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mystery-star · 3 years

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Waiting for you - Spock

Pairing: Spock x reader (gender neutral)

Warnings: mentions of injury and death

Words: 1838

Star Trek universe: AOS

A/N: Just a lil thing I wrote because I haven’t written (at least for Spocko) in ages. And didn’t feel like writing on a series.

“She’s here. She’s here” you heard someone shouting beside you and looked around and finally you could see the Enterprise approaching in one of many tunnels above you. You smiled and stepped forward a little and waited for the crew to dismount. When you saw the first of them, your smile got broader and you got onto your tiptoes to look out for your husband. Not many people of the Enterprise had someone waiting for them and those who did seemed overjoyed. It made you look down for moment because you had a feeling that Spock wouldn’t greet you like others greeted their loved ones. Finally, you could see him and slightly raised your hand, hoping he’d see you. When he did, he came straight towards you, stopping half a meter in front of you

“(Y/N)” he said “What brings you to Yorktown?”

“I’ll give you three guesses” you replied and just threw yourself around his neck “I’ve missed you, Spock” you breathed against his skin and he hugged you back slightly.

“Am I therefore right to conclude that you came here in order to see me during my shore leave?”

“Right” you let go of him but only that you could kiss him. He cupped your face and kissed you back. At some point his hand found yours, slowly stroking his first two fingers against yours. But then he pulled away from you all of a sudden, just holding your hand. You turned around and saw two older Vulcans behind you.

“Commander, might we have a word? Alone?” you wanted to ask why you couldn’t come when Spock threw a glance at you and squeezed your hand

“Do you mind?”

“Just be quick” you pecked his cheek “I’ll be waiting for you, okay?” you handed him a keycard of the hotel where you had booked a room for you both. He gave a nod, then let go of your hand and followed the two men. With a sigh you looked after him and returned to the hotel, knowing he would be clever enough to find it when he was done.

But he only came when it was dark and you were already in bed, reading a magazine on your PADD.

“Have you been waiting with sleeping until I return?”

“Well, you got some days of shore leave, then I won’t see you for another two years. I want to use every minute with you that I can” he gave a nod and sat down on the bed, placing a device on the nightstand. “What did they want?”

“I will tell you in the morning”

“Alright” you put the PADD aside and stretched yourself a little before sitting up, crawling closer to him and wrapping your arms around him again, kissing him. “We now have better things to do, don’t you think?” he kissed you back and placed one of his hands in the small of your back, pulling you closer while he ran his other hand over the side of your face. After the kiss he leaned his forehead to yours and you bumped his nose with yours. “Did you have fun out there on the mission?”

“I have written and called you three times per week, as we have agreed on, and informed you about what you call ‘adventures’ and have also answered each question concerning them I was allowed to answer”

“Well yes but your last message was two days ago. I need a recap of the past two days. Or retell me your favorite mission. Doing it face-to-face is much better” you pecked his lips. He gave a nod, pulled you into his lap and started telling you how the Captain had attempted to make peace between two species that didn’t work out as planned. Then he went on to their arrival to Yorktown and suddenly his communicator beeped “Tell me that’s your private comm”

“It is not” he leaned forward to get it and you just wanted to stop him but let it happen with a sigh. Placing you back on the bed, he gave your hand a squeeze, took the comm, opened it and left the room. With a sigh you fell back on the bed, glancing to the PADD and considering if you should continue reading but then looked at the ceiling, repeating everything you had planned to do with Spock in the following days in your mind. Soon Spock returned and you sat up with a smile but his words ruined it “I must go”

“Go? Go where? Aren’t you on shore leave?”

“I am. However, there is a matter that requires my assistance”

“What is it?”

“I cannot tell you much but I must leave Yorktown”

“You’re shitting me”

“I do not joke”

“But… but… will you at least get that time off later on? How long will you be gone?”

“I suppose it should not take longer than 36 hours”

“Oh well…. Then you owe me yet another debriefing upon your return” he gave a nod, came closer to put his comm on his nightstand and pecking your forehead.

“Please make yourself a pleasant day tomorrow”

“Okay. And then I’ll be waiting here for you… again”

But Spock didn’t come home the evening or morning after he had left, so you decided to make yourself another nice day exploring another area of Yorktown. In the late afternoon, you suddenly heard how the station went on alert and after looking around you saw that a swarm of tiny ships tried attacking Yorktown. Around you everyone was in panic, screaming, rallying kids and running away while you stood there frozen, staring at the many little ships on the other side of Yorktown.

“We have to leave. Come. Now” someone next to you shouted, pulling on your arm

“Can we go somewhere safe? Like a… bunker?”

“A bunker on a Starbase?” the man started laughing slightly and shook his head.

“Or can we do something? Something to help? Is there a defense station or militia? Or help evacuate people?”

“That’s Starfleet’s business” as if on cue, there was an announcement, informing the public that there was an attack and that you should not panic. You let out a snort and watched how the people around you seemed to panic even more. You looked around and finally saw a security, officer, going over to him.

“Excuse me, Sir?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll all be safe, just stay calm and…”

“No, I wanted to ask if I can help something.”

“Help?”

“Yeah. Weapons, evacuate people or something” he looked at you, considered it a while then said he’d have to check it out. But before he could return, they managed to somehow blow up all the small ships. Somehow you couldn’t believe that this was everything and sure enough, there was another announcement informing the public that a great part of the ship had been destroyed but that three of them had gotten into Yorktown but that they still had the situation under control and would do everything to stop them. For some reason, you found that three ships hand entered Yorktown almost worse than the initial attack. Because you knew there probably wasn’t much you could do unless the ships came to that part of Yorktown, you sat down in a café, ordered a drink and watched the news on the big screen that gave a permanent update on the situation at the other end of Yorktown. Not even 15 minutes later, you heard that everyone was out of danger and the intruders had been rendered harmless. After a sigh, you finished your drink and then returned to the scene of the action, maybe there now was something you could help, like tidying up damage or helping the wounded. You stayed there and helped until it was dark and the volunteers were sent home, so you returned to the hotel. But you didn’t get far and the receptionist called you over.

“You are (Y/N) (Y/L/N), right?”

“That’s me, yeah”

“I have message for you, from a doctor Leonard McCoy”

“I know him. He’s the doctor on the Enterprise. What is this message about?”

“He lets you know, that your husband… Commander Spock will spend the night in Yorktown hospital”

“Ho-hospital? They’re back? What does he have? Is it bad? Can I visit him? When did they get back?”

“He only told me that so you know where your husband is and in case you wish to see him. I don’t know anything else” you nodded and with a thank-you you ran out of the hotel, to the hospital, where you had brought a few people earlier today. You went to a visitor station to register your visit and once you knew where your husband was and that he currently could be visited, you rushed to the elevator and then to his room. When you saw Spock lying in bed awake, you let out a deep breath and moved closer.

“Spock” you breathed, not sure what to say and having a hundred questions at the tip of your tongue. "How are you?” was the first you asked

“I am well, (Y/N). The doctors insisted I stayed the night to ensure that my condition does not become worse” you nodded and came closer, taking his hand, pressing a kiss to it as you sat down on the edge of the bed. To your delight, he squeezed your hand.

“What happened? To you, I mean?” he explained how on the mission his side was impaled by a piece of metal and that McCoy didn’t have the correct equipment to properly treat him. “At least you’re safe” you ran your free hand through his hair. “When did you even get back?”

“4.2 hours ago”

“That was… that was when the attack happened” he agreed and said it was them who played a great role in stopping them. “Oh so that big ship that destroyed the central plaza was you, the Franklin?”

“Indeed”

“And what about the Enterprise?”

“She has been destroyed”

“Oh no. What about the crew? Are they safe?”

“We have not yet been able to ascertain who has survived the attack on the Enterprise and who lost their life, however, I am certain that at least 350 people have survived”

“Out of 428 that’s still a lot that could have died”

“Besides, I also know of at least 16 casualties from the crew” you gave a nod

“And what now? I mean is your mission over? The Enterprise is gone”

“We do not know yet but it is certain that we will remain her for longer than the originally scheduled 12 days of shore leave”

“Well, then we got more time to do something as long as we’re here. And I get to see you longer. Ha that visit was worth it” you leant down to kiss his forehead. “Now we just gotta make sure you’ll be on your feet as soon as possible because I have lot planned for the next days”

Taglist: @softsapphicideals

#spock #spock x reader #spock x you #spock imagine #aos spock #imagine

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milliumizoomi · 3 years

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𝓣𝓗𝓔 𝓡𝓘𝓓𝓔 !

Pairings: A! KiriTodoBakuDeku x O! Black Fem! Reader

Synopsis: You, your friends and all your pups went out and it took a turn none of you were expecting.

Warnings: Mentions of massive injury, Angst, Cursing.

Masterlist

GO BACK ⇢ Part 5 ⇢ UP NEXT

They ran.

That’s all they could really do. Running and frantically searching for you, the villain and rescuing citizens as well. This was one of those days that people would be terrified. It was horrible. People screaming, children crying and what made it worst of all.. is the place all of this is happening.

It was a pro hero’s job to protect citizens so they would get used to sights like these. But with the lingering thought in their mind that all of this devastation was happening in the place that no one say coming made their skin crawl.

“HELP..! PLEASE!! PLEASE HELP ME!” A citizen cried, stuck under rubble with blood streaming down her face. Midoriya flew over there as fast as he could and managed to safely get her out. “Hey! Ok I got you ok! Please keep your eyes open if you can!” He stated to her as her body was becoming heavier and heavier by the minute. While other pros who were more of rescuers came and took the woman from Midoriya, the other men ran forward, doing their best to save all the citizens that needed help while still in search of you.

A couple minutes pass and at the moment, all four of the heroes were helping citizens evacuate the area. At this time they were in the middle of the carnival where the Ferris wheel is located. “WHERE THE HELL IS Y/N AND THAT DAMN VILLAIN!” Bakugou yelled in frustration. It had been a couple minutes since anyone had detected anything from the villain. They have been stressing severely after the incident with the pups. They were thinking the worst.

“Bakubabe calm down.. you know that we’re all on edge about this situation and—“ Just before Kirishima could finish his sentence, a pound explosion and a bloodcurdling screaming was heard. And somebody in the crowd recognized the scream. The boys did too.

“Y/N?!” The mystery person said. They pushed through the crowd. “SO IT IS HER!!” Kirishima yelled, extremely panicked. The person made their way to where the heroes were. “IS THAT MY DAUGHTER?!” your mother screamed while crying. Your father came up behind her comforting her as she screamed. “BOYS! WHERE.IS.MY.DAUGHTER!!” Your father yelled as well, seeing red. The boys froze. They were not expecting to see their parents in law at a time like this. “Wait sir let me explain..” Todoroki started, wanting to avoid the unnecessary argument and also to avoid the lingering eyes on them.

The media knew nothing of you. They didn’t know you were connected to some of the most powerful heroes in society. So that meant not even the citizens knew. You were kept secret, to avoid villains trying to target you and now the pups. “But can we talk about it in private?” Todoroki continued, not wanting to talk about it in the setting where the citizens are within an earshot.

Your parents nodded and shakily walked to a corner. The boys then explained what they know and how the situation happened. Your parents were shaken. They never expected this to happen. “WELL PLEASE GO AHEAD! PLEASE SAVE HER!” Your mother cried. The boys nodded and bid farewell and took off.

“The bastard is gonna pay if there’s on mark on her..” Bakugou growled as he propelled himself faster in the air with his quirk. “Oh most definitely..” Todoroki said with a feral tone.

As they are nearing the area the explosion was, there was another one. And then the same voice was heard.

Your voice.

You screamed, “DO WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT TO ME BUT I WILL NOT LET YO BITCHASS TOUCH MY FAMILY!!” The boys froze. That was you..? “You got guts going up to me.. but that’s a pretty little quirk you got there” the villain laughed at you. “I’m gonna have fun killing you..” the villain continued as he charged at you.

“WE GOTTA GO!” Midoriya screamed. The boys finally reached the area. The other heroes were dealing with other villains in the area. It was said that this villain the boys are going after was the strongest there. As they finally reached the area, their eyes widened at what they saw.

You stood in the middle of a lot of rubble all battered and beat up. The alpha marks that littered your neck were stained with blood. Your clothes were tattered and your hair was all frizzy. The boys looked over to the side where they saw your two friends laying there unconscious.

You were protecting them.

And it looks like there was a struggle. You were stumbling over your own feet at times. No wonder you quirk disabled in the air with the pups inside. You had the overexerted yourself. “Oh.. we’ll look what we have here..!” The villain cackled evilly. This alerted you as you shakily turned around to have your eyes be met with your alphas. “A..alp-“ you said weakly. You were so weak it’s the only thing you could get out before the villain grabbed you by your throat.

“I’d advise you stay back before I pop this one open!” He said menacingly. The boys saw red. As far as they were concerned, he was the reason you were hanging onto your life, he was reason their pups may have trauma from this experience, he was the reason their family may never be the same. “You.. MOTHERFUCKER!!”Bakugou screamed as he charged at the villain. “YOU DID THIS! YOU DIRTY ASS BITCH!!” Kirishima yelled behind, charging at the villain as well. “WE’LL KILL YOU!!” Midoriya said, doing the same as Kirishima and Bakugou. “THIS WILL NOT BE FORGIVEN!!” Todoroki screamed, following suit.

They all charged at the villain with the intent to kill him. They didn’t hold back at all. In a state of shock, the villain dropped you. Before you could hit the ground, Midoriya was quick to swoop in and grab your body. “I’m so sorry we didn’t come sooner my love.. we’ll finish this in a second then get you the help you need...ok?” He said. You nodded weakly and smiled letting him know you were ok. He set you on the ground, near your friends then went back to the fight. You managed to crawl closer to your friends’ unconscious bodies to put their heads in your lap. You sat up against the rubble and tried to relaxed your body but all you could feel was pain.

As the boys were still fighting the villain, debris flying all over the place, the villain began to speak. “WHY ARE YOU SO WORKED UP OVER A LOWLY OMEGA?!” He cried, obviously loosing the fight. “THATS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!” Todoroki yelled angrily. “AND DONT YOU DARE CALL HER LOWLY!!” Midoriya chimed in. “YOU’VE RUINED SO MANY LIVES TODAY AND HAVE THE AUDACITY TO ASK THAT YOU SON OF A BITCH?!” Bakugou continued, still beating the crap out of the villain. “YOU GOT SOME GUTS ASKING US THAT RIGHT NOW!” Kirishima added.

