#Jesus saved me and broke every chain

[lets-talk-spirituality]

Do you think it's common for soulmates/twinflames before meeting to feel each other and each other's emotions and other things through physical sensations, for example through heartaches, headaches and such? Would that also perhaps mean that they are close to meeting?

Idk if it’s common. I know what I have felt and experienced as an innately spiritual person. I felt all three of my romantic soulmates before I met them.

The first, for about a year I knew I was moving somewhere and that where I was going would lead to a huge change. I just felt the energy coming in like a huge wave. I had anxiety about what was coming. Met my ex three weeks after moving to an energy vortex location. And he irrevocably changed my life in some painful ways. We had an outstanding soul contract from promises made in a past life. We still have a small tether through the pain he caused me. I know this because he will reach out anytime I think too much about him. Recently, I dreamt of him and a few weeks later he reached out. Until he understands my pain we will have this pain tether.

Second guy, I felt something coming and I started to slow down on dating. I just felt like I needed to clear my energy. I asked for magic and meeting him was like lightning. He came to me to make me feel again after I was completely numb from my first relationship. We were both very hurt and traumatized people and that’s why it couldn’t work. We also had a very intense chemistry that was almost irritating at times. I dreamt about him repeatedly after we broke up. Probably for like a year as we worked through our karma via 5D. It was the same theme every dream until he told me he loved me. Our tether is clear now. We may meet again in another life.

Third guy, Jesus, I have noted evidence of me daydreaming a scenario very similar to what I experienced with him, have notes of feeling him arriving to the island a few days before he got here and stayed in the place I felt the feeling. I knew I was meeting someone the night I met him. I would run into him at random and every time he was near by energetically I felt this sensation of searching. He admitted to feeling a connection between us from the jump. We were tied by the moon, met on a new moon and everything around us seemed to happen around the new moon. He told me telepathically he wouldn’t leave before my birthday and that he had something planned and I got that hit a month before. We ended up camping together the week before he left and up to the night before my birthday. He left the day after my birthday, 6 months to the day he arrived. He and I both lived here before, way before. The island called us both, like he was planning to come out here around the time I was except his mom died and he took longer to come. It wanted us here to connect our power. We also have an indigenous tie. And I think we’ve been together in a few past lives. Something tied to the sea because we are both intrinsically drawn to it. Idk if we’ll ever meet again in this life. I like to think one day our paths will randomly cross again. If not now, some life. I miss him deeply. Him leaving set off a chain of events in my life that has led to it drastically changing. And I didn’t necessarily want this change. But time will tell, as my daddy always says. Soulmates tend to feel drawn to the same places and that’s how we find each other.

I haven’t met my counterpart but I’ve had vivid dreams of them and I’ve had a lot of confirmations which I can’t ask them about til we meet. But I have felt their feelings and had shared emotions with them. They saved me from committing suicide by injecting me with pure source love and triggered my kundalini awakening.

So maybe? Idk if my men felt these things in the same way but I know they were aware. First ex called me his Angel and called us soul mates. Recently asked me if I believe in soul ties. I told him what I wrote above about us having karma until he understands the pain he caused me. Second guy was scared I’d leave him because he knew I was meant for more than he could offer. He said you’re meant to do big things in a big city and what if I’m just a small town sheriff. Jesus, god love him, asked while we were camping why he kept seeing certain numbers that are my birthday numbers. His energy always sought mine. He told me we’d always run into each other on the island, and I think that’s part of why he had to leave. He said he’d be back but I know how he is, I’m the same way. When you leave somewhere and it hurts you gotta clean break it.

Women think a lot that men aren’t as intuitive but men know immediately if you’re their energetic match and will push you away for your own good when you aren’t. I think all of my men knew energetically I have a counterpart and that’s why it never lasted. They just wanted to be in my energy and I loved all of them very purely and deeply.

I think it can mean they are close to meeting. But with my counterpart we’ve been doing this dance my whole life. Ebbs of intensity and flows of peace. So it never means that with us. The intensity is tied to how much we need each others support at certain times. My counterpart stepped in because if he didn’t I would’ve died. He told me he could feel it in our tether how low my life force was and it scared him. I killed myself in our last life together and he has some trauma around it. I’ve had dreams I’m consoling him and dreams he’s consoling me. Some where he’s saved me. So I’m not sure when we will meet this life. But I know it’s not tied to the intensity of feeling him because if that were true we would’ve met already. We’re bound by divine timing.

With soulmates, yes, I think it means they are close to meeting based on my three experiences. Romantic partners and soulmates serve different purposes and are contracted for certain things. I usually knew pretty early on who they were, that it wouldn’t last, and why I met them. Idk if other people know stuff like this when they meet soulmates but I usually do. Sometimes my soulmates reveal they felt that too. Especially with friendship soulmates. Right now, I don’t feel any romantic people on the horizon, just passion around my work and helping the planet. I think this work will eventually lead to my counterpart. And I’m still clearing Jesus from my field. And counterpart is cockblocking me hard. As usual 🙃

Hope some of this helps or sheds a light on things.

[faithisthekey-23]

Hi, I came here to post another poem of mine. It is special to me. It reminds me that God is Good and helps us a lot. He can do everything if you have a faith that is as big as a mustard seed.

My Salvation

He saved me from the darkness

He saved me from being brokenhearted

He saved me from constant anxiety

He saved me from the enemy

He saved me from all of my traumas

He saved me from having all painful flashbacks

He is my Savior, Way and Truth

He is the Light that never stops shining on our hearts

His Holy Arms are always opened to welcome you

For He is there to the very end of the age to lead you

To the lovely Kingdom of His Father who is Merciful

He created us with love and peace, made us feel so grateful

For He gave us His only Begotten Son to break every chain

He died on the cross in a brutal way

For us to be saved with Holy Spirit, Him and His Father

He broke the chain of the sickness

He broke the chain of the intrusive thoughts

He broke the chain of what seemed to be a never ending sadness

He took away from me all of this always judging voice

He died for us and showed us the greatest love

He was perfect, Holy, made of pure love and hope

In Him our strength, joy, peace that cannot be overcome

In Him there is a power for He is the Lord of Lords

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote the poem today, on 29th April 2023.

I recommend you to have a listen to this song:

#Jesus Christ #God Almighty #Holy Spirit #christian blog #Christian poetry #Christian poems #poems #poetry #Jesus can break every chain #Jesus is the Healer #Jesus is my Savior #Jesus is the only Way #Jesus is the Truth #Jesus is the Light #Jesus is the only right Answer #Jesus is powerful #Jesus is full of love #Jesus loves you #Jesus is here to comfort you #Jesus is my Comfort #Jesus is my Joy #Holy Bible #Love of God #Mercy of God #My Jesus #Jesus always makes a way #Faith #repent #Receive salvation #Admit that Jesus is God

[curtiscroachblog]

Setting captives free (2)

Word for Today written by Bob and Debby Gass

Saturday 22nd April 2023

'He brought them out of darkness...broke...their chains.' Psalm 107:14 NIV

When the Israelites 'cried to the Lord...he saved them...he brought them out of darkness...and broke...their chains' (Psalm 107:13-14 NIV). And he can set you free from whatever is holding you captive. Not just temporary, but long-term freedom: 'So if the Son makes you free, you will be truly free' (John 8:36 NCV).

Here are two steps to take to freedom: (1) Cry out to the Lord. God said, 'You will...find me when you seek me with all your heart' (Jeremiah 29:13 NIV). Away with dignity and decorum - desperate situations call for desperate measures! Stop trying to handle it alone. If you could save yourself, you wouldn't need a Saviour. Give it to God, 'casting all your care upon him, for he cares for you' (1 Peter 5:7 NKJV).

(2) Feed your soul spiritually. Freedom is a two-part process. The first is communion with Jesus. The Israelites fed on the Passover lamb in preparation for leaving slavery. And Jesus, the Lamb of God, declares, 'I am the living bread...Whoever eats this bread will live forever' (John 6:51 NIV). Sharing your feelings and needs with him will lighten your burden, relieve your loneliness and nourish your soul. Jesus came to proclaim 'freedom for the prisoners...to set the oppressed free' (Luke 4:18 NIV). The second part is meditating on Scripture. Rejecting God's word caused the Israelites to become slaves: 'Because they rebelled against the words of God, and despised the counsel of the Most High...they fell down, and there was none to help' (Psalm 107:11-12 NKJV). To be set free and stay free, feed every day on God's life-giving word.

[ashes-in-a-jar]

And I Owe it All to You

Hello! This is a fic I wrote based on @speakerunfolding 's wonderful Jonmartin scottish cabin comic which I couldn't stop looking at.

I wrote this while watching Dirty Dancing for the first time in many years. Quite an experience xD

Summary: It's a night in for Jon and Martin in the cabin and they decide to pop out the wine.

Rated: T

Word count: 2.2K

Tw: alcohol, drinking and being slightly drunk, minor injuries

Maybe it was the fact that neither of them had gone out much in the past few months. Maybe the Fears prefer their avatars lightweight. Maybe Scottish alcohol tended to be stronger than English alcohol. But the sparkling wine they bought on a whim at the village store shouldn't have had the effect on them that it did.

Having emptied two cups each (Jon was actually drinking out of a mug, since they found only one wine glass, and he conceded the honor of feeling classy to Martin) they have already become giggling messes over some dumb joke regarding one Peter Lukas and a computer that refused to boot.

It wasn't even that funny. But there they were, acting like complete fools leaning against each other on the couch, legs propped up in a completely uncomfortable position on the small living room table (dangerously close to the now nearly empty bottle), holding their cups precariously in one hand and holding hands with the other.

And enjoying every moment of it.

The giggling subsided. They took a moment of comfortable silence to regain their breath and enjoy another sip.

"Can't believe he didn't know he could just u-unplug and replug the whole thing. Even I know that." Jon's speech was ever so slightly slurred, his leftover wine sloshing in his cup.

Martin hummed and then snorted.

"Jon, you barely know how to do that either. I had to teach you how to open new tabs in the same internet window for christ's sake."

"It was a new laptop! All of the buttons were in the wrong p-place." Jon protested weakly, starting to hiccup.

"Sure."

"Prick." Jon nudged him fondly. "You underestimate my vast knowledge of 'modern' things."

Martin snorted again. "Modern, you say?"

"Yes Martin, what do you take me for?"

"An old geezer." Martin tousled his hair gently. Jon leaned into the touch. Then, the words sunk in.

"Hey! Why do you and Georgie keep thinking that? I can know pop culture!"

"Oh yeah? Tell me, what do you know?"

"Uh..." Jon struggled to straighten himself, which resulted in actually sliding further off the couch. "Um...I know S-Star Wars! And uh, Matrix? I think. I've seen it once. Oh! That, that dinosaur movie! And... Titanic?" He finished unconvincingly. 

Martin looked at him, raising an eyebrow. "Really, Jon? You're just naming movies now.  And not even new ones. Did you actually watch any of those?"

Jon avoided his gaze "I... I may have fallen asleep during uh, during some of these?"

Martin gave him a long look. 

"Yes alright, I fell asleep in all of them."

Martin huffed "Thought so". 

Jon gave up trying to salvage his dignity, taking a final long gulp from his mug, a small drop trickling down his chin. Martin swiped it away, absent-mindedly licking his finger, not noticing as Jon hiccuped, his face heating up considerably. 

"I-I did like the Princess Bride though— that was a nice film, if a bit sensational." 

"Hang on. You watched the Princess Bride? And liked it?" Martin asked, incredulous. 

"I'm allowed to like things, Martin. B-besides, Georgie made me watch it. Said it was a- a core staple of cinema history o-or something."

"Oh yeah? Did she make you watch those other movies as well?" Martin asked casually, swirling the liquid in his cup. 

"Unfortunately yes. She would cruelly  shake me awake when I finally managed to get some shut-eye for once in my life. I-it's not my fault the only times I could sleep normally were during those, those damn films! She woke me up for that ridiculous scene with the, uh, the bullets in the Matrix. And that lifting scene in that unseemly dancing movie."

"What lifting scene?" 

"That movie with all of the dancing? Th-the one where he lifts her at the end in the middle of the crowd with that song? At least, uh, at least I think there was a lot of dancing, I wasn't actually, hmmm... Focused at the time." 

"Oh my god Jon, do you mean Dirty Dancing? You fell asleep during Dirty Dancing?" Martin's delighted incredulity was plain on his face. 

Jon scrunched up his nose. "That's the name of the film? Good thing I fell asleep then."

"Jesus Jon. That's incredible, good on Georgie! Heh, at least you woke up for that scene. It's iconic, you know." 

"Yes, yes." Jon waved at him dismissively, reaching unsteadily for the wine bottle. Martin gently took it away from Jon and with a much steadier hand, poured the remaining bit of wine into his mug.

"Thank you Martin," Jon mumbled into the cup. 

Another warm silence fell on them, lulling Jon into a half drunken stupor. He nearly threw his cup in the air when Martin's words startled him back into awareness. 

"I can do that scene you know, that lifting part." He was looking intently at his glass. 

"R-really?" Jon hiccuped. "How?" 

"I… I had a boyfriend who wanted to try it. So we did. Turns out that I'm good at balancing large things that aren't stacks of paper."

Jon hummed. He suddenly imagined very vividly Martin lifting someone else in that way and felt a pang in his chest. What was that?

Another beat of silence. 

"Do. Do you want to try?"

"W-what?" 

"Do you want to do that lifting scene with me? I'm sure I could lift you." Martin suddenly sat up, his tone excited and anticipating. He looked at Jon. 

Jon shifted. "Uh, I-I guess it's fine? Sure."

"Okay! Let's do it then!" Martin got up on his feet, swaying ever so slightly. 

Jon looked up at him surprised. "W-wait, now? Shouldn't we wait? You know, to be less uh, inebriated? Don't you need to see the scene again for a reminder?"

"Mmm. We don't have reception so I can't exactly watch the scene again. But, but I'm pretty sure I can do it now, definitely sure! Come on." He held out his hand expectantly. 

Jon took it, stumbling only a bit as he got up. Martin took out his phone . 

"I might even have the song saved. Let me check."

A moment later he gave a whoop of success and the song began to play, filling the main space of the cabin with its soft, if slightly tinny sound. 

Jon stretched, releasing the tension in his muscles. "All right Martin, where do you want me?" 

"You need a bit of a running start, and then you need to jump high right as you reach my arms, so stand over there." He indicated towards the door of the bedroom. 

"Right." Jon stumbled only once as he made his way towards the designated spot. Martin moved across the room stopping right near the kitchen door. 

The song kept playing calmly in the background, slowly building up towards the upbeat chorus. 

Jon looked at him again "I dunno Martin. A-are you sure?" He suddenly felt a bit more fuzzy than he did sitting down. He hiccuped again. 

"Please Jon, you're thin as a rake. Have a little faith." His face wore that determined look that Jon couldn't help but love. 

"Alright, as you wish." He grinned, proud of his clever reference as he took his stance. 

Martin rolled his eyes as well as his sleeves. "Steady on Westley, this is the part."

Jon felt a rush of excitement as he caught Martin's enthusiasm. "Ready?" He asked, bouncing a little on his feet in preparation. 

"Ready." Martin crouched a little, holding out his arms. 

As the chorus neared Jon, with a wild drunken energy, took his running start, jumping up as he reached Martin, grabbing on to his shoulders for support. Martin firmly gripped Jon's hips, bent his legs and with a strained grunt lifted Jon in the air as the song reached a crescendo. 

Jon was flying. 

He laughed giddily, stretching out his arms in elation. 

As Martin continued holding him in his strong grip he looked down at his beautiful boyfriend. Despite the exertion, Martin looked up with the softest expression as the song kept playing for them in the background. 

For a moment everything was perfect. 

And then Martin leaned backwards a bit too far. 

In hindsight, they should have known this would happen. While Martin was better at hiding it, he was as drunk as Jon. And Jon's already impeded balance certainly didn't help. 

As they went down, Jon idly wondered if they could also recreate the rest of the dance if they practiced. And then he hit his nose on the floor. 

After a moment of stunned silence the pain rushed in and Jon grunted. 

Turns out that while most of him was protected from the fall by Martin's soft and sturdy body, his knee also missed the mark and crashed into the floor as well.

Muffled by Jon's body above him, Martin squirmed. "Ugh, Jon, are you okay?"

When Jon didn't respond, Martin groaned and picked himself off the floor, lifting Jon in the process. 

"Oh my god, Jon! You're bleeding!" 

Jon's face throbbed. And so did his knee. His hazy drunken state began fading away as the pain sharpened. 

"I-I think I hit something." 

"I'm so sorry Jon! God, where are the tissues?" Seemingly having sobered up considerably, Martin picked Jon up and carried him bodily into the bathroom. Jon allowed all of this to happen as the shock of the fall dissipated. He let Martin easily lift him onto the sink counter as he shoved a towel into his hands.

"Hold it against your nose while I... Jesus, your knee too?" He stepped back now hurriedly lifting the stained pant leg to reveal the damage. 

"God, Jon I'm so sorry. Hold still, I'm going to find the first aid kit. We shouldn't have done this. This was a complete disaster." 

He kept muttering irritably as he walked away. Jon sighed and pressed the towel to his throbbing nose. His foggy mind still felt as though it was trying to catch up to the recent chain of events. He spoke slowly, attempting to convey himself with clarity. 

"Martin, it's fine. Honestly, I think we both know I've had worse-" 

"You nearly broke your bloody neck! God, where's that goddamn kit." He shouted from across the cabin as Jon heard the rattling of drawers being forcefully pulled open. 

"Martin, please I-I'm okay. It's just a little bit of bruising. It honestly already feels better." 

And it actually did. In the chaos after the fall, they both forgot Jon's... situation. Jon watched as the cut on his knee slowly closed up, leaving only the drying stain of blood behind. The pain in his nose was slowly vanishing as well. 

By the time Martin came back holding the bag, Jon already put down the towel and was tentatively poking at the previously bruised spot. 

Martin stopped in front of him, looking at him with a mixture of emotions Jon couldn't parse out. He smiled at Martin hesitantly. 

"See? Good as new. No harm no foul, I say."

Martin let out a long suffering sigh and took the towel out of Jon's hands. He quietly dampened it in the sink and stepped closer to gently pat at his face. 

Jon looked at him. This close he could practically count his faded freckles, follow every line and trace every mark that was so beautifully Martin. He let himself smile. 

"I must say, I'm quite impressed by your strength, if we weren't so inebriated, I'm sure you could have kept me up there for quite a while," he said quietly, enjoying the fluttering touches. 

"It wasn't because I was drunk." Martin muttered. 

"Pardon?" 

"I said it wasn't because I was drunk that I dropped you," he said a little louder, oddly flustered. "I was looking at... At you. You just looked... I dunno, happy, I guess? I just never seen that expression on you before and it..." He trailed off, concentrating intently on Jon's knee, finishing up cleaning up the blood. 

"M-Martin, look at me. Please look up here." Jon gently tugged at his shoulders to pull him up. At this height, sitting on the counter, he actually came face to face with Martin, seeing his blush and ruffled expression right in front of him as opposed to slightly above him like he normally did 

He lifted his palms to bracket Martin's warm cheeks. 

"There you are," he whispered and leaned in for a quick kiss. He then leaned back slightly. "You know that I'm perfectly happy. Here with you. Y-you know that, right?" 

Martin looked at him for a few moments, then smiled. "Yeah, I do."

"Good. Now, help me down so we can clean up the wine stain, which I'm sure is growing on the carpet right now."

