just be discreet about it” you looked at Anakin like he’d grown two heads, he just winked at your confused stare.

“Okay let’s keep it simple. Are you attracted to him?” You thought back to the night before and firmly nodded in response.

“Do you like him as a person?” You pondered his question.

“Well, it’s Cross. I wasn’t sure if he even liked me for a long time. He’s closed off, anti-social, but he’s also a good guy, cares about his brothers, has saved my ass multiple times, and he is kinda funny in his own, snide way” you rattled off with fondness in your words.

“Well then I suggest you go and talk to him.” Anakin replied, giving you a knowing look when he spotted the small smile on your lips as you spoke about the sniper.

You took a deep breath, glad to have finally gotten that off your chest and feeling content that you now knew what to do next. “Thanks, Ani”

“Ugh please don’t call me that” he moaned back, apparently only Padme was allowed to get away with that one.

————————————————

Your walk back to the Marauder felt like it dragged on and on. Your brain ran over a thousand scenarios of what to say, how he’d react and you were about to short circuit. There was so much risk, so much possibility, that you did your best to shut your mind off and let yourself handle it in the moment. These things never went as planned anyway, it was best not to guess.

The large door to the ship hissed open, your boots clanking on the metal surface as you cautiously walked into your home. It didn’t take you long to find Crosshair, he was sat in the main hull methodically cleaning his hand blaster. Everyone else must’ve been asleep. He was just in his blacks, the material hugging him in the most wonderful way, it’s like whoever designed those things was trying to trip you up. The contours of his arm muscles flexing as he worked, his strong chest looked practically chiselled at the heart of his lean frame. You had to force yourself to calm down a little bit.

“Uh, hey” you greeted awkwardly. “Mind if I join you?”

You took his silence as a well he’s not saying no. He didn’t spare you a glance as you walked in and took a seat opposite him. As a General in the GAR, you rarely got nervous. War, as a concept, was simple. You knew your purpose, your objective, you had a job to get done and you’d do it. The risks never stopped you, rather they fuelled you. Probably why you’re such a good fit for the bad batch.

But this right now, personal feelings, not knowing where you stand with someone you care about. Because if you were honest, you really did care about Crosshair, the same as you did the rest of the team. You’d only been with the squad just under a year but you’d gladly lay down your life for any of them in a heartbeat. If you could at least get back to where you were before the other night, you’d be over the moon.

You weren’t used to being so nervous, you let your hands fiddle with you dark Jedi robes as you readied yourself to speak again.

“Look, I’m not here to throw some crap about being a Jedi at you, I promise. And I’m sorry for trying it before” he still didn’t look at you, finding his blaster much more interesting. But you could tell he was listening, you had his attention. Might as well keep babbling.

“In terms of an explanation for what happened yesterday, well I guess I panicked.” You sighed as you tried to find the next words “The way you made me feel that night, I… I’ve never felt like that before and everything i’d been taught over the years screamed at me that what I was doing was dangerous and wrong. I now realise that I’m just an idiot. I make my own decisions and I… uh -well, I stick by that one, starting something that is.” Still nothing.

“I know this is probably a long shot. But in the interest of being transparent” you rambled “uh… if you want to go down that road again, I’m up for seeing what happens, can be as casual as we like. I promise I won’t freak out on you again.” You chuckled and thought you almost spotted a slight pull in the corner of Crosshair’s lips “But if you want to go back to how we were before, I’d also really like that.” You watched him for a while as he gave no acknowledgement of your words, his cleaning finished as he now gave the weapon a once over in his hands. Having said everything you needed, you got up from your seat, looking away from him.

“Well, if I can do anything else, let me know” you turned on your heel to leave, feeling slightly defeated but glad you’d at least made the first step.

“I could think of a few things” he finally spoke as he leaned back into his seat and continued to stare at his blaster, still not meeting your gaze.

Well that caught your attention, you turned back around to face him as he carried on ignoring you. While his tone was unbothered as he spoke, you knew him just enough to know his words held a meaning. He was playing with you, back to his usual teasing and you could’ve laughed at the relief that washed over you. This you could work with. A cheeky idea popped into your head and you’d decided to run with it.

“Oh really?” Throwing caution to the wind, you strode over to the sniper slowly. His gaze finally meeting yours after all this time, watching you as you got closer and closer. Practically drawing you in with his amber eyes. You pushed him back by his chest, creating enough room so you could straddle his lap. “Care to elaborate?”

He huffed out a short laugh at your words, his face overall unbothered but his eyes, they were burning into you. “You’re a smart girl, I’m sure you’ll figure it out”.

You hummed in response, deciding to kick things up a notch you wrapped your arms around his neck, bringing your faces just breaths apart. “Something like this?” You asked, pausing for another second before bringing your lips to his in a surprisingly soft and gentle kiss. You felt his hands come up to rest on your back, pulling you closer as you continued your slow dance. This was so different from the other night, where before there was desperation and lust, now there was something more… tender, passionate. You were quite glad you weren’t standing as the way he moved against you would’ve definitely made your knees weak.

Dragging yourself away from his lips, you searched his face. His mouth pulled into a barely there smirk “That’s a start.”

“Who said I was finished?” And just like that, the last few strands of tension between you both snapped and you relaxed in his arms. You fisted your hands into the front of his blacks and pulled him back to you, his tongue slipped between your lips, curious and demanding. He was everywhere again, filling your nose with the scent of the standard cheap GAR soap but mixed with something earthy, something so distinctly Crosshair and you couldn’t get enough.

You could tell why the Jedi order frowned upon such activities, kissing Crosshair was intoxicating. You couldn’t think of anything else other than the handsome clone in front of you and just how much you wanted him in that moment.

His hands wandered lower and lower down you back until they rested comfortably on your backside, pulling you further up his lap. Feeling mischievous, you started trailing kisses along his jaw. Setting a teasing, languid pace as you mapped out the spots that made him squirm. Crosshair was never a man of many words, so you made it your mission to see just how vocal you could make him.

As your lips met his pulse point, he gave a loud exhale and you smirked in victory against his skin as you continued the onslaught on his senses. You definitely seemed to be doing something right as his hands found themselves in your hair, clutching slightly and you couldn’t help the soft moan that escaped you. Even while trying to gain the upper hand in the situation, he always had some control over you. It was maddening in the best way, setting your veins alight with desire.

Determined to get another victory you traced your tongue against the base of the side of his neck and trailed it all the way up to the bottom of his ear, which you teasingly took into your mouth, teeth grazing the soft skin. A strangled moan escaped the clone and that was the moment where you knew you were hopelessly and utterly gone. Your mind filled with nothing other than wanting to be closer to Crosshair.

“Not very Jedi of you” he commented, slightly breathless when you finally stopped teasing him and came back up to meet his eyes. Looking down at where your bodies were pressed against one another, you chuckled.

“What exactly about this situation led you to believe I was ever a model Jedi?” You smirked, though it was only visible for a second before his mouth was back on yours, devouring you as his hands greedily roamed your body.

You continued making out like teenagers for most of the evening, taking the time to explore each other, enjoying the closeness. Contentment settled over your body, almost as if this was were you were meant to be. If Crosshair’s arms were where you belonged, well, you could think of worse places to be.

Back to Part 1

Back to Masterlist

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albino-whumpee · 3 years

Text

Introduction

Superhero whump for practice and to set me into a writing mood again. Or a creating mood again. Idk anymore. Hope you like it! Also to fill my @badthingshappenbingo card, with prompt “pinned by wreckage”

This is a series

Masterlist

CW// blood, villain whumpee, superhero caretaker, gruff caretaker, enemies to friends?, murder mention, dub con bondage, impaled limb, defiant whumpee, field medicine and captivity.

Among the gravel and devastation, someone sweated the big drop just trying to get to someone. The quiet was made of the crackling fire and rocks sliding under their step; their “friends” long gone to be celebrated for their did. After years of endless, tiresome battles, they had brought Villain down.

However the hero that had turned off the microphone on the collar around their neck wasn’t sure their team had been heroic at all.

Villain had self destructed after being surrounded without escape. Fearing what they might do with them once captured, they blew up their whole base. Or that’s what the leader told the rest.

Hero spent hours after dawn searching. Digging and clinging to any little sound. After a few hours of smelling nothing but dust and their own blood, they found them. The hero’s breathing slowed looking at villain so utterly defenseless, dirty with blood pooling below them because of how a piece of the fallen building impaled one of their arms, and still somehow, when Hero got closer, was able to pull a scowl.

“Don’t get any closer, hero…” they said between laboured pants.

“Can you stop me?” They stepped forward regardless of their hissing. Hero was slightly amused of Villain recoiling their legs closer, away from their reach. “You lost, Villain”

Their eyes widened before pressing their lips into a tight line “Not yet, I… Im not yet-º

“There’s nothing left. It’s done” they cut them off, now towering over them. “And if you don’t treat that arm you will be done for, too”

“What?” Villain blurted out as Hero placed their hands over the metal structure “The hell are you doing?! Get off!” They screamed throwing weak punches at Hero’s legs and shins. They pushed with all their strength, grunting under their breath and panting harder before wheezing out of the effort. A few drips of blood stained hero’s boots “You’re not taking me to lock me up. That’s. Not. Happening.” they snarled with the fury of a wild animal that’s desperately fighting to get off a hunter’s trap. “Not when I was so close… I won’t let that happen!”

Hero looked from above at the pitiful image of their enemy trying to pointlessly push them away while taking their last breaths.

“They told me to leave you to die” Hero admitted suddenly. Catching villain off guard and throwing them off enough to make them look up at them in surprise. “If I found you alive, they told me to kill you slowly. If I found you half dead, to watch and bring your corpse” Hero’s dark eyes usually had a gleam Villain despised. But hopefulness wasn’t on the eyes that looked down on the dirty villain before them. Both of them knew that but Villain sighed a harsh breath.

After a long moment, Villain kept their eyes trained down, they spoke in a weak voice “They said I…ah, deserved that, didn’t they?”

“Yes”

Villain stilled and their bleeding arm tensed up, blood speeding down at the pressure before Villain released with a whimper. Their voice was empty and completely uncharacteristic of the Villain they knew “Maybe you should listen to them”

“Maybe” the hero said placing their hands over the metal again, firmly buckling their elbows in preparation “But if we’re done dealing with you I can choose for myself” they continued at the same time they freed their arm and Villain cried out.

Villain cradled their injured arm close, losing energy by the second and already tired out from the previous battle, Hero didn’t have to use their super strength to treat their injuries with the medical glue. An sticky white material that was applied with a gun and acted as a plug to stop the bleeding on deep injuries. They had pierced their arm in two sections, forearm and triceps, too close to the center and maybe too dangerous to have only the glue working when Villain was that pale from blood loss. They had to get somewhere else and get better treatment.

But Villain made one last effort to avoid their fate being suddenly placed on Hero’s hands, trying to jump away and falling into a pit filled with water from a busted out pipe. They crawled. Or tried to, but they had no more energy to lift themselves up the ground. Consciousness slipping, they felt themselves get scooped up, a warmth they despised, firmly against their cheek as the world turned white around the edges.

In Hero’s back, with the sway of their trot over the remains of their base, Villain cried helplessly. After so long, it was really over. Them and their work and everything they longed for was…gone. They could see the devastation beyond the ruins. They knew they were no saint, but now after losing, had it been worth it? All the sacrifices made?

They had dreams they took a long, long time to even imagine them. Much more setting them into motion. But they weren’t on the side that get their dreams realized, were they?

“Why?” Villain suddenly asked as Hero was getting back to their airship hidden in the woods, now just a few dead branches from the aftershock of the buildings collapsing.

“Why what?”

Villain couldn’t even find it in them to open their eyes. No energy left to fight either. There was no point now “You’re a…special kind of naive for…helping me when you’re killing me anyways” they said, controlling their breathing to not give out how tired they were. Hero probably already knew, anyways, by how they hanged limp on their back.

“Im not killing you”

“Same thing as locking me up” Hero stayed quiet a second. The sound of their boots crunching the dirt and loose branches didn’t stop.

“I won’t do that either”

Villain laughed wryly “Not just naive but stupid too”

“Guess stupid people stick together” Hero stopped a second to readjust their grip on Villain. A careful hop that let their head rest against their broad back, before they continued and Villain heard the engine of the airship.

“Dunno, your squad isn’t here…” Villain’s stomach churned at the frustration of getting carried into their enemy’s ship, hopelessly under their mercy. Just about to fill every nightmare they had relentlessly tried to avoid. But there was something about the way Hero laughed as they carefully laid them on the bed with nylon belts that ignited a doubt, a little spark of hope that Villain shoved down. In a situation like that hope didn’t have room anymore.

“I wasn’t talking about them” Hero said before eyeing the belts and sighing. Trouble noticeable in their face before deciding to speak again “We will fly to get you help but I need you to be still. I’m sorry but I’ll have to restrain you”

Villain snorted and gave a breathy laugh that ended in them pressing their mouth shut trying to cover the wince of pain from moving their arm. “Your lot never asked before” Villain shakily crossed their arms over their chest, and a dark thought tingled on Hero’s mind. Villain seemed to know exactly how the restraints of the airship worked already. They had never managed to capture them so why..? Villain panted harder and Hero pulled their attention on cinching the belts around them. Over their legs and the three over their chest, careful of the injured arm and passing one over their forehead. They were leaving to the cabin, when Villain talked again. “Neck. You forgot”

“My, you’re chattier than I thought” Hero said not moving an inch to buckle the belt over their neck. Villain opened their eyes and looked up at the metal ceiling, unable to turn or toss their head around. Only barely able to recline their head back a little. Honestly surprised to not been muzzled already.

They smiled at the inverted image of Hero “Just enjoying freedom as long as I can”

“Im not- “ Hero rubbed their temples before sighing long “We will talk about this later, but You can be sure of something, Villain” Hero said walking to the pilot seat and retracting the wheels as they heard the other take a deep breath and wince because of the constriction if the belts. As Hero’s ship went up and prepared for quick transport they added “I’m not giving up on you. Everyone can change”

Villain felt the pull on their stomach they knew so well and closed their eyes. Focusing on keeping an steady breath to not give in to panic.

“We’ll see about that”

#scars for redemption #villain whumpee #sidekick whumper #villain whumper #hero caretaker #whump #writing #my writing #hurt comfort #angst #captivity #River the villain #whumper turned whumpee #creepy whumper #collars #pet whump #superhero whump

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bambeptin · 3 years

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the map of infinity was wild as hell: an analysis

ok, let's get this out of the way first: there's no reason why Professor Paradox had to make the Map of Infinity other than "for fun".

which makes sense! he’s immortal, he’s been travelling for a while, and he’s likely very, very, very bored. anything he does is probably to chase new stimuli. his sense of morality is off, from human standards.

it's the complete space-time map of 17 different dimensions, which Paradox doesn't technically need, since he has the Chrononavigator and his own innate time powers. he doesn't even need it to reach the Forge of Creation, since he can literally just like, walk there whenever. Paradox was the person that made the barrier between the Forge and the rest of the Universe in the first place. was it even always outside of the universe? did he send it out there? I imagine it sort of went like this:

"boy, am I bored today!"

"let's see if I can make an in-depth map of a bunch of different dimensions"

fought Celestialsapiens when he reached the Forge of Creation, K6BD-style. they can't kill him (his powerset matches up well against theirs) and he can't kill them all (and they’re starting to mess with his time plans), so eventually they agree to a treaty. he found the war sorta fun

bored again

"what do I do with this map I made? destroy it? no, that would be pointless..."

"oh! I know!"

"split it into 4 parts, 2 of which are keystones to a world and 2 of which are in death trap temples, because that would be 1. fun to make and 2. could lead to fun situations in the future"

let's go over them all!

Map Piece 1. Mykdl'dy

gesundheit. if you don’t remember this planet, it’s the half hot/half cold one that Paradox made a death trap temple on, which is now guarded by Necrofriggian cultists.

"welcome to my crib....... I enjoyed creating brutalism-inspired shapes of dark grey prisms against the ever-changing backdrop of ice and fire. in front are two statues of a mysterious person in robes, because I thought it would look cool. within are some dastardly traps that I designed myself, so watch out! the Necrofriggian colonists making a religion out of it wasn't my intention though. it's just a coincidence that they're the same species as the statues! I felt like the high point of this temple is dragon-wyrm that I created! the acid is a fantastic extra touch.”

“dungeon design is my passion.”

it seems like he decorated the inner parts the most, lovingly, with his shade of blue, used a bunch of magical spells (presumably; elaborated on later) for that part too, then realized that it would be a bit of a pain decorating the rest of the place and made the rest plainer. I wonder if he made it all himself, or like, hired some dudes

Map Piece 2. Piscciss

it’s hidden as the anti-gravity multiplier that holds Piscciss together.

“huh?” you might ask. “why would that piece have that power?”

I don’t know, maybe they all had that power or something. maybe if Aggregor just took one and started blasting everyone with anti-gravity the arc would be over way faster. maybe it’s magic. maybe Paradox is fucking with you.

“wait???” you might ask next. “it’s hidden as WHAT????”

that’s right! this is the little thing that keeps Piscciss a planet and not a bunch of water filled with dead fish floating around in space. “haha yeah this works perfectly... trust me it's not a macguffin that will be stolen and break your planet apart and someone in the future will have to sacrifice an alien to replace it lol...” - Paradox handing the anti-gravity multiplier to the Piscciss Volann when they were making an artificial water planet for them to live on

either that or the Piscciss Volann stumbled on the piece in an unseen other death trap temple, found its powers, and decided to use it, which sort of goes against the whole “Paradox hid all the pieces” thing if he simply never checked up on them

Map Piece 3. Perplexahedron

I know they went to Ledgerdomain third but that is saved for the end because it’s fucking mental. so we’re gonna talk about the Perplaxahedron. it’s the cube from Cube (1997).

if you don’t know what that is, it’s an absolutely huge artificial planet/building that’s entirely made of death traps. each new room is an exciting and fresh way to die. invigorating! while it does have a simple design, it’s efficient at what it does, and the clinical nature adds to the theme of being an unknowable deadly object. that’s what he probably describes it as anyways. again, did he build all of that himself? can I make a “Paradox construction squad” OC?

maybe Paradox made these dudes to help build the place, and kept them around as guards, because that’s efficiency.

this dude’s sole purpose in life is to wait there and hand over the Map of Infinity piece to whoever’s smart enough to get inside. I assume Paradox made him, because he disappears from reality like ten minutes after he hands it out, but Paradox has hired people to be guards in his temples before. the pay must be really good. maybe their culture is like that. maybe he didn’t disappear and actually it was an actor to squeeze the most drama out of the universe.

anyways, if he was real, Ben basically ruined his life before he died by tossing out the very important piece of the Map to Aggregor for basically no reason. oops!