As this was happening, you heard a cry. It had to be enhanced by a quirk because it was a pup’s voice. Your eyes widened. “AMI! LITTLE PUP IS THAT YOU?!” You screamed. “MAMA!” She screamed back. That was your quirk.

Voice Adaptation.

You could basically do anything with your voice, whether it be making a shield, the orbs your pups were flying in or just sending messages, you could do it and apparently so can your pup. “Pup huh..” the villain groaned. He then slithered his way out of the boys and said, “LET’S SEE IF YOU’LL BE SO TOUGH WHEN I KILL THAT USELESS LITTLE DOG!” He screamed and started making his way to where the pups were. You were enraged and terrified. First of all, he just called your pup a useless dog and he’s now targeting your babies. “NO PLEASE, I’M BEGGING YOU!” You pleaded. The boys already took off after the villain, while terrified. ‘I have to do something I can’t just sit here!’ You thought to yourself wearily. After a few moments, your eyes then widened, finally getting a plan.

‘MOM?! MOM CAN YOU HEAR ME?!’ You said, sending a message to your mom through your mind with the use of your quirk. ‘Y/N?! SWEETHEART YOU’RE OK?!’ She replied. ‘I’LL BE FINE! BUT I NEED YOUR HELP! AND PLEASE CARRY DAD!’ You told her hastily. She sensed the urgency in your voice and said ‘I’LL BE RIGHT THERE!’ You slumped down and waited. A couple seconds later your mother and father appeared in front of you. “WHAT’S WRONG?!” Your mother screamed worriedly. “I can’t explain it right now but dad can you please pick up my friends and mom can you teleport all of us outside to where the ambulances are?!” You begged. Your parents looked at you, then each other then got stern looks. “Let’s go!” Your dad said as he picked up your two friends.

As this was happening, the boys was still in pursuit of the slimy squid like villain. “YEAH HELLO?! WERE IN PURSUIT! THE VILLIAN JUST STARTED TO RUN AWAY AND HE’S HEADING TO THE AMBULANCES! EVACUATE ALL THE CITIZENS IMMEDIATELY!!” Midoriya yelled into the communication device he had. “WE HAVE TO GET ALL THE PEOPLE OUT OF THERE! BUT WE HAVE TO GO BACK FOR Y—“ Kirishima started but was cut off by something.

It was your voice. You were talking to them.

‘Hello..! Alphas can you hear me?’ Your voice said in their head. ‘We’re here baby, we’re here! We’re coming back for you ok?!’ Todoroki communicated back to you. ‘No! Don’t! I’m fine’ you stated. ‘What the hell do you mean you’re fine?! With those injuries you could pass out at any moment!’ Bakugou says back. ‘Im serious! Keep going after the villain! My parents are here and their taking me to the ambulances!’ You told them sternly. ‘NO BABY WAI—‘ and before Midoriya could finish his sentence, your quirk cut off. All the alphas look at each other, decided if they should go back or not. “I have a bad feeling about this..” Kirishima says wearily, still chasing the villain. “OH LOOKS LIKE WERE HERE~” the villain laughs, drawing the boys out of their thoughts.

“FUCK!” Bakugou yelled. The boys watched as you teleported with your parents to the ambulances. They said a few things to you as you nodded your head. They left with the heroes that were directing them away.

For some reason, their stomachs were twisting. They had a lingering feeling that somethings wasn’t right.

You were looking around, silently begging to see your pups. The villain then charged at you but you managed to jump away in the split second if time you had left. “Y/N! GET OUT OF HERE!” Todoroki yelled. They didn’t wanna see you get hurt. You were so focused on finding the pups that you didn’t even hear him.

“THERE YOU ARE!” The villain said, alerting you and the boys. You looked over at him and saw that Ami, along with her three brother, Katsuo, Haru, and Izuko standing there in the care of a pro hero. “And looks like she’s got siblings.. Oh this is gonna be great!” The villain cackled. He charged at them. “NO!” The boys yelled in togetherness. They all ran after the villain. “DON’T LET HIM GET TO THEM! GET THEM OUT OF HERE!” Kirishima yelled, alerting the heroes. “HAHA I GOT YOU NOW!” The villain cried menacingly as he appeared infront of the wide eyed pups. He swung his tentacle as herd as he could and brung it down.

He hit something. But he didn’t hear crying. He opened his eyes to see you standing there, with a victorious smirk on your face, blood seeping out of the corner of your face and mouth. You looked up at him and said “I—.. I told you I wouldn’t.. let you touch... my family..—“ Your voice came out weak and hoarse. This was the breaking point to all those attacks you had to endure before. You had heard a loud crack and pop on impact. And it would be an understatement to say it hurt a lot. You knew that you were at your limit. “Y/N!!” Everyone who knew you cried out. The villain retracted his tentacle. “M-mama?!” Your pups cried, clawing at your legs. They looked up at you teary eyed. “M’ok babies, mommy’s gonna be just fi..—” you started weakly. Your vison started to get blurry. And darkness was the only thing you could see. “Get.. get them away.. don’t wanna fall.. on th..” you started to get out. You knew you were going to faint so you didn’t wanna fall on your pups. Your body began to fall. Before you hit the ground, you felt somebody catch you. By the way they held you, you knew it was one of your alphas. You could hear muffled screams. Your body soon went limp in the arms of whomever was holding you as you could do nothing but welcome the darkness.

©Property of Miashimaa. Please don’t rectify, repost or modify without my permission. Plagiarism will NOT be tolerated.

Taglist: @develith @uniquabackyardigans @unfazedrose @kiribis-confesion-page @darylthekidd @gm4176 (Open ! click here to be added!)

#funhouse—.reviews #bakugou x black reader #bakugou x poc!reader #bakugou angst #todoroki x black!reader #todoroki x poc!reader #todoroki x reader #todoroki angst #kirishima x black reader #kirishima x poc!reader #kirishima x reader #kirishima angst #midoriya x black reader #midoriya x poc!reader #midoriya x reader #midoriya angst #kiritodobakudeku x reader

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valkblue · 2 years

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— masterlist, tumblr post masterlist

Chapter 44 on 70

Chapter wordcount: 1.4K Rating: Mature Warning: Marge — so, swearing, slur and alcohol.

Author’s notes: A very short chapter... because everybody's tired in the Mesa. Especially Marge.

Ask box always open! I really want to know what you think about this story!

— Chapter 44

On Vivian’s watch, it would soon be 7 PM, and she was lazily letting the escalator bring her back to the Living Quarters. Exhausted as she was, Vivian couldn’t comb through Rafe’s code for a minute longer without her attention sinking in some kind of blend of colored characters and values on a black background.

But once he had calmed down, Rafe had taken Vivian’s revelations rather well. She had done her best to deliver them tactfully, showing him his code as well and answering all his questions, repeating herself as much as he needed her to, as he struggled to assimilate some details.

Rafe hadn’t blamed her either not to have told him anything while they journeyed together. In his own words, he understood… even if Vivian wasn’t really sure of what he had understood.

Then, he had followed her to one of the Body Shop’s cubicles where he had finally gotten rid of his sheet; he got to search through folded piles of clothes on shelves to come up with an outfit not quite matching but, at least, his size.

If putting clothes on had seemed to put Rafe’s head back on his shoulders a little, it had been nothing compared to the joy and relief he expressed to stumble upon Ike in the hallways. He was pushing one of those same trolleys loaded with messed up hosts, and despite the morbidity of the situation, their reunion had been heart-warming. Ike was also very comfortable with the truth even though he admitted that he still didn't understand everything he saw around him, or what was said to him. In fact, they all looked so calm that Vivian bitterly blamed herself or not having spilled the beans earlier — that would probably have spared them a great many complications!

Then, Ike had started to tell them about how he had finished off a mortally wounded Confederado soldier that had resisted them, he and the others, as they had tried to bring him here.

After what, Vivian had taken her leave with some pleasantries, knowing they’ll do well together. She had returned to the escalators and it was only halfway through, as she was making the conscious effort to ignore the bullet impacts and the broken glass, level after level, that the thought that she should have tried the elevators crept in. She had finally preferred to stay on the escalators — it was giving her some time to think things through before reaching her floor.

And once there, Vivian dragged her feet to her flat. Daisy had been brought back and this time, Vivian let her go through with her speech as she approached in the hallway.

"Welcome and good evening," she greeted her, with this same spot-on smile. "I’m Daisy."

"Hi, Daisy…"

Her answer lightened Daisy’s face a bit more and she continued, walking after Vivian who hadn’t stopped:

"I have been tasked to oversee your residential area to ensure communication between you and the people currently in charge, for your safety, information and well-being. Whatever your needs are, food or medical emergency, you are advised to submit your requests to me."

Vivian shot her a side glance.

"My purpose is to make sure that your stay here happens in the best conditions while you wait for your evacuation order, for which you will be informed of without delay."

"Wicked cool…" Vivian muttered, on a flat tone.

And if Daisy had something else to add, she didn’t get to as Vivian stopped by the door of Marge’s appartment, on which she knocked twice, softly. While knowing from Thawal that she had chosen to stay "home" gave her some comfort that she was okay, Vivian wanted to see for herself. Behind the door, there was no answer, even though she could hear a bit of noise. Vivian knocked again.

"Marge?" she called. "It’s me, Vivian…"

This time there was some motion, swearing and a faint bump against the door that made her take a step back. The lock gave a sharp clack, and the door opened to reveal half of Margaret's face. Her eyebrows raised and she opened the door wider; her black hair were in a mess, she was wearing yoga pants and a tank top, with socks on the tiles of the entrance and was holding a big glass of red wine in one hand.

"Look who’s here!" she muttered, with an air of total indifference.

And to be perfectly honest, she even looked a bit trashed.

"How are you doing?" Vivian inquired. "Thawal told me that—"

"That I’d rather be locked in my quarters than to work on the house for terrorists?"

She brought her glass to her lips and drank a slow sip without taking her eyes off Vivian’s who nodded.

"Basically…"

Margaret let out a shout of sarcastic laugther, leaning against the door frame.

"Yeah, well… I don’t want Delos to hold against me that I didn’t have it in me to remain loyal to who’s sending my payckeck once we’ll be evacuated from here! Especially since they left us the choice; work for the enemy, or stay home and enjoy room service!"

She raised her glass to Daisy, silent in the hallway behind Vivian.

"You there, Pansy, place an order, I’m about to get close and personal with my last bottle…"

"Right away."

And Vivian heard her tap on her tablet.

"So, you’re gonna stay there and drink yourself to oblivion?"

"Why?" Marge retorted. "You make it sound like it’s a bad thing."

She took another sip from her glass.

"No, I mean…"

"Oh, I know what you mean. And the answer is fuck, yeah, I’m totally doing that. A bitch had to enjoy life while it lasts, right?!"

She looked at her from head to toe before blurting out, wryly:

"But you can’t know that, can you? Since you were having fun out there in that shitty park while in here, your friends were being taken hostages and murdered, right?"

Vivian pressed her lips, hurt.

"Look at you! You even got to keep your toy gun!

"Yeah huh, you’re totally right," Vivian retaliated. "How can I be so selfish!?"

"Hey!" Margaret’s voice snapped in the hallway as she was straightening up, looking as if she had sobered up in an instant. "Leave the bitching to the professionals, Emerson!"

She lowered her voice to then mutter — and she wasn’t sober at all:

"Also, I’m low-key working on a way to be… evacuated sooner for… for 'medical reasons'."

She made what was left of her wine swirl in her glass, adding:

"So, now… If you’ll excuse me, Homegirl is gonna work harder. And you ain’t invited…"

On those words, Margaret stepped back without any answer from Vivian.

"You…" She pointed a threatening finger towards Daisy. "Wine… Fast."

And she slammed the door before giving a violent twist of the lock. Vivian let out a slow sigh and turned to Daisy who was still smiling. With an exhausted grumble, she resumed her walk to her own door; this talk had just drained her of what little energy she had left and, in front of her own entrance door, when Daisy asked her if she needed anything, Vivian only answered that she didn’t.

In fact, right now, she didn’t need anything else other than curl up on her bed and fall asleep.

Vivian undressed and wrapped herself in her bathrobe and in her sheets. There was nothing she could do about anything anyway; she couldn’t talk with Bernard about Rafe’s cognition before he’d be healed himself, and as for Lawrence… Well.

Vivian let out a slow sigh and closed her eyes. Should he come back on one of Hank’s carts, at least, she knew there’d be a way to get him back on his feet! It took away a little bit of the anxiety that weighed on her with every breath, just enough to let go into sleep at the rhythm of her breathing once it calmed down.

Tag list: @hathorik , @pheedraws , @something-tofightfor , @the-blind-assassin-12 ...

#westworld #westworld fic #westworld fanfic #fic:journey into night #full diagnostic series #ocs #oc:vivian #my writing

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princesssarcastia · 3 years

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first hp and now MCU *sigh*

sighs. anyway the reason the jane foster au thing is taking literally seven years is that I’m physically incapable of writing for the MCU without fixing everything I thought was dumb about it. can’t just do a canon re-write because I Refuse To Condone XYZ. The things I thought were dumb are many and myriad, but here’s one of them:

In Infinity War, they won’t destroy the mind stone while it’s still attached to Vision because they “don’t trade lives,” even though Steve made the same damn sacrifice, whatever. But the thing is the avengers then immediately travel to Wakanda and start trading Wakandan lives for Vision’s. They trade so many lives for Vision’s, and in the end it doesn’t even matter because they have to kill him themselves anyway. SO all those Wakandans died for nothing. They died for the aesthetic of the avengers having an army. They died because no one thought through “yeah, T’Challa is totally down to sacrifice his people’s lives for one android he isn’t close with.” They died because, let’s be honest, the lives of those random Wakandan soldiers meant less to not only the white main characters, but also the white movie creators. hmm. what could possibly be the impetus there. mostly stupidity, but probably also some racism, lbr.

anyway. all this to say what follows is a snippet where a) the battle to save vision isn’t taking place in Wakanda proper because the avengers don’t trade lives...other than their own. In fact, it’s taking place in the arctic circle, where Wakanda has a shielded research station with no civilians that Shuri can appropriate to fix Vision without having her citizens die needlessly. b) it’s just the avengers there, because they’re willing to put their own lives on the line for their friend and their principles. c) they’re using the mind stone as a lure to keep Thanos’ giant monster army focused on them, in this unpopulated place, rather than a city or a country.

you didn’t really need to know that, actually, because this fic snippet is about bruce banner. explicit tw in the tags you may want to check for if you don’t mind a spoiler. anyway, oh well, long walk for a short drink of water:

The walls shake with something other than the wind, and Bruce grits his teeth against whatever extrasensory response the other guy is having. If he doesn’t want to come out to play, then he doesn’t get to raise the hairs on the back of Bruce’s neck.