"Wha- oh," Martin said as he turned to see the fallen glass that apparently toppled during the mayhem. 

"Yeah. Let me down?" Jon said again, holding out his arms. 

Martin turned back to him, a teasing expression on his face. "As you wish." 

Jon groaned and allowed himself once again to be pulled, secretly enjoying Martin's burst of giggles as they both walked back into the crime scene that was their drunken night in. 

All things considered, it was a pretty good night. 

#Ahhhh i had so much fun writing this #While watching the movie itself xD #I hope you like it! #tma #the magnus archives #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #jonmartin #fabric rustles #tma fic #My tma fic #Tma art #I guess #Because its based on it so

[walkswithmyfather]

“For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.” —1 John 5:4 (ESV)

“And who can win this battle against the world? Only those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God.” —1 John 5:5 (NLT)

“He comes to set you free: Bible verses on the Lord's power to break every chain” By Alannah Francis

“Chains are an obvious symbol of imprisonment. In physical terms they restrict us, hold us down and back and signify our captive state. In spiritual terms they do more or less the same. While many of us won't experience physical chains, we're by no means immune to the impact of spiritual chains which harm our spiritual growth. These kinds of shackles are just as unmissable and detrimental to our freedom because they affect our behaviour, our outlook and our faith.

The Bible features numerous accounts of physical chain breaking but it also is full of stories about people who had their spiritual chains broken by the Lord. These types of chains manifested in various ways – demons, sickness, sin. But these biblical stories aren't just documented so that we know what Jesus was able to do for people that followed him in the past, they're also there to show us what he can do for us today. Jesus comes to set us free and destroy the chains that bind us.

The modern day chains that we may experience can come in a variety of forms. It might be an addiction, a lazy attitude or a failure to forgive. We can identify such spiritual shackles by assessing whether whatever it is weakens us, restricts our freedom and prevents us from reaching our potential to become closer to and more like Christ.

If you're aware that there are chains holding you down or you think there's something shackling you but you're yet to determine what it is, appeal to Jesus to set you free.

Here are some Bible verses that will also enable you to see that regardless of the power that chains have, the Lord's power to break them is far greater.

1. Mark 5:8 - “For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God's name don't torture me!" For Jesus had said to him, "Come out of this man, you impure spirit!"

2. Acts 12:6-7 - “The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. "Quick, get up!" he said, and the chains fell off Peter's wrists.”

3. Acts 16:25-26 - “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. 26 Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone's chains came loose.”

4. Psalm 116:16 - “Truly I am your servant, Lord; I serve you just as my mother did; you have freed me from my chains.

5. Psalm 107:13-16 - “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness, the utter darkness, and broke away their chains. Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind, for he breaks down gates of bronze and cuts through bars of iron.”

#1 john 5:4 #1 john 5:5 #mark 5:8 #acts 12:6-7 #acts 16:25-26 #psalm 116:16 #psalm 107:13-16 #bible #christian blog #god #bibletranslations #biblequotes #encouragement #jesus #prayer #belief in god #faith in god #belief in jesus #faith in jesus #jesus can break any chain #god breaks chains #alannah francis #keep the faith #make him known #christianity

[thatfanficstuff]

Impossible - 19

Pairing: Eric Northman x Reader

Warnings: canon typical

A/N: I'm lazy so a gif instead of a header and no editing. Course I'm lazy cuz I'm writing a bunch of stuff behind the scenes, so...

***

“How long has it been since you fed?” Eric asked Godric.

“I require very little blood anymore,” he responded, looking rather annoyed. “You sent a human to rescue me?”

Eric wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you into his side. “I had little choice. These savages mean to destroy you.”

“I know what they had planned.” Again, that little voice spoke up in the back of your brain that they couldn’t have taken Godric and held him without him allowing it.

“You should eat,” you told him and nudged Gabe’s leg with your foot.

He simply looked at you with a bored expression. “He would have raped your mate and the human,” he said without even turning to Eric.

A second later, Eric broke Gabe’s neck then proceeded to glare at the body in fury. Suddenly, an annoying alarm and a flashing blue light caused you to jump as it startled you. “Shit.”

“Get them out of here,” Godric demanded of his progeny.

“I’m not going anywhere until—”

“Now. I can take care of myself. Spill no blood on your way out.”

“Why do you always have to ruin all my fun?” you pouted. You managed to catch his smirk before Eric herded you and Sookie toward the stairs. When you reached the top, you and Eric peered around the doorframe while Sookie hung back. Several men were rushing around mostly armed with stakes. “Where the fuck did they all come from? They’re like cockroaches.”

Eric huffed a laugh. “I could have us out in seconds.”

“Not without killing someone you can’t. You heard Godric.”

He growled low in his throat. “Stay here.”

“What’s he doing?” Sookie asked as she came out to stand with you.

You shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

He slumped forward trying to make himself look more human, less intimidating. You snorted. Like that was even possible. “Um…excuse me, sirs, but uh, Steve sent me over to uh man the exit here so I’ve got it from here.”

What even was that accent? You laughed again knowing Eric would hear though the humans would not.

“By yourself? I mean, you’re big and all but there’s a vampire running around,” one of them said, looking uncertain. “Where’s your stake?”

“Oh, golly. I knew I forgot something. Could I, uh, borrow yours?” Eric asked. You prepared to sprint to his aid at the first sign of trouble.

“I don’t think so, man. Get your own.”

As Eric prepared to glamour the man into handing over his weapon, one of the others moved around him. It was obvious he didn’t trust a word coming from Eric’s mouth. “Stake!” you yelled as you moved from the doorway.

Eric turned too quick for your eye to follow and knocked away the man trying to kill him. He did the same to one of the others, while you shoved the third into the wall with a hand on his chest. His friends ran off when you did so. So brave. Eric snatched the stake from his hand and tossed it aside. He cracked open the front door to see a mass of men headed in your direction.

“Those arrows are wood, you’ll never make it through,” the man you had pinned said.

“The sanctuary,” Sookie said.

Eric glanced to you and you shrugged. You had no idea if you could get out that way or not. You were guessing not but you sure as hell weren’t getting out the front. The three of you moved into the sanctuary, your hand firmly ensnared in Eric’s. “Where’s the exit?” he asked.

“Back there,” Sookie said, hurrying a bit so she could show you the way.

Then Steve Newlin appeared with a smug smile. “There are several exits, but the easiest one takes you straight to hell.” As if he’d coordinated it, the door behind you opened at that exact moment to admit some of his ‘holy’ army.

“Fuck,” you spat.

“You’re in God’s house,” one of the men in the group behind you said.

“Whatever you got to tell yourself, buddy,” came your easy reply. God had nothing to do with what they had planned.

“Let us go,” Sookie cried. “Save yourselves.”

You glanced at her. You had a lot of faith in Eric and yourself, but you were surrounded by about thirty men at the moment. There were limits. And you had no idea if Godric would help at this point. “She’s right, you know. You really should let us go.”

“The war has begun you evil whore of Satan,” Newlin said, stretching his arms out. “And the vampires started it by killing my father.”

This guy was such an asshole. “I’m going to have to stop you right there, reverend. I’m the evil whore of Eric, not Satan. Just thought I should clarify.”

“Really?” Eric muttered beside you.

You shrugged. You might as well go out laughing.

“Well then, you won’t mind dying beside him,” Steve snapped, that creepy smile still in place. You didn’t bother to tell him you didn’t intend to go out any other way.

“The vampire you were holding got away,” Sookie said in an effort to save you. “He’ll send help.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t care about Godric. Any vampire will do and we have one right here.”

Eric tried to release your hand, but you were stronger than you looked and kept hold of him as he stepped forward. He looked up at your captor.

“We will have a holy bonfire at dawn,” he announced.

Eric turned his attention to you as you gripped his hand harder. He reached down and pried your hand from his. “I will be fine.”

You clenched your teeth as he stepped forward, every instinct you possessed telling you not to let him go. You hated this, but the only way you could escape was to wait for the right moment and this wasn’t it. So, you let him go.

You stood your ground while he laid on the altar and allowed them to lay silver chains across him pinning him down as you kept from crying out at the echoing pain in your own body. You ignored Sookie while she yelled at you and asked why you weren’t doing anything. You swallowed your protests when Eric offered himself in exchange for you, Sookie, and Godric. And you ignored Newlin announcing you would be tied to the stake to burn with Eric because you were a traitor to the human race.

Then your salvation came in the unlikely form of Jason Stackhouse and a paintball gun. Just the distraction you needed. He shot Steve in the head, a green splatter coloring his pale skin. His ‘solidiers’ fell back, confused. They apparently couldn’t function without Newlin telling them precisely what to do. “I’m not human, asshole,” you said as you hurried past him to take the chains off Eric.

Eric grabbed Steve by the throat and slammed him into the floor. Sookie was yelling, telling him not to kill the reverend while Jason was telling him to do it. Your gaze found the male Stackhouse to find him being held by several men. What the hell was he even doing here? You really missed your gun.

Then Steve himself starting in, encouraging Eric to kill him and make him a martyr. You rolled your eyes and kicked him in the temple to knock his ass out. Eric released him and stood. Before either of you could say anything to the crowd around you, you heard the distinct sound of vampires moving. You exchanged a glance with your mate as you reached out and pulled Sookie into your side.

The sanctuary doors flung open to reveal Stan fucking Baker flanked by several vampires who quickly moved into position around the room. “Steve Newlin, you have pushed us too far,” he announced.

He was such a fucking drama king. “He can’t hear you, jackass. I knocked his ass out.”

“Be that as it may, we’re not going to sit around while he plans to kill us. We’ll kill them first. Just like we killed his father,” Stan said, shifting his weight like he was in an old Western prepping for a gunfight. He dressed like it, too. “Kill them all,” he ordered.

The vampires swarmed forward to select their victims. Just before you could take control on behalf of the Authority, a voice rang through the room. “Enough.” Everyone stopped and looked up to see Godric standing on the wall of the balcony above you. You could almost see the irritation and disappointment rolling off Stan.

Steve stirred beside you and pushed himself up on his elbows. Godric looked down at him. “Reverend Newlin, we do not have to be at odds. I will make the first move by promising there will be no violence against you and yours. Will you join me and make the same promise?”

“I will not make deals with sub-humans,” he announced as he got to his knees. He looked up at Eric. “Kill me. Do it. Jesus will protect me.”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you,” you told him. “Then you won’t be a martyr. You’ll just be an asshole that pissed off the wrong person.”

Eric chuckled then you both turned as Godric flashed between you and picked the reverend up by the back of his neck. “Good people, who of you is willing to die for this madman’s ideals?” No one stepped forward. “That’s what I thought.” He released Steve and let him fall to the floor. “There will be no bloodshed here. Go home.”

Once the humans dispersed, Godric stepped forward and glanced at the vampires. “Come.” Stan stepped forward trying to push his agenda and Godric just stared at him. “I said come.”

Jason ran over to hug Sookie while Eric turned you to look you over. “Are you okay?”

You nodded and held up your wrist. “Better than you. Drink.”

He didn’t even bother to protest and accepted your offering to heal him from the silver. The Reverend Newlin was still crumpled on the floor beside you crying for everyone to come back and not leave him. Idiot. You glanced from him to Jason. “Jason, thank you for the rescue, but the Fellowship of the Sun are not good company to keep.”

“Yeah, I know. I see that now. I promise.”

You studied him for a minute before giving him a nod. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” you said as you grabbed your mate’s hand to drag him out the door.

#eric northman x reader #eric northman fanfiction #true blood fanfiction #eric northman x you #series #impossible

[ciggylungz]

Eat your heart out

Blurb night- 1.8k words

(request: ok but what if u wrote one where y/n is a virgin and they finally did it after dating for months and then Harry's friends came to visit him and you overheard h talking how bad u are and all that angsty stuff...)

 Virginity

The word means a something different to everyone. Some people save it for marriage, some don’t care about it, others tie it to religion. It’s all up to personal interpretation and value. For Y/n, it’s not that she didn’t want to lose it, she just never felt ready until she met Harry.

She had met him through a mutual friend, they were both invited to a birthday party and just got on so well they decided to get to know each other better. Dates, hangouts, and many hours spent together later they had become official and now they’re 5 months in and going strong.

A few nights ago, she had finally felt ready. She had communicated to Harry at the start of their relationship she’d never been intimate with someone before and it might take her a while to feel ready to be so vulnerable with him, but eventually the night came and while it was a bit clumsy filled with trial and error she thought over all it was a special experience. Harry had made her feel comfortable, he had made her feel like she was beautiful and made him happy, so she’s completely confused and crestfallen at the words she’s hearing come from his mouth echoing through the spacious house.

“mate, it was bad. Like proper awful, I almost gagged at some points from how bad it was.”

A cruel laugh followed his words. Her chest felt hollow, like her heart had caved in just from his words. She couldn’t bring herself to stop listening, she guessed she was just a glutton for punishment because the hurtful words just kept coming.

“I thought being with a virgin would be hot!”

She heard the voice of one of his friends exclaim, she had never hated the sound of someone’s voice before that moment.

“so did I! it’s why I put up with the wait, thought she’d be bloody tight and a good shag, but I was dead wrong. She barely got wet; she didn’t even taste good! I couldn’t stay hard for shit, pretended to cum and everything just to get it over with. I didn’t know sex could be so bad!”

Another round of cackles and random bullying comments were made about Y/n among the group of men, at this point Y/n felt worthless. She felt like she failed, she felt dirty and stupid. Everything he’d ever said to her was now being questioned. she swears she could vomit.

“Jesus H, what a waste of a pussy innit? Don’t worry can get some girls lined up for you this weekend. Can trip and have a proper orgy, deserve it after pity fucking that dud.”

“Thank god! Need a good fuck after that nightmare. Line up a good few for me yea?”

Humiliated didn’t even come close to describing how Y/n felt right now. Not only had her boyfriend objectify and completely embarrass her to his friends, she’d just heard first hand that he hated it so much he had faked his orgasm, and was planning to cheat on her with multiple women in less than 24 hours. She was sick, her heart stomped on and her feelings completely crushed. She’d never felt so worthless, stupid, used and disgusted with herself. She had confided in Harry how she was scared to be vulnerable, afraid to be intimate with someone because she wasn’t ready to be so open and bare with another person. Harry had told her how she was worth the wait, how she was beautiful and he loved her but now she knew none of it was real. He’d just wanted to be with a virgin, and he hated the experience.

The vomit crawling up her throat had finally reached her mouth, the girl darting towards the bathroom to empty her churning stomach into the toilet tears springing to her eyes as her body tried desperately to purge out all the hurt yet the waves kept coming.

If anyone had heard her getting sick, they didn’t care since no one even called out her name. The girl didn’t even feel like an actual person anymore, just a defective object who was disposable. She couldn’t be here anymore, the emotional pain starting to manifest into physical symptoms as well. Her head pounding, stomach turning and ears ringing. It took all the energy she had left to shove some of her things into her bag to take back to her flat.

The girl was too humiliated to even face them, to confront Harry or mention what she had heard. She internalized all of it, pulling her hood up and ducking out of the front door silently. She suddenly felt lucky that the living room wasn’t in view of the entry way so she could slip out without detection.

 ----

y/n didn’t bother to leave a not nor text Harry about her departure, making her way on foot to the underground to get home. She hadn’t driven her car there since Harry had picked her up, and she didn’t have any service to get an uber so she opted for the easiest option.

The majority of the train ride she spent with her head down, thoughts racing as she desperately tried to suppress the sobs begging to be let out. she somehow managed to keep it together until she got into her flat, as soon as she shut the door her back was against it pained sobs wracking through her body.

When her bottom finally hit the ground she was reminded of the bruises she’d woken up with on her hips and ass from where Harry had gripped onto her.

Maybe that’s why he made me switch to all fours, he was so disgusted he couldn’t even look at my face. Maybe that’s why he seemed to get angry, I couldn’t make him feel good.

The soreness didn’t even compare to the internal injuries his words had left her with. It was as if she’d been clawed from the inside out, every hurtful word slashed at her organs. Her mind burning with self-hatred, insecurity and disgust towards herself. Y/n had always been insecure, she struggled with body image and confidence since she was a child and this ridicule of her natural state and what was supposed to be special tore her limb from limb.

She didn’t know how long it had been, she seemed to zone out finding herself laying in fetal position on the wood floors of her home. Her back was still pressed into the cold steel door, using what was left of her to stand to her feet and lock it, sliding the chain lock as well just to make sure there would be no chance of anyone disrupting her decent into the void of pain.

She didn’t get much sleep that night, her head wouldn’t stop pounding and her thoughts never eased up. She’d gotten a text from Harry asking where she was, her only sending a simple message saying she was feeling poorly and went home in reply.

Harry left her on read.

It must have been many hours since the sun had rose then set again in the time she’d laid still between her covers. She hadn’t gotten up to use the bathroom or eat. She didn’t feel like a person anymore. She didn’t feel like she held any worth in any sense to anyone, seeing as no one had reached out for her in the hours she’d been MIA, not even the boy who supposedly loved her.

Y/n shifted her gaze to the clock on her nightstand, she then knew it was Sunday. It had been almost an entire 48 hours since she’d moved from her spot and by now she was sure Harry had been balls deep in numerous other women. Women who could give him everything she failed to, women who he desired and could get off with. They must be everything she’s convinced she’s not. Pretty, sexy, desirable, loveable, worthy of Harry’s intimacy. Something he regretted ever engaging in with his own girlfriend.

 ---

It was 10 in the morning on Monday when Y/n’s phone finally dinged. By Sunday night she had managed to drag herself to the bathroom to relieve herself and brush her teeth, yet she only then returned to her bed to lay in a depressed shame filled coma of sorts, she truly felt so heart broken it was like her body was giving up on her.

She caved and looked at the message, feeling another stomp on her deflated heart when she saw it was from Harry-

“you alright? Stopped by your work, they said you haven’t called out but you never showed?”

Y/n had forgotten about her job in her spiral, but even now she couldn’t bring herself to care. She knew she was already on thin ice with her manager for taking so many days off to see Harry preform or visit him on his breaks so it wasn’t a surprise if she got fired. She didn’t care though; she knew if she lost her job she’d be another month late on rent and end up being evicted since she couldn’t scrape together enough for last month either. This would lead to her likely having to move back home with her mother or find a hostile somewhere for women, yet she didn’t care. It seems silly that something as simple as someone commenting on her sexual skills would put her in such a state, but that’s not really the main focal point in her mind.

The thing that hurt most was knowing Harry had only been with her to get to take someone’s virginity, and she’d disappointed him so badly he talked shit about her to his friends and made plans to cheat on her. Harry had completely disrespected, objectified and crushed her, and he didn’t even know she knew but she decided he shouldn’t have to know she knew what he said for him to realize it’s wrong. He’s an adult man who knew full well how hurtful and horrid his comments were about someone he had claimed to love. He should have spoke to her if he felt that way, yet instead he played her and tossed her out like rubbish.

Harry broke her heart, one he’d known was already fragile and timid. He’d still said all those nasty things about her even after the nights he’d let her cry into her chest about how much she hated her body, how bad her self-image and confidence was, the way she felt like she was never good enough for anyone. His actions only confirmed what she’d always feared to be true.

Harry didn’t love her.

#harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles angst #harry styles imagine #harry styles writing #harry styles blurb #blurb night #harry styles smut #harry styles au #harry styles x reader #harry styles x yn #harry styles concept #harry styles oneshot #harry styles blog #harry styles request

[abandoned-ax]

Welcome to hell

Summery: UA student joins the league

When I joined the hero course I thought it would be fulfilling, I thought I would find the conviction to help people the way I never was, but the more I sit there watching all these kids learn how to protect people, all I can ask is why wasn’t I. They don’t really want to help people, they can’t really help people, we shouldn’t rely on hero’s who can’t do their job. I thought becoming a hero was the only option to help protect people like me, people who were hurt, but no, no one hero can change the world.

It was during the USJ incident that I first saw them, the league. They aren’t like anything Iv ever seen! They weren’t there to hurt just anyone, they were there to do exactly what Iv always wanted to. To breakdown the idea of hero’s, starting at the top.

After that there was stain. He seemed to understand better, hero’s and the big egos they have, some of them show up only for the money, people like Uraraka all they want is make big bucks. Or someone like Bakugo who’s just in it for his ego. But what stain doesn’t understand is that there all bad, that even the ones who wanna help people make all of us weaker, there probably the worst of them all.

It was when they broke into the training camp that I had finally decided.

I was out in the woods when it started, as the night progressed I started following them, chasing the girl, the magician, but in the end it’s the burnt guy that I followed the most. They had grabbed bakugo and tokoyami and were about to go through a portal when I came out and yelled out to them “take me with you!” And the guy with the burns looked at me curiously, caulking his head but then announced “do it!” To the magic guy and suddenly, I was in a marble!

I finally came too lying on a couch in a bar, I look around seeing the league facing the other way as a few of them are chaining someone up. I try to get up but realize Iv got handcuffs on my hand and feet.

“Ugh hello.”

“Oh so you’re awake now.” Shigaraki says

“You should be carful with that one you know, he bites.” The guys look back at the passed out teen and start restraining him better.

“So what’s the game kid, Mr. flames over there says you wanted to come with us. I won’t lie and say your quirk isn’t impressive from what I know of it, but your in the hero course kid, what are you doing following the villains.”

“I’m bored of hero’s, and Iv come to realize my goal is one that can only be achieved from this side of the fight.”

“And what would that goal be.” Shagraki

“To destroy the hero organizations. To destroy all hero’s. They make us weaker, and I, I want us to be strong, because they don’t really help us. They never helped me.”

“Oh I’m gunna like you! Dabi take the cuffs off them!”

The guy with the burns moves to take the cuffs off my hands and legs.

“Welcome to the league kid.” He says patting my leg before getting up. Now free of the cuffs I rub off the irritation on my arms and legs before moving to stand with the rest of them, watching bakugo as he sleeps.

“So tell me, why do you have bakugo captured.”

“I like him, I think he might be a good asset.”

“Ha! Bakugo! The only thing he cares about is his ego, and what his ego has decided is that a hero is the top.”

“Well maybe I just play into that ego a little bit and make him understand that the villains go down in infamy.”

“Oh we’re going to be good friends aren’t we Shagraki.” I say smiling over at him. But Dabi slings one arm around my shoulders from behind me bending down a bit to loom a bit closer to my ear. “Oh but don’t forget about me tho, the guy who brought you here to us.”

“Could never forget about the burnt chicken nugget who decided I was cool enough to save.”

“Save? Interesting choice of words.”

“Well you see, you did,” I drop the jesting tone of voice and repeat myself “you saved me.” I look him dead in the eye.

“So,” Shagraki moves behind the bar to get something to drink “I know a part of your quirk is the ability to copy someone’s quirk but there’s more to it isn’t there?”

“There is more to it, I’m also starting to learn how to control someone. But I can’t just do it by looking at a guy- any of it. There’s a process.”

“And that process is?”

“I must be able to touch you, when I touch someone I can search through your head, I can watch all your memories in 60 seconds right now, but the only one that really counts is the worst one...” I slow down my speech for a second, every time I describe it is awful, “ your most traumatic memory hold the shape of what you are, and as long as Iv seen that, I can pull it up and access your quirk.” Everyone pauses for a second, looking at me with disbelief.

“Wow, that’s fucked up” The myst guy says.

“Jesus kid.” Dabi says, I don’t think Iv ever seen a look of empathy like that in my life, I’m fact there all giving me that look, like all they can see in my is pity.

“Fuck! Stop staring at me!” I yell out making everyone turn back around and start talking about bakugo randomly, i think I heard someone say something along the lines of “why is his hair so spiky, like does he use products or does it just exist that way?”

I chuckle a little, to think all I did was yell at the most feared villains in the world and there all jumpy already. It almost cute, I can tell they trust me just by that, they didn’t get angry or feel like I might actually hurt them. It’s nice to feel accepted already.

But Dabi moves back to talk to me.

“I’m sorry about that side effect there kid. It pretty nasty.”

“Yeah but, I’ll live”

“If you ever need to talk, it just, I’m always here.”

“Thanks Dabi. You know I wouldn’t expect you to be good at these kind of things.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

“60 seconds is all I need to know everything Dabi.”

“We might be villains but I hope you don’t do anything like that.”

“I know I know, a joke in poor taste I’m sorry. I don’t really like doing it anyways, all I can see sometimes are those memories the bad ones, those stick in your mind for a while.”

“So what quirks do you have?” Dabi gives me a curious look. This was conversation I was waiting for!

“Oh a lot!!! Iv got most of 1As, a few of the others! I mean I really only use the useful ones, I might have lost a few... I can forget memories and that loses the quirk for me. But Iv got a few pro hero quirks too!”

“Like all might?” Shagraki asks

“No. I was never able to get his.”

But the conversation is cut short as Bakugo starts to stir.

“Alright kid, leave most of the talking up to us, but see this as a trial run alright.” Shagraki says moving to a stool by bakugo to wait for him to wake up, Dabi nudging me arm to tell me to follow him over to where he’s standing.

And Bakugo wakes up officially starting my time in the league of villains.

#bnha x you #bnha imagines #bnha headcanons #bnha dabi #mha imagines #mha x gender neutral reader #mha x y/n #mha x you #mha x reader #bnha x trans reader #bnha x y/n #bnha x reader #lov x reader #dabi x y/n

[pandoraimperatrix]

Cockblocked by Batman’s son

BatCat | Humour/Romance | 1,4k

The fucker was on her for a while, and as much as their cat and bat game was fun, it was beginning to get in the middle of her business. There was this tiny small Brazilian island with her name on it, and unfortunately it was hard to steal whole islands than jewellery, so, of course, to steal some of the latter to get her island. She was calling it her retirement plan.

She was so close to her goal 12 million goal, only 10k to go, the job had been a god send, a rich collector had just acquired an Edwardian aquamarine and diamond brooch that have been on her client’s list for ages, thank goodness it was not her style at all, so she wouldn’t be tempted. It was easy enough, the security system was not what she expected from her research, but it had been fun to crack it, it was good to be surprised sometimes, she thought, kept her on her toes.

Her prize was already safely inside her bag, and Selina was ready to leave, when he appeared dark and broody, cape flowing behind him like a vampire on a silent era movie.

“Put it back.”

“Oh for Bastet’s sake!”

She ran, he went after her, and to be fair she was having fun taunting him, but there was something odd about that night, usually he gave her a little more of work, he seemed to be lagging. She even looked behind a few times to see if he was still following her, because there was nights in which would just leave to take care of an actual life threating crime. Selina thought that was the case and stopped to look, as much as the danger of him actually catching her and taking her prize back was not null, it almost felt like a let down when he’d just leave like that without a proper goodbye. He had no manners! Have no one taught him how to treat a lady?

Not that she was one.

She turned away and head back small rooftop apartment on East End, she had just entered her home, and pulled the cowl off her head when she felt a massive weight smash against her back throwing her on the floor. Fear struck her even harder, had the celling just fallen? She screamed for her cats to find safety before she managed to wiggle her body around enough to get an idea of the situation.

“What the actual fuck!”

The celling was intact and what was currently pressing her to the floor was the wall of meat known as the Batman.

“Put… it back.”

And then his eyes closed. She had never been close enough to notice before, but they were blue.

Read on AO3

It was embarrassing. She was tied up to a bomb. Heist gone wrong, well, it was good that he appeared since it was his fault that there was a heist at all. After leaving her flat while she napped after playing his personal Florence Nightingale all night, he repaid her by stealing her brooch!

Can you believe it?

The ingratitude?

The disrespect?

It was entirely his fault that she was obligated to break into that stupid warehouse to steal her new mark – an art deco diamond bracelet with an asscher cut, totally her style, she was already planning how to get it back, for free, of course. It was not her fault that the intel that got forgot to inform her that it was the same warehouse that had been used by Don Malone to hide drugs. And that when she broke in the place was no empty and Malone’s goons thought she was working for Falcone. Of course, no one believed her when she told them that she didn’t have anything to do with that.

You know, that’s why Selina had no trouble lying, because the truth hardly matters when someone wants to fuck you up, they will just do it for good measure, for fun, because sometimes you bloody deserve it for being the fool that nursed the fucking Batman back to health and were robbed by him.

But then, just as was she was about to accept that was how she’d meet her maker, a little leprechaun fell from the roof and said in a squeaky voice that she’d be okay.

“Geez, freaks are getting younger every day!”

Until Batman appeared and started defusing the bomb she thought she had already died and was having a very weird afterlife.

“He’s not a freak.”

“Oh… he’s with you!”

Maybe she was having a very weird afterlife. But why the hell her afterlife included the fucking Batman?

“He’s my… hmm… son.”

Wait, that was too weird for an afterlife.

“Your son? And his mother is okay with that? Jesus, isn’t he afraid of falling down?”

The boy had limbed a rope hanging from the roof and was hanging upside down by his pixie booted feet.

“He doesn’t have a mother,” Batman muttered as he still worked on her bomb, well, not hers. She owned no bombs, your honour. He was awfully talkative that night, that Batman. “Robin, behave!”

Oh my god, he was the leprechaun’s father! The information was just too good and at the same time she had no idea of what to do with it. It was the kind of prize she’d keep for herself.

“I’m behaving!” the high pitched boyish voice shouted back, but he did a flip and landed on the floor. She could say she was impressed. How old was that kid? Less than ten, she’d bet.

“Poor kitten, is she…”

“She died” he said so devoid of feeling that she raised an eyebrow. Of course Batman tended to be stoic, but, that was cold even for him.

“I’m sorry for your lost” she tried lamely.

He sighed. Batman actually sighed. What the hell was happening?

“I didn’t know her. He’s adopted.”

That night was one shocking revelation after another, wasn’t it?

“So… There isn’t a Mrs. Batman, then?”

What kind of lame line was that? Urgh. But was he… Nah. She was imagining it. He had not, in fact, sniffed her neck.

Of course, she couldn’t see, he was behind her, and although she could see Robin at the entrance very well because the light coming from outside reflected his little yellow cape as he amused himself by doing what looked like very dangerous acrobatics, where she was sitting, tied to a chair that was chained to a bomb, was completely dark. She could only hope he was really some sort of vampiric meta that could see in the dark otherwise letting him disarm the bomb was not the best of her decisions.

“It’s done.”

He released her. Selina rotated her wrists and stood up, relieved.

“Robin, let’s go!”

She watched as the boy let out a happy yelp and ran ahead, they could use that one as a limitless energy source and end climate change.

“Wait” she said walking around the chair to meet him in the dark “let me say thank you first, you just saved my life.”

“There’s no n-“

He couldn’t end the sentence when Selina blindly pressed her lips against his.

She meant to be a small playful peck, but Batman’s gloved hand slid to the small of her back, pulling her close and before she could think clearly about what she was doing, her arms were around his neck, hoisting her body up to fix their huge height difference issue. He parted her lips and slid his hot tongue against the roof of her mouth, the hard pointy part of his mask that protected his nose biting into her cheek.

“Ewww,” they broke the kiss to look at Robin’s small face wrinkled with disgust, but still remained in each other’s arms for a moment. And then, slowly, they turned their faces back forward.

Selina swallowed down, she still could taste him. And he was not letting her go, she had to be the one to pull her arms back, her hells touching the floor again.

She never thought she’d ever see Batman acting awkward but there was no other word to describe the way he grunted and stepped back before nodding to her and left, taking his little killjoy with him.

She stood there for a while.

She almost died.

She kissed the Batman.

Was cockblocked by Batman’s son.

Batman’s son??

What the fuck!

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

The rain made the power go out and I was looking through my WIPs. I really don’t remember writing this story lmao. But now It is finished and you can read it!

Please tell me what you think of it.

Kisses, see ya.

#batcat #brulina #baby batcat #gotham #selina kyle #bruce wayne #catwoman #batman #my fic #dick grayson #robin

[mintyfrosty]

A Prince’s Guide To Reading

"Right?"

Ah, his name.

At least the one he preferred people to use for him.

The guard of the Toppat prince turned his gaze up from the door he had his eyes pinned on, studying the engravings of the wood to try and pass the time. He had to admit, being the prince's guard could be dull, since said prince seemed to take much gratitude in working within a quiet environment. Right didn't mind, of course. Then again, the commoner didn't exactly have a choice either way with what he thought or not. As if he had a choice. He didn't; that was the truth. It had been like that for the month he had found himself being the prince's care. Er, at least he thought it had been a month? Time was a bit weird in the castle. Every day seemed the same.

That wasn't to say he found it unpleasant, however.

Their eyes connected, the guard's gaze quickly descending straight after, since it was discourteous for a royal and a commoner to share a glimpse of their eyes. Well, he wasn't sure on that, but Prince Reginald had acquainted him of such. And he trusted him; a terrifying amount. And Right didn't want to get a stern talking from the king about this, that and something else. Despite clearing his throat before he spoke, Right's voice came up as hoarse and uneven like it always did. "Yes, yer 'ighness?"

Allowing his hand to rest, the royal put the quill in his hand down to table, slightly rubbing it as the chains of writing broke free. Putting his hand through so much work was unhealthy to his muscles and bones. However, much like the commoner, the prince didn't have a choice. Not since 20 years ago when the Toppat Kingdom fell under Terrence's rule. Not the time to think about, he scolded himself, bringing both of his hands down to his lap. He could at least say, however, it was flattering on how the guard put so much effort into trying to learn the mannerism that seemed impossible to understand.

"I wanted to ask you..." Started the prince, bringing himself to standing and tucking his chair into the table that sat peacefully in the halls of the library. "Do you-- know how to read and write?"

...

That came off as slightly insulting. But, unfortunately, forgivable to ask.

Crimson rose to the peasant's ears, gaze crunching as he examined the tile grooving on the floor, trying to, pathetically, hide his embarrassment. The prince was entitled to ask such a question; he was the prince for God's sake. It wasn't uncommon for a commoner such as himself to be illiterate. Many didn't have the money to claim the opportunity to educate themselves. It wouldn't be embarrassing if he said 'no', would it? Because, well, he just didn't.

He was a peasant.

A filthy one at that.

"Nah-- I mean-- No. No, I don't." Forced words of respect came out of the guard, slightly gritting his teeth with frustration as he let his accent slip his words into slang. Ugh. He hated trying to keep up with these stupid mannerisms. It was all so confusing. How the hell was he supposed to remember how to use three forks at a dinner table, wait to speak until spoken to AND not let himself slip into his comfortable language of slang? And that wasn't even the full list. "Er-- w'y do ya ask?"

"Well..." Without finishing the answer, the prince's feet waltzed over to one of the hundred books that decorated the library walls. Gloved hands met the cover a soft covered book; a light read. From where he was standing, Reginald waved an inviting hand towards the guard, taking a seat on the couch that was adjacent to the fireplace which crackled calmly. Swallowing the anxiety lodged in his throat, Right's brash footsteps pounded towards the prince, boots sounded like a wrecking ball hitting concrete. Maybe that was due to his mass. He didn't have a mind to care. With the guard now near him, the royal patted the seat lightly next to him, a smile meeting his face. "...if you can't, I'd like to teach you how to read!"

...

Wh-What?

The crimson turned a shade of magenta, spreading like a virus across his cheek and nose. Teach him? Teach him how to read? But why? Didn't the prince already have his hands full? His gaze fell over to the task assigned to Reginald, surprised to see a perfectly piled stack of scrolls. Was he finished? Wow, that was fast then. Incredibly fast. Eventually, however, the guard let his gaze fall back to the prince, eyes focused on the book in his hands rather than the blue sapphires that dotted his pupils. Awkwardly, he cleared his throat, pulling on his collar to let more airflow through his clothing.

In all fairness, he didn't believe he deserved such a privilege.

Being literate was seen as such an honour; only the noblemen and royalty got the joy of being able to read and write. And that same offer to him? Definitely out of the question. He, well, he didn't believe he was worthy of such a gift. However, he most certainly didn't want to make the prince upset over the matter; maybe he could blame it on something. Something like: "Er-- I...Would we 'ave the time? With supper happening soon?"

"Oh, nonsense! We've got a few hours! Two! That's enough, I'm sure of it! You're a quick learner, you know!" It only occurred to Reginald that there was a big difference between the prince wanting to teach him how to read and Right actually wanting to learn how to perform such an act. A quick sound of hesitation came from the prince, excitement in his tone dying as his shoulders fell to his sides. "Of course...only if you'd allow me."

Oh, God. He couldn't refuse now.

Because yes, despite reading being hard to master, Right couldn't be more excited about the offer, yet nothing on his face implied so. Lost on the prince's words, the guard nodded with certainty, holding his hands up and shaking them slightly. "Na- No-- I'd be t' rilled ta learn, ya majesty--"

Dammit, he was committed to it now. No going back. Just be on high alert.

Although the guard took a hesitant seat on his side, the prince couldn't be more excited, a large grin dotted his face gently. Reginald opened the book to the first page, their shoulders touching as he held the left side of the cover, gesturing for Right to take the opposing side. Trapped by anxiety, the guard's breath wouldn't come out of his throat, numbly grabbed ahold with his right hand to open the book. Foreign symbols came into his vision when it was a simple text of English. Jesus, how was going to learn this? He didn't understand any of it. He couldn't learn how to read-- this was dumb-- this was stupid. "Alright...let's start at the beginning..."

Gently, the prince's voice hit his ears, voice brimming with excitement.

...Sigh.

Guess he didn't have a choice.

But, at least, this was better than staring at the door engravement all damn day, waiting for something that would never happen.

The story Reginald had picked out was something about a girl from a village. An oddball herself; she knew how to read. How ironic. Then one day her father got kidnapped at an old castle that belonged to a cursed prince that had turned into a beast. And to save her father's life, traded herself to be the beast's prisoner. But, interestingly, the two fell in love and the curse on the prince was broken.

Huh.

What an odd tale. Granted, probably one of the first that Right had ever heard of but...still so odd.

The prince went slow with the words from the text, running his finger under words and pronouncing them slowly, teaching him what letters made what sounds. Vowels were undoubtedly the hardest; some words could have two of the same vowel yet make different sounds. Of course, he'd been speaking the language his whole life but...now it was different. He could physically see how goddamn confusing the English language was. By the time they got to Chapter 3, an hour had passed, the prince looking up to the guard brightly. "Alright, your turn!"

Right blinked.

...

"...you know...your turn to read!"

...

H-Huh? "Eh?" He couldn't. "I can't--"

"Of course, you can!" Cheered Reginald, the prince moving his gloved hand to underneath the first word, written beautifully in ink. Calligraphy made it hard to discern which letter was which. Gaining his breath back from swallowing the anxiety lodged in his throat, the guard gritting his teeth, a crimson colour rising to his ears slightly out of embarrassment.