Map Piece 4. Ledgerdomain

“he can reach the Forge of Creation. so obviously he can reach Ledgerdomain, a dimension of pure mana. what’s the problem?” well, there’s really no problem. it’s quite cool! no, what’s wild is that nobody really thinks about the ramifications of this piece of the Map of Infinity. for a refresher, this is what it’s hidden as:

“It is an object as old as time itself, through which all magic flows. It is the keeper of the true name of [Ledgerdomain]; source of ultimate power! And it is mine!“ - Charmcaster

the secret true name of magic. if you have it, you have power over magic itself. it can revive the dead or instantly kill people. that power corrupts its wielder easily. also, if it’s removed from Ledgerdomain, the realm loses all natural entry/exit points, destabilizes, and begins the crumble. that’s right! it’s the Alpha Rune.

Paradox is confirmed to have actually made the Alpha Rune, not just hidden a piece as the Rune. I implore you to think about what that entails.

he knows magic (3-page minicomic I made about that topic). he doesn’t just know magic, he knows the secret name of magic, automatically making him a disgustingly powerful mage. either that or it’s possible to get the secret name of magic without knowing magic, which is fine too, but just being around the Alpha Rune makes you able to cast spells. he probably ripped the Alpha Rune from the Omniverse and bound it to his will because he had nothing else better to do that day. could he make even more Alpha Runes (even if they’re weaker copies), since it knows it already? did making it into Rune form rip it from his own mind? I like to think that the reason why he can’t lie is because if he does, his latent magical abilities will automatically attempt to cast a spell to make it real.

here are three ways you can interpret “Paradox made the Alpha Rune”.

he found the secret name of magic and made the Alpha Rune out of it

he literally made the secret name of magic. i.e. he made magic itself. that would be wild as hell.

the writers didn’t really think about the ramifications of any part of the Map of Infinity past “cool artifact”, which, to be honest, fair enough.

he probably finds all the magic really useful, since it helps streamline all of his temples and stuff. all of the bright blue lines connected to Paradox’s creations might even be magic! or his time powers.

by the way, he pulls the same split-something-into-pieces-and-hide-them-with-death-traps stunt with Maltruant, so I think this is his hobby.

#human au paradox runs an escape room business #the time war is even in a closed-off time loop which is very impressive. i dont even think maltruant knows who paradox is #ben 10 #professor paradox #paradox is eldritch in my mind and you'll never take it away from me #meta #long post

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gellavonhamster · 3 years

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ghost stories

Suicide Squad (2016) || characters: El Diablo feat. everyone else || post-canon, sort of a fix-it

ao3 link eng || this was first written and published on ao3 in Russian in 2016 but I didn't attempt to translate it into English back then.

Harley is the first to see him.

She catches the smell first. Something appears to be burning, and she checks cautiously if there is something wrong with the coffee machine. She doesn’t find anything suspicious – not that the appliances about to flame up smell like that anyway. Could it be that there’s a fire starting? That would be funny, but seems like there’s hardly a chance. It is the smell of a bonfire at the beach, of the fallen leaves being burned in the yards in fall, of a melting candle in the church; weirdly, all this at the same time. A smell that seems too pure for Belle Reve, for Gotham, for everything that makes up her life these days.

Harley looks around once again – and springs to her feet like she’s been stung.

Chato Santana is standing next to her cage.

“Diablo?” she whispers, unable to believe her eyes. She would’ve thought she’s lost her marbles if there were any left to lose.

“Harley,” says Diablo, and it’s his voice, his shy, sad smile, his eyes and his tattoos, and Harley squeals in delight as she rushes to him. The bars of the cage are live, so she only dares to stick out the tips of her fingers. He touches them with his hand – certainly alive, certainly not a product of her mind being tortured by boredom and monotony – and she laughs.

“You’re alive, alive, alive! How did you survive? And how did they let you in?”

“It’s a long story. And I don’t think I have much time,” Diablo looks guilty. He’s still holding her hand and looking at her so earnestly it’s almost worrying. “Harley… don’t go with him.”

“Huh? What do you mean, honey?”

“He’s coming here. Don’t leave with him, Harley, stay. It sounds strange, but this would really be for the best.”

“Don’t leave with whom?” she can’t follow him. He gives her a melancholic look – and suddenly disappears. Without any smoke or flames or any other special effects. She can’t wrap her head around how it happened – it’s just that he was here a moment ago, and now there’s no one beside her, and she’s reaching out towards nothing.

“Diablo?” she calls, and when she gets no answer, she decides to get things straight by asking the guards. What kind of cruel joke is this? Only one person is allowed to joke here, and that person is her. “Hello there! Mister jailer, yoo-hoo! Where’s my friend?”

No one is in a hurry to respond. Finally, one of the armed-to-the-teeth guards approaches the cage.

“Why are you yelling, lady?”

“Where’s my friend?” Harley asks petulantly. “He was here just now, and we didn’t finish talking. Where did you take him?”

“There was no one here.”

“What do you mean ‘no one’? I just talked to him!”

The guard examines her from head to foot. Looks like he’s chewing gum, which, combined with his empty apathetic stare, makes him look like a cow.

“Definitely crazy,” he sums up, and leaves. Irritated, Harley forgets to take caution, hits the bars and falls down on the floor right away, writhing in pain.

“Well, well, well,” she whispers, playing the recent events over in her head. Chato was very much corporeal – not a ghost, then. Yet the guards didn’t notice him, and then he vanished into thin air. Harley thinks about the being Chato transformed into by the end of the battle – an ancient one, as if straight from the walls of some Aztec temple. Could some petty bomb kill such a being? Could the Enchantress’s brother have survived too?

“I am friends with a god,” she informs the ceiling. “Incredible.”

About an hour later, her Puddin’ comes for her, and she forgets the advice Diablo gave her.

Croc sees him on the night of the same day. He knows for sure that it is night thanks to the TV listings – the only reference point for time and days of the week that he has. Not that it was bothering him too much, truth be told. Monday or Sunday, every day in Belle Reve is a carbon copy of the day before. However, Croc doesn’t complain. He has a roof over his head, water, food – even better food than he used to have in the sewers in days gone by – and a TV, and it is honestly not too hard to do without such extras as companionship and fresh experiences. Still, he is glad to see Diablo. Even though first he lunges at him with his fangs bared, because he doesn’t immediately recognize him and supposes that Waller and company are sick of feeding him and decided to kill him. Or to put someone else in his quarters, which would have been no less audacious.

“Croc, it’s me,” Diablo hastens to say, and lights up a flame over his left palm – so unusual and out of place in the dampness of Croc’s cell. Croc freezes and watches the flame for some seconds. That must really be Diablo; there are hardly many people in the world capable of such tricks.

“Hey, man,” Croc says. “Whatcha doing here?”

“Just checking up on you.”

Well, that must definitely be Diablo. Croc knows that there are hardly many people in the world who’d care to check up on him, but that sounds like something El Diablo would do. Back then, during the mission, he was friendly, asked “You okay?” after each skirmish, and could clap him on the shoulder without shuddering. And there are definitely even less people in the world that would touch him willingly.

“Did they just let you in like that?” wonders Croc. Diablo gives him a slight smile.

“They don’t know I’m here.”

“So you’re, like, a ghost?” Croc asks. It occurred to him from the very beginning, but it sounds particularly joyless when said out loud.

Diablo gestures vaguely. “I’m still figuring it out myself, to be honest.”

“Hmm,” Croc glances over his cell. A bag of food on the cot catches his eye. “You want a burger?”

“Nah, I’m good. Save it for yourself.”

“They’ll bring more today, I’m telling ya.”

“Then I want one.”

“Then you’re not a ghost,” grins Croc, and the fact that Diablo doesn’t flinch or try to look away also proves that this is the real Chato Santana, because most people don’t like seeing Croc smile.

And so he and Diablo, who kind of is a ghost but kind of isn’t, sit there eating burgers and watching some crap on MTV. Life has taught Croc not to be surprised by anything, so everything’s fine.

“So what happened after the bomb went off?” Croc asks. Diablo opens his mouth, and then closes it again, apparently at a loss how to explain.

“I was smoke,” he speaks finally. “Then I was flames. Then I became myself again.”

“I see,” Croc replies, although, of course, he can’t see shit.

“Who are you talking to?” comes the guard’s voice from behind the door. “Hey, scum!”

Croc puts the burger aside.

“Wait a bit,” he tells Chato, gets up, and heads for the door.

When he comes to the bean hole, the guard already looks like he regrets calling him.

“No one,” Crock smiles as widely as only he can, and the guard, who isn’t among the people able to watch him smile without blinking an eye, steps back reflexively. “But come inside, and I’ll talk to you if you wanna. How about that?”

When he turns around, Chato has already disappeared, and Croc could have assumed he has dreamed it all, but there are two half-eaten burgers on the cot, not one.

Digger sees him next, and he isn’t even amazed. The bastards keep drugging him with all sorts of shit to calm him down. Usually after the shot he just lies there, feverish, and can’t even move, let alone stand up, but who knows, perhaps they’re testing some new poison on him. Or they’ve started using something stronger because they noticed that a couple of hours after the usual stuff he’s already able to yell, bang at the door, and do everything he can to get the best of them while cooped up inside. Or it’s simply that there’s already so much of this shit in his blood that it’s impossible not to have any screws loose, try as he might to keep them in place. In any case, he’s not exactly shocked when, as he tosses and turns on the floor after another injection, he turns his head and sees El Diablo, large as life and twice as ugly.

“Fuck me sideways,” Digger says. He doesn’t have any energy to be mad yet. “I must be tripping.”

“You’re not tripping,” Diablo objects.

“You died. So I must be.”

“I didn’t die either.”

Diablo sits down cross-legged on the floor next to him.

“Has it crossed your mind that if you stop getting on their nerves, they might start treating you better?” he asks.

“Go to hell.”

“Message received.”

There’s a footfall outside; a whole bunch of people must be running somewhere.

“They’ve turned the entire joint upside down,” says Digger, because it’s been ages since he has spoken to anyone who’d at least pretend to listen, so a hallucination will do. “Blondie escaped.”

“I know,” Diablo replies gloomily. “I tried to warn her not to go with the Joker, but she didn’t listen to me.”

“Why warn her?” Digger asks. Harley Quinn is no bosom friend of his, but she kind of tore out the heart of the witch who kind of tried to end the world, and anyway, teammates probably should take interest in each other’s lives. Probably. He’s never really made sense of that teamwork stuff. “What’s he gonna do to her?”

“At best, what he always does.”

Two tiny figures of fire appear on Diablo’s open palm – a man and a woman. The man backhands the woman across her face, and she falls down. Digger watches the dancing flames with fascination, and meanwhile in his head, bit by bit, stroke by stroke, a plan starts to take shape. He wouldn’t be Captain motherfucking Boomerang if he fails to use any opportunity that turns up – even a ghost of one.

“Listen, mate,” he begins cajolingly. “If you’re really here and it’s not just me tripping… help an old friend out, won’t you? I’m fed up with being stuck here, you know.”

“I’m not gonna help you escape,” Diablo says calmly. “How do you imagine that would even happen?”

“Can’t you just burn the entire Belle Reve to the bloody ground?”

Diablo smiles.

“I can,” he admits. “But I won’t.”

The next thing he knows, the son of a bitch is gone without a trace. Anger and offence must be giving Digger strength, because he manages to leap to his feet. Like a lunatic, he thrashes around the cell, looking for at least some kind of proof that someone else was here a moment ago.

“Oi!” he shouts, knowing damn well that the guards have long stopped listening to what he has to say. “Grab the devil! A convict escaped! Hey, wankers!”

But he’s feeling lightheaded, and this shit must be really strong, and he collapses, badly hitting his head.

Tatsu sees him next – late at night, in her apartment. She’s a light sleeper, and wakes up as soon as she hears footsteps. The sword is close at hand, and she grabs it instantly, blade swishing through the air.

“Who’s there?” Tatsu asks, and then repeats in English. “Who’s there?”

There is nowhere to hide in her bedroom. The only furniture is the mattress and the pair of chairs she uses to hang her clothes on. Everything is on the floor or on the windowsill – weapons, her laptop, the book she tried to read before going to sleep but could not concentrate on. It is an ascetic, comfortless dwelling that does not look permanent and is not supposed to become so. Fate and Amanda Waller, though, seem to have other plans in this respect.

There is nowhere to hide in her bedroom – but someone’s definitely walking in the antechamber; she flings the door open – and sees El Diablo, standing by the entrance and looking around. In a blink of an eye Tatsu is next to him, and the blade of the Soultaker is pressed to his neck.

“Katana, it’s me,” Diablo says, unfazed. “Chato Santana.”

“Chato Santana is dead,” she says through her teeth. Chato Santana was a gangster who killed, albeit by a tragic accident, his own family – but she fought side by side with him, he sacrificed himself to save the world, he called their squad his family and died for them. That is enough for her not to let anyone use his name as a cover. “Who are you?”

“I’m alive,” Diablo replies. He puts his hands up to show he’s unarmed, and forks of flame appear on his palms. “Or sort of.”

Sort of.

Tatsu lowers the sword and looks warily at the man standing in front of her.

“How did you…”

“You’re gonna have a new mission soon. Demand that Waller tells you everything.”

“About what?”

“I couldn’t overhear that,” he says with regret. “But…”

Something knocks on the window. Tatsu turns around quickly, but that must’ve been just a tree branch hitting the windowpane. When she turns back to Chato, he’s already gone, and her apartment is silent.

It’s just four in the morning, but she can’t make herself fall asleep again. Having poured a cup of tea, Tatsu sits down on the mattress and thinks, think, thinks about what just happened. Tatsu believes in ghosts – her sword is teeming with them, so she wouldn’t say that her worldview is shaken. Still, this is strange, very strange. What did he want to tell her? Why did he disappear so abruptly? Like… a broadcast was interrupted.

Colonel Flag calls her at daybreak and tells her that there’s a shoot-out between two gangs on the outskirts of Gotham, with metahumans on both sides. When Tatsu arrives at Belle Reve, it turns out they must have considered it to be not enough to ruin her Saturday morning, because she is asked – more like ordered, actually – to escort an inmate from his cell, an inmate who attacks anyone who tries to enter and has already injured three guards with his bare hands, and it’s not reasonable to sedate him before the mission, and “he’s likely to obey if it’s you, Katana” – the last is Rick’s argument, and if he told that to her face and not on the phone, she would have had to strain every nerve not to hit him with something.

No one tries to attack her when she enters the cell of Captain Boomerang – Harkness is sitting on the floor quite still, his arms around his knees, and when he notices her, he even smiles with bruised lips.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he says. “Am I hallucinating you too?”

“No,” the question is unexpected and confuses her. “Why?”

“Well, they keep injecting me some crap, and lately I’ve been seeing things,” Harkness explains peacefully, even eagerly. His voice is quiet and hoarse, which, combined with his Australian accent, leads to Tatsu being barely able to make out half of what he’s saying. To hear him better, she crouches down next to him, still gripping the sword hilt – there is no telling if he isn’t just making her come closer to take her down and bolt. “Saw the devil yesterday.”

“The devil?”

“Our devil. Día… de fucking Muertos. Chato Santana.”

Tatsu gives a shiver and, having lost her balance, half sits down, half falls on the dirty floor.

She isn’t the only one to have seen him. She isn’t the only one he wanted to send a message to.

“Hey, luv,” Harkness frowns and reaches out to touch her knee lightly. “You all right?”

“Same as you, more or less,” she wants to reply, which of course would mean she isn’t, not at all.

“What did he tell you?” she asks him instead.

When Floyd sees him, he is hardly surprised, since the others have already warned him. Boomerang, Croc, and Katana tell him everything while they’re waiting for the helo, and had it been just Boomerang, who believes inexplicably that he has a sense of humour although he certainly doesn’t, Floyd most likely wouldn’t have believed his ghost stories, but it is even harder to believe that Croc, let alone Katana would agree to take part in such pranks. Which is why he listens to them closely and takes note: okay, then he doesn’t have to worry about his mental heath if the late Santana suddenly appears out of nowhere to give some advice or share some news or simply ask how he’s doing. So the four of them keep whispering to one another like kids at the back of the class until their transport arrives – just the four of them, which is a pity. If there is anyone on the team that he had missed a little, it’s Harley. Floyd knows some things about the Joker, for it isn’t possible, as they write in the papers, to belong to the criminal world of Gotham and not know anything about the Joker. Floyd knows what Flag had spilled to him when visiting him in his cell or escorting him there after a visit to Zoe. Floyd thinks that in his entire lifetime he hasn’t understood a thing about love – is it even possible to understand it, on the other hand? – but he feels like the mad and brilliant Harley, Harley the whimsical, Harley the loving deserves better.

“What’s with the gossiping?” Flag inquires suspiciously.

“Nothing!” Croc and Digger answer in unison, in unison, and Floyd facepalms because seriously, are they in some cheesy movie or what? They don’t tell Flag anything yet, but Floyd is almost sure that sooner or later Santana will visit him as well, because Flag is one of them too, after all. Not that he’s even trying to deny it; no one’s making him drop by Floyd’s cell every other day to chat about some nonsense through the steel door.

So Floyd is hardly surprised when, as he makes his way behind the dumpsters loading one gun after another, he notices a familiar, head-to-toe-tattooed figure standing nearby.

“There are snipers on the roof over there and around the corner of the shop,” Chato says instead of greeting. Floyd nods.

“I noticed.”

“Eight men in the drugstore on the other side of the street. Each with a machine gun.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve just been there.”

“Got it,” there’s no time for lengthy conversations. No time to say: glad you’re alive, man. No time to ascertain: are you alive, though? So he thinks over the plan of action, making a mental note to ask all these questions later, when there are no bullets whistling past their ears.

People like them deserve no guardian angels, frankly speaking, but they may have managed to earn one for all of them.

#suicide squad #el diablo #harley quinn #killer croc #captain boomerang #katana #deadshot #rick flag #dc #talk talk talk #my fic #gella talks skwad #this might have been the most challenging to translate so far #i'm so used to bookish slightly outdated speech and most of my fandoms allow that #and then bam modernity. ugh #also i know nothing about the geography of the dceu!united states. sorry about that.

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awkwardpenguinproductions · 3 years

Text

Ascent

Part 13 of Dragon of the Yuyan

Read on AO3 | Series Masterpost

Good thing I’m not afraid of heights, thinks Zuko as he peers down the sheer drop at the edge of the Northern Air Temple. The rigid glider in his hands is surprisingly light for its size, and he can feel the winds tugging on it already. Behind him, Katara stands with her own glider while Teo and Aang talk about “flying with your spirit”.

Zuko has no idea what that means, and he doesn’t really care. He’s about to fly by himself. Kai is going to be eternally jealous.