The other guy. After two years being trapped while he gets to play, maybe Bruce is the other guy now. Maybe the Hulk—

“Doctor Banner,” Shuri says without looking away from her interface. “If you’re going to help, then help. Otherwise stop distracting me and get out.”

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four...”You’re right. Sorry.” He turns back to his equations and keeps calculating what kind of energy source they can create here to replace the mind stone. Vision may be able to survive without it, but it’s ridiculous to ignore that it serves a purpose in keeping him not just alive, but functional. There’s a difference between surviving and living and the Avengers aren’t risking their lives just so he can—

Boom.

Dammit.

Shuri’s guard, the one T’Challa left with them—Ayo? Was that her name?—steps further away from them and speaks into her bracelet—kimoyo beads. Bruce strains to ignore it because he doesn’t need to know what he’s missing outside, doesn’t need to know how poorly the battle is going for his friends, his—his shield brothers, Brun would call it, without him. There’s no doubt in his mind Shuri could save Vision without him and there’s no doubt in her mind, either; he’s here as a courtesy and because it’ll go faster, at least. Because he’d be useless otherwise, sitting there with his thumb up his ass while his friends fight and die without him, without them, dammit Hulk—

“Princess,” Ayo calls.

“Not yet.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know how long, I’ve never done a neural reprogramming for an android before.” Shuri purses her lips. “Longer than this, certainly, to revolutionize a field that doesn’t even exist yet.” She reprograms another synapse. It looks like maybe thirty percent of them are done. Thirty percent, after four hours.

Bruce glances at Ayo from the corner of his eye because he’s a masochist and he can’t help himself. Her face is troubled, and so is Okoye’s on the projection hovering over her wrist.

“Ayo, tell her she needs to hurry up!” The projection twists like the general has taken her hand from her face. There’s a flash of silver, a war cry, and a brief, incomprehensible glimpse of something black and twisted and horrible. It cuts out in the middle of the creature’s answers screech.

Ayo slowly lowers her hand back to her side, and Bruce tries to focus back in on his work. Tries to focus on the math, on the energy readings, on Vision’s life in here instead of all the death out there, because if he doesn’t—

“I really am going as fast as I can,” Shuri says in a small voice. Twenty. She’s just twenty years old, what was Bruce doing at twenty?

Don’t go there. Don’t go there, Bruce. Shouldn’t have come back to the Arctic, that was just asking for trouble.

Focus.

What would happen if he lost it, and the Hulk refused to come out?

Focus. Focus on Vision, on saving his life. Save lives. Save his life.

“So you're saying that the Hulk... the other guy... saved my life?”

Another explosion rocks the room, rocks the station, rocks the damn arctic ice pack they’re standing on. It’s the biggest one yet. “Evacuate the southeast quadrant. All personnel in the southeast quadrant, evacuate to the next defense point.” The intercom doesn’t even crackle as it activates over their heads and Bruce is struck by how odd that is; it’s almost more unnerving that the idea of the situation escalating to the point of evacuation. Ayo pulls up a map of the station on her kimoyo beads and manipulates it, pulling up what he assumes is the southeast quadrant.

“That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?”

“How bad is it?” Bruce asks.

Ayo’s eyes dart to Shuri, who is nothing but relentless; he hasn’t seen her stop once this whole time. “Bad. They have breached the facility’s outer defenses. Princess, perhaps we should—”

“No!” Shuri all but shouts. “I will not evacuate, I will not abandon this mission, we’re not finished yet. Tell someone to come fill the gap.”

“Princess, if they have not already done so, then they may not have the manpower to do it.”

“Then call reinforcements!”

There are no reinforcements because this is a hail-Mary, vigilante mission and all the Avengers on-world are already here. T’Challa isn’t bringing any more of his people into this, and Steve and Natasha and Tony would never ask him to. When they fail, that’s it, it’s done. And so is Vision, and this will all have been for nothing.

“I guess we'll find out.”

Bruce pushes his glasses off his nose and pinches his brow. He can’t even think about this; he’s thinking about it without thinking it, a glaring absence that lets you see the shape of it regardless.

“This wasn’t just a Wakandan station, right? I mean, you guys opened it up to other countries for the science and information exchange?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Any military?”

A longer pause. “...Yes. Dr. Banner, what are you...”

She trails off as Bruce looks up. There must be something in his face.

“Did they leave anything behind when they airlifted out earlier? Weapons?” He adds, because there’s no use beating around the bush. No time.

“Probably, but you will find nothing there of any use. Wakandan technology—”

“Is much more advanced, I know. But you don’t really have any projectile weapons.

Ayo’s nose crinkles up in disgust, but is already turning back to her charge. “Of course not. So primitive. Princess, we will need time to evacuate to the ship, please.”

Shuri cuts a glance at him, seemingly ignoring Ayo. “What do you need a projectile weapon for, Dr. Banner?”

“Something desperate.” He pulls his glasses off and sets them on the table. “Stay here, Shuri, finish your work. Save him.”

Bruce has never asked anyone else to risk their life when his own would do. He’s not fucking starting now, when the whole universe is at stake.

Between him and Shuri, Ayo reluctantly lets the issue go, but he can tell if Thanos’ army gets a single step closer to her Princess, Ayo will throw her over her shoulder and sprint for the quinjet, mission be damned. He marches out of the room and follows Ayo’s directions to the nearest storage area; the American one, as luck would have it. Because of course the American team brought guns to the Arctic Circle on a science and information exchange program. Of course. A few M11s just lying around, lost in the hasty shuffle to abandon this place. Bruce picks it up and just holds it. Feels the weight in his hand. Ayo was right, they are primitive; primitive and ugly and violent and only good for one thing. Another impact. The station shakes again, and the lights flicker above his head. Now. It has to be now. He doesn’t have a radio, but he knows where the southeast corner of the building is, so he keeps the gun in a tight grip and heads that way. Three corridors away and he starts to hear noises. Yelling. Screaming. Gunfire. Energy bursts. The ring of Steve’s shield, the whine of Tony’s repulsors. And above it all that same horrible screeching noise from those creatures invading their planet at the behest of a genocidal maniac trying to kill Bruce’s friends. Kill the Hulk’s friends. Louder, and louder, and louder, until he can’t even hear himself think which is good because he doesn’t want to think about this he never wanted to think about this again even though he did, a lot, like after Lagos and Sokovia and Sakaar. The team has driven them back from the breach in the facility, that’s good. Wind and snow come howling in through the massive hole and Bruce shivers and tells himself its from the cold. Outside is...pandemonium. His friends are like brief sparks of light in a sea of writhing, angry, violent darkness trying to tear them apart. There are so many of them he can barely see the horizon and they show no sign of stopping. In the distance, he makes out Steve, locked in fierce battle with something that looks less like a bargain bin eldritch horror and more like one of those Black Order people. He’s losing. Even Bruce can tell that. “Now would be a really good time for you to get angry” He’s always angry. But the anger isn’t enough anymore. “Bruce, what are you doing out here?” Tony screams at him, flying towards him with his hands still targeting energy blasts at the enemy. “I thought you said the Hulk can’t come out, you can’t be here! Go help Shuri!” Ten, nine, eight, seven—oh, fuck it. “Won’t, not can’t, Tony.” One breath. Two breaths. He squeezes the grip so hard it starts denting his palm. “Those are functionally the same, big guy, so get the hell out of here. We got this!” “No you don’t, we’re losing!” Bruce takes a short inhale through his nose. “They’re not functionally the same when I can force his—our hand.” That finally makes Tony look at him, and Bruce doesn’t know if he catches it on his own or FRIDAY points it out to him, but he finally sees the gun. He dissolves his faceplate and looks at Bruce with wide, exhausted eyes. “No, no, Bruce, don’t you dare, Bruce!” He lunges, but he doesn’t make it before the gun goes off, the bullet tears through Bruce’s mouth and then—and then nothing. The Hulk roars. Anger isn’t enough anymore. Self-preservation will have to do.

#tw self-harm #not quite suicide but he shoots himself in the head #this was another thing that bugged me #the whole 'the hulk won't come out' c-plot/running joke #if they had actually done something meaningful with it #like on screen character growth for bruce + the hulk #or resolution of his issues #that would have been great!#but instead it was just a way to nerf the hulk so he couldn help beat thanos' army #this is like a kinda dark answer to that but *shrugs*#bruce banner #shuri #infinity war #mcu #mcu fic #god what am i doing with my life that it's come to this #ugh #the plot bunnies #they're trying to kill me.

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paullicino · 3 years

Text

Ten Years

Taken from my Patreon.

Ten years is a long time. It’s long enough for many things to change, but also long enough for everything to remain the same.

I remember ten years ago as if it were yesterday, as if it passed by in the blink of an eye, with light and shadow, textures and taste all as familiar as ever.

A morning after. Shocked faces. A phone call. Events barely believable, yet all too real.

Ten years ago, my then partner and I were living in a top floor flat off Tottenham High Road. It was sweltering in the summer and the downstairs neighbours played dance music at four in the morning. But the views out the back bedroom window were of valleys of rooftops, sprouting television aerials and summited in the winter by the briefest dustings of snow.

The sun was for the front of the flat. The moon shone into our bedroom.

I remember that sunlight in the afternoon, sparkling through the shifting foliage of the tall trees outside. And I remember summer most of all. August.

We had a tap. A faucet. A great, overwrought thing that our landlady was obsessed with. It was the best tap ever, she said. It was large, curved and heavy, the pharaonic headdress worn atop a newly-fitted kitchen of which she was so proud. Wasn’t it exciting that we had such a good tap?

We just wanted our bed repaired. Our home wasn’t finished when we moved in and we slept on the sofa for weeks. When the mighty tap was finally installed, it was too heavy for its fitting. It teetered. Along with poorly-mounted cupboard doors with handles that prevented other cupboards from opening, its practicality was an afterthought.

The walk up Tottenham High Road took me to the only two locations I ever really visited, the supermarket and the job centre. The supermarket provided us with affordable food (though I’d watched the price of many staples almost double over five years) and the job centre provided me, an unemployed person, the money with which to buy that food.

The job centre, which was now extra special and had been rebranded Job Centre Plus, did not provide anyone the means with which they could get a job. It spent almost all of its time providing people with unemployment benefits. Most of the thousands of Tottenham residents who poured through its doors would’ve taken a job if they could’ve found one, but the listings at the centre itself were usually out of date, irrelevant or in some other way misfiled. Most employers don’t want to list their vacancies at the Job Centre Plus because they don’t want to employ the kind of people who go there.

Out of the Job Centre Plus and the supermarket, which one do you think burned that August?

I have written before about my strongest memory of the Job Centre Plus, but here it is again. It was of an old foreign woman and her daughter trying to speak to a clerk. The old woman didn’t speak English, so her daughter was attempting to explain that the woman was looking for work and thus registering as unemployed to gain unemployment benefit. The clerk was trying to explain that the woman was too old to work and should also be on disability benefit. The daughter was trying to explain that they had tried to navigate those systems and that they were obtuse and broken. Her mother just needed money. To live.

(Ten years before, in the summer of 2001, I’d first looked at the cost of moving out. I looked at rents around my Hampshire town, at the cost of housing and at the wages I needed to earn. England was expensive, I decided. It sure cost a lot just to live.)

Everyone was trying to explain everything. The job centre mostly wanted to give people their money and get rid of them, because there were many more lined up behind.

My strongest memory of the supermarket was of the man outside with no legs. He sat there panhandling in his wheelchair almost every day of the year. Britain had just launched its latest Astute-class nuclear submarine, each of which costs over one and a half billion pounds, but it was still a country where a man with no legs had to beg outside a shop.

I thought about that man long after I left Tottenham. I think about him here, now, ten years on.

My partner went abroad to see family and I spent some of the summer restarting my career as a freelance writer. I was fortunate with the connections and opportunities that I had, none of which would ever be found at a job centre, and I spent a lot of my time writing either to find work or simply for practice. I was writing on the night my street burned.

It began before dusk and I came home to find enormous police vehicles parked outside, the sort that are mobile command headquarters. Chains of armoured riot vans surged north. I heard there’d been a protest outside the police station and that a car or two had been burned. I checked the news occasionally. It didn’t have much to add.

Police vans kept coming, though all other traffic had stopped. The roads were closed, blocked by the police, and the latest news told me that petrol bombs had been thrown and a bus set alight. The reports were sparse.

The police in England are really good at responding to riots. They turn up in great swathes, on horses, in vans, or on foot and armed with batons and shields. They have all kinds of exciting equipment to help them. A year before, they’d kettled schoolchildren protesting the huge increase in university tuition fees, surrounding and slowly crushing hundreds of them in Trafalgar Square and on Westminster Bridge. Footage emerged of them beating the shit out of kids or dragging people out of wheelchairs. Here they were now in Tottenham, ready for more.

I kept trying to find news. The police had cordoned off most of the High Road, which meant the journalists that were arriving had no ability to find what was happening inside the riot. Distant footage of fires was the best most of them could provide. As I remember it now, the BBC had one van inside of the police cordon and couldn’t broadcast out because its dish had been damaged. I also have memories of a single journalist, almost in the thick of a mob, asking rioters to give them a moment to explain why they were protesting, or wondering why on earth they might want to block a BBC camera crew who were trying to film them.

What an inane question.

I found the news I wanted. I found it via Twitter and social media. And it was terrifying.

Broadcast news had described a riot not unlike any other. But the still relatively new sphere of social media was overflowing with witness statements, photographs and the kind of low-quality video that phones captured back then. People across Tottenham were panicking as they described growing crowds on the High Road burning not only vehicles, but also shops and businesses. They were breaking into commercial properties. They were looting. They were starting more fires. This had begun half a mile away from my home and it was spreading outward. The post office burned. Landmark businesses burned. Local shops burned and, with them, the flats and homes located above.