"Er-- I still don't get a lot of it--"

"That's okay! I'll help you along the way! It'll be fine, just watch!" No matter how much he tried to stop himself, he couldn't help that redness from his ears spreading to his face in a blush. Dammit. The prince's excitement was contagious; spreading and capturing his heart like some sort of plague. It made him want to try and complete this mission he was destined to fail at. He'd been learning to read for no less than an hour, and now he was going to read on his own? Seemed impossible. But that darn smile was enough to make him want to. Want to try. Want to learn.

Okay. He could try.

Hopefully.

"Er-- alright--"

It was slow.  Painfully slow.

The commoner needed more help from the prince than he could read words on his own. Nevertheless, successful. Very slow, but steady, gently drifting his voice across the paper to bring meaning to the written dialogue. Even if he made mistakes and made a fool of himself, he was still having fun. The prince was encouraging, giving him compliments and words of pride at when he could read a full sentence on his own. It was...touching, dramatically so. Crimson on his face turned to a soft, pastel magenta, taking comfort in the royal's presence instead of being on edge. Yes, it was technically not allowed for the two to be so close, despite having their shoulders touching, but the commoner didn't care.

The king and noblemen of the kingdom were still ignorant of the idea that Right had met the prince before the assassin outbreak. Heh; funny that the commoner was just coming for a visit but ended up being roped to be his guard. All because he saved the royal's life in an alleyway.

How curious...

However, it led to one problem; his guard was down. He got too complacent.

Find their shoulders sitting side by side was getting a little too uncomfortable, the commoner raised his, moving closer, then wrapping it around the prince's shoulders. There. Nice and comfy. If the feeling of the royal's muscles tense up hadn't occurred, he would've stayed there and continued. But, of course, life wasn't kind to anyone. Dread settled in his heart, abruptly stopping mid-sentence and pushing himself away and standing. Why did he do that? WHY did he do that!? WHYDIDHEDOTHAT?!

"I-I'm so sorry-- I don't know wot came o'er me!" Stamped the commoner, raising his hands and shaking them as if it were some kind of defence. God-- the king would have his head for this. What was he thinking!? Just, ya know, causally wrap your filthy, peasant arm around the shoulders of the prince of the Toppat Kingdom! No stress! Not one ounce of it! Dammit- Dammit- DAMMIT--

"I-t won't 'appen again-- I was just-- I-- I just--"

"Woah-- Woah! Hey, it's okay, Right!" Exclaimed the prince, quickly rising out of his seat and taking a firm grasp of his hand. Right, still scrambling to find something to say, looked down at their hands, caramel eyes finally connecting with the azure blue pupils that belonged to the prince's eyes. They were holding hands--

This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong.

A commoner shouldn't have been that close to a prince; let alone even within one meter of him. But to wrap his ARMS around his shoulder!? What was he thinking!? What was he doing?!

Shakily, he exhaled, not making any movement to return the grasp to his hand.

"Jesus-- I'm sorry I-- I just--" Stuck on his sentence, the guard brought his free hand to his face to try and conceal the growing magenta colour that lingered there.

"Just-- this 'ole thin' 'f not knowin' ya. And 'avin' to act like I ain't got a clue who you are or 'o you are aside from all the duties ya got stacked up--- it's kind of-- it's so frustratin'. 'Cause, yer know, ya funny and ya kind-- and ya got this presence about ya. And 've gotta act all manners and other bullshit-- I can't even just sit by ya witho't worryin' that 'm gonna get my head chopped off or you worryin' about 'dis stupid code-- JUST--" The commoner let out a grunt, bringing the hand on his face to his hair, tugging it slightly.

"It-It's just-- I wanna han' out wit' ya-- but-- we just can't. And it drives me bonkers."

A deadly silence filled the room as the commoner let weeks worth of venting material, catching the prince by an immense surprise. Of course, a faint colour of rose pink painted over his cheeks at the brief compliments, but nothing could stop or control the sudden frown forming on his face. In a way, the prince was dreading this. The lack of personal freedom for the guard was probably doing his head in, and the fact that he and the commoner knew each other beforehand probably made the situation much much worse for him. Even if Reginald had nothing to do with it (even though he had everything to do with it), he couldn't help but feel pity. He hadn't had freedom his whole life and, whilst he'd grown used to it, it was terrible in the beginning. Difficult, in other words.

Sympathetically, Reginald raised his free hand toward Right's that clutched against his hair, pulling it down from his face.

"Right...I'm okay-- I should be sorry I'm--" The prince let out a muffled sigh. "Y-Yes...I understand. This whole matter is aggravating. And I do want to spend time with you too! Believe me, I do. Heh, kind of why I asked to teach you to read. It's just-- I'm sorry I...I'm not used to this whole...' being close to someone' thing if you get what I mean? I've never met a commoner before you. And even then, there's all these rules and orders. And yet, you seem so nice and friendly compared to what I've been told what commoners are like. What I'm trying to say is...I'm sorry for my reaction with your arm-- I'm just-- following what I've been told to do."

...

An apology?

Jesus--

Reginald had to be the pure heartiest prince he had ever met if HE was apologising for a reaction that Right caused. In a way, it made his blood completely fire, bringing a low scowl to his face. It made the whole situation worse when you considered how the prince was treated by the king. Like garbage, that's what. And even then, Reginald put himself second to Right, considering his comfort to be more important than his own. Dammit-- that colour was rising back to his face, stifling a cough that rose to his throat.

The guard let out some sort of chuckle. "Heh-- we're both tryna follow rules 'ere-- Ehehe--"

Right didn't laugh a lot, but when Reginald heard it, it filled his heart up. A small smile itself met his lips, sharing his laughter. And only for an impossibly short amount of time, the prince's eyes shot purple, but far too quick for anyone to take note of it. They were both kind of messes; wanting to talk and laugh and NOT do something royalty related. The prince held up a hand. "Okay-- Okay. How about this. If I finish tomorrow and we have enough spare time, do you...want to spend that time finishing this book with me? To 'hang out', as you called it. We'll go out to the gardens; where no one can find us."

...

A smile met the guard's lips, putting a hand to his chest and bowing slightly.

"It would be ma greatest 'onour, my prince." ~~~XxX~~~ MEDIEVAL AU FLUFF BOYSSS!!

Thank you so much for reading this fanfic!!

For those wondering, this takes place in the transitional period between Right’s arrival and Galeforce’s arrival x3 

Also, yes I know that Beauty and The Beast didn’t exist yet but shh its cute

Oki have doodle!

#fanfiction #also fanart #smol doodle #au #medieval au #MintyFrosty's au #henry stickmin #the henry stickmin collection #henry #henry stickmin collection #Reginald Copperbottom #Reginald/Right Hand Man #reginald #prince reginald #right #rhm #right hand man medieval #right medieval #these twoooo #long post

[flowerflamestars]

THOUGHTS about the mate bond in shoreless sea though. Like we know it's motives are wobbly, Rhys' parents didn't get along, but it seems like the goal was that he be born. In Daylight, yes they're compatible, but also we get Illyria and the freeing of the gods, BUT if Nesta can break the bond and Elain can see multiple possibilities (I see Elain's power working similarly to the bond), I LOVE the implication that they chose this timeline from the start like Elain has to step in when bonds fail :P

Hi!! SO so very many thoughts:

I don’t like the way the bond is handled in the books. We get this vague framing for it that’s destiny sure, but more specifically, it’s biological destiny. And that’s gross, on a multitude of levels. Wildly reductive of what we’re supposed to think is this rare, beautiful thing. It’s a soulbond, and I can’t treat it like it’s all about babies.

So the through-line in Daylight, what makes Starlight, and is VERY featured in Shoreless Sea, is that love is a choice. Real love is always also, freedom.

There’s a part played for laughs in Daylight where Lucien keeps telling Cassian the bond is magical phenomenon. It’s made of you, it’s what you make it.

And that’s how I like to use it. Fate exists, but the destiny you run head first into is your choice. Elain can see every possibility, but there will never be infinite possibilities.

The bond itself is fated- there’s no path where, for example, Nesta didn’t meet Cassian- but what you need shapes what that bond becomes.

It happens like a flashpoint, the snap.

For example, Rhysand’s parents (who I, for the record, think Rhys very heavily projects his issues onto), but who this works for: they literally meet while she’s being dragged off. What does she need? Someone to save her. Someone strong. Someone who will never take away her wings, never deny her any part of herself. 

What did Rhysand’s dad need? Someone who was all his and not the crowns. Someone to be ruthless for. A counterweight to his rigidity.

Rhys says they had a bad marriage. But all we really know is that both sides of that were served well- Lady Night flew her whole life, lived in a palace no one, not even her husband could winnow to. Rhysand’s hardass dad was completely the kind of person to walk down ten thousand steps every day, and probably did. His heir was raised in Illyria. I would bet money he knew about the weaver test. 

I think they just...weren’t soft? with each other? they were both pragmatic people, looking to the future, and probably an incredible team.

Elain and Lucien: Elain needed someone to understand her, when she went too deep. Needed someone who wasn’t the Night Court, wasn’t saddled by war the same way. A companion, an anchor to life. 

Lucien needed a family. Someone that was his to protect, a reason to keep going, to even imagine the future existed. 

They’re family, they’re like siblings, because that’s the bond they chose and so it became the bond. 

The matebond is a tie between souls who always meet- magic, the whatness of a person- of course it’s love. But there’s so very many kinds of love to be experienced.

I love that you see Elain’s power that way! Because it really is that. She sees the Shoreless Sea timeline in Daylight, sees the mistakes.

This is absolutely magical fuckery I made up, but stay with me: mates always meet. There’s a sameness between them. (Feyre and Rhys, both nothing the world has ever seen before, ect)

Human Nesta is no less Cassian’s mate than she was as a God wearing a faery face- because there’s no future where she doesn’t become fae, in some way.

But the path diverged. A Cassian who chooses Rhys, who doesn’t know how to stop fighting, who won’t ever fight for himself- stops being a Cassian who becomes Nesta’s equal, remade by the rage of the mountain gods into something more.

He picked wrong- he’s never going to be her godly equal, the circle is never going to close.

Why? because this time he didn’t ask Azriel to go after her. And with Az there, they were too busy fighting about peace vs slaughter for Cassian to find that scrap of silver silk he carried for bravery. Because he’s so worn down that by the time he goes to see Morrigan he stays, and lets her say all that bullshit, almost believes it.

Cassian stays as mortal as immortal faeries can be, and the future breaks. 

He rejected the bond- shut Nesta out so soundly be can’t even find her when she leaves.

Even Gods can have mates, but Nesta’s mate is not God like her. She can bring back the dead, she can swallow the world. She could probably build a new one entirely, if Elain helped. 

We know even normal faeries can reject the bond so soundly it breaks. 

I think Nesta, who has built a life, who hasn’t heard a whisper from Cassian since, jesus, that horrible Solstice long ago, who knows now that she deserves better, would tire of the idea that there’s one last tie that can pull her back. Rein her in. The he never wanted her as she really was, even if she’d been willing to die for him.

Because they lived. 

They lived and isn’t that a new life? this whole new world, an entire eternity. Cassian doesn’t just not come to find her, he leaves her alone immediately. 

Nesta, bloody, trailing behind on a battlefield while Cassian is supported by Morrigan.

I think Nesta plucked up that thread of soul like a life that could be cut and broke it, shattered it like the chain it was when it became clear there was no going back.

#on this fine valentines day I apparently reveal A LOT about what I think makes love meaningful #Elain definitely saw Tarquin coming! #the second he hands Nesta a sunhat #I like to think the whole future crystalized #I don't know why I so totally don't believe rhys about his own parents #but the way he talks about his mother just screams UTTER mommy issues #and he fully like hated his dad #for...whatever reason #what we actually know about former Lady Night is such a more rich complex ruthless picture and I love that for her #yes Shoreless Sea is in Daylight for like two sentences #Tarquin is never going to be Nestas mate and thats fine #he loves her #the oceans of the world will still love her when he's gone #Nesta Archeron will never drown again #and that's enough for him

[greenninjagal-blog]

The Space Between Us

Alien au? Alien au! I have no self control! Please accept this one shot that quickly spiraled into 23 pages of Virgil being a disaster in space. (If you guys enjoy it, let me know because I’m considering making it a series.)

Summary: The cosmos is a Gigantic place and somehow Virgil’s past still catches up to him.

Words: 11400

TW: Human trafficking, Human experimentation, dehumanization, fighting rings, 

Quick taglist: @chelsvans @dante-reblogs @dwbh888 @glitchybina @faithfulcat111 @felicianoromano @harrypotternerdprincess @holliberries @jemthebookworm @killerfangirl3 @mrbubbajones  @musical-nerd18 @nonasficcollection  @stricken-with-clairvoyancy @the-sunshine-dims @themagicheartmailman @themultishipperchild @thenaiads @treasureofpriam @vianadraws @welovelogansanders  

Read on Ao3 || General Writing Masterlist

“Tell me again why this is absolutely necessary?” Virgil asked, watching Logan’s hands dance across the console. On any other day the sight would be comforting. Every time his digits landed on a key, his nerves glowed with sparks of multicolored light through his transparent crystal skin, creating a beautiful firework show right in front of them all. Logan had told him once it was called Lightdancing, an evolutionary adaptation of the Tenkarie people: their bodies were near invisible in dim light, and they could control the pulses of light just enough to attract other cave dwelling creatures to them before striking the killing blow.

Now, though, the sight made Virgil’s stomach churn. Logan’s lights were a calculated system that he had trained to hone better than most of his race: he could make any part of his body glow at a brightness ranging from a flickering candle light to a flood light, he could make his whole body radiate or he could make just the tip of one of his sixteen fingers, he could even change the color of the light with just a thought. Virgil had always been glad that Logan was the only Tenkarie that dared venture from their caves on L0-G1C; Logan’s kind had perfected the use lights and dancing which made all other creatures become so nauseated they couldn’t fight back or become so mesmerized by the swirling motions that they didn’t see the attacks.

(Of course, because Virgil was rather distinctly human, it took longer for either of the effects of Logan’s fighting to work, which had saved both their lives more than once.)

However, in contrast to the usual focus of Logan’s fingertips on the control panel, lights were flickering all over his body, up and down each of his four arms and burning from the notches around his neck. The lack of control was enough to make Virgil’s stomach churn.

“Because its Remus,” Roman replied, although it didn’t help that he said his brother's name the same way he might have said puppy kicker.

“And we care about Remus because....?” Virgil prompted, running his fingers over his satchel again, checking the latches to make sure they were still there, still closed, still containing the supplies within. “If my memory serves me correctly, Remus was the one that set us up to be ambushed by those space pirates the other week. You know, the ones that nearly killed Patton?”

“We care because, in Erefrenian customs, blood bonds are the most sacred of bonds.” Logan supplied distractedly. “And Remus invoked the Oath of Brothers, which means that if Roman were to ignore his call for aid, Roman’s honor would be forever stained which would prevent him from crossing to the planes of heroes after his death according to the religion of his people.”

“Yeah that,” Roman says, even less excited than Logan at the idea. The bone spikes along his spine had been secreting that red poison that usually only happened when he got annoyed or anxious. Virgil had learned quickly to stay away from him when he was like that: touching it merely made Virgil’s limbs feel pins and needles, but the Orlun thief had screamed until unconsciousness.

It was one of the (very) few perks of being a Deathworlder, Virgil supposed. Most of the things that hurt the other species out here usually had a looser effect on humans because humans rarely made it this far. In fact, it was illegal for humans to get this far by at least sixty doctrines (all of which Logan had filed away in his room). 

Humans were juggernauts-- the alien versions of the boogie man told to children to keep them from acting out. Virgil had seen some of the written documents about his kind, and the tales of bloodshed and terror invoked by merely existing were pretty horrifying. Graphic depictions of humans tearing aliens limb from limb, scientific studies on the amounts of chemicals that humans had absorbed and withstood against, an interview with a survivor of a human rampage who revealed the bite marks left by the so-called beast.

Almost every species out here was just as scared of him as he was of them.

The problem came from the ones that weren’t scared. 

Which, of course, was how Virgil had ended up hundreds of literal light-years from Earth, on a ship with three aliens whom he was pretty certain he would end up dying for sometime very soon. Yurinks were crafty, shameless, bold, creatures, and they were notorious for visiting Earth and abducting humans for individual sale. Weslors ran fighting rings and humans were almost always the safest bets for some quick cash. Quitans were a fan of skinwearing, which was not something that Virgil ever wanted to see, based on the name alone. And Pol’turs loved learning how things worked and paid very handsome prices for human subjects on the space black market.

Virgil, himself, had sold for 300 griot. (Which was apparently a lot, based on the way that Patton’s eyes had quite literally bugged out. Virgil was still trying to figure out the conversation ratio of American dollars to griot and getting nowhere with it.)

“I hate him,” Roman said under his breath as he threaded through the spare armored uniforms in the storage, trying to find one to fit over the rigid bone plates along his back. His tail squirmed behind him as he searched, dragging the spikes through the air. “I hate him so much.” His bone claws cut through the fabric and he growled as he tossed the ruined clothes to the floor. “We’re gonna save him and then I’m going to toss him off into space, myself.”

Logan made an affirming noise, using his lower left arm to nudge his visor back up his nose. Virgil had only caught sight of Logan’s eyes once or twice, as most light strained his sensitive eyes. They had paid a pretty griot for a repair and a spare of his light blocking visor after the first time some space smugglers had surprised them and managed to break the lens. Logan’s pained scream was the worst thing that Virgil had ever heard and he had sworn he’d do anything to avoid ever having to hear it again.

(That had been the first time that Roman and him had truly worked together on something, Virgil noted absently. Between Virgil’s uncharacteristic bloodlust and Roman’s furious wrath they had taken out the smugglers in less than five minutes and they hadn't been very nice about it.)

Looking from the back, Roman resembled a stegosaurus to Virgil. If, like....stegosauruses ran around on two legs, flourished a sword, and were prone to acting like every minor occurrence was a slight against them personally. His red-ish skin had the appearance of leather but was twice as thick, his bone plates were slimmer rounded triangles than Virgil remembered from his kindergarten picture books but they ran from the based of his neck all the way down his back and to the tips of his tail which he liked to use as a spike-ball-and-chain attack along with his ridiculous sword. Virgil couldn’t count the number of times that Roman had nearly taken him out along with the enemy. His claws were only a few inches long but Roman whined like a baby when they broke-- which was ridiculous because his bone plates literally grew back overnight, and the ones on his forearms were made to be taken off and thrown. (Logan had indeed informed Virgil that Erefren grow new bones every moon cycle and proceeded to lose the old ones which Virgil had then mentioned that humans did that too sorta! With their baby teeth! And Roman and Logan had both looked unnerved by that information.)

“I’ve got it!” A voice sang from the ceiling, which was about all the warning Virgil got before a child sized figure vaulted down from the rafters of the teleportation deck right onto his shoulders.

“Jesus! Pat!” Virgil yelled as he stumbled swaying to accommodate the new weight that had stuck itself to Virgil’s back and then wrapped around to hug his chest. “Give a guy a warning, will you?”

Patton giggled, hooking his legs around Virgil’s waist so that he could sit comfortably, swinging the two other satchels he had been sent to fetch from his hands. Roman accepted one of them readily.

“What's a Jeeezus?” Patton asked, stressing the syllables as English terms never really fit right in his tongue. As far as Virgil was aware no species were equipped to speak human languages, although Roman’s Erefren dialect involved some rolling syllables. He probably could have picked up Spanish, if Virgil hadn’t barely passed Spanish III with a C minus. 