Teo instructs him and Katara on how to take off with their gliders. Katara dithers, but Zuko takes a running leap and dives off the edge. The warm (for a given value of warm) air rising up catches the glider’s wings, and Zuko is carried up with it.

He must look incredibly stupid, but he can’t help the enormous grin on his face. He’s flying, like for real flying. He leans to one side, and sharply turns. He pushes the glider’s handlebar away from himself, tilting the glider so that the front edge of the wing is higher than the back, and finds himself angled skyward and rising. Grinning like a maniac, he pushes more, until he’s nearly standing upright in the air. A quick burst of fire from his feet propels him through the rest of the flip, and the skin of his face pulls as he speeds back down to level off.

He can hear Aang cheering somewhere to his left, and on his right he can see Katara sailing sedately through the air, laughing at him.

“Show off!” She shouts at him, and Zuko grins beatifically back.

Zuko’s landing is as clumsy and ungainly as a turtleduck on land, but he’s not injured and as Kai would say, “any landing you can walk away from is a good one”. He’d been talking about tree-running at the time, during Zuko’s first outing with Chihese Squad for wilderness training, but Zuko figures that the advice could apply here as well. The scattered members of the Mechanist’s people still on the flight deck give him wide berths and various suspicious or uneasy glances, and Zuko winces as he realizes that everyone has seen his firebending propulsion trick. So much for keeping a low profile.

Aang and Teo come to land as well, and while Aang easily bounces up to Zuko crowing about his trick, Teo is more cautious, slowly wheeling up with a guarded expression on his face.

“Aang…?” He says hesitantly. “You know that Lee’s a firebender?”

“He’s my firebending teacher,” Aang says staunchly. “He’s risking a lot to help me, and I trust him completely.”

Teo looks dubious for a moment, but then the three of them are distracted by Katara screeching about swallowing a bug and wanting to come in to land. Aang helps guide her in, and Zuko catches and steadies her as she lands and untangles herself from the glider.

“Thanks, Lee!” Katara says, patting him on the shoulder. Zuko grins at her.

“You’re really not like the other firebenders, are you?” Teo says suddenly, peering at Zuko intently. Zuko gazes calmly back, and then Teo grins.

“I’ve got some questions about firebending techniques, if you don’t mind me picking your brain,” he says eagerly. Zuko grins and nods, extending a fist for the younger boy to bump. Teo looks at him confusedly, as do Aang and Katara, and Zuko wonders if fist-bumps are just a Fire Nation thing.

Tell T-E-O to extend his fist out like I just did, Zuko signs to Aang, who dutifully relays the request. Teo does, and Zuko bumps his fist against Teo’s.

All three younger kids blink at him in confusion.

My brother and I would do that when we were planning something cool or had successfully pulled it off, Zuko explains. It can also be a greeting, or a sign of friendship.

“Wow, that’s awesome!” Aang cheers, after a moment visibly translating in his head. “Do me!” He sticks his fist out, and Zuko gently bumps it with his own. Aang giggles, and Katara demands a turn as well, grinning broadly when Zuko obliges.

They mess around a little bit, and Zuko and Teo end up creating an overly complicated fist-bump routine that even Aang has trouble replicating. Katara just rolls her eyes at them.

"Hey Teo?" Aang asks during a break in the shenanigans. "If you still want to see what's in the Sanctuary, I'd be happy to open the door for you."

Teo's face lights up. "Thanks, Aang. I know it really means a lot to you. I really, really appreciate it."

They make their way through the temple to the Sanctuary doors, and Zuko can’t help the shiver of excitement that runs down his spine. He’s going to see an actual Air Temple Sanctuary! Katara had told him about the one they’d seen at the Southern Air Temple, and now he’s going to see one himself!

And then Aang opens the door, and Zuko’s excitement flips to horror so fast it turns his stomach over.

The massive room is lit with eerie red light, and stuffed full of prototype weapons, some of which Zuko has actually seen in use, both at the Stronghold and in battle. All of their technology, all of the weapons the Fire Lord and his armies are using to destroy the world… they’re coming from here. From the Mechanist.

Zuko feels like he’s gonna be sick.

“This is a nightmare,” Aang says, voice tiny.

“You don’t understand!” The Mechanist has shown up, and the security expert in Zuko figures that the man must’ve rigged the Sanctuary doors to an alarm of some kind. The rest of him is just angry, and he palms two throwing knives as Aang shouts at the Mechanist furiously.

“Explain all this. Now.” Teo demands.

The Mechanist bleakly explains how early in their settlement, Fire Nation troops under the command of then-General Qin had found and threatened the Mechanist’s people and the Temple. In exchange for safety, the Mechanist had agreed to build weapons for the Fire Nation. Now-War Minister Qin had built and bought his position in the Fire Lord’s government with the Mechanist’s work.

As angry as Zuko is, he can understand, even if only a little bit. Not a single one of the Mechanist’s people are benders of any kind—they’re not even really warriors at all, at least in the traditional sense. They wouldn’t have stood a chance against a force bent on their annihilation, not as a barely settled group of refugees. The Mechanist had had to make a truly impossible choice, with the lives of his son and his people on the line.

But Aang can’t understand that yet, Zuko reflects, as the airbender in question storms away, flanked by Teo and Katara. He’s still too young, too new to this century that’s known nothing but war. He doesn’t yet understand that sometimes survival outweighs morals.

He follows his squad out, but spares a commiserating glance for the Mechanist, who looks on the verge of tears.

It takes a while for Aang’s rage to cool from a firestorm to a bonfire, but once it does, Aang becomes determined to end the Mechanist’s arrangement with the Fire Nation. Zuko, who has a very bad feeling about this, accompanies Aang and Teo up to the Mechanist’s private study, where the boys confront the man. The Mechanist is obviously terrified of the consequences of breaking his deal with Qin, but Teo asking how he can be proud of him visibly breaks his heart.

Zuko jumps when a bell suddenly rings on the desk, and the sheer terror on the Mechanist’s face as he tells the boys to leave makes Zuko’s gut churn. Instead of leaving, though, the three of them hide behind some junk as the Mechanist pulls a lever that opens a trap door in the floor.

The man who appears through the trap door is old, but not stooped, standing military erect in his Caldera Court robes, steel gray hair in an impeccable topknot and short gray beard neatly trimmed. His bronze eyes are hard and cold in his lined face, and suddenly Zuko recognizes him. This man had been a regular at Ozai’s dinner table since Zuko had been very young, discussing new technologies to bring to the war effort. Once Ozai had ascended the Throne, the frequency of his attendance had increased from once a month to once a week. Qin had practically ignored Zuko to suck up outrageously to Azula, but Zuko had enjoyed listening to the minister talk about the tanks and other machines the military was using.

When it becomes obvious that the Mechanist isn’t going to take a stand, Aang does it for him. Zuko’s heart leaps into his throat, terrified that Qin will retaliate and torch the entire room, but thankfully all he does is threaten Aang dramatically and retreat back through the trapdoor. Aang’s expression is unimpressed as he bends the trapdoor shut behind him.

The plan comes together quickly— they’ll use the advantage of the high ground to launch aerial attacks on the encroaching Fire Nation forces, with Katara and Zuko providing support from Appa. Sokka and the Mechanist will drop supersized slime bombs from the now apparently controllable War Balloon, and Zuko wonders if the two nerds are just using the battle as an excuse to play with their new toy.

Once the plans are finalized and watches set, Zuko takes himself off to a secluded corner with a (non-spark-powder-doctored) candle to meditate. This will be the first time Zuko will actively participate in a battle against Fire Nation forces, and while he understands the necessity and wouldn’t even consider doing otherwise, it still feels wrong. These are his people, being compelled to attack nearly defenseless civilians. Maybe more than a few believe in Sozin’s vision, but Zuko has to believe that the majority of his people are good at heart, or else he’ll go crazy. It doesn’t make planning to fight them any easier, though.

Compartmentalization. He can’t think about the attacking soldiers as his people, not when they would capture or kill his student and the rest of his squad in the name of the Fire Lord. Not when they would raze an ancient Air Temple full of innocent, harmless civilians to the ground. Aang, Katara, and Sokka are his people right now. He needs to keep them safe. Once the battle is won and everyone is safe, then he can mourn the Fire Nation lives lost.

Zuko takes a deep breath, making the flame on the candle swell massively, and then releases the breath, extinguishing the flame completely.

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#atla #atla fanfic #awkpenproductions presents #dragon of the yuyan #part 13 ascent #full text post

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lyranova · 3 years

Text

Children of the Future:

Chapter 7: Alistar

Hi guys! Here’s chapter 7 I hope you all enjoy it, i’m sorry it took a little longer than previous chapters 😅! There really isn’t much ship content in this chapter but I hope thats ok I’ll try and have more of that in the next chapter~! Anyway I hope you all enjoy!

Taglist: @eme-eleff @crazyclownthanos @jovialnoise @talpup (if anyone else wants to be added please let me know!)

Word Count: 2,911

Warnings: None

———

Julius looked up as William walked into the office, Alistar was currently standing off to the side and was leaning against the wall. Julius could see the slight confusion in William's face as he approached the desk; he did wonder how the masked Captain would take such news, especially since he was the only one called, unlike the other children whose fathers and mothers had been called up here.

“ Is everything ok Julius? Marx said it was urgent that I come up here at once.” Willam asked as he saluted before he frowned as the Wizard King let out a small sigh, but the blonde smiled nonetheless.

“ Yes, well, sort of. It isn’t anything pertaining to the Kingdom's safety if that’s what you’re worried about.” ‘Or at least not that we know of at the moment.’ Julius added the last part silently, he hadn’t the faintest clue as to why the children are suddenly arriving, and so far it had been everyday a child would show up. He saw William visibly relax at his words.

“ That’s good to hear, but if that’s the case, then why was I summoned?” He asked in confusion before Alistar stepped away from the wall and stood next to the desk, that same warm calm smile on his face. William looked the young man up and down for a moment before turning back to Julius.

“ Julius? Who is this?” He asked, he recognized his Golden Dawn uniform and cloak, but he didn’t recognize the man wearing them. William knew every person in his squad, or at the very least knew their faces if not their names and this man was not part of his squad.

“ Well-.” Julius started with a sheepish laugh before Alistar held up a hand to silence him, Julius frowned slightly before the young man's smile widened and he held out a hand towards William.

“ Hello Captain, it’s nice to meet you! My name’s Alistar Vangeance and I’m your son from the future!” He announced brightly, taking both William and Julius back a bit. Julius had been partially hoping Alistar would gently break the news to William as the other children had done, but instead he just blurted it out. Julius almost wanted to laugh at the shocked expression on Williams face, he only turned to look at Julius again.

“ It’s true. Marx verified his memories before he summoned you here, he’s the fourth child to be brought here in the last 3 days. I was going to bring all the Captains here tomorrow and brief you all on what information we have so far, but then this young man showed up in my office.” Julius explained and Alistar nodded.

“ It wasn’t that hard to sneak in here, you might want to tighten security a bit Wizard King.” Alistar said with a small laugh, Julius nodded, that was something that would have to be worked on. But how were all the security guards supposed to know he wasn’t a part of the current Golden Dawn, especially since he was wearing their robes and uniform.

William stood there silently as his brain tried to process this information. This young man was his son? How was that possible? William wasn’t seeing anyone at the moment, and he wasn’t really looking since he was busy being Captain. So, how? William looked at Alistar again; he looked a lot like him, there was no denying that, but he also looked different. His eyes were the main giveaway. They were the same shape and size of William’s, but the color was different; instead of purple like his they were blue, an almost icy blue. He silently wondered if they came from his mother? That would be the only logical explanation.

“ I think I broke him.” Alistar said in concern as he leaned down to look William in the face, slightly startling the masked Captain. Julius chuckled softly.

“ No you didn’t break him, he’s just lost in thought.” Julius said before standing up and walking over to clap William on the shoulder, making him jump slightly. “ You alright?”

“ Y-Yes, just a little shocked.” He said softly, Julius nodded.

“ It would be a little shocking, Yami was the same way too when his and Charlotte’s daughter arrived.” William turned at that, Yami had a child from the future as well? And with Captain Charlotte Roselei?! That was surprising! He never imagined the man settling down and having a family, especially not with her!

“ Do you need a minute da-i mean, Captain?” Alistar asked, his eyes full of genuine concern. Maybe he should have eased him into the news, but it was a little too late for that now. Alistar rubbed the back of his neck nervously as his face tinged pink in embarrassment. He hadn’t thought his father would take the news this hard.

“ No, I’m fine. The shock is wearing off a bit now I believe.” William replied warmly and with a shake of his head, he saw the relief pass across Alistar’s face.

“ That’s good. I was worried there for a minute.” He said with a nervous laugh, before Julius chuckled and walked back around to his desk and sat down.

“ Maybe you two will get to know each other better on your way to the Hideout.” Julius said before looking over some papers again, William and Alistar both frowned. “ We have a special house for all the parents and children to stay in, just until we know what’s going on.” He added before he frowned a bit at Alistar.

A strange look passed across the white haired man’s face at his last comment, and that made Julius curious. Did he know something? If so, why didn’t the other children know as well? And why didn’t Marx find anything in Alistar’s memories? Was it because Marx wasn’t looking for that so the information was allowed to stay hidden? Hm, very interesting. Julius would have to keep an eye on this one.

“ So, where is this house Lord Julius?” William asked curiously, it was starting to get dark outside so they would have to hurry if the house was very far. Julius gave him directions to the house and both William and Alistar saluted him with a nod before walking out of the room.

“ So, I’m not the only one who’s made it here yet?” Alistar asked his ‘father’, who nodded.

“ It appears that way, from what Julius said Yami and Charlotte’s daughter is here as well.” William said as they walked down the hall.

Alistar had caught that as well, he hoped beyond hope that it was her. But a small piece of him worried that if he got his hopes up too high that he would be disappointed if it wasn’t. There were two Sukehiro daughters, so it could easily be either one that had arrived. His stomach suddenly began to twist itself into knots at the thought of it not being her. He wanted to hurry to the house now more than ever before, if it was in fact her he needed to make sure she was ok and that she was safe. He made a promise, not only to himself, but to her as well. Even though he was feeling all these emotions on the inside, he didn’t dare let it show on the outside, his face remained calm and warm like it had the entire time in the office.

“ Do you have a broom to use?” William asked as they stepped outside, Alistar laughed and rubbed the back of his head sheepishly.

“ Ah no, I walked here. I didn’t think about looking for a broom. But it’s ok!” He said warmly before suddenly conjuring up a small broom with his plant magic, causing William’s eyes to widen at the sight.

“ You can use plant magic?”

“ Actually World Plant Magic. It’s similar to yours except, well, plants.” Alistar confirmed with a laugh before stepping onto his makeshift broom and lifting it up into the air with his mana. William did the same and he tilted his head curiously.

“ I take it you inherited your affinity from your mother?” William asked curiously, he watched as the young man’s face suddenly looked downcast at the mention of his mother. But it disappeared as quickly as it came as he looked over at William.

“ That’s spoilers Captain.” He said with a laugh. “ C’mon before it gets too dark.” Alistar added before quickly flying away.

———

Yami and the others listened intently as William finished the story, it was quite different to how they met their children. Yami glanced over at the table and watched as the children ate and spoke amongst each other, he turned back to William.

“ So he doesn’t know why he was sent here either?” He asked curiously, William nodded.

“ Apparently not, Julius said he would be informing the other Captains tomorrow to inform their squads to be on the lookout for any children who seemed to be lost and/or confused.” William explained softly, Charlotte frowned a bit.

“ Out of all these kids not one knows what’s going on? What are the odds of that?” She asked as she glanced over at the children as well, they were speaking in hushed tones at the table now, they didn’t want the adults to hear their conversation apparently.

“ I guess not, but I don’t think these are all the kids.” Zora said suddenly, causing all the adults to look at him curiously. “ The Wizard King is alerting all the Captains to tell their squads to be on the lookout for more kids right? Which means he suspects more are coming.”

The others looked at Zora in surprise, they hadn’t thought about the Wizard King's words, and now that they thought about it it did sound like he was anticipating more kids to be arriving, and if so, how did he know that? They all sat in collective silence for a moment when Nebra decided to break it.

“ Wow so you really do have a brain!” She told Zora in a mock surprise tone, the red head growled at her and opened his mouth to argue before Charlotte quickly intervened.

“ Don’t you two start up again! I already have a headache from earlier.” She said with a sigh as she rubbed her temple, the blonde quickly stood. “ It’s getting late anyhow, I think it’s time for everyone to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big and busy day.” She added looking around the room, and everyone sighed but stood along with her, she was right; all the Captains would have a busy day tomorrow giving their squads their new orders after meeting with Julius.

The kids and Nebra, Zora, and Charlotte all went to their respective rooms except for Yami, William, and Alistar. Who all stood looking at each other for a moment.

“ So, where will I be staying?” Alistar asked politely as he looked between the two men, William was wondering the same thing as he didn’t have a room either.

“ You’ll be bunking with the little red head,” Yami pointed at Alistar and then down the hall. “ and I’ll show you to yours since it’s near mine.” He added to William before walking away, William nodded and followed behind Yami.

“ Goodnight Alistar.”

“ Goodnight fath-i mean, Captain.” Alistar said softly before quickly turning and walking in the opposite direction of the two older men.

Alistar sighed, it was going to be difficult having to call his father ‘Captain’ again. It had been a while since he had to do that, but even when his father was Captain of the Golden Dawn he rarely used the title unless he had too. He wondered if Hikari and the others were having the same trouble with their parents as well. Alistar jumped as someone grabbed his upper arm and yanked him into their room with so much force that he actually tripped and landed onto their bed. He rolled over and saw the person that had pulled him into their room was Hikari.

“ My how very forceful of you Hikari.” He teased with a slightly mischievous smirk. He may have been playing it cool on the outside, but on the inside his heart was pounding and he had butterflies in his stomach.

“ Oh stop it you’re almost as bad as Ezio.” Hikari rolled her eyes and playfully hit Alistar on the shoulder as he stood up.

“ I don’t know, from what I hear Ezio is actually worse than I am.” He chuckled as Hikari herself laughed a bit before the two fell in a comfortable silence. They tended to do this a lot; just sit and enjoy each other's company without saying a word. The two hadn’t always been like this, their silence used to be very awkward when they were younger, but as they got older and closer, it gradually became more comfortable.

“ Alistar,” she started softly, he ‘hmed’ in response she continued. “ what’s going on? Why were we sent back?” She watched as the white haired man instantly tensed at the question, that wasn’t normal for him, usually he kept a close eye on his emotions and body movements. He looked away shyly and rubbed the back of his head.

“ I don’t know Hikari.” He told her with a sigh, the black haired girl’s eyes narrowed instantly.