The updates kept coming and it’s almost impossible for me now to try to describe to you not only the sheer volume of panic and distress that waterfalled down my feed, but also the sense of utter hopelessness that came with it. People beyond the High Road described not just the violence spilling into their streets, the fights and the hundreds of looters, the fires and the damage, but also how there was no one who could stop this. No emergency services responded. Their phones went unanswered or the lines were jammed.

I read update after update that echoed the same, basic fact, something which I still struggle to comprehend even now, something I’d describe as barely believable: No help was coming.

But the social media updates kept coming. Looters were turning up with empty vans and loading them up with everything they could take. Buildings were being destroyed. A whole estate was being evacuated.

The news provided by the BBC and its peers remained limp and languid, so I spent all night reading these updates, discovering more nearby shops were being gutted, or how the retail park near me was looted to the point of emptiness, and I watched as even my own view out the window became broiling crowds of countless restless and angry people. I remember one man walking off into the darkness with brand new flatscreen televisions under each arm, the police vans now long gone. The night was regularly punctuated by shouts, screams, thumps and sometimes what might have been explosions. The sirens were always distant. The helicopters came and went.

I don’t know where the police cordon had gone. It felt almost as if they had given up and let Tottenham run rampant.

The sun came up and from that back bedroom window I saw smoke rising. I hadn’t slept. The news was full of irrelevant speculation and so, at five-thirty, I put on my shoes and walked the High Road. What I saw was barely believable. Sometimes I met the stunned gazes of other people doing the same, sometimes I avoided any eye contact. I have kept a diary for a long time now and this is what I recorded (slightly edited):

“This morning at about 5:30, as the sun rose, I tried to wander through Tottenham to take some pictures. It became one of the scariest walks I've ever taken.

The atmosphere was tense and unpleasant. Columns of smoke snaked upwards and the High Road and several other streets were blocked off or packed with police vehicles, many more of which were endlessly arriving, some from as far away as Kent.

The nearby retail park was littered with debris and many of its shopfronts were smashed. Groups of people, perhaps gangs, loitered everywhere. While some areas were busy with police officers, others were neglected and patrolled by hostile looking young men.

I didn't end up taking many pictures. I kept moving. Depending upon where you walk, Tottenham looks like a cross between a blitz bomb site and the mess after a chaotic festival.

Something still feels very different. Tottenham has hardly been rosy at the best of times, but today the sunshine can't seem to dispel a strange chill in the air. I myself can't stop thinking of all the homes that burned last night. It might not be immediately obvious to many people, but above a great deal of those shops set ablaze were flats, often family homes for very poor people. Many of those who had little now have less.”

A day after those first riots hit Tottenham, they went nationwide. London wasn’t done and, for a week, many major cities in England played host to their own riots. Tottenham was totally locked down, but it was far too late. The disorder had moved elsewhere.

I remember telling a colleague I worked with that I wouldn’t be finishing something that weekend. He laughed at the news and imagined it would all blow over. He was from a much wealthier background.

Then, everyone started trying to explain everything.

The BBC caught up with events the way a great-grandparent catches up with technology, fumbling and frowning. Goodness me, they said, in their middle class, broadcast-trained voices, and they joined in with the three broad lines of discussion that emerged. One asked how this could happen, one asked why this had happened, and one was about how this would never happen again, because the law would be firmer than ever, the punishments and prosecutions authoritative and absolute. The police were ready for more. They were going to get water cannons. I imagine those work particularly well on kids and wheelchairs.

There was a lot of talk about punishment, including from the Prime Minister, who decided to stop being on holiday in Tuscany only after England’s third night of rioting. I wonder if he had imagined it would all blow over.

Sometimes there was talk involving the people of Tottenham themselves, but it was more likely to be talk about them. A lot of people in Tottenham are Black and have families that trace back to the very first Windrush immigrants of the late 1940s. One Black Labour MP said it was important to talk about their experiences in London, their economic situation and their history of treatment by the police. After all, the spark that had set these riots alight was a protest outside the police headquarters, subsequent to the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, a Black man, something that called to mind a similarly suspicious death of a Black woman that also precipitated Tottenham’s 1985 riots.

For some people, the discussion became about how Black people had started the riots and been the chief participants. This wasn’t reflected in anything I saw either on social media or with my own eyes, in person, on the night. But nobody was stopping to ask me what I thought or what I saw.

Not long after that first riot, my partner called me to check I was okay and to ask if those barely believable things she’d seen on the news were really as bad as they seemed. They were. I rode the bus up the High Road on my way to Wood Green, then later to Walthamstow, both of which offered me temporary job centres that took the overspill from ours, thoroughly gutted by fire and then looted of all of its copper piping. The bus crept past burned-out shops and homes. I don’t know where those people have gone.

Later that year, my partner and I discovered that our income was low enough that we were eligible for housing benefit. It took us so long to try to apply for it that we moved home before any progress was made. When I found enough work to support myself, I visited the job centre to sign off, as we called it, to close my file. I asked a woman at reception what I needed to do. “Nothing,” she said, as the line behind me wound down several stories of stairs and out into the grey autumn street. “Just stop coming. Stop coming.”

Winter came and things rustled in the walls. There was a long, tall hedge along the High Road and I would look out the window to see men using it as a urinal. I only had to live in Tottenham for around a year and a half and I have good memories from that flat, but I also remember a stifling and sad place to live, from which I was lucky to move on. Tottenham was never my home and I never had to stay there, but I certainly feel that I came to get a sense of the place.

After moving out, our ex-landlady complained that we hadn’t left the oven as clean as she would’ve liked. She hiked the rent 9% while we were staying there. She never fixed anything that broke and provided excuses instead of solutions.

I found more work. I taught games and narrative for a semester at a small institution in East London. One of the things I asked my students to consider was the stories and the experiences of people who weren’t like them. I asked them to share how often they had been stopped and randomly searched by airport security. “Not just at the airport,” one student reminded me. “On the tube. On the street.”

My life continued to improve in many ways, but I still remembered the man in the wheelchair. The BBC and many other media outlets continued to talk about poverty and race, but not always to poor people or to people who weren’t white. In 2014 I wrote On Poverty and one of the most surprising responses I repeatedly received from people was “I had no idea that it was like this.” A friend of mine tried to apply for support for chronic health problems and documented her many struggles, including being required to explain exactly how many times a week she suffered from migraines (“You said it was two or three times a week. Well, is it two, or is it three?”). The news regularly reported growing homelessness, rising use of food banks and the inevitable deaths of people who weren’t just failed by broken systems, apathy and a lack of understanding, but also simply too poor to be alive.

I feel like some of the people I knew didn’t like how I kept returning to these topics. I feel, even more, that they didn’t at all understand. I remember some of these people waiving off the Brexit referendum as it approached, certain the country wouldn’t vote to amputate itself from the European Union. I don’t think they understood and I don’t think they’d seen the unhappy England that I had, both as a child and as an adult. I think they’d only seen, and been, very comfortable people.

I think these people would call themselves open-minded, progressive and keen to make the world better. I’m sure they could explain those views. At length.

If I think of those people now, I’m quite sure they are all still very comfortable, ten years on. I also think there is still a good chance that man is sat in that wheelchair outside of that supermarket, though he could also be dead by now, again simply too poor to be alive. No longer able to watch the sun sparkle through tall trees, see roofs dusted with snow or catch the moon peeping through his bedroom window.

Such things aren’t for poor people. We still get frustrated when we give them benefits or find out they own mobile phones.

---

Ten years on, Tottenham is almost a dream, a memory where the details have faded and the edges have softened. I have moved countries, had the privilege of travelling through work, enjoyed many different creative opportunities and benefited from free healthcare that has addressed difficult, long-term health issues. I have rationed my life according to a tight budget, but I’ve never had to face the overwhelming, unending hardships of others that I’ve shared neighbourhoods and postcodes with. I cannot ignore these people because they have so often been one street away, visiting the same shop or riding the same train. They are not an abstraction, they are right there, ready to tell us all about their lives.

Ten years on, Tottenham has one of the UK’s fastest-growing rates of unemployment, the latest statistic in the region’s long history of joblessness and poverty. Many of its residents, like poor people across the country, live paycheck to paycheck, at risk of financial ruin should they experience a single upheaval. Ten years on, the most reliable predictor of success and financial stability in the UK (as in many developed countries) is now considered to be the circumstances of your birth. The idea of social mobility is more irrelevant than ever, with much of your destiny decided before you are even born. Ten years on, almost a quarter of the population of the UK lives in poverty.

Ten years on, continued austerity, government apathy and cuts to social services has meant that, yes, ten years really is enough time for everything to stay the same. Without change, the problems people face become generational, systemic. Some people tell me that the 1980s were like this for certain families, regions, populations. I didn’t know. We were doing okay. Perhaps I didn’t get it, didn’t notice it, didn’t want to think about it.

Ten years on, Mark Duggan’s family filed a civil claim against the Metropolitan Police and were awarded an undisclosed sum, after his death was officially ruled a lawful killing in 2014. Lawyers for the Duggan claim commissioned this in-depth report on the shooting, which illustrated many problems with the official police version of events.

Ten years on, the UK government is trying to curtain the right to protest. It commissioned a review that concluded that the country has no systemic racism. It wants to limit the powers of the Electoral Commission and has considered conflating the concepts of whistleblowing and leaking with spying, meaning those who leak information could be treated as criminals. It is increasingly intent on punishing those who might express dissatisfaction.

And ten years on, as we all know, wages have not risen to match the rising costs of rent, food, utilities or transport. It sure costs a lot just to live.

Finally, in 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty and Human Rights visited the United Kingdom and did speak with many of its poor. The resulting exhaustive and damning report concluded that “statistics alone cannot capture the full picture of poverty in the United Kingdom” and that “much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos.” It described harsh, ill-conceived and out-of-touch support systems devised and doubled down on by a government that not only failed to understand poverty, but that couldn’t even measure it accurately. It also predicted that these things would only get worse, and without any consideration of the effect of extraordinary events, such as a global pandemic.

The government described the report as “barely believable.”

I don’t think any help is coming.

---

There’s a question that sometimes bounces around social media and it asks people this: “What radicalised you?” As if there was some moment that changed a person’s political beliefs and rearranged their perspective on the world.

Here’s the thing. I feel like my perspective is from the floor, skewed and sore after I fell between two stools, always unable to find an identity amongst wider British culture. I grew up too comfortable, too spoiled and too well-spoken to call myself working class, but I was easily alienated by schoolfriends with multiple bathrooms and university-educated parents. My interests and my sentiments aren’t supposed to be working class, but many of my life experiences and even philosophies are. I know what it’s like to memorise Shakespeare and to explain themes in Romantic-era art, as much as I know what it’s like to fight government systems that are ostensibly supposed to help, to be unable to afford your own home, to walk into a supermarket and look at staple foods you still can’t afford. You think about Descartes and then you think about which dinner provides the cheapest way to keep your body alive.

When I was a kid I remember going to friend’s houses where they were too poor to clean the carpet, or seeing them lose a parent to lung cancer, or the time someone showed me a gun hidden in their brother’s car. As an adult I wrote to my politicians to ask them what they were doing about poverty, about education, about the cost of living. I went to protests and signed petitions and supported charities both practically and financially. I suppose I was trying to articulate some of the skills I’d learned from in some situations to articulate the experiences I’d had in others. Surely you have to do something.

I both resent and appreciate aspects of both classes and I imagine I’ll never work out who I am or what I’m supposed to call myself. But I do know there are vastly different worlds and vastly different experiences within British culture and that many continue to be overlooked even when in plain sight. And it’s what I find most frustrating.

If there was one thing I learned, if not one thing that radicalised me, it wasn’t simply that poverty never goes away, it’s that it always needs to be explained. There are always, always people who don’t get it, who don’t notice it, who don’t want to think about it or who will puzzle over it from a distance as if it were some transient mirage they can never hope to touch. Those in power will continue to make decisions about poverty that they do not experience, in spite of the fact that making financially comfortable people the authority on money is like making able-bodied people the authority on wheelchair access, like making men the authority on women’s bodies, like making white people the authority on racism.

And so, ten years on, here I am again, writing about Tottenham, about class, about poverty and about ignorance, and only from a slightly different angle. I will write about these things more, not least because I’ve already started another work on these themes, but mostly because I will always need to. I don’t imagine that, during my lifetime, the explaining will ever stop. I don’t imagine that our societies will give up on punishing people for being poor in a world where it is so often simply too expensive to be alive. And I don’t imagine I will have any more patience for people who imagine it will all blow over.

I refuse to let you middle-class your way out of this.

I don’t have any solutions to these enormous and complex problems. I don’t have exhaustive lists of who exactly to blame or where precisely everything has gone wrong. But here’s what I believe: If we don’t talk about poverty, and if we don’t listen to those caught inside of it, it will never go away, and there will be infinitely more Tottenhams.

#Tottenham #Tottenham riots #Mark Duggan #poverty #London #England #writing #2011

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the-firebird69 · 11 months

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We have several people in Charlotte county and punta Gorda who have to go and their assholes okay and I mean it these people are vagrants do you have big jobs to do tonight and right now they have to try and save their people and they're out in the park disturbing my husband on purpose I mean what winter is okay they need to get the hell out of here it sucks so bad.

-the civil announcements to make and the puke said he's going to ride by and here he comes firstly there are huge attacks going on against the morlock gigantic attacks and they are gaining momentum and gaining in size not shrinking and that's in the eastern hemisphere they're loading up into the areas of operation and they're deleting tons of them as in getting rid of them it's non-stop too

-the civil other things occurring and these people who are here are massively fried and don't want to announce because they want to get rid of their own people and their weakest hell we'd like to get rid of your own people too but there's tons of us and your computers don't exist during your imagination cheesy computers that you built at your USF have been gone for years and every time you try and build one honestly you should send them back to you in the format you so you'll understand it they're crappy computers but they're good enough to do stuff to you with if you put on my s***** robot he knows just the one actually since you were covering Tommy f and you tried to get us to fight them we're going to send that thing after you so they're acting very heinous on purpose so listening to your shouting and s*** we have to find out what it is has never occurred to you that you're dumber than a brick of s*** it's like Army intelligence that's what I grew up as an army brat and dad was helping you dumb f****** God damn ignorant piece of s*** wiggers God knows why I certainly don't even know I'm one of them now you figure it out so you talk about a lot this a****** saying it's a sound device and he's going to bring it home and try and use it on my husband so I want him out

And they're saying they're on it good

-there's huge basis that they're attacking in the eastern hemisphere but really they're almost gone they're that were partially remaining is really seven that are super mega bases and those are now coming under attack and they're planning on devastating them s*** that was a real bug. They're beginning to assault at this time and it is a huge assault and it's going on momentarily. There's about seven of those and that's in total after that they're not they don't really have that many bases.