To be fair though, that year had been bad. Janus had been in his class, and then he hadn’t. And it was hard to focus on conjugation of verbs when the golden student of the entire school who had sat next to him had been declared dead and Virgil had been the prime suspect of it.

That, and Virgil was pretty terrible at picking up new languages. He had only managed to figure out how to communicate with Logan by luck: hands raised with the fingers spread was a symbol of innocence and fear for the Tenkarie, while a sign of rage and fury for Yurink. This, of course, had also been in the middle of an illegal Weslor fighting ring which Logan had been dragged into and essentially sentenced to die in after being separated from Roman and Patton. 

(Virgil tried not to think too much about those days. Alien blood was still blood and it was very not-good to feel dripping from his hands, even if it was him or them, even if it had been his life on the line, even if it wasn’t another human with heterochromic eyes and smug smirk. Virgil had fought nearly six times before Logan had been his opponent, and that was six times too many.)

Regardless, Virgil was lucky that when Roman and Patton had come for Logan, Logan had remembered his reluctance to fight and insisted that Virgil come with them in an escape. Roman and Patton had their hesitations but Logan wouldn’t take no for an answer. 

(And Virgil who did not understand Common, had honestly thought that Logan had come back to kill him officially. Not a good first impression.) 

Logan had made him flashcards to study from and taught him common in the sitting area of their ship. The endless hours of memorization, the drills, the sentences, all of which helped him more than he thought the others knew. They were something to do with his mind and Virgil had been in desperate need of something to do with his mind those first few months that wasn’t thinking about Earth or home or boys who were dead.

“We could go to Earth,” Logan had offered once during one of their sessions.

Virgil had blinked looking up to from the practice reading he had been studying with a bewildered look. “What?” It had taken a moment for him to realize that he had spoken in English rather than Common, but Logan must have picked up on the meaning of the foreign word anyway.

“You were… badly, ah, stolen,” Logan had said, pointing at the flashcards. “We could give you back.” He had used his lower two arms to mimic the motion of handing something off.

It had been so touching, the way that he had scaled down his speech to match Virgil’s progress, had offered despite Earth being the infamous Deathworld, had been looking at Virgil like he was living being and not just some animal. Virgil had cried.

He should have wanted to go back to Earth, should have wanted to go home, but instead he had begged in his broken, garbled Common for Logan to let him stay in space with them. And Logan had glowed nearly blindingly with purple light, a relief light, a content light, a happy light and promised that he wouldn’t have to go back if he didn’t want to.

Perhaps that had been the day the Virgil had realized he’d die for Logan.

And once Virgil had decided that for Logan it wasn’t hard to decide it for Patton too. The Reytin was just so nice. Even back in those first months when Virgil didn’t know how to talk to them and Patton had been so obviously terrified of him, the alien had made sure that Virgil was eating, that he was sleeping, that he had space when he needed it. Though, Virgil really suspected that their friendship had blossomed so quickly because of Patton's rare Reytin ability to see emotions with his frog-like eyes. Once he realized that Virgil was actually terrified of everything, and it wasn’t just ploy to kill them (or maybe despite that….Virgil hadn’t gotten a straight answer from him), Patton had done his best to befriend him back to good health. 

And Virgil liked being on the ship. He liked his room, which was filled with stupid alien plants he had managed to collect and the weird shapes of the bed. He liked being right down the hall from the kitchen so he could smell when Patton was cooking something, and the way that he could always hear Roman singing in his room. He liked slipping out to the observation deck and just seeing Space the way no other human really had. 

(Its stupid really, that sometimes he forgot it had been three years. Its stupid really, that sometimes he still turned to ask a question of someone who was never going to be there. Its stupid really that he could be so happy and still feel the gaping hole where someone used to be.)

“Oh this is so exciting!” Patton said happily, shaking his hands in the air to show his excitement. “Isn’t this exciting, guys?”

“Exciting isn’t the word I would use,” Virgil said hoisting the smaller creature from around his waist to settle him on the floor carefully.

“More like Vexing! Or perhaps burdensome! Irksome! Problematic!” Roman snarled, finally finding the armor that would fit around his plates and slipping it on. “You know what? Let’s forget it! Remus got himself into this mess and he can get himself out!”

“Now kiddo…” Patton warned, and wow, Virgil sometimes forgot that the alien who was half Virgil's height and twice as lively, was also older than all of them combined. Reytin lifespans were literally off the chart. Patton had been around way back when humans were first declared illegal on this side of the cosmos. “You know that we can’t do that! He invoked the Oath of Brothers so we have to!” 

“We don’t have to do anything,” Roman griped. “Worse case, my soul just becomes eternally damned and I’m shamed by the rest of my race until I die a lonely, lonely death on some distant planet!”

“Must you be so dramatic?” Logan asked.

“You won't die alone!” Patton said, “We’ll be right there with you! Probably even die right next to you as well!”

“No offense Pat,” Roman said glumly, “But that makes me feel like I’m gonna be the cause of your death.”

“It’ll be fun!”

Thankfully before Roman could explain exactly there was nothing fun about making all his friends die, Logan cleared his throat and made his upper two palms glow with a soft blue light. Green and pink bulbs flashed up and down his neck. “I have mapped out the perceived trajectory of the enemy ship so we should be able to beam directly into the hold. However because of possible miscalculations I believe that I should be--”

“--The first to beam aboard as I am the only one who is not affected by the lack of gaseous properties and the extreme temperatures of the expanse of space.” Roman, Patton, and Virgil chorused together. 

“Must you all?” Logan asked, with just enough fondness in his tone for Virgil to know that he wasn’t actually bothered.

“Change up your speech sometime, Teach,” Roman suggested, and then he sighed dropping his head. “You guys are really willing to do this for me? These are mercenaries, you know. If this doesn’t go well they’ll likely sell us for parts.”

Virgil really didn’t need the reminder. Just the thought of once again having his arms restrained, having his clothes striped away, being reduced from a person to a thing used for entertainment, was enough to have Virgil eyeing the door back to the rest of the ship. Even on the off chance that they didn’t try to take him apart to see how he ticked, they would still sell him for griot. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, survive being thrust back into the fighting rings. He’d shake himself apart before they managed to drag him into that dust riddled death trap.

Patton reached up and tugged the edge of Virgil’s under armor tunic, drawing his eyes away from the door and down to his friend. Patton, of course, was smiling, imitating the human action of bearing his teeth (something that Logan had explained was incredibly threatening to all other species and you may want to avoid participating in that activity with Roman in the vicinity, Virgil). 

It was silly things like that that make Virgil hopelessly certain that he would do anything to protect his friends. He didn’t need to worry about being caught and sold off because the others wouldn’t let that happen again, and in turn, he wouldn’t allow them to be taken away either. They were a family, for better or worse.

(He wasn’t going to lose someone again. Not like before. Not without a fight, a trace-- not without Virgil doing every single thing he could to get them back first.)

“We’ll be fine!” Patton told Roman brightly.

“Yeah, cheer up, Princey,” Virgil added, hooking his satchel over his shoulder, “Worse case scenarios are my thing.” He offered out a folded fist, palm up and Roman dutifully knocked his own knuckles against it, as an upside down fistbump (a signal of friendship in Erefrenian). 

Patton let out a chittering and jumped up to knock his own knuckles with them. And Logan’s left forearms flickered pastel pink from the wrist up to his neck and he begrudgingly added his own to the pile.

“Everyone remembers their part of the plan, correct?” Logan asked, letting his two lower arms finish typing a final sequence into the control panel.

Patton sprung in the air, jumping Virgil’s entire height, and shook his palms. “I’ve got the emergency pods and the armory, using Virgil’s thingies to shut down the access to the lower rooms and blocking off escapes as I make my way to the medic bay!” 

“I’ve got the crew quarters to where I’ll use Virgil’s thingies--”

“Can we not call them thingies?” Virgil grumbled. “They’re just EMPs. Barely enough to take out the door locks. And it's likely they won’t do much of anything if this group has an emergency system reboot in case of an electrical surge. It’ll buy us five minutes, max.”

“--Virgil’s thingies,” Roman repeated with his tail rattling in that way that said he took pleasure in Virgil’s annoyance. “To lock as many of the doors as I can, before travelling to the cell blocks to get my brother and his crew and move them to the medic bay where Patton will have the necessary supplies ready incase of injuries.”

“I will take the Bridge,” Logan said, “and act as the major distraction, as Tenkarie are very rare and it is likely that they will have never encountered nor have preemptive measures against my Lightdancing. Once I have control of the bridge I will cut off the communications to other ships in the area and start inputting the redirection course. Once I have the new coordinates I will send them to Virgil for him to implement.”

“I’ve got the engineering deck,” Virgil said, finally, “To make sure they don’t try to blow us all up with the warp core and whatever. Then I’ll redirect the teleporting course and get us home while the rest of you take out the bad guys. Piece of cake.”

Logan’s neck notches glowed red, “There should be no stopping for cake--.”

“Idiom,” Virgil interrupted quickly, “Human saying. Means it should be easy.” 

Logan hummed musically, which sent a vibration of multicolored lights off his shoulders and down under his clothes. “Ah, interesting. This should indeed then be a piece of cake.” He picked up one of the teleportation bracelets from their charging pads and fixed it on his upper right wrist. “I’ve already added in the coordinates to the watches, so merely wait for my signal and press the button.”

Virgil would be lying if he said he didn’t have a little bit of anxiety over their plan. It was pretty slapshot compared to the things that they had put together before, but Remus’s transmission had been shoddy, even after Roman and his combined efforts to clean it up. It was hard to remember that Remus was every bit a ship captain as Roman was with how he had appeared in the picture dressed in ripped and tattered clothes, oozing green poison from his forearm plates, and bleeding profusely from a wound on his forehead. He had been leaning heavily on the communication panel, gritting his teeth through the pain, but his tail had been dancing in the air behind him in the same motions that Roman’s did when he saw a new sword to add to his collection. 

Remus had invoked the Oath of Brothers, spit up blood on the console, and then relayed as much information as he could about the attacking ship. They were lucky, in that way. Most of the Pol’tur ships followed the same base model, which meant that the Bridge was always going to be at the bottom, the engines would be at the top and the engine core center would be between them.

If it was possible Virgil was sure they all would have wanted more time to make a better plan, but they all knew that Pol’turs loved to work quickly. They had already lost three days chasing after the ship, and in that time, Pol’turs could cut apart fifty Reytins like Patton.

They were working mostly on the assumption that the Pol’turs would save Remus for near last, and they were going to be absolutely fucked if they had chosen to chop up the other Erefren first.

In addition, their plan had Virgil avoiding most of the fighting. well, as much as he could while being on an enemy ship. Virgil himself wasn’t sure how he would do in a lot of combat, but they had seen what happened when one of the others were in danger (when Logan’s glasses had broken, when the space pirates had almost shot Patton through both his hearts, when the spikes had been pulled from Roman’s spine by the Quitans before the new ones had grown in--). He could fight, and he could fight well, but the cost was a little bit of Virgil’s sanity and his ability to sleep through the night.

Patton plucked his own teleportation watch from the pad and hooked it on, before offering Virgil his. Well it wasn’t really his, the same way that the red one wasn’t Roman’s and Patton didn’t own the blue one. They were all Logan’s pet projects, but he had tailored them to their favorite colors. It felt a bit like coming home when Virgil clicked the locking mechanism into place and the screen lit up with the digital alien symbols.

“I shall see you all soon,” Logan said matter-of-factly, as if he couldn’t see all the ways that their plan could go wrong. Then with barely more than a breath he clicked the activation button and his form flickered out of existence.

Roman made a nervous noise with the back of his throat, which ended up sounding a bit like the first bars of a Disney song Virgil had forgotten. Virgil gently tapped his tail with the toe of his boot, avoiding the glisten poison spikes. Roman startled just enough to laugh.

“Its funny, you know?” He said, glancing towards Virgil. “A year ago Remus told me he had taken in a Deathworlder, and I thought he was crazy. A Deathworlder? But now that I know you guys I can’t believe I didn’t get my own sooner.”

“Remus has a human on his crew?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, I wonder if you know each other!” Patton added.

Virgil bit back his original comment, and let the weight settle in his stomach. If Remus had a human in his crew there was even more of a chance that Remus was dead, because the Pol’turs had chosen to save the mysterious human for last.

“Earth is a big place,” Virgil said instead. “Like really big. They’d probably be from like Russia or something.”

At the blank stares he got, Virgil tried rewording, “We probably never have met before. Or speak the same language.”

"There's more than one human language?"

Virgil breathed through his nose, warding off a memory of rolling Rs and failed pop quizzes. "Yeah," he said, "Humans can't agree on anything."

Roman thoughtfully crossed his arms, but Patton made a chittering again and bounced, “Oh well! Now you guys are gonna meet! All the way out in space! How cool is that?!”

Virgil hid a smile in his shoulder. Trust the Reytin to find the bright side to everything. 

Roman looked like he had more questions (questions that Virgil wasn't exactly enthusiastic to answer; Earth was a sore topic for him) but mercifully each of their watches let out several musical bars from Patton’s favorite song. The alien shook his palms one last time, beaming at each of them.

“Oh this is gonna be so much fun, guys!” He said right before pressing the activation button and disappearing.

“I’m so going to kill Remus for this,” Roman grumbled, one hand on his sword hilt.

And, really, Virgil agreed with him on that. Tossing Remus into the airlock and ejecting him directly into the void sounded like an excellent plan for when they got back to their ship alive and whole and safe.

“Let’s do this,” Virgil said and jabbed his thumb into the activation button.

***

Predictably, their flimsy plan fell apart within seconds of them appearing on the ship. Starting with, exactly, Virgil did not appear in or near the engineering deck. Instead he had landed approximately two feet above a box in the Cargo hold of the Pol’turian ship, which likely meant he was somewhere left of where he needed to be.

It also meant that the Pol’turs in the Cargo Hold had a grand view of his body blitzing into existence, landing on a crate, and then tumbling off it with a lot of English cursing. It was a mere matter of luck that Virgil was able to roll his body to the side just before the first BZZZTTRRRT of their blasters went off.

(There was an actual name for the guns that most aliens used, and Virgil was pretty sure that it started with a hard K sound but he had never been able to remember it. He stuck to calling them blasters in his head, and hoped somewhere back on Earth George Lucas was proud of himself.)

The Polyfurnish of the crate hissed and sizzled as it took the brunt of the attack meant to vaporize Virgil, and the human hissed another curse as his hands dug through his satchel.

One of the Pol’turs-- the deep purple one although Virgil hadn’t truly been able to catch sight of how many there were-- shouted something in its language. Probably something along the lines of “Stop”, “Surrender”, or “Kill him”. Virgil wasn’t exactly a fan of any of those options.

He had heard them before-- too many times. The hundreds of variations of the terms spat and yelled and cheered down at him, and he scrambled away from the edge of a sword, as he tasted nothing by dust and dirt as he dodged another attempt on his life, as he desperately backed away from an opponent who couldn’t understand that Virgil didn’t want to fight, please, stop, please, I’m sorry, please I don’t want to hurt anyone--

Virgil curled up as another gold blast ricocheted off the top of the crate he was cowering behind. The air was cooler here, he told himself, the air was cooler and the floor was slicker, and he was surrounded by shelves of goods. He was not in a colosseum and he was not in a fighting ring and he was not alone.

He had the others to regroup with and no time to panic over the past here and now. Virgil gritted his teeth, remembering the feel of Roman’s knuckles bumping his, the sight of Logan’s excited lights, the sound of Patton’s laughter, and then his hand wrapped around the homemade smoke bombs in his satchel.

He yanked the pins from their sockets, wound back, and launched them over the crate into the mass of where all the shooting was coming from. Almost immediately the shoots veered off course, and the cavernous room echoed with high pitched screams. Virgil ripped his turtleneck up and over his nose and then he grabbed the edges of the nearest shelf and hoisted himself to a higher area, out of the range of the low hanging gas.

It was a pale red, near pink thing: a concoction formed by Logan out of Roman’s poison that had taken them literal years to perfect. Virgil was mostly immune to it, the same way he was mostly immune to most poisons that horrified the other species. Inhaling it made his head dizzy and his limbs a little numb, which was just unpleasant enough that he tried to avoid inhaling anything when he had the chance. Other species though...they weren’t so lucky. According to Logan, inhaling it allowed it directly into the bloodstream where it would swiftly ignite all the pain sensors in the body and could make one feel like they were being stabbed everywhere at once.

(He knew this, Logan admitted, because it had taken him many times to get it right. His scientific journals recorded experiments #1 through #357 as “unpleasant” and “ill-advised” and Virgil had nearly throttled him when he discovered that Logan had used himself as a test subject.)

Using the shelves he boosted himself another level until his head was parallel with a box of what he thought were floating Welsor hearts, before he scanned the ground under him. There were three Pol’turs on the ground writhing in pain, blasters discarded, and pale smoke floating ominous above them. Their usually languid tentacles flopped up and down on the floor like a bunch of fish out of water.

The glass container next to his hip exploded, missing him by mere millimeters. Virgil cursed as he scrambled up another level, eyes darting around to find where the hell that shot came from. His armor took much of the hit but it was sizzling with heat in a way that was decidedly not-comforting. 

“Up there!” Something shouted.

Another blast missed his ear and a container of Sblorp fangs shattered and sent the teeth spilling to the floor. Virgil kicked his feet through the lower shelf pushing through a crate and a dozen jars of various indeterminable body parts and squeezed his body in the place of them. The crashes on the next isle were rather satisfying.

He ripped the pin from another smoke bomb with his teeth, and felt his tongue buzz slightly as the proximity to the toxin before he launched it out at the direction of the other shooter. There was another scream and Virgil took the time to roll into the next isle and leap back down to the floor. 

The gas still hadn’t cleared around the original three Pol’turs, but they had gone unconscious from the pain, with a few seizing tentacles here and there. Virgil would feel bad about it, really he would, but the last time he had been in a room of Pol’turs they had been discussing how nicely his skull would look in the centerpieces of their tables and tried to buy him for 270 griot.

 His skin tingled the same way he thought it might right before he would get struck by lightning back on Earth. Virgil ignored the feeling in honor of sliding across the polished flooring to the nearest fallen mercenary and hoisting it up as a shield, while he grabbed its blaster from the floor. 

Two blaster shots sunk into his Pol’tur shield and it dissolved into ashes in his hand. Virgil cursed again, raising the blaster with his other arm and using his ash coated hand to slide the trigger, because this blaster-- like all other blasters-- were not made for human anatomy at all.

The last Pol’tur was a sickly orange color, like some type of invasive evil moss with long arms. Virgil grinned as the blast exploded forth in a dangerous golden ray of death. The heat singed the edge of his fingers, although the mild numbness prevented him from feeling much more than the slight pressure he assumed was warmth. The shot went wide, and the kickback sent Virgil to the floor, but it was enough. 

The blast shattered though several items on the shelves and Pol’tur scrambled back to avoid the avalanche of perishables-- scrambled back right into the pink fog of Virgil's last smoke bomb. It was screaming before Virgil could even sit back up.

Virgil inhaled heavily, sucking as much oxygen into his lung as he could afford and breathing it out through his nose. He squeezed his hand around the handle of the blaster, and tried to pretend like his skin didn’t feel too small. His empty hand-- the one that had held the Pol’tur-- was trembling, shaking, burning.

“I just think you’d be better off spending time with someone else.”

“You’re not fooling anyone, Storm!”

“What was it like, Virgil? When you killed him?” 

His hand was covered in soot, tingling from nerves and poison and the heat of the blast that had annihilated all evidence of the living, breathing alien.  