“ Somehow I find it hard to believe that the Captain of the Golden Dawn doesn’t know what’s going on with serious matters related to the kingdom!” She said in a slightly raised tone, he quickly shushed her before looking behind her, as though expecting someone to come rushing through the door at her words. He let out a small sigh of relief before his ice blue eyes narrowed at her.

“ And I find it hard to believe that the Vice Captain of the Black Bulls doesn’t know anything either.” He countered, Hikari crossed her arms as she looked at him.

“ You and I both know the Vice-Captain doesn’t know about anything important like this unless the Captain tells them.” She smirked as she saw his eyes widen slightly; he seemed to forget who he was talking to.

Alistar sighed in defeat before looking away from her, she watched as he rubbed the back of his neck nervously. She almost laughed at his nervous habit, he had done that ever since he was a kid, although she wasn’t quite sure where he picked it up since his father didn’t seem to have that habit. Her eyes softened as she could see the struggle in his eyes.

“ I...I can’t tell you Hikari, not yet.” He said softly when he finally looked back up at her. “ I have to wait until everyone else has arrived.”

“ So there are more of us coming?” Hikari asked and he nodded in confirmation. “ How many?”

“ I don’t know. All of our strongest people I’d imagine, especially since you, I, and Josslyn are here.” He said with a shrug. Hikari glared slightly at him, she could see in his eyes that there was more he wasn’t telling her.

“ Why won’t you just tell me what’s going on?” She asked him in a slightly angry and raised tone. “ What, do you think I can’t handle it? Do you think I’m that fragile that I can’t handle the truth about why we were sent back?” Alistar shook his head and placed both hands on her upper arms and gave them a gentle squeeze.

“ No, I don’t believe any of those things. Especially about you being too fragile to handle the truth.” He told her softly and somewhat apologetically, yet his eyes were cold and serious, the complete opposite of his tone. “ But I can’t tell you just yet, so please,” he gently shook her shoulders.

“ Trust me.”

Hikari looked away, she had always trusted him, for as long as they had been friends she had trusted him and vice versa, that’s why they were a great team even though they were in two different squads. He trusted her with his deepest secrets and she did the same in return. She sighed and nodded.

“ I trust you.”

Alistar smiled at that and he nodded firmly before giving her shoulders one last squeeze before he walked around her and placed a hand on the door knob.

“ Goodnight Hikari, sleep well.” He told her warmly before opening the door and walking out of the room. He closed the door softly behind him and sighed, he hated keeping this from her, he walked away with his head hung low and his heart broken into a million pieces. Soon, he would be able to tell her what happened soon, but for now this information had to stay between him and himself. He found his and Ace’s shared room and walked inside, gently closing the door behind him.

“ Well, well, well, pretty boy is hiding something. He’s a chip off the old block if I say so myself.” Zora chuckled as he came out of the shadows and looked at Ace’s bedroom door. “ Just how much do you actually know hm?”

———

Sorry there isn’t much ship content but I hope you all enjoyed! Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a good day~!

#children of the future #oc; alistar #oc; hikari #hikari is not my oc #yami sukehiro #william vangeance #julius novachrono #charlotte roselei #zora ideale #nebra silva #black clover fanfiction

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redara · 3 years

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Okay, big rant with SPOILERS, i honestly thought RE7 Chris was Hunk without a mask. Without the DLC, i thought it would go like this :

Blue Umbrella sends Hunk to "save" the Winterses and claim himself as "Chris Redfield", building trust with them, etc. We'll call him Hunk!Chris for now.

Fast forward to RE8, the Winterses are having a nice little dinner, when BAM BAM BAM, gunshots and ambush from men in masks - i repeat, IN MASKS - like the ones worn by Hound Wolf Squad. One of them wears a slightly different mask, is called 'Alpha', and he takes Rose away.

Ethan's convoy crashes, and he's rescued by Hunk!Chris, and is told to go to the village and meet Mother Miranda and the Four Lords. They're not acting hostile at first, but they show how they hate the men in masks - bear in mind, the Lords look just the way they are, big woman, scary creature, and all.

The difference is, they claim to be the leftovers of Umbrella's old experiments, and that 'Alpha' and his team wants to eradicate them for good. Mother Miranda lets Ethan stay with them.

Well, our boy Ethan can't sit still, so he snoops around the guarded village, only to be attacked by the lycans, the monsters and all. He finds clues from the villagers, enough to make him secondguess the Lords.

Now, important, this is RE8, and Leon always appears in even numbered franchise, so we're gonna put him here.

In helping the villagers, Ethan is assisted by Leon. He then sees Leon talking on comms to Chris, and Ethan concludes 'oh must have been a member of Chris' squad or something'. The convo may sound like this:

Leon to comms: Chris? Where the fuck are you? ...yeah, but - well, have you seen the village lately? There are lycans everywhere, how am i supposed to be there - ...*sigh* aye ay, captain.

Ethan: Well?

Leon: Well... I'm needed elsewhere now.

Ethan: Chris' not an easy guy to persuade, huh?

Leon: You tell me. In the twenty years that i've known him, he's only listened to me twice. See you around.

(yeah, whatever convo they be having, Leon is implying that he knows Chris the best, and that Ethan believes him, and they part ways).

Eventually, after prodding around the village, Ethan finds out too much, and figures out that Rose is actually safe and sound in Lady D's castle, so he tries to get her back. Lady D and her daughters deny at first, until they can't play nicely any longer, and shows their true selves. After killing them, Ethan finds out Rose has been taken away to another Lord's house.

Now comes the hunt.

So Ethan goes on Liam Neeson's Taken mode. He goes to Beneviento's house, asks questions only to be played with, so he has no option but to kill.

While heading to Moreau's place, Ethan encounters the Men in Masks, got captured, and taken to their hideout. They are all still wearing masks. Though he hears them saying things like, "he killed two out of four Lords", "do you think Miranda knows?", etc.

Ethan believes he's going to be taken back to the remaining Lords and killed for good, but then BAM, big fishy comes to the rescue.

So now Ethan goes to Moreau, fights him, and gets told to stay away from Mother Miranda. In the brink of death, Moreau's willing to spill the details, but he is shot dead by sniper instead.

Coming forward is Hunk!Chris, claiming to have saved Ethan, and being all friendly and stuff. Naturally, Ethan tells him of what he has done, killing three out of four Lords, and meeting the mysterious masked men. Hunk!Chris tells Ethan to just kill the masked men whenever possible.

So, Ethan travels with Hunk!Chris to Heisenberg's place. Quite a way. All good at first, until Hunk!Chris offers to split up to cover more ground.

Poor Ethan meets Heisenberg all alone, has to join in his little game, kicked twice to the bottom of the factory. The second time, he's crawling out of the vent, and sees bloody Hunk!Chris being held by two men in masks. So naturally, Ethan jumps to help.

Sooo Ethan manages to have one of the masked men in grip, gun pointed to his temple, and begins to negotiate.

Ethan: you okay, Chris?

Hunk!Chris: *grunt*

Masked men #1 to Alpha: his name is Chris?

Ethan: so are hundreds thousands of people in the world.

Alpha: what's the last name?

Hunk!Chris: ...Redfield.

The masked men look around in shock, but the Alpha approaches Hunk!Chris.

Alpha: So you're the copycat we've been looking for.

Ethan: copycat? What the fuck are you talking about?

Alpha looks at Ethan: Ethan Winters, right?

Ethan: yeah?

Alpha: this man isn't the good guy like he claims he is.

Hunk!Chris: bullshit!

Alpha: shut up.

Ethan: i'm not gonna believe the men who killed my wife - Chris saved my fucking life!

Alpha: it wasn't Mia Winters that we shot, it was Miranda. She disguised herself as your wife to get to your daughter.

Ethan: then where's Mia?

Alpha: Miranda had locked her up. She's safe with us. Now, put the gun down, Ethan -

Ethan: if he's not Chris, then who the fuck is he?

Yeah basically it's a big "fuck you" "no, fuck you" moment, until Leon arrives at the right timing to declare.

Leon: Umbrella's special forces, codename Hunk.

Ethan: Leon?

Alpha: took you long enough.

Leon: i had a detour. Ethan, i've known Chris long enough to know that he doesn't look like that. That man isn't Chris Redfield.

Ethan: wha - why are you agreeing with him?

And Alpha finally unmasks, and shows the face we all recognize, and says, "Because i am Chris Redfield."

Sooo, Real Chris elaborates on how he has been hunting Blue Umbrella, about Hound Wolf Squad, about Mother Miranda and her real plan. Leon is apparently sent to deal with the identity theft, and he elaborates on info regarding Hunk, Blue Umbrella, all working together with Mother Miranda.

All in all, they get to an understanding. Ethan is fucking seething for being betrayed, but more importantly, he wants to help. Before all of them can compose themselves, Heisenberg drops by, clapping, having been listening to the whole thing. He manages to separate the group, Ethan going with Chris, while Leon goes with the rest of HWS.

Cue boss fight of Heisenberg vs Ethan and Chris.

Now afterwards, the duo heads to Mother Miranda. They split up, Chris to plant a bomb, while Ethan is supposed to wait for Leon and backup. But the backup never comes, and Ethan drives head on to face Miranda on his own.

Well, this is where Chris sees what Ethan really is, how he still survives despite being injured and all that. And Ethan seems to have come to terms with his unusual condition, that killing Mother Miranda is a one way ticket for him.

So Mother Miranda dies, Rose is saved, but Ethan is also dying. Chris forces Ethan up and running, carefully, as the body is crystallizing. But Ethan is at his limit.

And as you all know, he knows he has to sacrifice himself to detonate the bomb, cause let's face it, he will never make it out alive. Even if he does, barely, he doesn't want to live as a BOW. So he hands Rose over to Chris, asking him to please tell Mia that he's sorry, and that he loves her and Rose, and that everything's gonna be okay now, he's gonna set things right.

Aaand boom.

(sorry)

That's about it. No fast forward to some years later at the ending.

I'm also thinking that perhaps in mid story, there should be a time when the players get to play as Real Chris as Alpha, only that it's never mentioned who he is. The players only see from first person perspective, and his voice is like coming from radio (ya know what i mean), and it's shown how he goes so far to save Mia. How Mia reacts to him all scared and is all like, "who are you?" With no explanation, then it shifts back to Ethan.

Reading back, this is hella long to write, but yeah this is what i thought upon seeing RE7 Chris, like the fuck, that can't be Chris. And working with Blue Umbrella? Really? I think real Chris would be having Racoon flashback from just hearing the word 'Umbrella'.

#chris redfield #ethan winters #karl heisenberg #lady dimetrescu #mother miranda #angie beneviento #moreau reservoir #resident evil 8 #resident evil #what if #my au #stemming from why re7 chris looks fucking different #seriously why

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tonystarktogo · 4 years

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(this could’ve been) a villain’s origin story -- KHR remix

[this fic is my first attempt to write in the KHR fandom. i apologize in advance.]

II.

The first time it happens, Tsuna doesn’t see it coming at all. It’s not the kind of thing one sees coming.

He’s following up on one of the many, many anonymous tips they receive daily, about villain movements, suspicious sightings, potential collaborations, the works. Nowhere in the official Vongola Inc. recruitement speech do they tell you that working for the world’s largest superhero organization mostly means digging through trash and interviewing witnesses, rather than bashing a supervillain’s head in.

Granted, most teams go out and get at least some action and technically Tsuna’s team is no exception. Tsuna is, though.

“You’re more likely to get one of us killed than be of any help!” Mochida had snapped when he’d seen Tsuna trott after the others on their way to the briefing room. “Make yourself useful for once and stay out of the way.”

[continues under the cut]

[In all honesty, Tsuna can’t blame his squad leader. He never thought he, Dame-Tsuna, always too slow, too clumsy, too useless, would get recruited by Vongola Inc. The best, most powerful, most feared superhero organization the world has to offer and they wanted Tsuna.

Of course that turned out to be bullshit. Tsuna should’ve expected nothing less. Should’ve seen it coming. Why doesn’t he ever learn? But he’d been so shocked, so gratefulrelievedelated to know that someone saw something in him. That someone wanted him.

If he’d known all Vongola wanted was Sawada Iemitsu’s son -- his bloodline -- well. Tsuna knows himself well enough to realize that it probably wouldn’t have changed a thing.

But that doesn’t stop him from wishing it had.]

Mochida is cold and cutting and often cruel, but he’s not a terrible team leader. He takes his responsibilities seriously. And even though Tsuna knows the man doesn’t like him, sees being saddled with Tsuna as some kind of creative punishment by his superiors, Mochida doesn’t let Tsuna’s inability to walk a straight line without running into a a door and his utter lack of super abilities get in the way of their job. It usually ends with Tsuna being sidelined and manning the coffee maschine or the phonelines -- wherever he can cause the least damage -- but Tsuna doesn’t mind much.

Sure, it’s not glamourous, but it’s still little things that need to be done and Tsuna is glad he can be of help, even if his co-workers rarely appreciate it. Mochida doesn’t expect much of anything from him and sometimes that hurts, but he never sets Tsuna up for failure just to have something to laugh at either -- and that means more to Tsuna than it probably should.

Besides it’s not like spending yet another endless day at work, following up on various anonymous tips, 98 percent of which always turn out to be a useless waste of time, is a bad price to pay for a steady job in a respected profession.

It’s only in retrospect that it occurs to Tsuna that what happens next is not at all surprising. That it is almost inevitable. Because no matter how many crazy, paranoid or joking people call the Vongola Emergency line, sooner or later Tsuna was bound to stumble over a nugget of valuable information. That this was why they kept a tip line in the first place -- because it occasionally proves to be useful.

In Tsuna’s defense, he’s pretty sure none of the others expected today’s calls to be real either. They sure wouldn’t have sent him out otherwise.

But here he is. Searching -- read: stumbling through -- a long abandoned warehouse that Tsuna just knows would have Hana sniff in disgust at the utter cliché of it all. Without back-up or any particularly useful weapon.

[His team learned in their first month together not to arm Tsuna with anything he could use to hurt himself with. Or them.]

Staring in horror at the supervillain staring at Tsuna with equal surprise.

At least I’m not the only one caught off-guard, Tsuna thinks hysterically. And he’s allowed to be hysterical when he finds himself trapped alone and unarmed in an abandoned warehouse with Skull De Mort of all people.

[Tsuna doesn’t have many hero-like qualities, but he’s got a lot of free time on his hands when manning the phone lines and pulling graveyard shifts on days where even villains prefer to catch a break and sleep in. Tsuna also, by virtue of his heritage, has access to the kind of high-level intel most field agents can only dream of.

As such, Tsuna has a better understanding on the recently active and inactive supervillains than most.

Whereas the average newsreporter likes to scoff and sniff derisively when Skull De Mort pulls one of his outrageous attacks that always mean impressive amounts of property damage and no civilian deaths because Skull is just an ambitious, loud-mouthed thug with ideas above his station as far as the general public is concerned, Tsuna knows better.

Skull De Mort is an Arcobaleno. As in one of the seven most powerful villains in the entire world. He might not drown the city in blood, but it’s sure as hell not because he can’t do it.

Sure, Skull baffles Vongola Inc. regularly with his antics, but his name is spoken in the same breath as Reborn, Fon or Viper and the point is oh god, Tsuna is gonna die here.]

With perfectly reasonable, if unhealthy amounts of panic and horror fighting for dominance within him, it takes Tsuna several long seconds to realize that Skull isn’t launching into one of his infamous supervillain speeches. Isn’t even throwing glitter bombs at Tsuna -- and those glitter bombs might not kill anyone, but walking into Vongola HQ and leaving a trail of glitter everywhere just might.

Hibari-senpai -- who isn’t even Vongola, is the definition of unaffiliated asset everyone is too afraid to alienate -- hates glitter.

Tsuna is so dead.

Except he still isn’t. He’s been standing here, gaping and panicking for close to five minutes and Skull still hasn’t made his move. In fact, now that Tsuna pays attention, it’s not just his breathing that’s unnaturally loud and heavy in the empty hall. And-- Tsuna squints. Skull doesn’t seem to be leaning against the wall so much as clinging to it and he’s watching Tsuna with a look that no one has ever directed at Tsuna in his life, something that almost looks like, like wariness and--

“Are you okay?” Tsuna blurts out before he can think of all the reasons why starting a conversation with an Arcobaleno is a terrible idea.

It’s just— this is a supervillain and that’s terrifying and Tsuna should probably call someone more qualified to deal with this situation, but also this is an injured supervillain and somehow that makes all the difference.

Skull scoffs, ironically putting Tsuna a little more at ease. People always scoff or scowl when he reminds them of his existence, this is no different. Besides it’s hard to take the villain’s derision seriously when he promptly sways on his feet. He’s not wearing his helmet, either, and despite being dressed in the usual black motorcycle suit, Tsuna is pretty sure his violett hair is matted with blood.

“You’re hurt!” he exclaims, horrified. Promptly drops the taser he’s been trying to pull out of his overstuffed bag with shaking hands and rushes towards the villain’s side, who’s eyes widen in alarm as Tsuna approaches.

Somehow that makes it easier to breathe, but it’s not enough to distract Tsuna from the long cut along the man’s temple and the dark bruises on his jaw.

“The Great Skull-sama is fine!” Skull protests frantically.

He’s clearly not, considering he promptly loses his balance when he tries to take a step back. Instinctively, Tsuna reaches out to catch him, realizing a second too late that one, he doesn’t have the strenth to keep the taller man upright and two, Tusna is a walking, talking disaster who inevitably trips and brings Skull down with him. They hit the ground hard enough to knock all the air out of his lungs and land in a graceless heap on the floor.

“Sorry!” Tsuna squeaks, breathless from where his face is smushed against Skull’s padded shoulder. “I’m so sorry, please forgive me, Skull-sama!”

Kami-sama, he’s knocked the poor, already injured man over! Trying to untangle them immediately, Tsuna accidentally rams his elbow into Skull’s side, which earns him a pained groan and Skull another flustered apology.

This is why his team doesn’t take Tsuna on missions. He’s a hazard not just for himself but everyone around him.

Scrambling away from Skull before he manages to kill the guy through sheer clumsiness, Tsuna forces himself to take one deep, steady breath — only one, though, else he’ll have time to think about how stupid what he’s gonna do in a moment really is — and starts to unpack his bag. Tsuna might not carry as many weapons as a Vongola Superhero on duty technically should, but his emergency kit would make any aspiring doctor proud. And Nana too, but that’s because Tsuna’s mom thinks he’s healing the innocent bystanders — "My Tsu-kun has such a gentle heart!" — not himself.

"What are you doing?!" Skull asks while slowly pushing himself off the floor and into a sitting position.