-this is the Western hemisphere and it's going to come under attack momentarily and yeah that idiot gets arrested every day it could be Garth and he's a f** and he needs to leave too what losers okay they don't live a civilized life if I offered it they don't. The more I have significant bases in the Western hemisphere they have about 200 that are kind of well they're about 10x10 and they have 300 that are four or five by five and they have 20 that are like 70 by 15 literally that's pretty big then that's where they're coming from they said we're all evacuating to Australia and they're laughing and saying all that stuff tons of them were though and they knew I didn't want laughing that much it kind of covered up the fact that they have 10 more people Mac knew about it and it says he's getting it from the future exactly s*** head most people don't let me tell myself. Max says yes that's true so if they just sit here and do her this monkey show I mean these people are as dumb as primates and is annoying so Dave went was eight or nine characters so far over at fisherman's village it was two or three here and he just came back again and it's a different guy we think I'm the same ebike he dropped off so he's doing great I guess smart people check that stuff and they go after people who are f*** ups but really it's kind of an order so going after a ton of people for it it's great cover to go after both sides

-there are huge attacks going on the shortly in the Western hemisphere but not only on based they're going to start with the tax on bases of operation. And it works real well to attack both they're all going to get sucked over there it's a great decision we think it's an awesome idea and we think it's going to work very nice there's no reason why I shouldn't we are going to express more interest in my husband's day to day life this was horrible and it can't be repeated there's a lot of loose ends every day it's terrible and the guys are the ones who are driving it now and globally too that group is exhaustingly huge we had to man up and we didn't man up as much as we should.

-well there's bugs at him so he has to move but there's a big list of things they're attacking the planetoids it's not going very well and they're getting your asses kicked they are attacking several other areas other than the planetoids and still they are persisting during the large attacks on their basis and it's not really helping them is huge huge strikes on the basis and they are still going after the planets planet toys they're going after the saucer shortly and a huge groups okay massive numbers and we're talking about trillions and trillions and trillions of troops trillions really there's going to be a huge Force going after these ships.

More shortly

Hera he said a little not a ton but helped us

Zues

Olympus

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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RWBY Recaps - Volume 8 “War”

Hello, everyone! Story time.

Yesterday food was delivered for my two idiot dogs (they’re thrilled about it) but, because it was delivered by Fed Ex, shenanigans were bound to ensue. These particular shenanigans involved realizing that the food had not been left at the front door like tracking said it had. Instead, it was down the very long driveway by the mailbox. Specifically, it was on a low wall beside the mailbox, currently inaccessible due to a mound of plowed snow.

Now, how the delivery guy managed to get it there I’ll never know, but given that our postal system is currently killing itself to get us our Amazon orders for Christmas, I shrugged, let it go, and resigned myself to lifting an 18 pound bag plus box over that snow without dying. Which meant that in reality I just dragged it, uncaring what bumps the bag might accumulate along the way. What are the dogs gonna do? Complain about presentation?

Snow successfully circumvented; I was home free!

… until I was lifting the box into the car, hit a patch of black ice, and was suddenly looking up at the sky, my right hip and leg screaming.

I’m fine. Bruised, but fine. It’s 2020. Did I expect to not fall? C’mon, Clyde. Be sensible.

The reason I'm telling you all this is because falling on ice at 10:00pm with an oversized bag of dog food was less painful than watching this episode.

I jest... but only a little. To be fair to RWBY, it admittedly wasn't painful in any new way. Everything that's a problem this week has been a problem for years now: confusing motivations, changing semblances, unpersuasive character beats, etc. So in some ways this episode — especially as a hiatus episode — is rather underwhelming. I expected RWBY to do something big before taking six weeks off, but this episode simply set the (unstable) stage for what's to come. With the exception of Ren, nothing changed this episode, which makes for a rather "Okay..." note to end on. It's not inherently bad, it's just a bit of a letdown after hyping ourselves up over the expectation that something even crazier than grimm soup will happen. Which, to again be fair, is on us as opposed to the writers. But that feeling of, "If this was last week, what in the world will we get right before an unpredicted hiatus?" was palpable. Turns out the answer was, "A pretty tame episode."

As always though, let's start at the beginning. This episode is titled "War" — straight to the point — and it's actually a little shorter than our last three episodes, adding to that "Okay..." feeling overall. We open on the outskirts of Atlas, amidst what appears to be a wheat field, or something similar. Upon reflection, it makes sense that the bubbled city would be able to grow things not normally growable in the tundra. This might also explain Cinder's strange beginning. Perhaps her orphanage existed on these rural outskirts and then she was brought into the city proper? We'll probably never know for sure, but at least this is a simpler answer than, "The Madame went off to an entirely different Kingdom to secure her child slave." Occam's Razor and all that.

Ironwood's army has assembled to hold off Salem's army. Wow, aren't we glad Ironwood invested in thousands of trained professionals rather than a handful of independent fighters? Seriously though, this is now a battle of numbers. May says later in the episode that Ironwood's forces are doing their best to assist Atlas, so they should go help Mantle... but that help only exists because years ago he recognized that the tiny class sizes of the Academies, this

wasn't going to be enough if grimm attacks suddenly increased. Sure enough, now they're in a situation where Ironwood needs even more men to keep up with Salem's creation magic. The fact that he has any at all is crucial to what little hope is left. How do Jaune, Yang, and Ren think they're going to get the time to look for Oscar without everyone dying while they're gone? Because Ironwood's army is keeping the attack at bay. I love how the story keeps angling for the "Military people are evil" message while actively showing us how much a military is needed in this world. If Ironwood had been a generic Good Guy who dismantled his armed forces because others wanted to ignore that they've always been at war against objectively evil creatures — both the grimm and Salem — then there would have been nothing to hold Salem off until small team rescue/bomb plans could be implemented.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As usual. The army is on the front lines and one guy is scared enough that he's shaking. Can't say I blame him. As always, RWBY functions best when it leans towards horror, with skeletons rising alongside the normal grimm and intense music playing to convey the stakes. Ironwood watches the onslaught and immediately calls for a civilian evacuation into the subway system. Get people below ground, behind a few, defendable entrances, rather than wandering about the city where land or sky grimm can pick them off easy-peasy. Makes sense. Yet I'm already seeing fans make snide comments about how Ironwood is "still running," which just demonstrates how many viewers take the emotions of the show at face value — who is Good and who is Bad — rather than considering the situation and deciding for themselves. What's far more egregious than viewers enjoying a story however they'd like on a Saturday before the holiday though (seriously, my salt aside, no one has to enjoy RWBY any one way) is that RT again tries to paint Ironwood as crazy when he's... just not? Beyond the choice to animate him with scary expressions

once he gives the order the soldier starts to say, "But sir — " and Ironwood yells for him to obey right now. The scene makes it look like Ironwood is doing something shady again. Here's this goon balking at the order, but we're not told why. What's bad about getting the people to (relative) safety? Why is this order treated like something to question at all? We're not told and, from what we do know, it's not something that would be questioned, so unless we learn something new post-hiatus, that line exists only to make Ironwood look bad. It's a (nonsensical) excuse to have another ally turning against him (slightly) and to give Ironwood the chance to look scary and violent again. Nevermind that his city is under attack and if a subordinate started questioning a completely sensible and time-sensitive order? I might yell too.

So we're off to a great start. The above looks particularly stupid given that we immediately see the flying grimm arriving in a populated area, terrifying all the civilians there. Everyone bolts for the subway and we cut away from a man trying desperately to reach his daughter, unsure if either of them survive. But people want Ironwood to not use what few resources he has? See, this is why generic messages like, "You have to stand your ground" don't work. Sometimes there are situations where you should run and that doesn't automatically equal being a coward. It means you're smart enough to take the actions necessary to save as many lives as possible.

Later on we'll have a similar issue with the message, "You have to trust people" when my darling Oscar briefly loses his mind.

Now though, we see that the "fugitives" Yang, Jaune, and Ren have been taken into custody. Of course they have. Look, when the preview dropped yesterday I saw a number of takes along the lines of, "How dare the Ace Ops do this. They need to put aside their differences until the attack is over!" but no, they really don't, because it's no longer their responsibility to extend trust towards this group. Especially when doing so, to their mind, has a high chance of making a horrific situation that much worse. What are they going to do if, in the middle of a Salem attack, the kids they decided to trust betray them, attack them, and leave them knocked out somewhere while the world burns?

...Oh wait, they already did that.

See, the group broke trust first. Numerous times. The Ace Ops listened to Yang admit that she and Blake had betrayed Ironwood days ago. Then they watched Ruby betray him again by alerting the rest of the team, turning them against him. They swore they wouldn't attack, so Team RWBY attacked them first. They learn that Qrow had a hand in murdering their leader. They encounter the group again and Weiss gleefully asks if they want a second defeat. They watch Ruby tell the entire world to dismiss Ironwood because he’s the one who can’t be trusted. Outside of JYR not immediately attacking them when they arrived to help (something I praised them for), this group has never put their trust in the Ace Ops. So why do they — and we — expect the Ace Ops to do so now? Imagine for just a moment that it was reversed. We find out that someone betrayed the group for no good reason, set themselves against them, continued to do so as everything fell apart, told the rest of the world they’re the enemy, and then a close associate is involved in Ruby's murder. How many people would expect the group to just shrug all that off? Would they put their differences aside and embrace these people because blind trust is (supposedly) the right thing to do? Of course not! Yang would punch their lights out and everyone would cheer, but that's because they're the established heroes. Outside of that role, no one else is allowed to mistrust those who have proven themselves untrustworthy and take precautions against getting betrayed again. To say nothing of how these characters don’t have our meta perspective. Meaning, they live in a world where this trio is not a part of a protagonist group destined to remain a part of the plot because that’s how story conventions work. They’re three random teens who were promoted to huntsmen early. They’re three soldiers out of many who can, at any time, be taken out of the fight. No one on the Ace Ops is working under the belief that they “have” to be a part of this fight. From their in-world perspective, you could toss them in jail for the rest of the battle and that’s that. Outside of their fugitive status they are entirely unimportant.

So yes, Jaune, Ren, and Yang are in handcuffs. They deserve to be. Don't worry though, they get out very soon.

Yang makes a snide comment about Winter "Still just following orders" and honestly? I've lost the love I used to have for her as a character. Yang is just an exercise in frustration whenever she speaks now. Thus far she's blamed Ruby for everything that's gone wrong (ignoring her own choices there), did a 180 to yell at Ren for acknowledging how bad things are, worried nonsensically about Blake being disappointed in her even though Ruby is the one she fought with, and is now back to the "You just follow orders" shtick. Yang will label anything she personally doesn't like as evil order following, but conveniently ignores how following Ruby's orders helped get them into this mess, and how the one time she went AWOL made things even worse. These characters don't actually have beliefs they stand behind, they just say whatever is currently necessary to make themselves look good, even if that contradicts previous statements or actions.

She also gets mad at Vine for saying that grimm don't take prisoners, ignoring that she only found this out a few hours ago. No one in the group is equipped to navigate the emotional minefield that is this war because they can't even take two seconds to put themselves in another’s shoes. Weiss doesn't bother to consider Whitley's situation. Jaune points at the snow and gets frustrated that Harriet doesn't magically know there's grimm soup flowing nearby. Yang snaps at Vine for stating what she also knew to be a basic fact about grimm up until Oscar's kidnapping. It's all framed as, "How can you be this stupid?" rather than, "Oh yeah, these people haven't had the experiences I have. If I was randomly told this I'd doubt it too. I should try to explain this in a way that will make sense to them and increase my chances of being believed."

This is the group who decided it was a good idea to tell the whole world about Salem and did it just as badly as I suspected they would. The story has shoved a delicate, information-based war into the hands of punch-happy teenagers and refuses to grapple with how that's a bad thing.

Anyway, Ironwood comes on the radio to say that the whale is pretty indestructible on the outside, but it might be vulnerable from the inside, so let's get a bomb in there. Seems like a good enough plan as any, especially given that the grimm is currently on the very outskirts of the city, away from the civilians if/when it's blown up. What kind of bomb might this be though?

Could it, perhaps, end up being a now severely damaged android who is based off of Pinocchio?

Time will tell. For now, the group is quite obviously upset that Ironwood is planning a big BOOM while Oscar (and Ozpin! Tellingly, no one mentions Ozpin...) is still inside. Here's the thing: Both sides are right here. YJR are right to be worried about their friend, while the Ace Ops — who have no emotional ties to Oscar and, as just established, are questioning whether or not a grimm really kidnapped him — are right that they cannot prioritize a single life over the entirety of Atlas. They just can't! And any hero worth their salt is going to recognize this. You cannot knowingly sacrifice thousands of people (if not more) for one (admittedly awesome) farm boy. It would be a different situation if the people of Atlas volunteered to remain in danger to give Oscar a chance at escape, but that obviously isn't the situation here. If someone told me, "Sorry, Clyde, we can't get you out because the place you're in is super dangerous and attempting to extract you would likely cause the rescue party to die. Also, the longer we don't blow this location up the longer lots of other people die" I'd be like, "Fair enough. Have a nice life!" I mean, obviously anyone would be terrified and devastated by the news, but if you're still thinking straight and have even an ounce of compassion for others, you don't trade all those lives for your own. Spock does not open the door to flood the whole Enterprise with radiation!

And notably, neither does Kirk. Oscar isn't given the chance to sacrifice himself — ignoring his choice to try and undermine Salem's forces rather than escaping — so Jaune, Ren, and Yang are deciding that for him. Which, again, makes sense for them emotionally, but it's still a selfish choice. They're prioritizing their family over everyone else's. If someone ever told me they’d risked a whole city for my sake I’d be touched, but also pissed as hell. Because what were you thinking?