“It wasn’t….” Virgil breathed heavily, “I didn’t….” 

He sucked in another breath, two, three, seven breaths, until he could feel the masquerading gas in the air turn his face numb, and the voices in his head went back to threatening buzzing. 

“Fuck,” he whispered softly, and pushed himself off the ground.

Virgil took the blaster with him, and made a private note to ask Logan to look into building communicators for times like this. There were an untold number of things that could have happened to get them mixed up: the Pol’tur ship could have barrel rolled at the time of, or before the final teleportation codes were in, it could have slowed or sped up, it could have marginally changed direction. All of which just proved that only stupid people like Virgil, Logan, Roman, and Patton would dare attempt a teleportation on a moving ship. Virgil tried not to think about what would have happened if his coordinates had been a little lower in space, a little closer to the box he had landed on, a little more personal and prompted whatever was inside of the crate merged with whatever was inside of Virgil.

It took him a moment to realize that the lights had started flashing an interspaced red and yellow series: a visual alarm to the crew.

“Fun,” Virgil mumbled, hugging the wall next to the exit, with one last breath, and then punching the exit lock. The hydraulics took a moment to work (probably due to excessive use of the doors and wear on the components), but it opened to reveal a brightly lit, completely empty hallway. Virgil raised his blaster, checking both the direction before he stepped out and punched the door closed behind him. Then he lined the blaster up with the door controls and fired.

You know, for safekeeping. The last thing they needed was the Pol’turs inside to wake up with a vengeance and come after them before they were off the ship. 

(If he was still on the ship by the time that they woke up, Virgil was pretty sure he’d be dead. But hey! Surprising things happened all the time when one lived in fucking space.)

The floor was springy under his feet, some mixture of carpet and flooring that Virgil didn’t know the name of, just that it was weird and he didn’t want it in his Sims House. He could feel the fibers through his shoes as he hugged the wall and sprinted towards where he thought the Engine room would be located.

He could hear the sound of more blasters echoing from the depths of the ship, some yelling, some cursing: all lovely signs that Roman was doing his best to be the most annoying moving target anyone had ever seen. Virgil found his lips curling into a smile as he faintly at the noise.

“Oh come on!” Roman taunted, “I’m a big guy! Surely, you can’t be that bad of a shot!” 

There was deafening BZZZTTRRRT, a clamorous crashing, and an ear splitting series of screams. 

Virgil flung around the last corner but in time to see Roman stand up from a kneeling position over a clump of bodies that had probably been more alive a few seconds ago. There were blaster marks all along the walls, and several had blown through a wall revealing a cozy living quarters with giant sword slices in the beddings and floors.

“Oooh, so close!” Roman said with faux-empathy bordering on smugness which at this point should just be his default to the mass. “Maybe next time you’ll think more before attacking an Erefren!” He spun at the sight of Virgil coming around the corner, pointing his sword and then shaking his tail in a greeting.

“Roman,” Virgil sighed in relief. “You okay?”

“Virgil! It seems like I got a little off course! Checked the prisoner cells but they were all empty. And then a few new friends of mine had some fun things to say about Remus.” Roman looked feral as he bared his teeth. He jabbed his sword down into the corpses and something wheezed painfully. Virgil didn’t look at them, didn’t look at them, didn’t look.

“Do you know where he is?” Virgil asked.

Roman used the edge of his shirt to wipe the blue grey blood from the tip of his blade. “Not yet, but if you give me a few more minutes with these lovely fellows of mine I will!”

It did not take “a few more minutes”. Roman hoisted on still gasping Pol’tur up by its gangly neck and it had already started blubbering in a mix of languages. Virgil watched the halls while Roman took notes from their new best friend. 

Half a minute later Roman dropped their captive to the ground with a fire in his eyes and turned to Virgil with his bone plates clinking, and dripping poison.

“He was on the Bridge.” He said, coldly, “He didn’t know if they had finished with Re or not, but he was up there”

“Okay,” Virgil said.

“The rest of his crew, Virgil,” Roman growled, squeezing the hilt of his sword. “His friends! His family!” He stared down at the shaking cowering alien life. “They..!”

The back of Virgil’s throat tasted like his stomach acids. 

Remus had tried to have them killed, he had sold them out, he had been a thorn in their side since before Virgil had become part of the team.  Between the harrowing escapes and the near deaths, it wasn’t hard for Virgil to absolutely despise him.

But his crew? His entire crew? In three days? 

Just….gone?

Condensed into the memories with a snap, removed from the future in just a blink. The initial attack on them must have been bad and bloody for Remus to call them for help, a surprise ambush type of attack. And for all Virgil hated Remus, he couldn’t help but wonder if Remus had had plans with them-- had they been discussing visiting the bars on L3-012 or shopping on K5-369 or relaxing on C2-276? Had Remus made plans with the people he had been close with and now those plans were meaningless because the people he had made them with were dead and gone and never coming ba--

The Pol’tur on the ground giggled something hysterically, one last brave blubbering comment, and Roman took the toe of his boot right into the creature's soft flesh. Its tentacles flopped on the floor with a plu-plat. 

“Virgil,” Roman hissed, without looking up.

Virgil blinked and swallowed hard, “Right, Engines,” He said, turning to go back to his task but Roman reached out and hooked his claws on Virgil’s shoulder, stopping him there.

“Change of plans,” The Erefren said, “You’re coming with me to the Bridge to get my idiot brother.”

Logan was on the Bridge too. Roman didn’t need to have Virgil come with him-- in fact, Virgil shouldn’t come with him. Too many people, too close to fighting, and Virgil couldn’t wipe away the feeling of grit on his hand. 

His entire crew. In just three days. 

Roman didn’t mention anything about how Virgil was shaking from head to toe, and Virgil didn’t point out the way that Roman’s voice wobbled with silent pleading. He just nodded at the alien and let him lead the way towards where they suspected the examination rooms would be.

Two heads are better than one, and all that. 

It was less of a guessing game when the halls and doors were labeled and Roman was very fluent in Pol’turian. Roman was quick to move, quick to sort his way through the poorly designed areas, quick to move. Virgil kept the pace as well as he could, watching the halls behind them for stragglers attempting to get the drop on them and Roman cut down anything in his way. 

Blue grey blood splattered across their shoes, filling the air with a sickly sour smell that made Virgil want to gag. He settled for squeezing the handle of the balster and counting out his breaths again as he avoided Roman’s tail striking forward at astonishing speeds and squeezing his eyes shut when he thought he saw a pair of mismatching eyes in the reflection of the lights.

There was no way for them to go quietly through the halls, not with Roman stomping hard enough to shake the entire ship and his poison attacks turning every enemy into a screaming, begging, crying puddle.

“Roman!” Virgil yelled as heat billowed around them, and the taller alien stumbled back, hit the wall and fell to his knees.

Virgil snarled at one of the mercenaries and fired three times at them. Between the near misses and the scattered yells of “Deathworlder!” they retreated into nearby rooms and locked the doors after them. Virgil tore one of his EMPs from Roman’s belt and sent it flying down the hall to keep them trapped there for a little bit, before he turned to check on Roman.

His shirt was smoldering, and one of his bone plates were cracked, but he just looked out of breath and angry, “I’m fine.” His claws scraped the floor as he stood up. “Armor took most of it.”

Virgil checked the hallway again. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, like a cancerous lump that he couldn’t get rid off no matter how much he swallowed or coughed. It pulsed to a beat that he wasn’t sure he could replicate: too fast and yet the space between each thud had felt like forever. It was so loud he almost was afraid of missing the sounds of another attack.

(An attack where Roman’s armor wouldn’t be enough, where he wouldn’t be able to wheeze off the pain, where he’d hit the wall then the floor and he wouldn’t be able to get back up and it would be all Virgil’s faul--)

Roman’s claws pricked his shoulder as he looked. With a slightly trembling hand he pointed in the direction they needed to go and Virgil did his best not to let his churning stomach get the better of him. 

“Virgil! Roman!” They both spun at the voice; Roman in particular struck out with his tail, and just narrowly avoided impaling Logan’s crystalline chest on spikes.

Logan didn’t even flinch, not that he could really. His lower arms spread with palms out to signal innocence but his upper arms were busy holding up the profusely bleeding Erefren that was leaning mostly on him. Logan’s arms were flickering with so many colors Virgil couldn’t keep track of them. (Vaguely it reminded him of a disco ball, of party lights, of something so Earthly it would have made him laugh if he wasn’t so busy trying to hold back a panic attack.)

“Remus,” Roman breathed, reaching forward, impossibly gently.

“Ro’mn,” Remus slurred, shifting his head ever so slightly. His blood was pooling down the left half of his face, his eyes were partially glassy, but other than that he looked remarkably like Roman: they shared the same face with a strong jawline, the same dark dark hair curled the same way, and the same long tail with dozens of bone plates. The only real difference was the tinge of white in Remus’s hair, the oozing green poison leaking from his bone structures in place of Roman’s red, and the gaps where someone had torn out his bone plates before Remus had grown new ones in.

“Didn’t think…” Remus’s head lulled to the side, showing off the smile he was desperately forcing on his face, “didn’t think… you were comin’.”

“I’m throwing you out of the airlock,” Roman told him.

“‘ounds fun…” Remus murmured, dropping his head back to Logan’s back, and wincing like each inhale was a battle.

“They had him on the Bridge,” Logan explained, “When I arrived, they were attempting to retrieve information from him through barbaric methods. I may have gone overboard with my retaliation.” Logan shifted Remus’s weight slightly, drawing a groan from the other alien. “I am by no means a medical examiner, however, I suspect that he may have several rib fractures, and a few wounds that need to be looked at and well bandaged.”

Roman nodded, although Virgil didn’t think he actually heard anything. Virgil was an only child himself, but he could guess that even if Remus had been the biggest asshole in the entire cosmos seeing him reduced to this weakened, bloody, broken mess was terrifying. From the stories of their childhood, Virgil had always guessed that Remus was as lively as they came. But this version of him couldn’t even stand by himself.

Roman’s head shot up, “Patton. Where’s Pat? We’ve got Re, now its time to get out of here and get him help--”

“NO!” Remus shouted lunging forward suddenly. Logan stumbled at the change of weight, nearly dropping him to the floor, but it seemed that the movement had taken most of the rest of his power. “I can’t… They have…Jay… I prom’sed…”

Virgil checked the hall for enemies because that was easier than looking at the desperation in Remus’s eyes. His voice was scratched and grated like a glass under the assault of a diamond. He coughed so violently it dragged out a glob of purple blood from him.

“Remus, you can’t--” Roman said.

And despite Remus looking like a simple breeze could end his life, he grabbed at Roman’s outreached arm, above the danger of the forearm spikes.“Me and... my crew,” Remus coughed, weakly. “The oath…” 

“I talked to one of those bastards,” Roman countered, forcibly soft, forcibly strained. “Re, your crew is--”

“Ro…” He pleaded, “Please.” 

Roman made a noise like something in him was physically shredding him apart. Virgil suspected it was his hero complex, which usually manifested the urge to save every living being he saw. Lost wasn’t a good look on Erefrens, Virgil decided right then and there. Hopeless and terrified and sad-- all of them made Roman look wrong. 

“What's wrong, Vee? You look like you want to say something.”

“....It’s nothing.”

“What? Not even a joke? Come on, I know you--”

“Let it go, Ekans.”

Virgil blinked away the unwanted memory.  He sighed out of his nose and reached up to hook on the back of Roman’s armor collar. “Let’s go.” 

“Virge…” Roman murmured.

“If we don’t do this now,” Virgil said, “We’ll regret it.” 

He didn’t wait for the others to catch up with his train of thought, or maybe he wasn’t waiting for his own train of thought to catch up. He tugged Roman back a step and nodded at Logan. “We’ll double back and find any crew that’s left and get Pat. You take Remus to the engine room room and get the codes ready for us to get back.”

“For real?” Roman said.

“Understood, Virgil.” Logan nodded back. He glowed purple softly, around his neck notches as if he had expected this after all. “Don’t be late.”

“Time is a construct.” 

Remus laughed like he was choking on a handful of rusted nails. Roman tensed at the sound, gritted his teeth, and then tightened his grip on his sword. Resolved hardened in his eyes, burning through the lost expression like a lighthouse in the middle of a storm. 

“Right,” Roman said, “Let’s go.” Roman grabbed Virgil’s hand and took off in the direction they had come from. “Any guesses where the guy’s gonna be? Or where Pat is?”

Virgil felt his stomach churn. He closed his eyes and let Roman pull him along as he tried to remember the 3D diagram of a Pol’turian ship. “Well if I was in cargo, you landed near the prisoner blocks, while Logan was on the Bridge...that means that while Logan was doing the calculations the ship probably did a half roll on the longitudinal axis, which he couldn’t have accounted for. Since this ship appears to be the same as the other makes and models of Pol’turs that means that Patton probably ended up in the medical bay. And if I had to guess that’s where any last member of the crew would be as well. Take this left here.”

Roman nearly stumbled over his own feet. “How in the name of the Great God, Disney-- have you memorized all the maps?”

Virgil furrowed his brow at the alien, “Haven’t you?”

“Well yes, but--” Roman’s face flushed with a bit of his purple blood, “Nevermind, Deathworlder.”

The medical wing of the ship was easy to get to compared to the other places. It seemed that either the Pol’turs had wisened up for an ambush or they had fled when they had the chance. Either way they only came across two mercenaries and Roman made quick work of them. 

He knew they had arrived by the buzzing of air, the tingle of his skin that made him feel too big and too small at the same time. The walls were bare and there were four rooms lining them, each with a number engraved in the door and the lock panels glowing red with what Virgil guessed was the Pol’turian symbol for “closed” or “locked” or “dangerous chemical inside do not release”. Virgil reached for another EMP, but his bag was empty. There were scents around them, faint scents: something metallic, something sour, something clean, something, something, something--

Something that smelled like blood. So many different kinds of blood.

Virgil swallowed hard. He hadn’t known a lot about Remus’s crew, but he knew that Remus had had a dozen different species with him. A dozen different species that hadn’t survived the encounter. 

“Pat!” Roman yelled down the hall, brandishing his sword. 

“Roman! In here! Help--” A voice that was most definitely Patton’s yelled out.

Roman didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward to the room the voice had come from, almost feverishly, desperately, and he didn’t bother with the password. With a swift violent motion he jabbed his sword into the locking panel and then pried open the door with his claws and his hands.

Virgil thought that it would have been one hell of a sight: if he had been strapped to a table, a knife jab from death’s door, begging, pleading, crying and knowing that all his friends had been taking to the room before him and had not come back out intact? If Virgil had been bleeding out and clinging to the slippery bit of hope that was a miracle, and then he saw his captain’s brother literally prying open the door with his bare claws to get to him---

Virgil thought it would have been pretty awesome.

Not something that should have warranted a knife being thrown at them.

Roman let out a curse in Erefren and it was one of those don’t-repeat-this-don’t-tell-Patton curses that Roman specialized in. He staggered back, clutching his shoulder where the knife had sunk in all the way to the hilt, Jesus! What the hell! Virgil kicked the rest of the door open, dropping low as scalpel skirted by where his body should have been, and then he sprung back up with his blaster set on that asshole. 

Except.

“Virgil!”

The room was small, almost claustrophobically small. Just standing in the doorway made Virgil’s breath shorten (his cell back at the Welsor fighting rings had been bigger than this--). And it was lit with cold harsh white light, nearly blinding, if it weren’t for the greyed walls and the splashes-- the splashes of faded pink and blue and other colors that Virgil recognized all too well as blood. The table took up most of the room, leaving just enough space for a Pol’tur to sweep around and a small hand tray of twisted instruments.

In fact there was a Pol’tur on the ground right there. Limp and unmoving with an eye scoop so far in it’s skull there was no way it was coming back out.

But Virgil wasn’t staring at the body. 

“Don’t you get tired of being everyone’s favorite person?” 

It couldn’t--

“Just shut up and help me with these conjugations, will you?”

This wasn’t--

“What do you mean no one can find him?” 

He hadn’t--

The detective had looked at him with such a pity that it had made Virgil’s entire body flinch. He squeezed the plastic cup in his hand, crushing it, letting the fragments cut into his skin. He couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything. The man was still talking to him, talking softly like anything louder would shatter the fragile reality around them, talking so quietly Virgil couldn’t hear a single thing he was saying at all over the sound of his own heartbeat.

“You’re wrong,” Virgil had croaked. “He’s not dead.”

But he had been.

He had been for nearly two years now.

And everyone had thought that Virgil had done something to him, had thought that Virgil was the last to see him, had thought that his dark clothes and his eye shadow and a few sneers in the hall had meant that Virgil was suddenly capable of killing Janus Ekans in cold blood.

Except.

Except that Virgil was staring at Janus --fucking-- Ekans right now.

It was unmistakable, the shape of his face, the curve of his lips, the slimness of his nose. The wispy brown hair that turned golden under the summer sun, the mischievous eyes danced with different colors, the flick of his tongue that moved so freely when he let it, the tattoo of two theater masks on his chest that no one was supposed to know about-- Virgil could have spent days naming things, committing them to memory, staring in disbelief at him. This was the same boy who had sat next to him in Spanish. The same Janus who had been convinced he was so completely untouchable up until Virgil had dragged him off his stupid, golden pedastal.

It was the same Janus who was currently wrapped around Patton like a boa constrictor cutting off the alien’s ability to move and had a knife perched ever so closely to one of Patton’s eyes.

“What the hell?” Virgil had said because-- because--

Because Virgil had asked Logan once if there was a race that could pick through minds, pull memories from heads, change the way someone thought. And Logan didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t lie to him. There were no alien types that could break into a mind and drag illusions into reality and there were no races that could bring ghosts back from oblivion.

“Virgil,” Janus said barely a whisper, barely enough to be heard, barely enough to mean anything. The knife was tilting in his hand, tipped like he wasn’t sure what he was saying, wasn’t sure what he was doing. “What-?”

Partially drugged, Virgil thought with absolutely no room to breathe in his chest. Partially drugged, holding a knife to Patton’s weakest point, and alive. 

“Janus,” Virgil said, ”Put down the knife.”

He’s still partially strapped to the table, bound by his left ankle and sporting a lovely series of cuts on the side of his face as if someone had started carving scales into his cheek for funsies. If Virgil had to hazard a guess he would have assumed that Patton had dropped in literally as the Pol’tur was taking Janus-- Janus, alive, breathing, real-- apart one centimeter at a time, then proceeded to win a very cramped fight in the room. Virgil would even say that Patton had started taking the restraints off of Janus when he had gained enough consciousness to realize that he needed to defend himself. 

(The fact that they found something capable of drugging a human, a Deathworlder, was concerning, so concerning, terrifying--)

“Virgil….You are not real,” Janus said, slowly, blood dripping down his neck. “You cannot be real. None of this is real.”

“I’m the one thats not real?” Virgil muttered. “You’re the one that was declared dead.”

He laughed. Virgil’s stomach swooped.

For a second, a brief fleeting second, he could have sworn that this was all a dream. A fever dream in which Virgil would blink himself awake from and find himself on the floor of Janus’s stupid, giant ass room surrounded by a dozen cans of off-brand energy drinks, a half eaten bucket of popcorn, and the credits for a horror movie scrolling on the screen. For a second it felt like he would roll over and bump elbows with Janus who had woken up an hour previously to study for that stupid Spanish test that wasn’t until Monday. For a second it was like he was seventeen again and his biggest worry was figuring out if it was too weird to ask to run his hands through Janus’s silky hair.