"I’m just looking for the— there!" Tsuna knew he still has one of Irie’s newest ice packs. He kneads the white package for a few moments to activate it, then holds it out to Skull. "Here. Hold this to your jaw for at least ten minutes, but no longer than thirty. Ichi’s still working on some issues long-term use has on human skin."

Tsuna babbles like he always does when he’s scared. [It drives Mochida crazy sometimes because Tsuna is scared most of the time and Mochida hates babbling.] It doesn’t stop him from noticing the odd look Skull shoots him, a bit like he’s measuring Tsuna’s worth. Except that’s a look he’s intimately familiar with and would recognize anyone, so it’s something close, but not exactly that.

"Please take it, Skull-sama." Tsuna shakes the ice pack lightly, pretends like his hands aren’t trembling when those bright, violett eyes fixate on him. "That looks like it really hurts."

[He’s not sure if all Arcobaleno carry their superpowers on the outside. If it’s part of the costume, colored contacts and all, or if their bodies are brimming with power to the point where they’re overflowing, where it pours out of them in any shape it can.]

Slowly Skull takes the ice pack. Looks at it as though he doesn’t know what to do with it.

"H-Hold it against your chin, please, Skull-sama." Tsuna busies himself with sorting through his various bandages and tries very hard to pretend his voice isn’t shaking and squeaky like a frightened mouse. "It’ll help keep the swelling down."

"…The immortal Skull-sama heals fast." Skull says the words like a question. Tsuna doesn’t look up, but he can feel the weight of the man’s stare.

Hunching his shoulders, Tsuna pulls what little courage he has together, and stutters, "That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, Skull-sama. Please, can you just take it? I— I don’t like seeing people hurt."

Skull is still staring, Tsuna can tell, but it feels less like he wants to lean over and rip Tsuna open to figure out what’s inside, and more like he’s just watching Tsuna drop the disinfect spray for the third time. After a moment, he presses the ice pack to his face and even though Tsuna’s still trembling a bit, he smiles.

"Thank you."

Skull doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t protest when Tsuna tells him to disinfect the gash above his eyebrow — not deep enough to need stitches, thankfully. He draws the line at more bandages, though, which is worrisome. Tsuna is pretty sure the man has at the very least bruised his rips, but Skull is a supervillain, not runaway kitten, and maybe that means he knows what he’s doing.

That would at least make one of them.

Finally convinced that there’s no other injury Skull will let him help with, Tsuna carefully packs up his things again and bids the villain a hesitant goodbye. Which brings up a somewhat awkward point.

"I have to go back to work now and someone might ask where I’ve been." Eventually. Maybe. Tsuna rocks back on his heels, not sure how to put this. "If they ask, they might come here. And you— might not want to be there when they come," is what he settles on.

Skull’s watching him with another strange expression, both eyebrows raised as he watches Tsuna make a fool of himself. "Why?"

Tsuna eeps. [It’s not a full-on shriek, thankfully, but it’s far too close for his comfort.] There’s an intensity to Skull just now that has the hairs of the back of his neck stand up and reminds Tsuna rather violently that he’s talking to an Arcobaleno. That he’s been treating an Arcobaleno’s wounds. For a moment, Tsuna sways on his feet, as though his body wonders whether it should just give up on him completely.

"Ireallyneedtogonow!" Tsuna rushes the words out so fast, they trip over themselves, grabs his bag and high-tails it out of there. "Please take care of yourself, Skull-sama!" he adds over his shoulder, almost walking into the door as he does so.

It’s not until Tsuna is sitting in his comfortingly safe work chair that it occurs to him that not once during the entire, surreal encounter [he still can’t believe he was in the same room as an Arcobaleno and survived] did it occur to him to call Vongola. Even now Tsuna is hesitating to speak up, to tell one of his co-workers. Because while his gut feeling tells him that Skull got out of that warehouse as soon as Tsuna turned his back on him, he isn’t one hundred percent sure and what if they catch Skull because of him?

Tsuna resolves to spill the whole story as soon as someone asks — he’s a terrible liar and he never promised Skull he wouldn’t tell, not that the man asked himto — and tries not to think too much about the many crimes he committed by letting the chance of catching a supervillain of Skull’s calibre go to waste. Not that anyone would expect Tsuna to catch a supervillain, but still.

[His team returns two hours later, bright-eyed, bruised and breathless with the enthusiasm of a successful mission tangible in the air around them. Mochida even greets Tsuna with a smile and doesn’t scold him when Tsuna drops his tea cup in response and Haru tells him all about the exciting and ultimately successful arrest they’ve pulled off.

No one asks Tsuna where he’s been or if anything interesting happened while they were gone.

Tsuna tells himself he’s relieved, for Skull’s sake if nothing else, because the pang he feels at the thought that no one would miss me if I was gone has gone beyond pathetic a long time ago.]

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reliciron · 3 years

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Decided to write out the important bit of my jedi consular’s backstory.

It should be noted that he doesn’t technically want to die, he’s just very scared of his master and doesn’t see any way to escape.

That said, at the end of the day he does try (and fail) to die by throwing himself at some jedi, so please don’t read if you’re uncomfortable with that.

Go to the northern reaches of Brentaal IV. There you will find a small Jedi temple: the place where Grand Master Satele Shan first trained.

It has enjoyed relative anonymity since, but this must change.

Infiltrate the temple. Slaughter everyone within. Show the Jedi that nothing is safe from the Sith.

Do this, my clever acolyte, and I will raise you from the shadows.

You will be my apprentice.

Dust kicks up as he races across the northern plateaus on his stolen speeder bike. It will take hours to track properly, with the damage he left behind. But by then he’ll have either completed his mission…

Or he’d be dead.

He clenches his teeth.

She was mad. She HAD to be.

No.

He shakes his head.

No. His master is many things, but not mad.

Just calculating. And he may be a mere acolyte, but he hadn’t survived this long without learning some of the game.

If her words were true, the Sith would send a platoon, or at least a full squad. Make a show of the massacre to demoralize the Republic and Jedi Order both.

One lone acolyte would not be enough to guarantee victory. Indeed, it was very likely that he would not survive the attempt at all, even with 6 years of careful training from his master.

He’d been her faithful servant. Her knife in the dark. She’d liberated him from Rattatak and kindly taken him under her wing as a boy. He’d learned to wear the Force like a shroud. Hide himself from sight and strike from the shadows.

She gave the word, and he carried out the sentence. A name, a picture, a place, and they’d be dead in a matter of days.

He couldn’t be her apprentice. No matter his talent, he was Rattataki. And as far as the anyone else knew, he didn’t exist.

He KNEW this. She’d said it so many times. But now she was offering it to him.

It wasn’t real.

And the impossibility of the task only affirmed his suspicions.

He was not MEANT to succeed.

He did not exist, yet as more Sith and Imperials fell before him it became harder and harder to keep his existence secret. And she would never let him go, not when he knew so much of her secrets.

He was a liability now. One she hoped would take care of itself in a pointless attack on a temple.

He should run. He SHOULD, but he CAN’T.

His throat goes tight and he slows down a bit as the temple’s coordinates loom on the navigation computer.

He’d tried to run once, before he’d truly understood how much of a PRIVILEGE it was to have been chosen by his mistress. He couldn’t recall the ‘how’s and ‘why’s anymore, but he remembered the punishment had gone on for well over a week.

Run and I’ll find you, little one. And I will not be so merciful the next time.

If he tries to abandon his duty, he’d die all the same, but she’d make sure to make it hurt. At least the Jedi would make it quick.

Yes.

If its one thing the soft-hearted fools abhorred, it was making a being suffer.

There was no way out for him, but an end by their sabers would be better than by her hand.

–

It had been laughably easy to enter the temple. The roomy interior had given him plenty of space to cloak himself and slip through without being noticed by the guardians. He’d made it all the way into the empty training room, where he’d entered a vent near the ceiling and used it to gain access to the meeting room.

Inside there were a handful of masters and their attending padawans, likely a collection of the strongest jedi in the temple. An incredibly foolish target.

But that was the point, wasn’t it.

He could have killed a great many by now. Picked off padawans one by one has he slithered through the building. Had he actually believed the lie his master had told him, he would have.

But he didn’t. And now these Jedi were his best chance for a swift end.

As he grips his lightsaber, he wonders, not for the first time, what his mother would have thought of him. He didn’t remember her, or much of Rattatak for that matter. But he hoped he’d grown to be a strong son, one who might have made her proud, had things been different.

He muffles the sound of the grate being opened, curls his toes over the edge of the vent frame, and leaps.

–

The creature had seemed to come from thin air.

A calm discussion with his fellow masters about possible changes to the curriculum one minute, and a whirl of dark robes and red light the next.

By the time he and the others managed to pull their lightsabers, 3 padawans lay crumpled on the floor with the attacker ready to strike again.

The battle had been vicious.

Master Evren nearly had a leg taken off, and Knight Balrus fell in a burst of lightning before Ixal finally got in under its guard to slice up through it’s hood.

It screamed, bringing its saber up in mindless defense as it clutched its smoking face, but it was a futile effort. He followed through, ducking its arm and spinning around behind to carve his saber deep across it’s back.

It folded like a house of cards, crashing to the floor in a heap of dark robes.

Not dead, but also not getting up any time soon.

Healers and medical droids are called, and to everyone’s relief no one was killed. But it still left them with a host of very injured jedi, and a deeply wounded assailant who should have never made it this far.

–

Once the others have been seen to, he and the few other jedi of rank gather in the assassin’s room.

The scans the droids provided them with were both enlightening… and disturbing.

A juvenile rattataki male, approximately16 years of age. Signs of extensive, long-term electrical trauma, 18 healed fractures, and general malnutrition. And that was all underneath the damage he himself had caused in the battle. Evidently he’d blinded the man - no, boy - in one eye, and his final strike had severed his spine. He was now paralyzed from the waist down.

Stars above.

It’s about an hour more before the boy comes to, numbed heavily around his injuries but not sedated.

They needed to speak with him, and it absolutely could not wait.

Even so, none of them are prepared for the tsunami of terror that all but knocks them off their feet.

He chokes and tugs desperately at his restraints, every inch a panicked child despite the destruction he’d wrought only a few hours ago.

It makes his stomach roil to know he’d not fought a man, but a boy.

“Peace, young one,” he says softly. And the single remaining eye fixes upon him.

A muscle jumps in the rattataki’s jaw before his face goes eerily blank, at odds with the fear still saturating the Force around them.

“My name is Master Ixal. I’m afraid you’ve committed some rather serious crimes here today, but I would like to talk, if you wouldn’t mind.” When all the boy does is stare at him, he smiles, “May I ask your name?”

There’s a long stretch of silence before the answer.

“Acolyte.”

His accent is Kaas-ian, but given that he’s an alien, there’s a very good chance that he was a slave.

“Is that your name, or the one you were given?”

He blinks, as if trying to parse the meaning.

“Did you ever have a different name?”

Something small and fragile flickers across the part of his face that is still visible.

“…. Faun.”

He sighs. Good. Not so far gone that he won’t answer questions entirely, “Faun then. Can you tell me why you’re here?”

“My master sent me.”

A sith then. Were they truly so desperate as to use children?

“They sent you to attack us?”

His eye closes and he seems resigned.

“Yes.”

“Who sent you? Are there more coming? Why is the temple being targ-?”

“It doesn’t matter, kill me and be done with it.”

“What-?”

“I killed your people and infiltrated your temple, is that not enough?!”

He seems desperate then, like a frightened animal, and the fear redoubles in the Force.

“Easy now,” he assures, “You killed no one, all those who were injured survived.” He frowns, “And you will not die for it. We certainly won’t be letting you go, but you will live and be treated fairly. But I can promise you, the more you help us now, the easier things will go for you in the future.”

Instead of being assured, the young man barks a harsh, bitter laugh.

“What, future?! I failed to die! Now my master will come for me to correct my failure!” He positively whimpers and shrinks in on himself, “She’ll be so angry! She’ll make it hurt! Why can’t you just kill me!”

They’re all taken aback by the outburst, but as his words start to sink in a sick feeling begins to settle in to Ixal’s stomach.

“What do you mean you ‘failed to die’?”

“You think I am a fool?!” he spits. “What else am I to believe when she gives me such an impossible task and promises rewards I knew could never be!” He sags onto the hospital bed. “I do not exist. She cannot allow me to be tied to her, and I was no longer worth the risk.”

He truly feared this master of his so much that he would willingly undertake a suicide mission? Stars above, what had this woman done to him?!

He shakes his head. They knew the why now, but not the how.

“How did you manage to make it all the way into the meeting room? You would have had to pass several guardians.”

The boy huffs, voice still raw and wavering, but evening out as they entered more neutral territory. “Your security is poor and my master trained me well. I cloaked myself in the Force, muffled my presence, and walked right passed them.”

A hint of pride threads through the fear in the air, but already a few of their number have left, unable to take such overpowering emotions.

Cloaking is a rare gift. That this young man is capable of doing so, well enough to fool full fledged jedi, is both dangerous and intriguing. Between that, his combat ability, and the hyper-projection of his emotions, they were dealing with a powerful force user, no matter his age.

It only occurs to him now that the young rattataki could have likely killed dozens of padawans and younglings before being discovered.

But he didn’t.

An idea starts to form but he’d need to consult his fellow masters first.

“Thank you, Faun, you’ve been very helpful. Please rest for now. We will speak again later.”

The boy looks wary as they leave, but more than likely the sedatives are already being administered through his drip. He won’t be conscious for much longer.

–

The discussion is heated, with several knights and masters arguing against it, but after consulting the Jedi Council, they finally come to an agreement.

They would attempt to rehabilitate Faun.

Turning a sith was notoriously difficult, but his youth would work in their favor.

The skills of an assassin, Force-cloaking especially, where nearly impossible to teach to jedi. Too close to the dark side for many to want to risk learning. But as much as they may wish otherwise, sometimes those skills were needed, and if they could earn Faun’s loyalty they’d have an invaluable ally.

It would be a long and delicate process. Mind healers would be needed to try and break the chains his master had instilled in his mind, and the physical reconstruction and recovery would be just as taxing.

There was no guarantee that it would work at all, but he genuinely believed it was worth a try.

The poor boy had been through so much. With a bit of work they might give him a second chance at a fulfilling life.

Dark-side or no, the Force practically hummed around him in a way Ixal had not seen since young Satele. He didn’t know what part this young man might play, but he had a feeling he may yet prove essential in the future.

This would not be the end the young man had sought, but a new beginning.

======

From there it takes a long time to deprogram him, and they need to install several internal cybernetic bypasses in his spine to get around the damage. At the end of it, he’s got a pretty serious scar that runs from right shoulder to left hip, a few numb patches on his lower back, and his eye is still blinded. He learns to hide his accent, too. And he’s somewhere in his late 20s-early 30s by the time the game starts.

He was sent to Tython as a fresh start for his padawan training, since no one there would know who he was, aside from the Council.

His companions don’t find out until they’re fighting the First Son and Syo tells them to try and get them to leave or turn on Faun. Zenith almost does leave afterwards, but after a long discussion they all stick with him.

#swtor #jedi consular #character backstory #sith acolyte #he was kidnapped from rattatak and enslaved i just was trying to put it through the lens of what a brainwashed person would see it as #satele shan DOES come from brentaal 4 but everything else is completely made up #so if there is actual information from her backstory that contradicts this then *shugs* whoopsies #tw: suicidal thoughts #sort of

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renaerys · 4 years

Text

PPG One-Shot: Alone Together (Brick/Blossom)

This is a ten-years-later sequel to Beyond This Morning (BTM). It’s not the official sequel; it just takes place in the same universe. You do not have to have read BTM to fully enjoy this, but it rewards you if you have.

This one is for Carrie. Not only is she an awesome friend and a stalwart enabler, but she also did a very entertaining live reading of BTM and I owe her, like, a lot. Shoutout to the IG squad too. Y’all are the best fandom ever, period. Have a spicy Reds cookie on me with a side of family shenanigans. 💁

***Also posted on my AO3.***

xxx

The night was gold dust and gossamer, the liquor an oak barrel scotch neat, and Blossom had nothing but time. She savored the smoke as the swallowed her scotch and smiled at her reflection in the mirror behind the cherrywood bar. The amber lamplight softened her long red hair, and the liquor’s burn made her pink eyes glisten with a liminal haze in between sensual and soporific. Even the patrons’ voices were nothing but a heady hypnosis far away and standing guard between her and the chaotic world beyond. She could hardly remember what peace and quiet felt like, and she’d sooner be drunk on this serenity than the Lagavulin.

“Enjoying yourself?”

Blossom’s stomach clenched at the sound of that mellifluous voice directly behind her. His body heat radiated like an active volcano: simmering and still right now, but not for long. “I was,” she quipped.

A slim body slipped into the barstool next to hers. The tailored suit did him every favor, as did the rare lack of a tie that allowed for a more lax treatment of his shirt buttons. Liquid crimson eyes held her in his crosshairs, and she froze.

“Blossom,” he said, setting his own drink on the bar with an air of permanence.

“Brick.” The scotch burned Blossom’s throat going down, but not hot enough.

His grin betrayed a hint of teeth, white and sharp.

“Can I get you anything?” the attractive bartender asked Blossom.

“You can bring him another,” she said.

“I’ll take a glass of the Bordeaux.” Brick pushed his empty tumbler toward the bartender.

“Of course.” The bartender cleared the old glass, and neither Brick nor Blossom spared him a glance.

“How about now?” Brick asked while the bartender disappeared to retrieve his wine.

Blossom’s eyes lingered on the styled bangs that hung in his heartbreaking eyes. “I’ll let you know.”

The bartender returned with Brick’s wine and left them alone to their universe. His adroit fingers held the wine glass’ delicate stem with intention and care as he swirled it. Blossom bit her lip.

“What brings you here?” he asked like he didn’t care even as his gaze trailed down the plunging neckline of her little black dress.

She grasped his chin and lifted his gaze to hers with a sly smile. “Rare night off.”

His eyes burned as she dragged her thumb over his bottom lip, and when she tried to pull away, he caught her wrist. “Lucky me.”

“That’s presumptuous.”

He laughed, and she felt it in every buzzing cell in her body. “Liar.”

This close, Blossom could smell his cologne. Just when she thought he might come closer though, he released her and went back to his wine like it was the most interesting thing in this bar. Despite herself, she twirled a tress of hair around her finger and silently counted to five while she waited for her heartbeat to return to normal.

“What about you?” she asked, returning to her drink. “What brings you out tonight?”

He grinned as he took a savoring sip of wine. In the warm jeweled lighting, the few threads of grey in his burnished copper hair gleamed silver. “Apparently, I’m turning 40.”

“And this is how you’re celebrating? Drinking alone at a bar?”

“Looks like it.”

Blossom ignored the way his eyes lingered on her profile. “What about your brothers?”