Which is really my biggest issue with this divide. It would have been nice if the show had done more to make me believe these three are that ride and die for Oscar. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that they are and I'll take this characterization over the apathy we had in the past, but let's be real, it kind of came out of nowhere. The group as a whole pretty much ignored Oscar up until the movie invite and two of these characters — Yang and Jaune — have actively hurt him in the name of getting at Ozpin. Now suddenly they're willing to toss aside their huntsmen duties — protect the people — in order to save him? Nice sentiment, it's just that, as always, we have very little development for it, especially given the level of emotion shown. Particularly when it comes to Ren. The prospect of someone sacrificing Nora? I 100% believe that he draws a hard line and this kick-starts a change in his semblance. Ren is shown to be thinking about how he lost his teammate Pyrrha? Totally believe it! Someone is sacrificing the kid I'm not sure he's ever had a conversation with? That's less persuasive. At the very least, it would have been nice to have the trio grapple with whether they can or should prioritize Oscar over everyone else, rather than taking such a black and white stance of, "Of course taking the time to save this one guy while everyone else dies is worth it. You're evil for thinking otherwise."

We even get a shot of Winter's hand shaking and clenching like Yang's used to, just to hammer home who the correct party is.

While they begin this argument we cut to Salem who is literally conducting her grimm in their attack against Atlas.

Very nice. I love when a villain has

Emerald watches her, clearly freaked out, and then sneaks off to where Oscar is held. In the hallway she encounters one of the jellyfish grimm, so she casually makes it not see her until it has passed.

Her semblance works on grimm, but not “real girl” androids? Okay.

We all realize how crazy powerful Emerald is though, right? The stuff that she could do in a fight is staggering and I'll be forever salty that all she managed in the Penny battle was to create a couple different Cinders. Emerald, Marrow, Salem herself... RWBY has a real problem of having the antagonists conveniently not use the power at their disposal when the heroes need to win.

So Emerald starts listening in on Ozpin's torture. We learn that Hazel was recruited when he tried to kill Salem numerous times and had to watch her keep reforming. Which, if I remember correctly, is a technique she used back when she and Ozma were playing at Gods. It worked and now Hazel believes that they "share a vision. She's going to create a new world order," one without Kingdoms or Huntsmen Academies. No, says Ozpin, she's going to divide humanity past reform, summon the Gods, and hopefully die when they take out all of Remnant.

...My god, did we finally get Salem's motivations after seven years?

Seriously though: seven years. It's way too late, especially when we now have so many questions attached to this supposed goal. If Salem always wanted to divide the world irrevocably, why didn't she attack, oh, say, a thousand years ago? Why has she kept to the sidelines until now? None of this answers why she held off until our simple soul was conveniently ready to fight her. We also have the issue of Salem's knowledge, or lack thereof. So she obviously knows about the Relics and that they'll summon the Gods, but not how to work them? How did that come about? Even Ozpin's motivations are murky now. He repeats Salem's curse word-for-word — though notably, minus the "You must learn the importance of life and death. Only then may you rest" part — yet unless Salem told him this herself when they first reunited — and we know they both hid things from the other — Ozpin could have only gotten this line from the lore episode, something he witnessed along with us just a few weeks/months back. So is he only now realizing that this is what Salem wants the Relics for? Might he be wrong? Or did he somehow figure this out lifetimes ago and we're just not told how? If this is the case, why haven’t Salem’s motivations come up before now?

This sudden, "Oh yeah, she's always wanted to die" feels pretty tacked on. Like RT had Salem arrive last Volume because that's ~cool~ and then suddenly realized that they have to deal with her motivations now, so they hastily cobbled this together. But, as said at the start, this is entirely expected for RWBY nowadays. A problem to be sure, though one we've been putting up with for a couple of years now.

During all this, Hazel shouts that this is what Ozpin deserves and the first word out of his mouth is, "Yes."

But Oscar and the rest of Remnant don't deserve it, so make the right choice for them. How did RT think they were going to make this guy an antagonist? Ozpin has so much self-hatred and yet is still trying SO HARD that he makes Ruby Drinking Tea While The World Burns Rose look laughable.

Oh yeah, we'll be getting to that scene in just a second, but for now I just want us all to appreciate Ozpin as a character, even if the story won't.

....

.......

..............

...Okay, moment done lol. Sorry, Oz, there's a lot to cover this episode.

We cut to a semi-conscious Nora who asks Weiss, "Now what am I good for?" So that’s a double serving of oof. That's when Ruby arrives with fine china steaming with tea. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate. Whatever it is these girls are drinking. What comes next is accompanied by a strange kind of vindication for me. I mean, the fandom dragged me so hard for taking issue with their snuggly smiles during Ruby's message, yet now we literally have the girls sitting back in a mansion as everything goes to shit around them. I know the knee jerk reaction to this will be, "They have to watch over Nora" and “They deserve a break” but really? All three of them need to watch her? And a break during the height of the action? Blake says she hopes everyone else is okay, but who is actually out looking for information about the rest of their team? May. Who's going to do something to get Nora help? Whitley. These characters are so good at telling us they're the heroes while rarely ever displaying those traits. They all (somehow) saw the attack on Atlas and have the ability to get out there and defend people — the job they wanted — yet Ruby looks out the window and asks, "What can we even do?" while taking a long sip of tea. The people of Mantle are (supposedly) freezing to death, yet one of the few with aura, Weiss, sits by a roaring fire going, "Do we just wait for someone to come? If they even come.” I'm sorry, you didn't consider this before you told the whole world about Salem? No one questioned whether asking for potentially non-existent help was worth the risk and what they'd do if it never came? Or even just what they’d do in the meantime? I’m not saying the girls can’t have basic necessities like drinks, or that it can’t be done in style when that’s conveniently available. I’m saying them enjoying the food, warmth, and relative safety of the Schnee household (built on racism) while casually talking about what, if anything, they should do for the people dying outside looks a bit Not Good. "Should we wait for the fire department?" Asks the character as their kitchen burns, sitting beside a number of water buckets that could help slow things down. "If they even come," they sigh, taking another sip of tea. This is ridiculous! The city is currently under attack by the series' Big Bad and half our heroes are just sitting around, watching the evil lightning, wondering if they should try to do anything about it.

"How did it all get like this?" Ruby asks her cup, ignoring the many steps she took to make things this bad. It continually boggles my mind that Ironwood is out here trying to keep people safe in the subway, coming up with a plan to blow up this whale, sending out an army to kill countless grimm... yet "What can we even do?" Ruby is supposed to be the hero here. You know, the one who has silver eyes and could one-shot huge numbers of Salem's army if she actually went out there and tried to help.

Ironwood is taking action... and so is May. As said, she's the one out looking for info on their teammates and when she returns says that they should all get back down to Mantle. Why? Because, as mentioned earlier, Atlas at least has an army to help with things. Mantle only has them.

Yet suddenly, Weiss doesn't want to leave.

Where did this come from? They succeeded in their preferred plan of telling the world what's going on over Ren and Yang's plan of helping what people they could, and now they're looking for something to do. Why wouldn't they head back to help? (Especially now that the shields are down.) Weiss yells that there are people dying in Atlas too but, as established, Atlas has the army. And where was this concern when they refused to let Atlas leave? After a Volume and a half of pro-Mantle content, this seems to come out of nowhere. Worse, Weiss tries to guilt May by asking if she has family in Atlas, which leads to the reveal that she's trans. Her family rejected their daughter.

I want to be clear that I'm very happy RT made this canon. For what she is — a side character we know incredibly little about — I really like May and the fact that they were clear in her identity rather than keeping it to twitter deserves recognition. Yet I'm not going to pretend that the reveal didn't leave a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, simply because we have this incredibly privileged cis girl, who knows a great deal about shitty families, hearing how horrible May's was and still trying to tell her she needs to suck it up and help Atlas over Mantle. When May angrily asks whose side she's on, Blake makes a comment about hearing that before, comparing her to Ironwood. May is painted as the misguided one here, but can you imagine if someone told Weiss to go help Jacques over her found family, Team RWBY, regardless of what he's done to her? The fandom would explode, and rightly so. There's something to be said for realism here, showing us Weiss and Blake's inability to see where May is coming from... but it doesn't feel like a commentary on that. It feels like another Penny situation: May is put in her place for being inconsiderate, even though this time it's her choosing to help people who are ALSO in danger over the people who represent family she's broken with.

I wanted conflict this Volume and I absolutely got it, but damn if it isn’t badly thought out at times.

Because rather than grappling with these personal motivations, Ruby brushes them aside by yelling, "There are no sides! We want to help everyone."

Does that extend to Ironwood? Ruby's speeches started falling flat when she betrayed Ozpin, attacked Cordovin, betrayed Ironwood, attacked the Ace Ops... This girl does not want to "help everyone." She wants to help those who agree with her.

Yet her rock solid optimism generates the question, “So how exactly do we get out of it?” which, as expected, Ruby has no answer to. The story keeps showing us how bad a leader Ruby has become, yet no one is actively responding to that. They kinda disagree about lying to Ironwood, but still go along with it. Yang kinda criticizes her sister, but that's then lost to general worry as they split (on Ruby's end, anyway). They want to know how she'll lead them next and are seemingly fine when Ruby continually says, "I don't know." At this point I'd be like, "Well... you didn't like May's plan of going back to Mantle, but apparently can't come up with a plan yourself... so I'm going to go with her."

This is the same conflict we had last Volume: Ruby spoke optimistically about saving everyone, yet was unable to come up with a way to do that. Ironwood had a plan that, while horrific, might save a lot of lives. Yet Ruby is presented as the one to back. Now here she is, hours later, still unable to figure out a way to achieve her perfect outcome. Ruby wanting things to be a certain way is not going to make them so and I’m wondering when someone within the group is going to recognize and act on that.

As Ruby fails to answer this crucial question, we pull back to see Whitley listening in at the door.

Cutting back to Ozpin and Oscar, Hazel has listened to all this craziness about Gods, immortality, the destruction of Remnant... and literally goes, "Cool story, bro."

Okay, he says "Nice story" but the emotion is the same. Which I'm really happy about! I mentioned in a recent post that, as far as we know, Hazel hasn't been told anything about the Gods up until now. What Ozpin is telling him sounds like gibberish at worst, incredibly hard to believe craziness at best. Now chuck in Mercury's point that as a tortured prisoner he'll say anything to get free, as well as the fact that this is Ozpin talking to Hazel... and I'm really glad Hazel just ignored his speech (for now at least). It wouldn't make sense otherwise. Granted, this means that the plan literally amounted to, “Let’s info dump a bunch of nonsense-sounding lore on our enemy in the hope that he’ll believe us and betray Salem.” It’s something to try, certainly, and it admittedly is a much better plan than what Oscar is about to cook up.

So since Hazel won't listen to Ozpin, Oscar wants to try instead. Why did you two switch in the first place? It's really obvious that RT is having the characters do weird things in order to stretch out the plot.

Either way, our farm boy is in control again. What new strategy will he try?

"Her name is Jinn."

This is BEYOND stupid. No, none of this "You have to trust people" nonsense. This is not “people,” this is Hazel. There is a Grand Canyon's width of difference between learning to trust your allies and blindly trusting an active villain who just rejected your "Please defect :(" speech. Even if we remove Hazel from the equation, this is still a monumentally foolish move. I mean, has Oscar considered where he is? This isn't some random warehouse he's been taken to, this is a semi-sentient grimm, a creature creating other creatures out of its ceiling

and whose doors automatically open when people need them to (Mercury). This is a living being created by and connected to Salem herself. How does Oscar know Salem can't hear everything he says? Or that the whale can't relay information to her? That the grimm in the walls won't pop out and run to their master? Or even that a normal person isn't listening in at the door — like Emerald is. If that had been Tyrian instead, that's it. They're done. Game over.

Someone: "Wow. Salem got the Lamp and managed to ask where the Beacon Relic is. Since the school is still overrun by her army, she snatched it up quick, finished destroying Atlas, and is now on her way to Vacuo. She's nearly completed her plan in days! How did all this happen?

Oscar: I, um... told her what she wanted to know?

Someone: You what?

Oscar: But not Salem! I just told Hazel! ... and then the information somehow got back to her.

Someone: "Somehow?" You deliberately told one of Salem's henchmen this crucial piece of information, in a place where there was a good chance you would be overheard by conventional or magical means, and you're surprised that she "somehow" learned it and used that information to doom us all?

Oscar: ...Yes?

This is so staggeringly stupid it... well, it could only have been done by a kid. So at least that fits lol. Oscar, I love you, but Ozpin should have been screaming in horror the second those words left your mouth. Generations of precautions undone because a kid wants to believe the best of the guy currently pummeling him. Sweet, but stupid. I’m all for optimistic characters, they just can’t risk the whole world on that optimism. Oscar risking himself on the seemingly doomed plan to turn Hazel is one thing, Oscar risking all of Remnant on the seemingly doomed plan to turn Hazel is another thing entirely.

Even though you know this is precisely how the story will go. Oscar willingly hands over Jinn's name to Salem's forces, but happily none of the THREE who hear about it will tell her. The story's unwillingness to follow through on consequences doesn't change what a bad move this was. I mean, Oscar himself accused Ironwood of playing into Salem's hands by disagreeing with them about how to not die, yet a few hours later he will willingly give Hazel the one piece of information Salem needs to move closer to world-wide destruction? That's uh... well, that's something.

They should have just had the poor boy be tortured, spill the beans to make it stop, and start an arc of self-forgiveness. Oscar can be awesome without coming up with world-dooming plans.

So yeah, Oscar is hoping that Hazel will use the Lamp himself and find out the truth. He wants Hazel to trust him and the man he despises most in the world enough to go against the immortal woman he's terrified of, get the Lamp away from her somehow to use for himself, wasting a once in a generation question to confirm all this, so that Salem will lose a guy with muscle who, to be frank, is absolute insignificant in the grand scheme of her power. Fantastic.

As said, Emerald overhears all this and immediately runs to Mercury, who is less than convinced by her "Salem wants to destroy the world" talk. Just as he's expressing doubt, Tyrian appears to confirm that this is exactly what she wants to do — and he's loving it.

“Of course she is! You’re surprised? Salem is destruction incarnate!”

It's a legit point. Are our villains so dense they never considered that Salem might do something to the world they didn't like? It's like the group not thinking about how Salem is still around if Ozpin has been fighting her for a thousand years. RWBY continually gives the impression that these characters don't think about their situation past what they're doing at any given moment.

Tyrian maintains his title as best villain though, simply because I understand what he's doing, why he's doing it, and he's so damn good at it.