“Of course, I was declared fucking dead!” Janus said, like it was the obvious thing that would happen, “I am dead. I have to be, because there’s no other way that the kid who's afraid of going outside made it this far into space.” 

“Janus, put down the knife.” Virgil took a step forward, a half a step, but Janus just squeezed the knife tighter. 

“Why don’t you come and make me?” Janus smiled at him, smiled, smiled, smiled.

Smiled like he knew that this was a dream and nothing he did was going to matter. Smiled like they were back on that balcony of his room with their feet swinging between the bars and two Seagrams gone each and they were going to get in a shit ton of trouble for it. Smiled like he had never been dead and Virgil hadn’t had to bury the thought of him.

Patton made a noise, a small whimper, and Virgil felt it in his chest. The near silence of the room, the soft muted buzzing in his head, the fuzzy dream like quality of reality-- it all shattered at the sound. Shattered like glass, like a mirror, like the concept of “forever”. It shattered and Virgil was suddenly hyperaware of how small the room was, how cold he felt, how metallic the air smelt. 

“Hm, just as I thought,” Janus said softly, smile dropping into something wistful and disappointed, “I really am just seeing thin--”

Virgil didn’t give him the satisfaction of finishing; he surged forward, throwing his blaster to the side, and using his left hand to catch Janus’s wrist millimeters from putting that knife in Patton. He twisted his hand, pining his fingers into the soft flesh of Janus’s nerves until his hand jerked open on reflex and the knife fell into the open air.

Janus froze, inhaling so sharply Virgil was certain that he took all the oxygen in the room away. 

He was warm, Virgil realized absently. He was warm and had a pulse and for some reason both those things made Virgil’s chest hurt. His skin was soft and his breath was sweet and Virgil had gotten punch-drunk stupid on less.

Which probably explained why, how, when, Virgil’s lips ended up on his, pressing firmly, and tasting like something from a past Virgil had thought he had given up on. Virgil had always been stupid, but this was another level of stupid. This was incredibly dumb, unbelievable, ridiculous. 

Janus’s mouth was on his, and Virgil’s hand was tipping his head back ever so slightly, and Patton had managed to scramble out of Janus’s absolutely shocked slacked hold.

“You’ve always been so annoying,” Virgil gasped between breaths, “Always thinking you know everything. Have you ever considered you might be wrong before?”

“You’re--” Janus whispered, “Real? For real?” Then, “Don’t you know what the fuck consent is?”

“Fuck you,” Virgil told him.

Janus grabbed him by his collar and yanked him forward again. “Since you asked so nicely.” 

“Don’t be cute.” 

“Don’t be coy.” Janus shot back because he was still the same asshole who needed to have the last word. He bit at Virgil’s lip, and then pulled back to show off a wolfish grin. 

Virgil was stuck somewhere between wanting to smash his stupid smug face in and wanting to kiss him until he lost all sense of direction. Janus was like that, Virgil remembered suddenly, even when they were kids, when Janus was trapped on that pedestal everyone had put him on, when Virgil couldn’t have cared less about him and somehow had ended up unsure how to live without him.

“Not that this isn’t the fucking cutest shit I’ve ever seen--“ A voice behind them called and Virgil stiffened.

“Language!” Patton interrupted, as Roman grunted through the pain of still having a surgical knife in his shoulder. 

“--But can the two of you save your weird-ass….human…. greeting custom…. for some other time?” The Erefren snarled with one hand clutching the hilt and then yanking it out with a wheeze that Virgil felt physically. His purple blood spouted out from the wound but Roman didn’t seem to care, beyond tossing the knife to the floor.

“That’s an Erefren,” Janus said because he’s just as good at stating the obvious as he is at kissing. “That is not Remus.”

Roman snapped out something in his native tongue, which by the stress on the syllables was probably not nice and definitely not Patton approved. The Reytin even puffed up, shaking his head in a way that normally prefaced an hour long lecture on manners and the reintroduction of a swear jar. 

However, Janus just laughed that pretty stupid little laugh of his but when he opened his mouth the words were all forgein. It took Virgil a moment to catch up, a moment to realize that he hadn’t even fumbled, that Janus had actually spoken Erefrenian and it had been grammatically correct enough that stunned Roman for a whole half second. 

“You speak Erefrenian?” Virgil asked.

Janus blinked up at him a smug looking expression on his face. “You don’t?”

Virgil had a good response, he did. It was a response that had been some-three years in the making and Virgil had been ready to wipe that prideful expression of his face. But before they could do anything the entire ship lurched to the side, taking gravity with it. Virgil let out a yelp and grabbed for Janus and clung for stability.

(Space had done wonders for Janus’s abs, Virgil thought distantly.)

Roman slammed into the door frame and stumbled out into the hall, with all the grace a drunken ballerina, and cursed again when Patton landed on top of him.

“That’s our cue to leave!” Roman growled.

“Ya think?” Virgil shot back. He lunged for the end of the table where Janus’s bare foot was still strapped to the table. He didn’t look at the rusted color on the buckle, at the stiffness of the leather strap, at the rawness of Janus’s skin where it was biting into his ankle. He didn’t, didn’t, didn’t--

His hands shook. Janus reached over and clasped his forearms, the fabric of his tunic, him. 

“Virgil--” Janus said, softly, unsuredly, with no trace of that previous pompous expression on him. “I--”

There was blood on his face, trailing all the way down his neck in scarlet silvers from the cuts. His hair was sweat matted, pressed and tousled in a way that made Virgil feel a certain rage in his chest, like someone had been running fingers through his curls while they sliced him apart. His eyes were still slightly glassy from whatever they put in him. There was an unspoken question on his lips, in his eyes, through his fingers as he clung to Virgil. 

“I’ve got you,” Virgil told him, practically scooping him up. Janus heaved a breath as his feet touched the ground again. “Us humans have to stick together, right?” 

Janus Ekans was alive. 

It sounded surreal even in the moment, because Virgil had been mourning him since they were seventeen and stupid. Everyone else had moved on, had buried his memory, had forgotten about him. But he was not dead, and Virgil had not killed him. Somehow he had ended up in space, ended up with Remus, ended up here on this ship in the several billions of lightyears from anything they had known previously.

There would be no more late-nights-turned-early-mornings study sessions, no more sneaking over the gated walls of the Ekans mansion, and no more scaling the lattice underneath Janus’s balcony. They were never going to go stargazing on the hills outside of town again, never going to ruthlessly text each other under the desk during History class, never going to skip prom together to go trespassing in the woods somewhere to find Mothman. He was never going to butcher Spanish past participles in the cozy corner of the school library after hours and he was never going to get to listen to Janus brag about obtaining his Seal of Biliteracy finally despite his proficiency in about three languages. 

Janus had disappeared right before senior year. And Virgil, who had been the biggest thorn in his side, the biggest instigator of all their fights, the wild and unruly punk kid that lived in detention-- Virgil had stopped looking for him. Because everyone said he had died. Because everyone said that Virgil had killed him.

But Virgil could feel Janus’s pulse, could hear his heartbeat, could see the way his chest moved as they stumbled out of the room. 

Part of him was afraid that if he let go now, later, ever, Janus would disappear again. Shimmer and fade like a mirage in the desert.

“Careful Virgil,” Janus said breathily. “I almost think you missed me.”

“I hate you so much,” Virgil said back, as Roman and Patton led the way toward the engine rooms by blade and alien jujutsu and well-placed pun.

“Somehow, I don’t think you mean that, at all.” Janus said, grinning.

And then he closed that last little bit of space between them again.

[Next installment: Stars Die (But We Don’t)]

#Sanders sides #Virgil Sanders #Janus Sanders #Patton Sanders #Roman Sanders #Remus Sanders #Logan Sanders #Alien Au #Sympathetic Deceit #Sympathetic Remus #23 pages of Virgil in space #humans are space orcs #blood #Anxceit #background intrulogical #Probably will end up as part of series if you guys want more

[deathonyourtongue]

Resurrection | 11

Summary: A ragtag team of Spec-Ops operators are brought out of retirement for all the wrong reasons. When the dust settles, only the best will be left standing. Pairing: Pablo Schreiber x OFC, Henry Cavill x OFC (listen, she gets with the whole team, okay? Don’t lie, you would too.) Word Count: 2.1K Warnings: Nothing much really. A/N: Shit hath hitteth the fan. Again.

“Ooh, smells like semen in here!” Jake says with far too much enthusiasm, smiling brightly at me as he pours two cups of coffee, doctoring mine just how I like it. 

“Shut up. If you or anyone else brings it up, be ready to be on the receiving end of Beef’s fist,” I mutter, giving Jake the only warning he’ll get from me as I take my seat at the conference table, rolling my neck side to side, amazed at just how sore I am. 

“My lips are sealed. I just gotta know one thing: What was he holding out for?”

“Me,” I whisper, watching as Jake’s eyebrows go sky high and he leans back in his seat, silenced. 

“I mean, we all sort of suspected. He’s not exactly subtle about...well, anything, but you never seemed to catch on, so we left it alone.” He shrugs, his smile more genuine this time, Jake looking truly touched by the revelation. 

“Yeah, well, next time do us both a favor and tell me sooner.”

“And spare him the blue balls? Where’s the fun in that? Was it a mess? Did you have to stick the shower head up there after?”

“Jake, shut up!” I crow, throwing a spare pen at him just as Rick walks through the door, breakfast in hand. 

“Literally the last two people I expected to be up early after last night, but I’ll take it. Where’s the rest of the gang?” Rick asked, setting the bags of food and the tray of coffee down in the center of the table. 

“What did you get up to last night?” It’s my turn to interrogate Jake, my eyebrow going up as I watch his smile go impish. 

“Her name was Star and she did things to me that are deadly sins in most religions.” Jake says with as much seriousness as he can muster for all of 2.5 seconds, his face breaking into a smile just as he takes a sip of his coffee.

“Just be glad you weren’t stuck in a box with him for more than 24 hours,” Benji mutters as he takes the seat to my left, squeezing my shoulders before sitting down. 

“Morning,” Max mumbles as he sits to my right, avoiding eye contact with everyone, including me.

“Save the act, Beef. We all know you got some,” Dom cuts in, moving to sit next to Rick, leaning back in his seat, and grinning like that cat that ate the canary. 

“Congratulations on losing your V-card, bro,” Flip adds as he comes in, patting Max on the back as he scoots by him. 

“Alright, enough. What d’we got, Rick?” I cut the shenanigans short, knowing if I let it go on any longer, the guys will yank Max’s chain a little too hard first thing in the morning. Even I’m not that patient before coffee. 

“Well, since we let Wallace literally walk out the front door, we have to chase again. I asked intel for his whereabo--”

There’s barely time to hear the blast before the shockwave hits us, taking out the bulletproof glass as if it were single pane. I feel Max’s body collide into mine, before we both hit the ground hard. Car alarms and smoke detectors go off in nearby buildings, making it clear the blast came from the outside in, but leaving no doubt we’re the targets.

Breaching charges come next, one at the front door, one at the secondary exit. I finally open my eyes as I get to my feet, keeping low and feeling Max’s hand clamped around the back of my neck. Though smoke fills the meeting room, I get enough of a glance to know that the guys are all okay, each of them in the same crouched position I am, all of us moving with precision. 

Max pushes me into my room, slamming the door behind me. Without hesitation, I grab a t-shirt, vest, pants and socks, throwing everything on in a hurry. My boots go last, the laces double knotted so I don’t have a slip-up later. I pull my hair into a messy knot before grabbing my M4 and checking the mag. Seeing it fully loaded, I push it back into place and slam it home, ready to go. 

The knock at my door comes just in time, and I knock back once to let whoever is on the other side know I’m ready and armed. Pulling it open, I fall in behind Flip, covering him and bringing up the tail end of our little procession down the hall. Up front, I hear Dom call out targets, he and Rick taking out three men without hesitation. 

“Let’s move!” Rick calls out, and I pivot so that as I move forward, I can cover us against anyone who might want to come up behind. Within moments of doing so, two of Wallace’s men come out of the meeting room and into the hallway. Leveling my M4, I take four shots, ensuring both men’s deaths. 

Just as I pass the last of the bedrooms, I feel my body get pulled sideways. With little time to react, I let my gun fall to my side and pull my knife out of my vest. Before I can sink it into the nearest limb, I feel his arm go around my throat in a rear naked choke, the man squeezing hard enough to make me see stars. I only have six seconds before the chokehold takes me out, and with gunfire sounding ahead of us, I know the boys won’t be coming to save me. Stepping forward, I pivot towards the man’s thumb, palm striking his hand away as I go. Out of the hold, I don’t waste time, wrapping his neck in a guillotine choke and cranking with every ounce of anger I feel towards the man who’s made our lives a living hell for the last few weeks. 

It takes a second, but I feel the distinct pop of tendon and bone breaking and from how limp the man goes, I know he’s gone. Swinging my gun back into my hands, I check my corners and sprint to catch up with the team, reaching them as they start going down the exterior stairs of the building. At street level, more of Wallace’s men are posted up, guns aimed directly at us. I pause for a moment, eyeing the most imperative man to take out, and with a quick check through my scope, put two through his forehead, taking him out just before he can let a shot off; a shot that would’ve surely hit Rick where it counts. Taking out two more men before moving again, I sprint for our car, slipping in just as Dom puts the pedal to the floor. 

“Everyone good?” Benji calls, his eyes wide as they dart around the van, watching carefully as we all pat ourselves down. Unlike our last shootout, I don’t find a hole where it shouldn’t be. Still, I’m not surprised when I find Max’s fingers lifting my chin. 

“Jesus,” he hisses as I turn my head out of his grip, nodding. 

“Yeah, it’s gonna be muteville for me tomorrow unless I can ice this soon,” I acknowledge, resting my head back against the seat as the pain finally kicks in. 

Our secondary safehouse is nowhere near as luxurious as the one we use for headquarters, being nothing but a small, modified warehouse, but it has water, ice, and a place for me to lean back while I ice my neck. Max brings me the bag and gingerly sets the ice down on my neck, smoothing my hair back after. With a gentle kiss to my forehead, he takes his seat next to me, his gaze focusing on the screens where Rick is pulling up traffic cameras.

“Home Office is going to love knowing you broke the Freedom Act just for one man,” Max deadpans, all of us focusing on a different part of the screen, trying to figure out where Wallace and his men went after the bombing. 

“I’ll have a look at security cam footage from right after the stairs, see if I can pinpoint what direction he went in,” Dom says, pulling his laptop closer before entering the same camera network the traffic ones are on. If nothing else, I’m glad we’re in London because as one of the most surveilled cities in the world, the chances of not finding him are slim to none.

Silence falls over the room as we all study the feeds, looking for any sign of the black vans Wallace and his men got into after the bombing. It seems like hours go by before Dom finally speaks up, his voice terse as he checks and double-checks his findings.

“Cameras show him headed east-”

“I got him. He’s on A12,” Rick interjects, standing to get a closer look at his square, where the two vans are headed in the exact direction Dom had said. 

“A12 ends at London City. He’s gonna try and hop ship!” Max is the one on his feet now, reaching for his phone. 

Taking the ice off my neck, I sit up, well-versed in what’s about to happen. Joint ops are always a mess, but we need the airport locked down with him and his team in it, and with the head start Wallace has, we’ll never make it in time. 

Max paces as the call rings, his face making it clear he needs the person on the other end to pick up, and pick up quickly. As he waits, we all start getting ready. Vest plates are checked, mags get loaded and stowed, and extra ammo is stuffed into a singular go-bag one of us will carry just in case. 

“John. Hey mate, I need a favor and I need it fast. No questions right now. I need you to lock down London City as quickly as you can. No making calls to anti-terror, understood? This one’s ours and ours alone. He’s an animal and we need to put him down. Can you do that, mate? Good, thank you. What’s your ETA?”

Max listens intently to his friend on the other line even as he starts prepping his own gear, knowing we don’t have much time. 

“Great. I’ll see you there, mate. I’ll explain over a pint when it’s all over, I promise.” Closing the call, Max grabs his gear, on my heels as we all rush out the door and back into the truck. 

We check and recheck everything as Max drives towards the airport we know Wallace will be trying to fly out of. The silence in the truck is deafening, all of us tensed and ready for what we hope will be the end of this nightmare. 

London City’s facade reminds me of a used car dealership, all concrete and glass, with the airport’s title written in blue letters across the top of the entrance. It’s not a stunning piece of architecture, and despite its prime location, it’s nowhere near as heavily-trafficked as Heathrow or Gatwick. I try my best to keep my face neutral as we arrive; by the amount of lights and personnel standing around outside the building, the Mets weren’t exactly subtle about their approach. The chances that Wallace is still in the building drop more and more, the closer we get.

Max tears out of the car like a bull in a china shop, eyes narrowed with laser precision as he marches inside to find his friend. We follow suit, scanning the area for any sign of Wallace or his men, knowing he could be waiting to spring another trap on us at any moment. 

“What the hell happened, John?” Max barks as he makes a beeline for his friend, having no idea how scary he looks when he’s on the warpath. 

“We were too late, mate. He had a private jet set to take off. Wheels were up by the time we got to the counters. We’re pulling surveillance and the flight manifest as we speak.” John, to his credit, manages to face Max without shrinking in his presence, unintimidated by the rabid dog routine he tends to default to whenever a plan is going south.

Appeased by the quick reaction to missing their primary objective, Max backs off, scrubbing a hand over his face as he turns back towards us.

“We’re all in consensus that he wants to recreate the night he was arrested, correct?” He asks as we all gather around, ready to rejig the plan as necessary. Everyone nods, the rest of the team’s anger rising to the level of Max’s, none of us wanting a repeat of that night. “So he’s headed south. Probably back to Libya.” 

The flight manifest appears before anyone can say another word, and as Max reads over the report, I know the bad news is about to be compounded. 

“He took a hostage. FUCK!”