“Probably at home with their families. Married with kids, you know how it goes.”

“Mm. I’m drinking alone at a bar too.”

“Right, a rare night off, you mentioned.”

Blossom ran her finger over the rim of his wine glass. Tiny frostlings crept down the glass like ivy. “Well, then,” she said, plucking the glass out of his hand and taking a full sip of the chilled wine, “I suppose we’re alone together.”

Brick’s thumb at the corner of her mouth was so warm she gasped. It was gone as soon as it had appeared, and the drop of wine he’d caught along with it. Blossom watched as he brought the digit to his mouth and licked it clean.

“I suppose we are,” he said, breaking the hypnotic pull.

Blossom flushed. She supposed she deserved that one.

“Can I get you two anything else?” the bartender asked politely.

Blossom flashed him a curt smile. “No, thank you. I’ve had enough for one night. Please send the bill to my room.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She got up and gathered her clutch and phone. The entire time, Brick watched her like she might catch fire if he looked away.

“Brick,” she said primly.

“Blossom,” he returned. “Turning in?”

“It’s late.”

He ran his finger over the rim of his wine glass, and the frost vines evaporated under his touch. “Is it? I lost track of the time.”

“Well, you still have a couple hours left of your birthday. I’m sure you’ll find some way to enjoy them.”

“I’m sure I will.”

With that, she left him to his wine and headed for the elevator that would take her to the topmost floor, where she had rented a room for the evening. A honeymooning couple giggled as they dashed into the elevator after her, holding hands and dolled up to the nines as they whispered to each other and completely ignored Blossom. She smiled and moved to the far corner to give them some space.

But before the doors closed, a hand shot in between them and forced them back open. Brick sauntered into the elevator and perched against the back wall next to Blossom, but he didn’t say a word or even look at her. In his defense, the young couple making out like it was their last night on Earth commanded attention. Their soft giggles and sweet words reached Blossom’s Super hearing, and she bit her tongue not to laugh.

Finally, after nearly thirty floors, the doors opened and the honeymooners flooded out, nearly tripping over their skirts as they stumbled down the hall to their room and fumbled for the key rather poorly. Blossom followed them out, and Brick followed her at a sedate pace.

“Young love,” she quipped as she arrived at her room at the end of the hall.

“Disgusting,” Brick said.

“Now who’s the liar?” She opened the door on the first try as the honeymooners’ laughter grew louder in their repeated failed attempts.

Before she could push the door open, Brick’s hand closed over hers on the knob. Warm lips pressed against the shell of her ear, and she shivered. “Caught me.”

Blossom couldn’t hide her smile anymore and yanked him inside with a burst of Super strength that sent him crashing into the wall with a crack. She pinned him by the wrists before he could move and pressed herself flush against him. “Damn right I did.”

He came alive when she kissed him. Red sparks jumped in between them as he pushed back against her, but she didn’t offer an inch as she shackled him to the wall and held him there for her pleasure for a few glorious seconds. A low growl was her only warning before he got serious and used his explosive Super strength against her. Blossom gasped when her back met the opposite wall.

“We used to be like them,” he said, his voice husky with their kiss and their power.

“You and I?” Blossom ran her hands over his face, in his soft hair she loved even more with its silver veins. “We’re not like anyone.”

Like a struck match, Brick ignited above her and kissed her hard. Her hands fumbled at his belt as he slid her underwear down and off beneath her black skirt. They didn’t even bother with the rest, too intoxicated with the night and the memories and each other to waste another minute. Super or not, there was something incredibly hot about how he could lift her up with his bare hands and hold her there against the wall as he fucked her like they were ten years younger and just as desperate for each other.

“You’re goddamn right we’re not,” Brick said as he pushed in deeper. “Fuck, Blossom—”

The plaster cracked behind her, and it went straight to her core as she tightened her grip around his narrow waist and yanked his hair back so she could kiss him properly.

“You want me,” she said, breathy and crumbling with every move he made.

“Yes,” he moaned against her lips.

“You love me—ah!”

He bit her bottom lip hard, the cheater. “More than anything.”

Blossom whimpered as he held her just right to melt in his arms. Ecstasy: every moment, every touch, every Earth shattering push. He knew her precipice so well it was nothing to plunge her over it and catch her as she fell. With a shudder, she kissed his ear, his temple, his mouth. “You chose me.”

Heat seared her thighs where he held her, and his gorgeous eyes held hers at the expense of all others. “You’re my wife,” he said.

Blossom’s pride flared at that spell in his voice, as powerful as the first time he had ever cast it, and she rewarded him with a clenching embrace that broke him. With a muffled cry, he buried his face in her neck and bit down as he came. The air shimmered around them, Super heated, and Blossom summoned frost to her lips and fingertips as she threaded them through his hair and whispered softly.

After a few moments, his grip loosened and she slipped back to the floor still in her strappy heels. She appraised the entrance to their hotel room: a wrecking ball may have checked in for the night in their stead. “We didn’t even make it past the threshold.”

His laugh came out more like a wheeze as he fixed his pants and leaned one arm on the cracked wall to catch his breath. “Your act worked a little too well on me.”

“The role-play was your idea.”

His gazed trailed down her figure. “No wonder it was perfect.”

Blossom ran her hand over his chest, damp with sweat. One by one, she popped the buttons off his red dress shirt. “Satisfied already?”

With every button she popped off, his face slackened as the afterglow faded and his desire for her returned with a vengeance. Blossom fought the urge to squirm under his heady gaze.

“That sounded like a challenge,” he said, physically straining not to grab her.

The last button was off, and Blossom ran her palms over his smooth skin to shoulders, pushing the shirt and his blazer off. “You know me so well.”

Before he could respond, she had his shirt off and flew him across the room in a blaze of pink, where he hit the bed with a whoosh. For as long as she lived, Blossom was sure she would never get tired of the absolute high she felt looming over her husband about to have her wicked way with him, and the unadulterated passion and pride with which he watched her doing it.

She pulled the tie out of her hair and let it tumble over her shoulder. Slowly, the straps of her dress slipped off, leaving her bare from the waist up. “Happy birthday, Brick.”

It was a miracle the guests in the room below theirs didn’t file a complaint with the front desk when the bed gave out.

xxx

Brick pulled his black Aston Martin into the circular driveway of Princess Morbucks’ seaside vacation home on the Sonoma coast. He cut the engine and sat there as Blossom finished texting a work email on her phone. When he didn’t budge, she put her phone away and looked at him quizzically.

“Brick?”

He sighed and leaned his head back against the black leather rest. “Do we have to go in there?”

Her fingers through his linen shirt were cool to the touch, and he repressed a shiver as she leaned close. “Are you pouting?”

There was a smile in her voice that he chose to ignore and grabbed her wrist. “Don’t tease me right now.”

She smiled for real and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry. You know I love you.”

“And yet, here we are.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s my birthday weekend.”

“And the weekend is nearly over. Hey.” She touched his face and turned him toward her. “Are you okay?”

He searched her eyes for any hint of a ploy, but he found none. They were such a lovely shade of rose, unlike anything he had ever seen on another person, and they were honest. She had always afforded him her honesty since they became reacquainted, and for that, he would have given her anything she wanted. “I miss this,” he said, letting her see a glimmer of the vulnerability he was sadly so good at keeping under lock and key.

“What do you miss?” she asked.

“Us. Time. Our time. One weekend isn’t enough. We shouldn’t need some excuse to take off.”

She looked at him like she really heard him, but before she could respond, something Super-powered and little girl-sized hit the driver’s side window.

“Daddy! You’re back!”

Brick nearly jumped out of his own skin and coughed up smoke. Blossom was out the passenger side door faster than the naked eye could see, and she quickly yet carefully peeled her five-year-old daughter off the side of Brick’s beloved car.

“Hey, no hello for me, Briar?” Blossom hiked Briar up on her hip, and Briar blinked dark scarlet eyes far too savvy for her age.

“Maaaaaybe,” she said, aloof.

“Oh, I see how it is. Then I’ll just have to give you a big frosty kiss!”

Brick got out of his car and watched his grown-ass wife and mother of his children stoop to a five-year-old’s level and blow an icy raspberry on Briar’s neck, freezing half of her solid. Briar squealed in surprise or delight and leaped out of Blossom’s arms. She bent the ice off her skin to gather in her hands, and blew out even more with each peal of laughter as she began launching Super snowballs at Blossom.

Brick caught one that went awry in his bare hand before it could smack into his car, and it evaporated to steam almost instantly under his infernal power. “Briar, where’s your brother—oof!”

He got an armful of little girl wrapped up in a rose-red blur for his complacency and fell back on his ass. Instinct and old habits stoked furious fire in his lungs, but it fizzled to nothing as his daughter laughed and plied him with kisses, smearing pink lipstick all over his cheeks and chin.

“What the hell are you wearing?” he demanded. “Is that a tiara?”

“You bet your grumpy old ass it is.” Princess emerged from the house looking far too fabulous for a Sunday afternoon at home. “Swarovski crystal. You like?”

“I like!” Briar chimed in.

Blossom grinned. “She does look fabulous.”

Princess flipped her stupidly luscious hair. “In this house, every girl is a princess. I should know.”

Unfortunately, Blossom found that funny and laughed along with Princess. As convenient as it was that his best friend and his wife had become as thick as thieves over the years, it often resulted in a battle of the sexes that saw him giving up far too much ground to the both of them. Some wars, however, were not worth fighting. Not when they both looked at him like he’d won something by picking himself off the ground with Briar tucked under his arm like a Corgi.

“Oh Brick, that’s a great color on you,” Princess gushed. “Pink is the new black.”

“Please, pink never went out of style.” Blossom winked coyly at Brick, and his pathetic heart beat a little bit faster.

“God, you’re so right,” Princess said. “Listen to your mom, Briar. She’s the smartest person I know, and that’s saying something.”

Case in point, some wars were not worth fighting. Brick ignored the playful jab and wiped the pink lipstick smears off his face.

“Daddyyyyyy,” Briar whined.

“Don’t ‘Daddy’ me, Briar,” Brick said. But he took one look at her big scarlet eyes and her cute ponytail she insisted on growing out because she wanted to be as pretty as Mommy and Mommy was the prettiest girl in the whole world (which, true), and he caved like a bendy straw. “Fine.”

“Yes!” Briar flew out of his hold and plopped down on his shoulders like a queen on her throne, and Brick held her in place by her ankles.

“Oh, cheers, Briar.” Princess raised her wine glass to no one at all and took a satisfied sip.

“Hey, where’s Blaze?” Blossom asked.

“Who?” Princess said.

“Ha ha. Please tell me he didn’t burn anything down this time.”

Princess waved her off and headed back inside. “He’s fine, don’t worry. But he didn’t want me to dress him up for some totally insane reason. Am I right, Briar?”

“You’re always right, Aunt Prin!”

Brick rolled his eyes so hard he could see his brain short-circuiting in his skull. “Jesus Christ, what have I done.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault you managed to make an impeccable daughter,” Princess quipped.

“Nope, that one’s on me,” Blossom said.

They laughed again, and Brick felt the small part of his soul that wasn’t bonded to Blossom’s wither and die.

“This way, Daddy.” Briar tugged on his perfectly styled hair to steer him left once they were past the foyer, and Brick automatically changed course.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Did you have a good time with Aunt Princess?”

“Uh-huh!”

“How many new clothes did she buy you?”

“Um, this many?” Briar waggled all ten of her fingers in his face.

“Cool,” he said.

Not cool.

Princess was single-handedly turning his children into fashion-forward little snobs. And while Brick would never abide any child of his looking like some snot-nosed, slobbering baby, a part of him worried whether he and Blossom were spoiling them too much. Blossom insisted it was fine so long as the gifts came from Princess and not from them, and they learned how to say thank you and pick only a few to keep from the vast collection so the rest could go to charity, so maybe it really was fine. He wouldn’t know, having never received much from his own father growing up, let alone a cool rich aunt.

In the living room, a skinny eight-year-old boy wearing a red baseball cap too big for his head slept on the leather sofa with his back to Brick and Briar when they entered. Brick checked behind him for any sign of Blossom, but she was obliviously chattering away in the kitchen with Princess, probably indulging in a glass of that rosé Princess had been drinking. Briar had fallen very quiet on his shoulders, and he squeezed her ankles conspiratorially.

Heat churned in Brick’s lungs, gathered pressure in his cheeks, and burst from his lips in a tight ball. His sleeping son’s arm shot up and caught the ball of fire before it could hit him in the back and incinerate the sofa. Briar whined in disappointment, like she’d wanted to see her big brother’s pants catch on fire.

“Hi, Dad.”

“It’s four in the afternoon, Blaze,” Brick said. “Why the hell are you sleeping?”

Blaze snuffed out the fireball and turned over on the sofa with a lazy yawn. He pulled off his cap that used to be Brick’s, scratched his short red hair, and slipped it on again backwards. Pretty, almost feminine fuchsia eyes blinked blearily up at his father and little sister towering over him.

“Aunt Prin made me heat up the pool this morning,” he said.

Of course she fucking would.

Leave it to Princess to choose swimming in an unheated pool over the goddamned ocean that was literally her backyard on a whim and putting his pyromantic son to work.

“Did she pay you?” Brick asked.

Blaze shrugged. “Nah. But she promised me a favor. Anything I want.”

Brick cracked a smile. “Well played.”

He was learning fast. Perhaps too fast. Oh well—he was Blossom’s son; she would have to deal with him when the time came.

A loud bark of laughter from the kitchen preceded a sharp and rather chilly tug on Brick’s hair. “What’s so funny?” Briar asked.

Brick took a deep breath and tried not to think about the damage his daughter’s ice powers were doing to his hair. “Let’s find out. Blaze, get your ass off that couch.”

Blaze got up with minimal grumbling, and Briar leaped from Brick’s shoulders to his. “Sleepy head!”

Blaze scrunched up his freckled face in a way that made him look his very young age despite all his best efforts. “Briar, quit it!”

“Make me!”

“I will.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yes-huh!”

“Nuh-uhhhhh!” Briar hugged him tight and burst with frost.

“My hair!” Blaze flashed fuchsia in a panic and shimmering heat rose from his shoulders, melting Briar’s ice. She laughed and took off flying, and he was quick to follow. “Get back here!”

Brick considered stopping them, decided it one hundred percent wasn’t his problem, and headed to the kitchen to grab a glass of Princess’ wine.

“Did you find Blaze?” Blossom asked when Brick entered the enormous marble kitchen.

Brick opened his mouth to respond when Briar and Blaze blasted into the kitchen in a burst of scarlet and fuchsia. Blossom dissolved in a blur of cotton candy pink and reappeared with two tiny Supers in each hand dangling from their collars.

“She started it!” Blaze exclaimed at the same time as Briar said, “He started it!”

“And I’m ending it,” Blossom said in a tone that brooked no argument. She looked between her two children, contrite and expecting her punishment.

Blaze looked to Brick for a lifeline, but he held his son’s gaze with unwavering indifference: if he was going to fuck around like a little baby, then he would be treated like a little baby.

“What do you say?” Blossom asked.

“Sorry,” Briar muttered.

Blaze wiped his nose. “Yeah, sorry Mom. Sorry Aunt Prin. We didn’t mean to almost wreck your house.”

Princess shrugged. “Whatever, kid.”

Brick shot her a withering look. “Really, though?”

Princess poured herself more wine.

Blossom caved like the sap she was and hugged her children close, showering them both with kisses. “I missed you guys!”

Blaze and Briar bravely put up with their mother’s effusive love for a few seconds until she put them down.

“Do you have something to say to your father?” Blossom asked.

Both Blaze and Briar beamed at Brick, and he repressed a cringe. “Happy birthday, Dad!” they said in creepy-cute unison.

Brick took one look at them and grabbed Princess’ arm. “Princess.”

“Say no more.” Princess poured him a generous glass of wine. Unfortunately, she also looped her arm around his and hugged him. “Happy birthday, hot stuff.”

“Kill me.” Brick downed his wine.

“You are so dramatic. Runs in the family, obviously,” Princess said. She kissed his cheek and wiped her red lipstick off after.

They hung out in the kitchen drinking wine while Blaze and Briar entertained themselves talking Blossom’s ear off about every single thing they did this long weekend. Like a champ, she listened and enthusiastically responded to it all, while Brick sighed and thanked whatever gods didn’t exist for the gift of wine and Princess.

When eventually Blaze climbed onto Brick’s lap and fell asleep again, Blossom decided it was time to leave. Brick carefully shoveled Blaze and Briar into the backseat of his Aston Martin and buckled them up. “Keep your shit under control,” he warned them.

Briar beamed. Her energy knew no limits. “Okay, Daddy!”

Blaze crossed his arms and promptly went back to sleep without a care in the world.

It took another ten minutes to pry Blossom away from Princess as they embraced and confessed their undying love for each other and, like, almost made out probably because there was nothing in the world better than a positive female friendship, as Blossom was fond of reminding him.

By the time they arrived at their suburban Citiesville home, Blaze and Briar were passed out cold. Once Brick and Blossom put them to bed, they sat together in the living room with a blanket between them.

“Hey,” Blossom said as she leaned against his side on the sofa admiring the garden through their floor to ceiling windows, “do you want to continue what we were talking about earlier? About there not being enough time for us?”

Brick sipped his wine. He had an arm around Blossom, and he could smell her perfume. “Not really.”

“Okay.”

They lapsed into silence for a bit, and Brick squeezed her shoulder. She said nothing. He shifted under the blanket. “I mean, I’m just saying.”

“Saying what?”

He scowled and ran a hand through his hair. Her stony gaze made him shiver. “I love them.”

“I know you do.”

“I would die for them.”

“I know you would.”

Brick gritted his teeth and looked her in the eye. “I’d die for you too.”

She touched his cheek and waited for him to meet her gaze. “You’ll never have to.”

“I know. You’re stronger than that.”

She held her breath and he held her. There were memories here, history, a trust they had bled for to earn. But he knew she meant it and so did he, and that was everything. He shuddered, weak like he never was with anyone but her.

“Yeah, I am,” Blossom said. “Hey.” She took his hand in hers and kissed his knuckles. “We have time. You have me. I love you so much, I can’t even catch my breath.”

“I know you do,” he said, his throat constricting.

“And if you want to take more time for us, we can do that. You just have to talk to me.”

“You’re busy, and the kids…”

Her fingers in his hair were a cool balm. He pressed his forehead against hers. “I’m not too busy for you. I love you, Brick.”

Her confession always floored him, no matter how many times she gave it. When he kissed her, she was soft and cool, and she kissed him back. “Let’s do it, then. Take more time. Not because it’s my birthday, but just because.”

“Okay. I’d like that.”

“Princess can take them.”

“Princess spoils them.”

“Who gives a fuck?”