Also, can we appreciate Mercury's face here?

Amazing. This is the kind of humor we should be getting in such a tragedy-laden Volume.

The two of them, Tyrian and Mercury, head off to Vacuo for the Secret Mission, despite Mercury's newfound hesitation. I quite liked these quiet moments between him and Emerald. It has a very "Do what you've gotta do" vibe while showcasing their care for one another, something we haven't seen in a while.

Back with the airship group. YJR are still horrified that Ironwood would blow up Oscar (even though he has no idea Oscar is there), begging the Ace Ops to give them "a chance to try to rescue him first.” Ren goes pretty hard on the "no one is replaceable" bit, which is frustrating not being what he’s saying is inaccurate (it’s not), but because that's not the issue here. The writing has Harriet start yelling about Marrow replacing her old teammate and Winter replacing Clover, but the question is not whether you'll just forget a teammate and move on with someone new, but whether you're willing to sacrifice them for the greater good. That's the stance: Should we sacrifice one life to save thousands? Will you, as a protector of the people, put those people before your own found family? Yet what RT has Harriet say is: Oscar is replaceable. Which obviously makes her come across as an ass. Like the random soldier questioning Ironwood — or making Elm about to punch a defenseless Ren in her anger — it exists solely to show how bad these character are... even as they say pretty persuasive things.

The writing also continues to be confused about whether the Ace Ops are friends or not. Yang certainly didn't think so... up until she asks (rhetorically) whether Marrow would sacrifice himself for Elm, Harriet, and Vine. Since their introduction, the story has loudly insisted that the Ace Ops aren't friends... up until it's revealed ("revealed") that Harriet is actually gutted about Clover. So which is it? Are we supposed to believe that these are cold soldiers who only work together out of duty, or that they're a team who clearly love one another? I'd say that show has shown us the latter, but it doesn't seem to understand what point it's trying to make. Does this look like a soldier who doesn’t care?

It’s especially weird when Ren again makes the claim that this is why they lost to Team RWBY. Because they're not a team.

...So is this why they did such a fantastic job fighting the geist, demonstrating such perfect teamwork that the group was open-mouthed impressed? Is this why they nearly took down a Maiden together? Is this why Ren, while furious at Yang and Jaune, was still able to work seamlessly with them to try and rescue Oscar? Do we think if Yang was suddenly beside Ruby again that the two would fail spectacularly in a fight because they had a minor disagreement?

This is now the third time RT has tried to excuse nerfing the Ace Ops with, "They disagree about things and are thus not friends and thus can't fight well together" — despite all evidence to the contrary — and it's getting really old.

At one point Harriet tells Ren, "I had you pegged as the most level-headed of the bunch, but I guess you’re just as naïve" which, ignoring her then random claim that people are replaceable, is correct. I also pegged Ren as the most level-headed of the bunch considering he was just yelling at Yang for how much damage they've caused, all the mistakes they've made, and that maybe — just maybe — they should have tried harder to work with Ironwood. Yet now here he is, in a position to start that process, and the Ren we got in the snow is simply gone. He's fully Team Yang and Jaune again, facing off against the evil Ace Ops.

I knew this was going to happen, but it's still disappointing. The story gave Ren a great speech to appease those of us frustrated with the direction the story has taken... and now we’re back to ignoring that. Ren was told off for daring to question how great the group is, apparently thought it over in the snow, and is now of the opinion that yes, they are that great. People are going to die because of us? Who cares about that anymore! We will absolutely, single-handedly rescue Oscar and there's no reason why this might be a questionable choice when an entire city is on the line. Again, emotionally understandable (if we buy into the group suddenly loving Oscar this much), but it rings hollow right after making Ren the one person who was willing to look at the big picture.

Good news though: Jaune got the braincell this week! He suggests that they go in to try and rescue Oscar/provide intel, but won't stop the Ace Ops from launching the bomb when necessary.

See, this is heroic. This is what the group should have done during the Mantle conflict: Volunteering to take the personal risk of facing off against Salem while letting Atlas try to escape. Basically, not forcing everyone else to risk their lives for their pipe dream, which is what Ren and Yang want by rejecting the bomb entirely. Jaune recognizes here that they can't prioritize Oscar over an entire city, but also that they may still be able to save him before the bomb is complete and ready to go. So they compromise, with JYR the only ones at risk.

Good job, Jaune!

Winter agrees to this plan with a firm, "I outrank you" to Harriet. People are going to love that.

Oh, but in his anger Ren's semblance suddenly changes. So we're back to the ridiculous.

Truthfully, I like this direction. Granted, I would have liked some buildup to it, especially since this is the second time this Volume that RWBY has dropped a major semblance change on us, but the idea itself is really cool. Ren can now see emotions! Awesome! And I don't mean that sarcastically. I actually think that’s a neat extension of his original semblance.

Too bad the story seems to think he's a mind reader.

Seriously, take a look back at the dialogue. What Ren sees are confetti-like petals floating around a person, their color seeming to determine their emotional state. Red means Harriet is mad, blue is sadness for Marrow, etc. But what Ren ends up saying is a great deal closer to mind reading. Harriet is angry about Clover and is gutted at his loss. Marrow is questioning his place here and wants to leave. These aren't base emotions, they're targeted thoughts and feelings about situations not immediately apparent from the verbal conversation. “In fact, you don’t want to be a part of it at all anymore." How does Ren know that? They just gave him telepathy instead of the cool power with firm limitations that the imagery suggests.

There are also some, uh... iffy implications in all this. For example, Ren allows Yang privacy by not reading her mind emotional state, but has no qualms about reading every one of the Ace Ops’. So privacy is only for the people you care about, huh?

We could also say something about RT perpetuating unfortunate racial stereotypes: the two women of color are pure anger, the marginalized man is pure sadness, the Asian coded character is pure calm... and the white woman set to turn against the others gets a mix of all emotions. AKA, human complexity.

To be clear, I don't think RT is doing this deliberately. Rather, they’re writers who have demonstrated time and time again that they don't have a good handle on depicting the sort of sensitive material that RWBY is infused with, and that extends to the mild, but still unfortunate, implications in scenes like this. Even if we ignore the iffy details — a benefit of the doubt that, at this point, many fans aren’t willing to grant — we're still left with the continuity errors. Visually, we're presented with a woman who is experiencing multiple emotions at once and is, therefore, torn. Yet Ren reads Winter definitively: "I know you [don't want this] either." It's yet another moment that makes me wonder how much communication there is between the writers and the animators, because too often the two seem to be at odds with each other.

As the group prepares to go into the belly of the beast (literally!) we return to Ruby who is, once again, failing to make me believe she's this super compassionate person.

“Wait! What about Qrow and Robyn? Maybe if we get them out of wherever they’re held—”

Please tell me I'm not the only one who took issue with this? Ruby doesn't express an ounce of worry for her uncle, not even when she learns he's been arrested, and the one time she brings him up it's in the context of what he can do for them in this fight? Ruby doesn't grapple with whether to rescue her uncle (personal desire), or get the message to the world (her version of the heroic action) and then realize that, now that her duty is done, she can finally turn to the more selfish act of helping her immediate family. Instead, Ruby seems perfectly happy to let Qrow stay in prison up until she's unsure what to do next and thinks that maybe he has the answer. Heaven forbid Ruby think about rescuing him because she loves him.

Sadly, this Ruby is long gone.

In recent years she's expressed no gratitude for him saving her life, no respect for him as her teacher, demonstrated incredibly little compassion for his own struggles, and outright told him that if he wasn't going to listen to her then he doesn't need to be part of the team. Then he's arrested and she doesn't care until she deems him useful again. Like the fandom wondering where the sisterly bond between Ruby and Yang went, I'm likewise wondering where the bond between Ruby and Qrow went.

May outright rejects this though, yelling that they still don't get it. “This is not a situation where everyone wins!"

She tells the trio they have to choose for once: Are you going to help Mantle, or Atlas?

...which means there's immediately a knock at the door, interrupting the moment where they have to decide.

See, this is just like Ren. The story keeps giving us moments where characters speak absolute truth, dangling the potential for the group to grow from these realizations... only to pull back before it goes anywhere. Ren is once again aligned with Yang and Jaune in their desire to save Oscar. May's demand is interrupted by the plot. If means nothing to give us these moments unless the story acts on them.

It's Klein at the door. Whitley called him to help with Nora because I guess he's a doctor now, as well as a butler? Fine. Let’s run with it. Weiss is super pleased to see him and hugs Whitley for the good deed.

Why so shocked that Whitley would look out for another, Weiss? Could it be because he's had so little reason to be kind when everyone, including you, has treated him horribly? If Klein always had these medical skills — if you’ve grown up with a doctor — why didn’t you talk to your brother and ask if he knew how to contact him? And of course, she apologizes to Klein for her father’s actions, but not to Whitley for her own. Whitley's surprise isn't cute to me.

Weiss stuck a weapon in his face, insulted him, sent him to his room like a toddler... and now is randomly hugging him because he did something she liked. The context of this scene doesn't paint Weiss in a good light. Like the rest of her friends, she only extends basic respect and kindness towards others when they're assisting her. Whitley was nothing to her until he suddenly proved himself useful. That's not cute sibling love, it's a love that's going to run out the moment Whitley puts a toe out of line, according to Weiss' unspoken list of what behavior keeps him in her good graces.

I believe that Klein cares for Whitley because he greets him kindly and gives him that shoulder pat on the way up. Whitley didn't need to first prove himself to Klein somehow and Klein didn't start this interaction by shoving a gun in Whitley's face, just in case he wouldn't let him through the door. They feel more like family than this hug does.

So yeah, Whitley and May have done more good this episode than our entire main cast. How about we just make this story about the side characters instead?

We then hear a massive boom and the group runs out to find a crater. Penny has landed in front of the manor, which is pretty convenient considering we saw her pass out as she fell.

She's somehow still in control despite the hack and apologizes to Ruby, then falls unconscious (again).

And that's where we end! Definitely a cliffhanger, though a rather underwhelming one considering we already knew Penny was in serious trouble. As said at the start, this episode felt rather underwhelming to me, especially as a halfway point before a hiatus, and compared to some of the stuff we've seen previously. It's not bad per-se — especially if we ignore the issues that have been around for an age now, which is most of what this recap deals with — it's just not terribly exciting either. Everything of importance — Salem's attack, Oscar's rescue, Penny's demise, subordinates turning, Nora's condition, etc. — had already been established in previous episodes and very little of it moved forward. Ren's semblance is the only thing the episode gave us that we couldn't have (generically) guessed for ourselves between last Saturday and now.

So yeah, underwhelmed is the mood of the day, with a hefty dose of salt for everything that continues to be a story-breaking problem in this show. I will say though that, as has become the trend for this Volume, all the establishing shots are gorgeous. RWBY is, at the very least, pretty to look at.

As a final note, in lieu of the Bingo board (since, again, not a whole happens plot-wise) I want to point out something mentioned by a friend: how absolutely bonkers our timeline is now. We began the second day last episode with the sun rising (recall that Jaune had tried to sleep that night at the outpost. So it’s definitely sunrise as opposed to sunset).

And we re-confirm that it’s sunrise at the start of this episode.

Yet throughout the episode many of our shots take place at night (note the stars behind the trio).

These moments with Ruby can't take place in the past because they're talking about the attack, an attack that only happened after Jaune's group met up with the Ace Ops and the geyser attacked — during early morning. I doubt I'm supposed to believe that it has been another full day of Salem starting an attack, a full day for the group to fly to the whale, a full day for Penny to fall, a full day which would put us at the end of the Volume’s timeline at only the halfway point... so I think RT is just going for the aesthetic of night shots without thinking about what that does to the continuity. It's a mess.

Not the highest praise to end on, but I’m working with what I’ve got lol. I feel as naïve as Oscar when I say that maybe Part II will be better.

I will, of course, see you all in six weeks. Until then, I'll do my best to catch up on asks. Another doomed endeavor, but one can try!

A very Happy Holidays to all of you who celebrate and, as always, thanks so much for reading! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #rwby recaps #rwby war #mymetas

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siennahrobek · 3 years

Text

Initially, Obi-Wan thought that sleep would assuredly allude him.

Perhaps he underestimated the trust and affect his troops had on him and how exhausted he really was because he slept fairly soundly through the night.

He was still surrounded by troopers by the time he woke up, although he was fairly certain that there significantly less numbers of them. Although it was a bit of a challenge with position, Obi-Wan tried to meditate a little before the next disaster would inevitably occur. It was only a tad successful as he kept going back to thinking about Anakin. And right now he just…couldn’t.

Afterwards, he got dressed, complete with his old armor pieces and left the barracks to get to work.

“Greetings, Master Kenobi,” Cin Drallig nodded at him as Obi-Wan walked onto the bridge. There wasn’t many present; it was mostly a skeleton crew, but they paid him little heed. Next to the battle master stood a clone trooper from the meeting before, one of Obi-Wan’s 212th boys, Menace.

“General,” Menace welcomed.

“Master Drallig, Menace,” Obi-Wan nodded at the both of them.

“The boys and I have encrypted and encoded a way for you to get a message to the other Jedi generals that are scattered across the galaxy,” Menace explained as he pulled up a map of the galaxy, planets already highlighted. Obi-Wan presumed that was where jedi and their troops had been positioned. “As long as we know where they are stationed, we can get it to them and encode it so only a Jedi would be able to access it. We made this option just in case there are any activated chipped troopers around or natborns who are loyal to the Empire.”

“That was rather fortuitous of you,” Cin glanced at the trooper, curiously but he projected gratitude, something a little odd from the battlemaster but it was no less appreciated.

“Just precautions sir.”

“Alright, we have to figure out exactly what information we need to send to the others,” Obi-Wan said as he followed Cin and Menace down the halls which ended up being to an office. Was it his? At this point, he wasn’t really paying attention and most of the office rooms looked virtually all the same. This one had been recently packed with communications equipment and a holotable for good measure.

“The basics will be key,” Cin replied with a hum as he closed the door behind them and tied back his longer hair. “We will have to divide it up between what to do when running from activated soldiers or what to do when communications have been shut down so they can’t receive the orders to active the chips.”

“Constrain natborn officers, no communications aside from jedi, which will come up in about three days,” Obi-Wan listed.