#henry cavill #pablo schreiber #henry cavill x ofc #pablo schreiber x ofc #resurrection #deathonyourtongueoriginals

[theredandwhitequeen]

Roswell New Mexico thoughts 3.02 Jumper cables Hydrated water bottles He crashed our spaceship and ruined our mothers lives Bringing up Noah, not nice Noah was bad, Jones is worse It’s him or it’s Max The Oasis planet Reckoning of sorts Adapt or run for the hills The engineer and the empath Louise and Nora Forged resistance  Built a ship by themselves Secret weapon of a dictator Max wakes up alone but she’s still there reading his book You’re legit good and it’s offensive  Heath is still there cooking her food eggs and ashes  I’m gonna need my shirt back, the one she’s wearing Rosa and Wyatt at the hospital with Kyle Retrograde amnesia, forgot last 10 years Trying to talk to Rosa, Kyle chases him out Alex, at crashdown, a card, numbers, I wasn’t expecting him in the episode  Clock was Jim’s Kyles mom is leaving town, 😭😭 Lost the election Maria got hurt by bad men, stole money, smashed booze,  Vision I think someone’s getting murdered Max was with her, he’s a sheriff again Lots had abilities, he was 7 If healed too much, get sick Tortured parents to make him comply Max Alex in fancy uniform Playing games, Alex is so smart Kyle, Maria, Max trying to figure things out, Maria to hospital  Clue at crashdown, on roof Liz at work, Heath Go home and figure things out Got samples from Libya You were the reason they want to kill us, the reason our moms are dead Trying to rescue Max Louise and Nora had Max chained up Young Max from last season Nora stole Jones DNA The dictator might have been immortal  Are you telling me you wouldn’t do anything to save the ones you love - to Michael Michael and Isobel fighting Michael angry and using his powers  Michael is heartbroken Alex trying to escape  The new character  Alex thinking and working things out Alex is brilliant and I love his mind There are no hornets in the Air Force  Dark Sky Figured it out Alex is very pretty in just a tee shirt Liz and Heath Heath giving Liz ideas Crashdown, Maria, Kyle, Max - trigger a vision by jumping off the roof Maria jumped, Maria has a lot of anger and upset due to the visions and robbed I’m guessing.  Michael saved her  That was weird Isobel and Jones  Could tell he was sick the moment he touched him  Kyle and Rosa talking about Wyatt Sober for a year What if I do fail? Keep trying Max and Michael at the crashdown  You’re about to die, there is no more time to be scared or stupid  I saw something, I thought Louise was setting me free He felt safe I don’t want to ruin the memories of your mother for a feeling Somebody made me and I want to know why. There is a reason I exist… Isobel and Jones Drinking alcohol  Can you heal him Gives him alcohol  I caught glimpses of a lot of things They underestimate you don’t they Talked about Louise Manipulative  Creeped out and upset, broke car a bit Rosa doing art outside the crashdown, hears noises and dogs barking Holding spray can and runs into Wyatt who bought her paint pens Do not make Wyatt good Alex exploring with the Eduardo Ramos Lockhart Machine Don’t know what it is 11:11pm, every 47 days it turns on Alex exploring it Deep Sky Michael and the old article,  The flames couldn’t touch him, so Michael put his hand in the fire and it was fine Do no harm banner Recent rise in racial crimes Anatsa is a reporter  Kyle and Maria and Isobel, memories Michael is the son of the dictator, Jesus He’s the heir oh my god Vision her eyes rolled back Max sees Liz outside crashdown Liz, Max

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. This episode was amazing and insane all at once. I love everything about it.

Especially Michael and his hand in the flames. Wow.

Alex is so smart and such a good man, he figured it out from context clues on a uniform he looked at for maybe a few minutes. I’m intrigued about the lockheart machine

Don’t make Wyatt a good guy, he’s not and nobody wants that. But using the drug to erase 10 years of Wyatt’s memories is kind of hilarious in a sad way.

Rosa and Kyle was so good

I need to rewatch Maria’s scenes to better understand what she was saying to Michael and to Kyle and Max.

I just really loved the episode

#roswell new mexico #my thoughts #3.02

[dog-day-morning]

WHEN DOGS CRY

Ezekiel 3:1-4

3 Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel.

2 So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.

3 And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.

4 And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them.

The children of God thirst for the word of God, but there's a drought in the land for the Devil comes to steal that word from you. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it. We are a rebellious house who have walked in the ways of sin forgetting the will of God. The Father was the same today as He was yesterday. Our temperament, and faith can change with the current of the wind or something we may perceive as being better than the Father’s love which is what Satan wants you to believe. When Yeshua fasted for 40 days and nights Lucifer came to Him while He was weakened thinking He could get the Son of God to forsake everything for his deception.

Luke 4:6-8

6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.

7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

How can you give me something you never owned? Derek Chauvin is appealing his court conviction without a lawyer, and no money. This is Satan’s downcast people, the wicked kingdom of Babylon that's falling apart in front of the whole world. Satan has no kingdom, we’re taking back everything they've taken from us including our dead, and slaughtered children. The drought will end with a Jubilee celebration of God's people who have been without, and the curses shall fall upon those who have persecuted us from the beginning. If you thirst your souls will be quenched by the waters of God, His Spirit that will enable the downtrodden to overcome and overwhelm ourselves including our enemies, the inner me; YOU!!! Satan will not go down without a fight, he's unrighteous, salty, and afraid of the judgment that's coming to this earth that will consume our open enemy without us having to lift a finger.

The dead in hell shall be given back to the Lord of host that is the army of Israel who will fight the enemies of Israel as we have been a homeborn slave to all of the Earth. We have bowed down as a broken people to all men with no one to care for our plight save our Lord. To see people defend the institution of WS is a cancer to your spiritual process that needs to be fixed before the Day of Judgment comes to claim those who are puffed up before the Lord. The missing white woman syndrome is a frustrating reality we witness throughout the year. People should be concerned about their missing loved ones, but you must realize who are the one’s going missing at an alarming rate. Becky, and Mai Ling do not have more precedent over Tanisha, or Quantasia yet they are the ones the public is asked to search for more than a Black child or woman. Asian nail salons that partake in sex trafficking on the sly use Black women as well as Asians against their will to facilitate their male, and female patrons. There are no Happy Endings for these women and children. God loved Israel when we were without fault, and could do no wrong before Him while the rest of the world compounds, and exacerbates our issues. If he didn't love us He wouldn't reprove or chastise us. In order to reign with Christ you will suffer with Christ. We suffered at the hands of our Egyptian Brothers including Esau while Esau revised the world’s history to favor him which is an abominable sin. We were children who sucked milk from our mother’s teets. Now the Lord has been feeding us meat to strengthen our spirit for what lays ahead .

Ezekiel 16:4-13

4 And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.

5 None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the lothing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.

6 And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

7 I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field, and thou hast increased and waxen great, and thou art come to excellent ornaments: thy breasts are fashioned, and thine hair is grown, whereas thou wast naked and bare.

8 Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becamest mine.

9 Then washed I thee with water; yea, I throughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil.

10 I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers' skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk.

11 I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck.

12 And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head.

13 Thus wast thou decked with gold and silver; and thy raiment was of fine linen, and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine flour, and honey, and oil: and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou didst prosper into a kingdom.

He said thou wast exceeding beautiful. For every woman who looks at the European standard of po, broke, and boney as a standard of beauty don't. Love your thick lips which they pay thousands of dollars a year to get, and maintain. Breathe through your flaring nostrils that the Father gave unto you in order to run, and never grow weary. Love your wide curvaceous hips, big thighs, and thick, lovely hind they pay a Dr. in Atlanta tens of thousands of dollars every so many years to look like Shantell from the hood who was blessed in the womb with a body they get augmented in order to try and look like hers, and by all means if you're deeply melinated with dark skin do not bleach your blessing. Melanin Is responsible for our higher intelligence, those hips, and that beautiful derriere, your brother's athletic prowess, the ability to endure the hell we've endured for these hellish 500yrs. You don't have to be darkly melinated to succeed in the world of athletics or academia. Florence Joyner Griffith set a record in the 1988 Olympics that still stands today. Katherine Johnson helped pave the way for the first American astronaut to successfully orbit the Earth. Melanin is called the God particle for a reason, it can't be duplicated or created in a lab. Thanks to cloning they can produce this element close to its essential form, but not to God’s precise design. Men have been trying to manipulate God's works through science without considering that He is Spirit. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. They're trying to circumvent the Father’s work carnally, that's' the crux of the problem. I said all of this to say this. They have used us like lab rats from the Tuskegee Experiment, back to days of slavery when they experimented, and operated on Black women without using anesthesia, to this day with this COVID-19, catastrophic, doomsday annihilation that got out of control, and became a global pandemic that was only supposed to affect the African Diaspora. The Chinese are first cousins to Esau. They are descendants of Japheth along with the Canaanites including the other tribes of the Earth whom Israel has blessed. I may be beating a dead horse so shoot me. This is what's coming down the pipes after God has had enough of the blood shedding of His people.

Revelation 6:10-11

10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

11 And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.

Those of us who have been slain, and suffered on this Earth who had a relationship with Christ will receive a robe of white. People are still going to hell like the police, neo Nazis, klansmen, KKKARENS, KKKENS, your 10yr old nephew Man Man. All of those who hate, and persecute Israel and our kinsman. After God has seen enough of this world's abuse of His children, that's when you'll see the miracles, signs, and wonders that will scare the junk out of everyone's pants, skid marks and all. There will not be a zombie apocalypse. What will happen is a Nightmare on Everywhere Street. This is the war they asked for.

Zechariah 14:12-14

12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.

13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the Lord shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.

14 And Judah also shall fight at Jerusalem; and the wealth of all the heathen round about shall be gathered together, gold, and silver, and apparel, in great abundance.

The Mark of the Beast. We will spoil them by taking everything they've stolen from us globally. The colonization of Alkebulan is almost over and you have to believe these truths. The West, and the Far East have colonized the continent, whoring it out for its resources giving nothing back in return except paper, ink, and dust. I don't ascribe to the faith or religious doctrine of the Sabeans (Muslims) that came from the Bible of the Hebrews. The Israelites took nothing from the Quran, it didn't exist. My skepticism makes me suspicious of the biblical scholars who claim that Yeshua went to the Far East (Asia) while on Earth to study which is a misnomer in itself, He's all knowing. He may have journeyed there, but He said I come for my people Israel, and told His Apostles to minister to them only before His final ascension. I'm not trustworthy of those who are inclined to lie about everything including the world's history that is Black history. The Bible has hundreds of books that were purposely left out of the original 66 books that revealed more truths about God's people that are in the libraries of the Vatican. They will be revealed before or after Vatican city is decimated by the Father. The truths we seek will not come from a book exclusively interpreted by men, people lie. It will come from the Lord’s Spirit. Satan's time is up, and he's trying the saints who suffer not because of his torment, but for the testimony of Christ. We have been chosen by God to lead those who have deceived the world through clever deception and manipulation. Our souls are consumed with many insecurities that were intentionally placed in our spirit by men who understood how feared we were in the Old Testament because of the anointing. They have oppressed, and suppressed our powerful anointing before the Earth with a tactical methodology that if it wasn't for the Lord it would've consumed us before man. The word of God does not separate us from the love of God, it embraces, and keeps us safe with the blood covering of His Son.

Hebrews 4:12

12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Those who rebuked the word of God will have to answer to the Lord on the Day of Judgment. People in the last days are walking away from God's will like stubborn goats. Satan will lead you away from God blindly before those who'd rather believe in a lie to foster confusion, and a selfish mentality that's unhealthy for your soul. Israel. You are blessed by the Father to overcome, forgive, show a selflessness that others do not, giving of your sustenance to bless another, sacrificing for a greater cause that's greater than oneself. I tell you things that are written in the Bible you refuse to discern or cannot determine that are coming upon us. They are meant for this day, this hour, at this time. God will lead us out of the darkness into His marvelous light. Do not don't forget that this is Tribulation. Be prepared for calamities to hit us back, to back, to back, harder, and worse than the previous as a warning He's coming for His faithful. No man can judge himself worthy of the Kingdome. Pray for one another with a fervency. This will be the day of reckoning for the unrighteous who have sought innocent blood, and the provision God set aside for His children. This battle shall be fought by the Father’s host army that is not Christian?!! I worship in the Christian faith, but I desire to know the truth. I, and many of you are in search of the Lord's truths that we’ll find in the appointed season which is coming, but this battle is the Lord’s

Ezekiel 37:7-10

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.

8 And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.

9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

It amazes me that people still don't believe after what we've witnessed the last 40 or so years. Maybe it’s somewhat my fault. The Father works in mysterious ways. Man's flesh will melt inside of his loins, he will tremble in fear, and faint after witnessing hell on Earth; God's wrath. I’ll see you when I can breathe. Good evening, Elohim. 9/26/2021

[imagineofallkindsxxx]

Eternal Flame- Kol Mikaelson 7/?

A Hundred Dead Witches!?!

Summary: 'You never know whats in a persons heart until you truly know them' - Belle French, Once Upon a Time

Singing. Thats all what Alexandra Gilbert has cared about since she was young and all she would care about until she met him.

With Alexandra fighting vampires, werewolves and all between she may do a thing she vowed never to do, fall in love.

And to think it all started with a walk in the woods...

Tonight was the night of Illuminations, a town tradition that has been going on for centuries so a group of us had volunteered to help or in my case forced to. While hanging lanterns from the trees Carol Lockwood decided to make a speech to the volunteers deciding to thank the people actually doing the work instead of sitting around making speeches along with introducing Tobias Fell. 

"Remind me why we're here again?" I whispered to Mark but before he could answer Sam butted in. 

"It's my uncle Tobys night, my mom's forcing me to volunteer and I'm sure as hell not doing it on my own." Making me roll my eyes at the bassist. 

  "Yo, what'd I miss" James said coming behind us making me jump out of my skin giving him a push. 

  "Nothing the speech is about to begin." Sam informed him. 

  "The first illumination..." He started, going on about history of the town and the founders. 

"I'm gonna dip. Finish my lantern" I whispered to James making him look at me incredulously. I just looked at him and blew a kiss at the drummer before a quietly and as slyly as possible trying to escape the wrath of Sam Fell who although may look skinny and weak can destroy you. 

When it looked like I was in the clear for now I walked up to Caroline and Bonnie who were tying lanterns to a branch.

"-comment on that." 

"Comment on what?" 

"There. You Commented" 

"I'm confused, what are you commenting?" Asking the duo confused at what is going on and what is being commented. 

"What do you want me to say Caroline?" She asked clearly distressed before finally addressing me "I went against the balance of nature when I brought Jeremy back to life and now, I'm paying the consequences. Whenever he wants to see Anna and she wants to see him, she's still here". Jesus this is fucked up. 

"Bon..." I started looking at her sympathetically before Caroline butts in 

"I want you to tell me you're not okay with it." 

"I'm a thousand times not okay with it. I just don't know what to do about it" she said looking deflated at the entire situation making me throw my arm around her shoulders in comfort. 

"You, Bonnie Bennett are the most powerful, smartest and amazing witch. You'll figure out, trust me. You're Bonnie Bennett for Christ sake!" She smiled at me giving a small laugh before a blue Camaro comes out of nowhere pulling up with a raven haired vampire driving. 

"Greetings, blondie, witchy, brainy. I think you got your voodoo wires all crossed when you got rid of Vicki Donovan." She tells us with an annoyed expression on his face. 

"Vicki Donovan?" I questioned confused to how a dead vampire was being brought into this conversation, 

"What do you mean, why?" Bonnie questioned the annoyed/annoying vampire in front of her. 

"Because I'm pretty sure I just got spit-roasted by Mason Lockwood's ghost." He explained. What the hell did Damon do to that poor and attractive werewolf? 

"What?" Bonnie asked very confused. 

"And why exactly do you think that?" I asked wondering how Mason Lockwood was the first person he thought of.

"Maybe because he chained me to a chair and shoved a hot poker into my chest. let's say I'm having deja vu." With this being told me and Caroline both look at Bonnie who looks very confused and conflicted. 

"I thought you said ghosts couldn't interact with people." Caroline said talking straight to Bonnie thinking how it can't be possible that Bonnie may have been wrong. 

"They can't" 

"Yeah well, I don't have time for a vengeful Lockwood. When I kill someone, they're supposed to stay dead. Whatever you screwed up fix it." He ranted towards the witch after that he drove away extremely quickly and most likely above the speed limit. 

Across the road was Matt watching the interaction of the four of us. I was the first to cross the street to talk to the quarterback with Caroline and Bonnie following closely behind. I asked him quickly if he had seen Vicki.

"I haven't seen Vicki, I swear" He told us all before looking down upset about having to go through the loss of his sister a second time "I sent her back like you told me to do."

"Are you sure?" Bonnie asked making sure that Matt actually did get rid of Vicki "Because she has just as much reason to haunt Damon as Mason Lockwood does."

"90% of the people who have been killed in the past two years has as much reason to haunt Damon as much as Mason Lockwood." I added making Caroline nod in agreement.

"She's gone Bonnie. If she was here, I'd know it" I gave him a small sympathetic smile it clear that he was severely upset about this whole ordeal.

"Why do you think its Vicki and not Mason?" Caroline asked the witch.

"Because if any ghost other than Vicki Donovan has a physical foothold on our side, that means Damon's right." Words I never thought I'd hear "and something has gone really, really wrong." Bonnie states looking extremely worried about this situation and what would happen if all the ghosts from our past come to literally haunt us.

"I've had enough of this ghost stuff to last forever. So can you guys can leave me out of this one" Matt tells the three of us, I nodded understanding that if that happened to me, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed forget going to work. He walks away from us, and you can hear Caroline talking.

"I feel so sad for him. It took a lot for him to send his sister away."

"Yeah" Bonnie replied shortly.

"I highly doubt I could do that, if I got to saw my mom or dad again... I don't know if I would be able to let them go." I stated feeling so much sympathy for the blue-eyed boy. "It took a lot of guts anyway." This made the other girls nod.

"So much strength in a man." Caroline continued looking at both of us.

"Caroline it's never going to happen, get over it." Rolling my eyes at her Insinuating that Matt would be a perfectly good boyfriend as she's done for the part two months.

"I've got a ghost problem to deal with, Caroline. Save the Jeremy lecture for later" She snapped while grabbing her bag all of her stuff falling out when the strap broke. I bent down and helped her pick up her things and just as she was going to put her grimoire up it opens itself to a page in the center of the book.

"Did that just..." I asked the witch and vampire not believing my eyes.

"I think so." Bonnie said cocking her head to the side while picking up the book reading the page that the book opened itself to.

"Okay please tell me that's a recipe for witch cookies" Caroline half joked half serious about the page Bonnie was currently reading.

"It's a manifestation spell. It's used to reveal veiled matter." Bonnie told us the meaning of the grimoires spell.

"What's veiled matter?" Caroline asked and before Bonnie answered I said in shock.

"Ghosts." looking at them all.

"What do we do? Do we do the spell? What is the spell exactly?" I questioned Bonnie repeatedly wanting the ghosts to be a thing in the past and look into the future.

"I think we need to go somewhere more private."

***

Caroline pulled her car up to an abandoned creepy looking house. the three of us enter the front room me and Caroline a little bit more apprehensively than Bonnie.

"So, this is where you brought Jeremy back to life?" I asked Bonnie looking around the room severely creeped out, the interior being as bad as the exterior.

"Yeah. Sorry, I know it's creepy, but we needed a private place to do the spell." Bonnie apologized getting ready to do the spell.

"Hmmm. There's no chance it's haunted by the hundred dead witches who were horrifically burned to death in this very spot, is there?" Caroline question clearly scared, and that question alone made me just as scared.

"A hundred dead witches?!"

"They're not here anymore. And they made it clear they were never coming back." she reassured us both trying to calm our nerves or well attempted to.

"Right. You pinkie swear?" Caroline asks trying to make a joke in the tense environment. Making me give her a look. I got the candles out and gave Caroline a lighter so she can help light the candles with me for Bonnie to start the spell.

"Ready do you need us to do..." I started turning around to see Bonnie already starting to start the spell "Right. Okay" I looked at Caroline while Bonnie was continuing to do the spell getting louder every chant a breeze beginning to surround us getting stronger and stronger by the second making everything in the room moves. Seeing all of this makes my eyes widen and start to worry about Bonnie and how safe this is for her.

"Bonnie, I don't like this. Bonnie..." Caroline voices my thoughts while also looking around that was until we saw something shocking.

"Oh my God, is that your...?" I started but couldn't finish due to the pure shock of what I as seeing. All three of us shocked Bonnie can't say anything, it even leaves Caroline speechless. The silence was broke with Bonnie saying quietly.

"Grams."

*************************************************

A/N:

Small chapter but next is quite long an different than others as a special character will be appearing. Hope you enjoyed, Part two will include more of the boys (a slight twist).

Please correct any grammar, spelling or British slang.

Any positive or negative feedback is appreciated.

Thanks for reading lovelies xxx 

#kol mikaelson imagine #kol mikaelson x you #kol mikaelson x reader #kol mikaelson #the originals #the vampire diaries #the originals imagine #the vampire diaries imagines #kol mikaelson series