Blossom laughed. “I do. Don’t be an ass.”

“Well, we need a nanny or something. Boomer and Bubbles can do it.”

“Boomer and Bubbles have their own kids.”

“So they have experience.”

Blossom laughed again and snuggled closer to him. “You’re terrible.”

“I’m right.”

Blossom sighed dramatically and buried her face in his chest. “I guess you are.”

He grinned and held her close. She smelled like lavender when he kissed her head. “Blossom.”

She smiled and snaked her hand around his neck. “Brick.”

When he kissed her, he gave her all of himself. How could he have lived for so long without her to share everything with? What would be the point?

“What do you think about the Seychelles?” Blossom asked.

“Hm?”

“We could go diving, lie on the beach, you know. Just…away.”

He pictured it: Blossom in a bikini on the white sand, greeting the sunset with champagne, or under the sea SCUBA diving with creatures most people could never even fathom in their lives. And he smiled. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

She kissed him softly, and she held his entire heart in her hands. “It’s a date.”

They spent the rest of the night in each others’ arms, alone together, and Brick couldn’t remember a better birthday in all his life.

xxx

Thanks for reading!

***Trinity House is now live on AO3! Check out that fic if you enjoy my writing and want more PPG content. I hope to see you all there!***

#Blossick #Reds #Blossom #Brick #Princess Morbucks #Powerpuff Girls #Powerpuff Girls fanfic #I love this universe so much #expect more in this playground from me!#maybe I'll do Greens at some point :)

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scythian-andromache · 4 years

Text

chains around my demons

a The Old Guard (2020) fic Relationships: Andy & Nile & Joe & Nicky, Nile & Quynh, Booker & Quynh, background Joe/Nicky being immortal husbands Rating: T (swearing, canon-typical violence) Summary: Every night, Nile dreams of Quynh. Every night, it's the same vision, the same terrifying dream. And then one day, suddenly, it isn't. Ft. low-key found family and escaped!quynh

also on [AO3]

***

Desperation. Rage. Insanity.

None of it is new. She dreams of it nightly, Quynh’s last moments perpetually invading her sleep. Each time she screams, slams against her iron coffin desperately, drowns. Over and over again. Nothing new under the sun.

None of it is new. She wakes with a gasp, the visceral fear, anger, fraying senses lingering like an acrid taste in her mouth, gripping her as her own adrenaline pumps furiously through her veins, before her body finally adjusts to her physical reality.

None of it is new. She blinks, and she’s underwater. Blinks, and she sees Quynh’s scream, a cloud of bubbles escaping, the last air in her lungs. Blinks, and feels the bite of the metal as Quynh’s fists pound the door to the coffin. Blinks, and Quynh is still, feels the life leave her, feels her eyes roll back in her head. Blinks, and Quynh is screaming, pounding the coffin door, feeling it budge—

That’s new.

She wakes up, already in a sitting position as she heaves a breath. In front of her is Andy, shaking her roughly.

“Andy—” she gasps, trying to realign with reality, trying to tell her that her dream about Quynh was different tonight.

“C’mon, kid. We’ve gotta go,” says Andy.

“But—”

“No buts, it’s time to move,” the other woman says, handing her a loaded Glock.

From the other room, there’s a crash, and the thud of feet, seven—no, eight—separate sets of footsteps advancing through the house.

“Fuck,” hisses Nile, because there’s no time to put on combat boots, and this is absolutely going to hurt. She’s up in a flash, gun aimed at the doorway, and takes out one, two, as the tac-team comes storming in.

There’s a flashbang, and in her disorientation, just manages to throw herself in front of Andy as the pop – pop – pop of their guns go off. (In the background, there’s the sound of measured shots from Andy’s gun, calm and deadly, and the more explosive ring of Nicky’s sniper shots.) She dies, still painful but not nearly as terrifying as the first dozen times, and eleven seconds later, feels one of the bullets push out of her skin. Coughs, and spits out another. Feels her skin knit back together for the three through-and-throughs.

“Right, time to go,” says Nicky’s voice through the haze, and Andy grips her arm and pulls her up. On the floor are eight dropped bodies, the remains of a once-elite squad.

“Copley’s going to have a field day with this one, but he deserves it,” Joe snarks.

They always have go-bags on hand, and it’s only a matter of grabbing a few things to clean out the space. Nile gets to put on shoes, this time, and then they’re out, screeching away from the carnage in Andy’s beat up Citroën. Four immortals, back in the wind.

It’s nearly forty-eight hours, five countries (six if you count Luxembourg, which none of the rest of them seem to), and three continents before Nile gets the chance to sleep again. Sure, she catches a few winks of sleep in transport, but never deep, never enough to recoup her energy. Nile, after all, is not yet used to getting the rejuvenating sleep on nose-diving cargo planes that Andy, Joe, and Nicky seem to achieve, even after six months of this life.

Only when everything’s over, when Copley’s wiping yet more footage and the four of them are at one of Andy’s safe houses—this time in Bangkok—does Nile gets the chance to sleep again. In the interim, she died seven separate times, and frankly, dying is exhausting. She’s surprised she’s still standing. She’s out like a light, and sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks. No dreams, no visions, no dying Quynh invading her thoughts at every turn.

She awakes naturally, to the sound of clinking dishes somewhere nearby, and the alluring smell of coffee.

God, how long has it been since she’s had coffee? Four days? Five? Too long, in her estimation.

“The sleepyhead awakens,” teases Joe.

“Good morning, bambina,” greets Nicky, a cup of coffee already in a mug for her. “Yusuf, hayati, she is only a baby,” he scolds gently. “They need sleep.”

Joe hums. “There are tamr to break your fast and a plate of pancakes in the fridge.”

Nile blinks, and goes to retrieve the pancakes. It takes a moment for her brain to catch up and supply the fact that the dates on the table are also meant for her, if she wishes. “Shukran kteeran,” she says, conscious of her accent as she thanks Joe; she’s been making an effort to learn more than English, high school level Spanish, and the few words of Pashto that she speaks ever since joining up with them.

“My pleasure,” says Joe fondly.

“Where’s Andy?”

“Where is she ever?” By now, Nile knows that’s code for ‘out and we don’t know where.’

“We are going to Wat Arun, later,” says Nicky. “If you’d like to join.”

Nile only vaguely knows what that is, but it would be nice to do something that doesn’t involve shooting or dying.

“Sure.”

They have a very enjoyable afternoon touring the temple—not a single bullet in sight, much to Nile’s pleasure—and Joe and Nicky tell her the story of the first time they came here, when it was being built more than four hundred years ago. Joe and Nicky narrate back and forth with the practiced ease and fluidity of people who know intrinsically how the other thinks, and their comedic timing is unparalleled. Nile finds herself laughing more than she has in weeks, and it feels good. For a few breathless moments, she feels weightless, like everything might just work out, despite the fact that she’s immortal and the world has become infinitely more complicated for her to navigate.

As good a time as she’s having, she ducks out in the mid-afternoon, making excuses about still being tired, so that Joe and Nicky can gallivant around the city alone, instead of with a third wheel. When she gets back to the safe house, Andy is still gone, and she finds that she actually is tired. It takes very little to fall asleep again.

Desperation. Rage. Insanity.

Shit, this dream again.

Wait—no, it’s the wrong flavor of each.

Desperation, but the fiery, yearning sort of a goal not yet accomplished, not the despairing, scrabbling misery of before.

Rage, but calm and white-hot, not the frenetic rage of a cornered animal.

Insanity, but an ordered sort of chaos, not the entropic fraying of a mind from endless, repeated trauma.

All of this is new. There are no bubbles, no pounding hands on unyielding iron, no screams, no death.

Instead, there is rocky coast. The flash of a café, an umbrella filled terrace. The feel of a deep lungful of air, bright and fresh. A cool, salty breeze. An undercurrent of rippling, deep anger.

“Oh, a baby,” says a voice, and a face comes into focus. Quynh, she realizes, slightly gaunt, but with eyes that are a thousand meters deep. She tilts her head. “Two babies.” She grins, razor sharp, like a predator and—

Nile wakes with a gasp.

The light is low, the sun set over the horizon, only the last lines of pink and orange still lingering in the sky.

Every nerve ending in her body is on fire, adrenaline pumping, because those eyes, those fathomless, bottomless eyes are still imprinted in her vision.

“Andy,” she croaks.

“Calm down, kiddo, you’re all right.” Joe and Nicky must be back from their sightseeing and/or shenanigans.

She feels cold. She’s not all right.

“Booker,” she gasps, trying to convey her fear. Two babies, Quynh had said. Her and Booker. Two people—new immortals—for Quynh to dream about, now that she isn’t dying every three to five minutes.

“Traitorous—” a word falls out of Joe’s mouth that no longer exists in any living language. Nile’s not sure she could replicate its rasping consonants even if she tried, but she gets the message loud and clear.

“Quynh is alive and I think Booker’s in danger,” she says, in a rush, heart racing and eyes panicky.

Nicky takes her hand in his. “I need you to breathe with me, Nile. Deep breaths. In, and out.” He coaches her through several cycles, until it no longer feels like her heart is going to gallop out of her chest. He says something to Joe in a language Nile doesn’t understand, and he leaves the room, presumably to do whatever it is Nicky asked of him.

“What you have gone through, seeing Quynh every night, it is something I do not wish to imagine,” says Nicky softly. “I am blessed to have met her, to not see her every time I close my eyes. I know this is difficult, but I need you to tell me everything you have seen.”

“It’s different now,” Nile says, taking another shaky breath. “Before it was just—endless drowning. Every time. But I—before everything happened, I felt the coffin door move. I was going to tell Andy but—” We all died a couple of times and ended up here. She falters, but Nicky seems to understand. He squeezes her hand, so casual and reassuring in his touch.

“Just now, I saw her in a town. I—I don’t know where. But it was like she was aware I was seeing her. She said two babies, and the look on her face…” Nile trails off, unable to describe it. She’s not sure she’s ever felt her own fear so viscerally, not in Afghanistan, not in the cargo plane with the dead/not-dead pilot, not even at Merrister. Quynh is out for blood, and there’s something in her bones that tells her this is a primordial force to be feared.

“Quynh has been trapped for a long time,” says Joe, who has returned. “You don’t spend that long alone and in pain without it changing you.”

“We need to protect Andy,” says Nile, rationality starting to creep back in. Quynh may be a threat to them—to her or Booker—but she’s a threat to now-mortal Andy most of all.

“Protect Andy from what?” says Andy, who has reappeared as if by magic, as if the invocation of her name summoned her.

“Quynh has escaped,” says Nicky, flatly, and all of the color drains from Andy’s face.

Booker is extremely drunk. His body, dreadful regenerative thing that it is, metabolizes alcohol out of his system much faster than the average person, so he’s gone through three fifths of rum in an attempt to dull his senses.

He’s never stopped dreaming about Quynh, exactly, but the dreams which had been so dull and infrequent for so long showed up again full force after just a few weeks of exile from the rest of the group. He’s tired of it. He just wants to sleep peacefully, for a little bit.

Booker stumbles into his apartment, bleary eyed and praying that this dull feeling will last long enough for him to fall asleep. He thinks maybe he could just pass out in the kitchen when he lays his eyes on a ghost.

Merde.

The dream has come to him apparently, and he’s unprepared. He doesn’t want to watch her drown again.

“Booker. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

It’s Quynh, very much alive and very much free.

“You can’t be serious,” snaps Nile, upon hearing Andy’s intention to find Quynh.

“I must face what I did to her,” insists Andy.

“She is out for blood, Andy. Yours. You gotta play this one smart.”

Andy grips her arm, looks her dead in the eye. “You know how I left her. There is a penance to be paid.”

“Joe? Nicky?” Nile says, looking for back up, but they seem to defer to Andy’s stupid choice.

The eye roll Nile gives them contains multitudes: I can’t believe I’m doing this and you’re all idiots and so help me, the sheer dumbassery here is unparalleled.

“Goddamn it,” she huffs. “Okay, fine. Here’s what I know.”

They spend the rest of the evening plotting their course back to Europe, where they’re sure to find both Booker and Quynh, maybe together or maybe not. Nile swears she’s going to protect Andy, even if she has to die a hundred more times. The other woman has grown on her, and besides, she’s one of only four—now, maybe, five—resources that Nile’s got. She can’t die permanently now.

Quynh has already blown up an old safe house of Andy’s on a bluff in the nearby Scottish highlands that she remembers from before her drowning before Booker sobers up enough to try to do something about it. (In retrospect, he should’ve just shot himself; it probably would have been a faster reset.)

He catches her sitting on a rock, watching the blaze, back resolutely to the sea. She probably never wants to see it again, and he can’t say that he blames her.

“I’m going to kill her,” Quynh promises venomously. “I’m going to kill her at least a dozen times in a row.”

“She’s not immortal anymore,” says Booker, as casually as he can.

“Even better,” Quynh spits, but he sees something flash in her eyes.

He knows that look. He’s too well acquainted with that look. It’s the fear of being left alone, like she already has been for five hundred years. (Well, he hasn’t been alone for quite that long, but sometimes it feels like it.)

“Will that sort of revenge really make you feel better, do you think?” he asks conversationally, and is rewarded with a throwing star to the chest. He drops, dies, blinks, coughs, and stands back up, the freshly expelled throwing star falling into his hands. (Ah, so it did reboot all the alcohol out of his system. At least he won’t have a hangover, for however brief a time.)

“I think it’ll feel excellent,” says Quynh, but he doesn’t believe her. Even in his misguided efforts to find the cure to their immortality, he never wanted to be the one to snuff out the life of one of his friends permanently. He’s never felt more regret than when he shot her, when he realized she wasn’t healing.

He sighs heavily. “It doesn’t feel as good as you think it will.”

“You are a child,” Quynh says dismissively, “still gumming at the teat of time. You have seen nothing.”

Booker closes his eyes, tries not to be get angry. He’s been alive half as long as she spent drowning. He hasn’t seen nothing, but Quynh is old. Even his two hundred years must feel like a few grains of sand in comparison to her—what, two thousand years? Three?

“If you want to be angry,” says Booker, thinking that this is the least he can do after what he did to his friends, “be angry at me. I dreamed of you drowning, and I didn’t try very hard to find you.”

Quynh narrows her eyes. “She betrayed me. Have you any idea what that feels like?”

No, he’s just been on the other side of it.

“Besides,” she says. “I was already planning on killing you a few more times today. This changes nothing.”

She pulls a gun seemingly from nowhere, and puts three rounds in his chest. It takes him a little longer to regenerate, this time, and she finally gets a few moments of peace and quiet.

“That was Copley,” says Andy, ending the call. They’re at Joe and Nicky’s apartment in Paris—a proper apartment, not just a safe house like Andy’s church, the one that got practically blown to bits in the Merrick debacle. “He says there was a bombing in Scotland yesterday.”

Nile’s eyes widen, but Joe is just wearing a get to the point face. Andy scowls. “It was one of mine. She’ll come for the cave next, I bet.”

“We could keep the Rodin here, in the meantime,” suggests Joe glibly, earning himself another pointed scowl from Andy, but it doesn’t faze him in the slightest. “I’m just saying that it’s a masterpiece, and we all know what Quynh is capable of. It would be a shame to lose such a work of art.”

They end up moving three crates of “knickknacks” from the cave to the Paris apartment. (“What the fuck,” murmurs Nile. “Is that a Van Gogh, too?” Joe happily informs her that it is, and that it’s also probably the least valuable thing in the crates. Nile is suitably horrified.)

There’s a fourth crate that doesn’t fit in the Citroën, and when they go back to the cave, they find it already occupied.

Quynh has a battle axe and a stick of dynamite; Booker is perched on the crate. He gives the smallest little wave to Nile as they walk in.

What ensues is not entirely clear to Nile, because apparently the primary language that Quynh and Andy communicate in is not English. It’s entirely unsettling to not be in the loop as she listens to the two of them ping-pong back and forth, until Quynh starts yelling, at which point Joe and Nicky start yelling too, and for a couple of minutes it’s utter chaos.

Maybe not understanding gives Nile an edge, though, because she’s concentrating so hard that she sees Quynh’s hand twitch before anyone else, and before she even knows what she’s doing, she’s taking a flying leap to body-block Andy as three daggers come out of nowhere and meet her torso. She lands with a hard thud, and—as seems to be the norm, lately—dies.

By the time she comes back to consciousness, there are five faces staring down at her. Quynh and Andy are no longer fighting, at least for the moment.

“There was a different poison on each dagger, so I think technically you died four times in a row,” says Booker cheerfully.

“Super,” says Nile, groaning. It certainly feels like she died four times over.

“Quynh has decided that for today, she’s not going to kill Andy,” adds Nicky helpfully. “And says that she’s sorry for killing you.”

Nile narrows her eyes at Nicky.

“Maybe I’m editorializing a little,” he admits. “But the first part is true.”

Nile hauls herself into a sitting position and assesses the situation for herself. Andy’s face is ghostly pale, and she’s staring at Quynh like she’s both her nightmare and her salvation, but at least she’s alive. Booker looks vaguely amused; Nicky looks tired; Joe looks relieved. Quynh’s face is inscrutable.

“I’m Nile,” says Nile cautiously.

“Hello, second baby,” says Quynh, smiling sharply. She says something else, but she’s speaking Middle English, which is almost unintelligible to Nile. Five hundred years drowning really puts a damper on language learning, it seems.

“Excellent, introductions are out of the way,” says Nicky, crisply, cutting off any scathing reply Nile might have. “Can we go eat something now? If another argument is going to break out, it’s probably best we all have full stomachs.”

“And we’re going to trust her. Just like that.” Nile’s voice is flat. “Five minutes ago you were all arguing and then she killed me and now she’s okay.”

Joe shrugs, soft and elegant. “Someday you’ll understand,” he says, and it irks her, the insinuation that she’s a child and not the fully grown adult she’s had to be since the age of sixteen.

Maybe in a thousand years she will understand, but it still seems unfathomable to her now.

Nile heaves a long-suffering sigh. They theoretically know what they’re doing. What’s one more ridiculous decision in the grand scheme of things, right?

Maybe the six of them will beat the odds, and figure things out together. Crazier things have happened.

***

#the old guard #the old guard fanfiction #andromache the scythian #nile freeman #yusuf al kaysani #nicolo di genova #quynh #booker #lenci writes #yusuf al-kaysani #nicolò di genova #quỳnh #r: the gang's all here

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suearthboundau · 4 years

Note

a summary of the plot points would be appreciated!

alright so here’s the whole story:

the end of the current bit would’ve been that yellow n steven just get some time to interact

skip to a day or two later. blue is still mopey and depressed, peridot is getting frustrated w her and then lapis steps in like “i’ll talk to her”. she gives her a speech like “i know what it’s like getting stuck here and never being able to go home, it sucks and it’s miserable, but you have to snap out of it. earth can actually be pretty cool if you give it a chance.”

she takes her out on a walk in the countryside where she shows her the sights of earth, animals and nature and stuff. at first blue is really apprehensive and nervous but she slowly warms up to things and has a good time. her and lapis become friends.

blue comes out of her shell more. she gets really interested in animals and starts observing/studying them, she basically wants to keep anything she sees as a pet. her and lapis get tadpoles from a pond to keep as pets and they all have names and stuff. blue also gets interested in earth fashion since it’s nothing like the uniforms theyre all stuck with on homeworld.

yellow mainly grows close to steven since everyone else ignores her and blue tries to avoid her. she acts pleasant but is secretly trying to figure out how to escape. she never gets anywhere but comes to like steven bc hes genuinely nice and tries to make sure she’s happy and stuff. he brings books to educate her on earth, which she finds interesting, and they also play boardgames together.

lapis leaves about a week after the zircons arrive. pretty much the same as in the show, except blue tries to debate her into staying. when lapis says they can take the barn into space, she points out that 1) the tadpoles will die and 2) the barn is obviously an earth structure and stands out so homeworlders will easily spot them. but instead of convincing lapis to stay, she just flies off without the barn. so everyone remaining continues to live in the barn.

more character development and stuff yada yada. smaller fillery arcs. then one day a homeworld ship arrives at the barn, filled with quartz soldiers. they spot yellow, and yellow’s terrified they’ve come to arrest her but then they reveal they’re trying to rescue her. some of them free her from her cell, while the other quartzes find and bubble peridot and blue. yellow realises from what they’re saying that she was never a wanted criminal and that sapphire must’ve lied to her.

she pretends to play along with the quartzes and act nice. they ask if she knows where the other rebels are and she says yes. something wouldve happened previously so she knows where the crystal gems house is, she leads them to it. however when they arrive and the quartzes disembark, ready to fight the cgs, yellow stabs them in the back by destabilising their leader. the other quartzes are so shocked that they let their guard down, giving the cgs time to form alexandrite and effortlessly defeat them. they bubble all the quartzes and free peridot and blue.

garnet congratulates yellow and tells her she can be free now bc they know they can trust her. but yellow still doesn’t trust them, and only really likes steven. peridot and blue reform (new outfits yayy), and it’s decided that they should all stay at the temple instead of the barn because homeworld knows the barn is a base.

the plot kinda chills out after that big event. it’s mainly just character development stuff and characters growing closer to each other. all the peridot and steven episodes from canon happen off-screen or in the background bc the zircons have nothing to do with them. this is the maybe month or so before ASPR, where there’s no more major canon plot.

yellow gets a new outfit, whether it’s from having to reform or just deciding to change for fun. also the zircons move into the lighthouse, maybe with peridot. generally all i had planned for this was smaller, humour-based storylines. blue becomes more outgoing, yellow develops interests if her own and joins jamie’s acting club. the zircons still argue constantly but start to agree on a few things. like, they both like the same tv shows, they’re both crazy competitive rules lawyers with board games, and they both hate ronaldo, who comes up to their house to play lookout and constantly bothers them about “totally seeing aliens” in his telescope.

eventually they finally just talk things out, apologise to each other for all their grievances, and yellow admits that she’s actually happy living on earth with blue, and it feels more like home than homeworld did. and then they hug it out and fuse. we would’ve had a few comics here where i might’ve taken questions for green zircon. then she’d hear ronaldo coming up the hill to do lookout, panic, and unfuse.

they’d both go inside, do some stuff, then hear ronaldo freaking out outside about spotting a “real moon alien”. they’d just roll their eyes about it but he’d insist they come look. and then they’d see lapis on the moon. ronaldo runs off to get steven, while blue gets really excited that she might see her friend again. when steven goes up to the moon, she tags along. lapis still leaves again, and steven tells blue about his dream, causing her to go into Theorising Mode.

blue obsessively goes over the evidence while yellow teases her for being a crazy conspiracy theorist, and she figures out that pink diamond was rose quartz and cracks the whole mystery. then like 2 seconds later steven knocks on the door and sits them down to explain the whole story. he doesn’t even get to start saying anything before blue’s like “in a second, can i explain my thing first?” and basically explains to him everything he was about to tell them. and then stevens like “uh yeah u got it.” and blue gloats at yellow that she was right while yellow pretends not to care.

garnet has her wedding and the zircs go, yellow doesn’t really hate the cgs anymore but she doesn’t feel hella welcome around them but yeah she goes anyway everyone has a good time. the diamonds show up, pretty much the same as in canon, i hadn’t really figured any way the zircons might impact stuff as i couldn’t see them fighting. they’d probably just hide tbh.

when everyone goes to homeworld, yellow goes with them so she can visit her friends and tell them how she’s been. blue decides to stay on earth so she can catch up with lapis, and also bc there’s not really anything for her up there. pretty much the same as in canon, yellow is not invited to the ball and she doesn’t want to go bc it’s not her place, she splits from the squad and goes to the zircon quarters to chat with her friends. she would’ve changed back into her uniform.

so we’d basically just be following yellow and seeing what life on homeworld is like for a zircon, the living quarters etc etc. as well as the kind of friends she had and her old life and stuff. i had an idea that gems like zircons that access databases can basically connect to the homeworld internet, and yellow would’ve known when they were almost at homeworld bc she would’ve suddenly got three trillion notifications from all the texts people had been sending her trying to find out where she is.

we’d also go back to blue on earth. she’d chat with lapis and they’d reconnect, i’d also have lapis and peridot talk things out bc they left on a sour note. also bismuth would get to know blue bc they never met. then they’d get the steven message and go up into space to help. while everyone else is going to the diamond fight, blue would go to find yellow and make sure she’s safe. they’d meet up in the zircon quarters, check everything’s alright, and the other zircons would be like “um yellow why r u hanging out w that loser lol”. then the chapter would end with all the zircons noticing white diamond’s ship blushing and being like “wtf”.

there’d be an epilogue thing set at the little party that ended the season. i didn’t plan to go into the movie or SUF (the whole plot of the movie would just be the zircons hiding in their house going “wtf” at the giant injector planted right in front of it lol). i guess in SUF they’d just be living their best lives.

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grumpy-zane · 4 years

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((Had a ninjago fan season idea that takes place after s13 and semi centers around Kai ninjago. This seasons theme: Vacation gone wrong! I have segmented it into episodes for convenience. I uh, may or may not dedicate some time to drawing content for this thing, so I apologize in advance. ((also it is. a long post.

Episode 1 - Answering machine going off and its’ Ronins voice over the machine: 'Looks like I’m gonna run late.. ugh this whole thing is falling apart isn't it. But we'll make it work. I got you a ferry to take you there, one of the cruise ships. It was the least I could do for now... I'll meet you there, I promise.' >Cuts to Dareth on the boat, taking him and the rest of the people to ‘Aves Isle’. >While everyone is getting off, Dareth helps a naga lady with carrying some of her stuff because Dareth ninjago. >Naga ladys' name is 'Olive', she is a semi native. She starts talking about the islands' history. 'there used to be a temple but we don't know what happened to it, but it sunk into the ground. >two investigate the area because Dareth has time to wait on Ronin. >Upon finding whats’ left of the area and entering, the atmosphere changes and inflicts a weird curse or whatever. >Dareth starts getting progressively more pushy Episode 2 - After s13 Wu wants to do more adventures so the bounty is just flying wherever the wind takes it I guess w/e {{Also realized I didn’t write much for Wu this entire rest of the story so I am assuming he’s having a grand ol’ time being on vacation}} >wow it is night time, the bounty is flying in >The crew ask where they are and Zane starts to go on his normal informative spiel before getting cut off. >Oh there’s a thing on the radar. What the heck is that thing flying towards us OH GOD THAT’S A BIG ANGRY DRAGON >Bounty has two smaller 'runner' boats? I guess? marketing. Two of the ninja hop on those and fly off. >Zane and Jay distract the dragon so the bounty can safely land but it turns out there are two dragons and Jay gets taken down first. Yay soft landing. >Bounty makes it safely over the fences that are on the island >Zane gets taken out. >Cuts back to Dareth and Olive still rooting around. activates something and wow a lava fountain. the ground is glowing in weird markings! >Dareth snaps at Olive and she wells up and runs away and Dareth snaps out of it temporarily like 'oh crud why did I do that I didn't mean to be so bossy' and goes after her >Olive gets overtaken and now: pointy. >Dareth tries to stop her but she jumps into the portal lava whatever? hole?? not sure. >He, of course, jumps in after. >Fire Dareth. >Random golden-looking platform chained to the bottom of the hole they are in. ominous voice: hey how about you get these locks free and we'll rebuild the temple? nice. >Temple platform rises >Zane gets tossed into an area? park? fenced in something or another?? >oh hi Jay >oh community service sorting trash from recyclables? can do.

Episode 3 - The remaining ninja visit the two who are in 'time out' before deciding to have a look around the island. >They take a nice walk down the beach Cole reminisces about the time Kai was extremely afraid of water >Kai frowns as a laugh track is played. Claims he has gotten better at it but screams when Nya splashes him. >Zane and Jay are done with service and its like 'okay how about we try to get out again?’ >Zane suggests doing it in the broad daylight since the dragons went out at night and may be nocturnal >they try >they get taken out again >another round of community service >sees another aircraft fall out of the sky >guard: wow more property damage. >sundown. lloyd notices that something strange is happening with some of the residents randomly getting more nippy and then not. strange. (Ninja get into an arguments with the locals or whatever) >Stop by community service area >Jay is now frustrated >rest recuperate at where they parked the bounty >Nya: well nothing is really going on here we can probably leave once the two are done breaking the law >Ronin shows up to the area and is greeted sourly by Jay ninjago

Episode 4 - The ninja are ready to leave when they notice a weird ominous structure that wasn't there before. >Crew investigate >oh its hot. you can go in, Kai ninjago >kai enters >oh frick fire dareth >kai ninjago, walking out and is krispy: there is a problem. >three get out of service >ronin asks if the little runner ships are 'truly' important >hekcin steals their engine or whatever >regroup at the bouty >Kai: hey uhh, Dareth is peeved haha, I don't get it though he and I hang out every now and then. >Ronin, internally: oh god he's really mad I didn't follow plans to a T- >the ninja exchange awkward glances of guilt >decide it'd be best to talk to him tomorrow, or try to. Also, more people are randomly getting upsetti, Jay is still frustrated.

Episode 5 - jay still has a bad attitude. lloyd is also starting to get upset. Cole tries to diffuse the situation but it causes the two to point their noses up at each other in silent anger. great. >Kai enters in the temple again, which is even more built than it was before. >Dareth being snarky >kai apologizes and tells him he wasn't aware of it, and that he thought the two were good friends, reminding him of the times they hung out outside of mission things. >Dareth calms down a bit >finds a reason to be mad again. >Ronin shows up >'ronin?' >''Told you I'd meet you here, what didn't you believe me? not really much of a vacation. How about we get some fresh air?" >Dareth approaches >oh no he's really hot. >cheek caress with the robotic arm. gae. >two head out. Room is no longer unbearably hot. good! >squad enters in. goes into one of the inner chambers >oh look the towns people overtaken by rage are building. nice. >oh no jay and lloyd are fighting again. >grabs attention of workers. >the ninja get their butts handed to themselves, and lose Jay and lloyd in the process. nice >cuts to Ronin and Dareth walking on the beach. >Ronin smooth talking, normal Ronin behvior >Flames and whatever fade from Dareth and he snaps out of it completely and immediately starts pouring out how he feels bad about being rude to Olive and whatever the bad guy is and what the plans of the temple are. >Ronin: maybe we should tell the ninja. I don't want us to get involved anymore.

Episode 6 - Ronin informs the ninja of what's up. >Nya: oh no we gotta stop this ! >Dareth: I want to help. >Ronin: no we are on vacation we shouldn't have to; leave it up to them. >Dareth: no I started this, this is my fault, I have to make it up to Olive and everyone <:( >Ronin: :/ >Zane: we should focus on. not making the locals angry because that seems to draw them towards the temple. >Ninja proceed to do good deeds, while part of them break off to do research >learn about the bad guy dunn dun dunn!

episode 7 - Kai ninjago somehow is the one keeping the most level head out of everyone here and things get tense again. is it potentially out of character? Well he's mad that lloyd and jay are overtaken but he's doing a good job at self control. >cuts to lloyd and Jay >lloyd: this is dumb! why are we helping!? We're supposed to be stopping this! >Jay: we're helping because YOU dragged us into this with your plan! >argue. great >bad guy laughing or whatever, oh the voice has a physical form that's manifesting from the heat of the temple. 'Good, soon I will be reborn and reclaim the island!' >Olive inform him that Dareth has broken the spell >bad guy furious and confused but is also like 'whatever we have a lot more important things to worry about' >Nya and Zane are stepping on each others' toes. >ronin and Dareth relay what they learned. >kai sitting in the bounty looking disheveled >'Human pinata makes the kids happy'. Horrifying. >story about how the bad guy was dispersed after 'other beings' landed on the island and taught he locals the importance of peace and not war or whatever. It was probably some Oni and dragons chillin. >Cole: oh! I mean we have two 'other beings' and those are the dragons, but they seem really angry and territorial >Kai: maybe they want something and just haven't gotten it? ((Id have to mention one of the festivals known as the 'laughing dragon' festival or whatever but it's fallen into obscurity due to the dragons not being happy. Mention that sometime during episode 3)) >investigation time part 3. >learn that there's a fruit that the dragons like, but the recipee was lost on how to make the disk for them >well gang, time to get cooking! thank goodness Zane is on our- >just kidding Zane and Nya are gone now because they got too angry at each other and went to 'get space' but they're probably at the temple now.

Episode 8 - Gotta do the cookin by the book! >the ingredients are gathered. >Dareth insists that they used a very speicific brand of exctact. >Cole has no idea how to cook well >Kai starts putting things together. >Cole: when did you learn to cook? >Kai: Well I had to take care of my sister buutt.. I dunno I think being the master of fire, cooking comes easy. ;) >Cole: if there's any way I can help just let me know. >kai: oh, yeah, bust open those things. >Cole literally smashes open the fruit sending bits everywhere >good ol happy comedic moment. >first try >Cole: . looks. uh. strange. >Ronin: I am afraid to taste it. >Dareth: oh I'm sure it can’t be- -face scrunch- >Kai: <:) >Dareth: well... I swallowed it.. at least.. >cuts to temple again >bad guy is like 'we need more people how come everyone stopped coming?? someone needs to go out and start beating people up >:(' >Olive reports that the ninja were gathering ingredients for something or another >Bad guy is like 'okay send some people there and stop them'

episode 9 - after the 5th attempt it's much more palatable so they make a larger batch and stick it in a boat all fancied up and now have to deliver it >oh god angry people >why are they looking at us hhh >fite >Kai: we legit cannot let any of this spill otherwise I'm going to scream. >only way to get it away from the people is to go by ocean >Ronin: we'll do what we can but you gotta do this kai. You're tough. >kai: ahaha I still don't like water but! >boat on water >gets to the part outside of the gate >oddly silent. >kai proceeds to put it on the beach and starts calling out for the dragons and starts making noise or whatever. "im gonna kick your sand! haha! what are you going to do about it??' >Dragons emerge, ready to fight >sees the offering. Kai: it's okay it's okay, this is for you. >backs away from the boat >lets the dragons have it. >the smaller one is curious about him and approaches him after >good ol’ kai dragon interaction. yay confidence!

Episode 10 - wow I sure do hate this sorting plant by now, thinks Ronin ninjago. >tossed in the sorting plant Cole: this isn't too bad. Dareth: yeah I thought we were going to be burned by the stake, haha! Ronin: oh you'll hate it soon enough. >Dareth and cole exchange glances. Cole: oh I know, how about we do a song, get a beat going? I'm sure kai has things under control! Dareth: good idea! Keep the spirits high, huh? >Olive informs that the offering made it out into the ocean >bad guy says 'no fear the ocean probably will swallow it', both unaware that kai was on the boat. >temple is nearing completion. >the angry ninja attempt yet again, to try to make a plan to stop him. >everyone has a different idea >they don't work together and go do their own plans. >lloyd tries to go after him directly >jay attempts to use his powers to get the workers to stop and go after him >nya yells at jay >Zane attempts to take out Olive, with mild success, kicks her out of the temple. >olive decides to visit in on the captives >glares at Dareth >Dareth proceeds to apologize profusely >Olive is stunned and snaps out of it, sorta. moment of clarity >apologizes for stopping their plan about the dragons. gives more detail about the situation inside the temple before getting ready to head back. >ronin. heckin. kidnaps her w/e He wants answers, and also doesn't want her relaying the information she gathered back to the bad guy. Dareth: oh my GOD did you KILL her?? Ronin: :B no messengers.

Episode 11 - The dragons fly overhead and do their little dance and show and yaay, the people are happy! >people working on the temple stop and notice in awe and decide to go outside to have a look. >bad guy takes notice and a n g r y, number of the workers stop and go enjoy the show. Some even going to their work areas and getting snacks and things like a festival. Bad guy: where is my messenger?! How did this happen?! steppin out. that's it, I'll deal with this personally. >bad guy stands on his temple top whatever. Starts blasting fire balls. >kai ninjago shooting fireballs back to deflect Locals: wow firework show! >even more stop their progress. >lloyd notices >the rest of the ninja notice. lloyd: woah kai ninjago..! Nya: I don't know how long he can last doing that.. Zane: the power comes from the temple.. Jay: so we have to sink the temple! >sink time >as the temple starts to submerge again the fire balls become weaker >bad guy adverts his attention to the ninja and decide to try to take them out >Kai ninjago shows up and they have a fire bending battle not ripped from avatar at all Jay: kai you gotta get outta there the temple is collapsing! Kai: I will give me a minute! >This is sparta kicks the dude into the portal thingy lava(?) and gets the heck outta there before everything falls in again. >yaay, we won! >mini celebration that's more like we gotta recover

Episode 12 - partially filler episode? w/e >actual festival held >good ol relaxing for real this time. >Dareth: that was fun! >Ronin: so much for a vacation, seems like trouble is always following you around. >Dareth: thank god I have you to protect me from it all, huh? >Ronin: wow gay >Dareth: also why did you run late? >Ronin: weeeeeell... that's a long story. B) I'll tell you on the flight back. >Olive: how did you find the recipe for the thing? >kai: I didn't I just... I mean, Well, when you have flare like me you tend to know how to make a good dish B) >Cole: he guessed and messed up 5 times. >Olive: oh- >kai: >:( c o l e >the ninja can actually leave now >FFIV victory fanfare

#ninjago #Mun rambles #will post the art separately for the sake of sanity #Aves Isle

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