“That is a fair chunk of time,” Menace admitted as started to open up and turn on the machinery around the room, as well as the data blockers for outside communications, just incase someone would try to butt in on the networks. “Can they avoid the Empire for that long? We don’t know which forces that the emperor has now or how quickly they will go after those they cannot get a hold of.”

“If they come across conflict, leave immediately,” Cin suggested as made his spot off to the side. “Getting too close to activated chips will active any clones they are around. But we did warn many jedi. The Empire Forces have to be fairly diminished if they understood those warnings. I can’t imagine the new government is completely on it’s feet yet.”

That was true. Even though the Republic had been slowly shifting into something less democratic over the course of the war, it was still a fairly big change, and a lot of things would have to be restructured. There was also the issue, for the Empire, of those who would fight back against its creation or not agree with it. That may buy them some time, he mused.

“But we do need to plan quick, because I’m sure it won’t be long before they are organized and mobilized enough to chase us,” Obi-Wan added, sitting down in one of the chairs next to Menace. In front of him was a little desk area. “If they haven’t realized that Kamino specifically isn’t responding because of this, they will figure it out soon.”

“How about we make a list?” Menace suggested, his gaze flickering between the two masters.

Obi-Wan nodded and his hand shuffled around the desk to find a data pad. Putting it in front of him, he grabbed a utensil and created a list.

“Alright, so first and foremost, the clones are chipped, proximity to activated chips activates others. Activation can also be verbal but only from the Sith. Block all communications available to clones,” Cin started quickly as Obi-Wan immediately wrote down the thoughts on the datapad.

“We can send Healer Che’s information on where the chips are as well, if anyone has the equipment or skills to start taking them out,” Obi-Wan added, the pencil flipping around his fingers to momentarily point at the battlemaster. They both nodded in response.

“Two; the Republic is gone, an Empire has rose. We are being hunted and killed as we are claimed to be traitors. Confine any officers loyal to the Empire until further notice,” Cin continued

“If you have inactivated clones, keep them away from conflict with others, due to the proximity thing,” Menace included, flicking on a few more nozzles and switches.

“If you are around activated clones, get away as quickly as possible, stay low or get away from them if you can,” Cin added, eyeing Menace, carefully. The clone’s presence filled up with a moment of quiet grief and disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan whispered, unable to meet his eyes.

“Don’t be, it’s not your fault sir,” Menace swallowed harshly but shook his head. “We can’t save anyone yet without a real plan.”

“Contact,” Cin started up again, a little hesitant to keep going as he looked between the two. “Contact will be reestablished within a couple of days, once we get to Kamino. If you have a long range holotable, use it, but keep your comm on you. There will be a coded message to indicate if communications come from us.”

They paused.

“I think…I think those are some good basics, hopefully they can survive until then,” Obi-Wan sighed, jotting down the last of the notes.

“Battle master Drallig and I can get these coded and sent out fairly quickly,” Menace said, gently taking the datapad from Obi-Wan’s hands.

“It’s a start,” he echoed.

***

“I believe it is about time we talk,” Padme said, her face flat with one hand rested on her stomach. Her greeting was desperate and although not exactly unkind, it wasn’t very patient either. Obi-Wan glanced around and let out a silent sigh. This was not going to be a pleasant conversation. One that he didn’t particularly want to have.

He had been working with the other masters and clones to figure out where to go and what to do next for some time. He knew this conversation was coming. He was just dreading it.

Obi-Wan just swallowed and nodded in defeat as he turned to face the pregnant woman. “Alright. But I think it would be best if we would keep this conversation rather private. The 501st survivors and much of the 212thhave been following me like ghosts and they certainly don’t need to hear this.”

Padme’s expression was something of confusion, but she consented, and they found themselves in Obi-Wan’s former office. It was still technically his office, he supposed, but others had been using it since the evacuation. One could tell by all the paperwork and things that cluttered it more than it already was, the things that he knew were not his or Cody’s. He locked the door behind them and let Padme sit on the cot in the corner. He dragged a chair over to her to sit himself, although he could not find a position that was comfortable.

“I suppose we can start with what happened with Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, a bit quietly. He did not want to talk about this right now, not at all. He wasn’t ready for this; he was hardly wrapping his own head around what had happened. His heart clenched harshly in his chest, and he was sure his throat would close up. Taking a shaking deep breath, he tried to continue to speak. “What, exactly, do you already know?”

“Ahsoka called me, telling me there was an attack on the Jedi Temple,” Padme confessed, shaking her head in disbelief. “She told me that Anakin had turned to the Dark Side, that he was killing younglings and leading brainwashed clones to kill everyone.”

Her tone was incredulous and unconvinced, not that Obi-Wan could exactly blame her. He was not even sure if he believed it, and he was there. It seemed impossible. He knew Anakin struggled with some of the jedi tenants, especially that of attachment, which Obi-Wan had tried to talk to him about, to reach out. But Anakin had been closing off more and more as of late. That didn’t mean he could have ever have seen this coming.

Perhaps he should have. Was he so blind?

“That…that would be accurate,” Obi-Wan choked out but did his best to keep his voice constant and steady with as much as patience as he could lacing it.

Padme stood up suddenly but then wavered and leaned against the wall for support. He leaned forward, ready to catch her if she should fall. She steadied herself and straightened her back to stare down at him. “That is absolutely ridiculous,” she announced with such confidence even he almost believed it. “And you know it, Obi-Wan! He is your friend, and he would never do such a thing; the Jedi…”

“If you start blaming my people while we are fleeing for our lives, please refrain,” his own voice continued to be soft but there was a steel bone underlaying it, that made no room for challenge.

“Anakin would never do such a thing,” Padme repeated firmly and shook her head. He closed himself off to her in the Force, he didn’t want to know what she was feeling. He wasn’t sure if he could handle her feelings along with his own. “He has been worried and stressed but that is only because of…”

“Because of what?”

“He’s been having nightmares…” she started slowly, eyeing Obi-Wan as if that would give her some insight, some answers on what was happening. “About me, dying in childbirth.”

“Nightmares,” Obi-Wan repeated numbly. “That is what he was so worked up about? He didn’t come to me or anyone else about them. And he knows how dangerous pregnancies are in this sort of situation. He should have known to talk to the healers about it.”

He should have talked to the healers. At least doctors, someone. Generally speaking, people didn’t just die in childbirth, not on Coruscant, certainly not a prominent senator. No one would ever deny her prenatal care, no matter who the father was.

Even if the father was a jedi.

“He was probably afraid,” Padme glanced away.

It was as if Anakin didn’t know anything of the Jedi at all. The Jedi would have never turned Padme away for pregnancy care or information, Force around, the Jedi wouldn’t turn anyone away who came to their steps in need of help with pregnancy. Force sensitive or not.

“We are getting off track,” Obi-Wan shook his head with a small sigh. He ran a hand through his hair. He just wanted… honestly, he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted. He supposed he wanted this to all be his own nightmare, one he could just wake up from. One where none of this was real. “Padme, I don’t know how to convince you of what Anakin has done,” he continued. “He led an attack to kill everyone in the Temple, he led an army of brainwashed clones. He murdered Temple Guards and younglings just trying to escape the battle. He fought mewith the intent to kill, rambling about the failings of the jedi,” Obi-Wan stressed, leaning forward. “Master Drallig said he called himself Darth Vader which let me tell you, is a Sith name. All I could feel in him was desperation and fury.”

“You’re wrong,” Padme insisted, her eyes blazing into something so passionate, it nearly hurt to look at. Her loyalty, although her perhaps commendable to an extent, was difficult to work with. Difficult when she wouldn’t believe the truth. He knew it was hard to swallow. He was still in that process. “He is good, there is good in him, of course there is. Something else must be at play.”

“Something else?” Obi-Wan asked, his own voice echoing confusion. He couldn’t imagine much else being at play, his former padawan, his brother, had intended on murdering everyone in the Temple, all those that thought he was their family. All those that thought he cared about them. He had nearly succeeded. If Cody’s chip hadn’t been activated when and where it was… Obi-Wan nearly shuddered at the prospect. He sighed and shook his head again. “I love Anakin. And even after all that he has done I still love him; I will always love him. But I am not blind to what he has become now. I was blind before, not seeing it; only seeing what I wanted to, the good person I thought he could be, the person I thought he was.”

“He is that good person,” she persisted with a sound not open for debate.

Obi-Wan was tired, even the several hours of last night’s sleep would not erase all of the time he had been awake, active, fighting for his life and the lives of those around him.

“Tell that to the younglings that he cut down in front of his former padawan,” Obi-Wan’s hand waved out in emphasis. He hated bringing Ahsoka into this but Padme cared about the young Togruta, probably nearly as much as Anakin used to as well. “Or the 501st troopers who were forced to lead an attack on the Temple, on the Jedi, against their own free will.”

The young woman just stared at him, and he knew that she didn’t believe him. He didn’t think she would ever actually believe him without seeing it for herself.

The fact that Anakin, of all people, would lead a forced brainwashed army to fight people they never would have in their right minds seemed ludicrous.

“Okay, we are at an impasse,” Obi-Wan slumped back a little in his chair. He took a commlink out of his pocket and let his fingers sweep over it, absentmindedly. “Perhaps a break from this line of conversation may be beneficial,” he said slowly, giving Padme the time to sit down on the cot once again. “I think…we need to also talk about your pregnancy,” Obi-Wan added slowly. Padme placed a hand on her belly, protectively.

“You mentioned…you mentioned I could die from this,” Padme replied slowly, her eyes meeting his in a massive flurry of concern and fear. The conversation was not over about Anakin but for now, for now what he had said would have to do. He didn’t know how much longer he could try to help her in that scenario. “So, Anakin was right, I’m going to die in childbirth.”

“It’s not that simple. There is a lot that is included,” Obi-Wan shook his head. How to explain something that he only knew the basics of? Perhaps a professional was best to be in order “Look. Let me call my friend Bant. She is a healer, and she will be able to answer most, if not all, of your questions.”

Without waiting for an answer, he sent his friend a message who near immediately contacted him back, relieved that he had found their wayward patient. Apparently, Padme was not supposed to be out of the medbay. Obi-Wan imagined they would want to monitor her, considering her pregnancy and situation. His comm beeped again.

“We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

Obi-Wan didn’t know who the other side of the we was but at this point, he would take all the help he could get.

Those few minutes were the most awkward ones Obi-Wan could remember.

The Mon Calamari walked in with another healer trailed in behind her and Obi-Wan could not even help the sigh of relief. At last. “Hello Obi-Wan, senator,” Bant greeted, giving them both a nod, her large dark eyes brimming with sympathy and kindness. Obi-Wan would forever be baffled and astounded at the amount of love and compassion his friend could hold. “Senator, my name is Bant. I am a healer. This is Healer Jayden; she specializes in pregnancies.”

“You have special doctors for pregnancies in the jedi?” Padme asked, a little taken back.

“Of course,” the doctor nodded as Obi-Wan got up to give them both seats. He ended up standing off a little to the side, often finding himself leaning against the wall for support. “Believe it or not, the jedi are not celibate,” she pointed out, even though Padme’s glance looked a bit skeptic. “And although it isn’t extremely common, jedi can and do get pregnant.”

“They do?” Padme echoed.

“Of course. Force Sensitivity isn’t always passed down, but it is more likely if one or more of the parents have it,” Jayden explained, her voice smooth and calm. It could not be said that Jedi didn’t know when they were supposed to be healers. He could only imagine how determined they must be in such an art. “Pregnancies involving force sensitivity in general can be quite difficult, but we should really talk about your case specifically.”

“Is it…different?”

“I have been briefed on a few things,” Healer Jayden said, giving Bant a quick glance as if for confirmation. Obi-Wan wondered how much she had been told about the situation, about the father. “The father of your children is former Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, is it not?”

“Current Jedi Knight,” Padme corrected, her voice laced with bitter undertones and eyes narrowed. Something she had picked up from Anakin, he supposed. “Unless the Jedi have kicked him out for loving someone.”

“The Jedi do not typically, kick people out,” Bant continued, her voice just as relaxed and mellow. She was taking this very well. Obi-Wan nearly felt like shaking Anakin or someonewho should know better for all the things misinterpreted, deliberately or otherwise. “Not for loving anyone or getting people pregnant.”

“Yes,” Padme confirmed, her voice subdued. “He is the father.”

“Alright. So, the father has an incredibly high number of midiclorians in his body, which is how one can determine how force sensitive an individual is. He is a very high number, more than anyone else and is very, very strong in the Force,” Jayden explained, patiently. She spoke in chunks, probably to better allow Padme to follow what she was saying.

“What does that mean for the baby? That it will be force-sensitive?”

The healer nodded but her expression was a bit grave. “In your case, certainly. Because if they hadn’t, you would probably be dead already.”

And… Obi-Wan hadn’t expected her to be so blunt. Padme stared wide-eyed.

“Skywalker is so strong in the Force that it is killing you, not to mention the darkness that is practically permeating you,” the healer continued and although Obi-Wan could feel a tad of concern with it, she did not show it outright, rather keeping a cool presence of security. “The only reason that you are still alive and as strong as you are, currently, is because the two babies inside of you are also extremely force-sensitive and are keeping you alive. It is…very complex and seems a bit paradoxical, and difficult to explain when it comes to the specifics, as well as the ins and outs of what is happening in your body.”

“So, I will not survive this birth,” Padme realized.

“The odds are not fantastic,” Jayden replied truthfully with a small frown. “But the only way you can survive is with a Jedi Healer’s help. If you stayed on the planet, you would not have survived the birth and I doubt anyone would have understood why. But we can and we will help you, Padme,” she said, taking the woman’s hand gently, curling her partially translucent fingers around the younger senator’s. “You can trust us that we will do everything in our power to make sure that you survive to see your children grow up.”

“What are the odds?” Padme whispered, staring at her hands.

“It is difficult to say,” Jayden admitted, candidly. “We’ve never had a child from someone as powerful as Skywalker before. Best case scenario you will be out of commission, maybe even comatose, for some time while your body regenerates its strength.”

If it can, went unspoken.

With her free hand, Padme brought it up to cover her mouth, letting out a shaky breath, tears starting to slip down her cheeks.

“I think you could use some rest, senator,” Bant advised, speaking up for the first time. Although Healer Jayden did most of the talking, Obi-Wan was still grateful for his friend’s presence. “I think we have a small room near the medical bay that we can use for you,” she added and glanced at Obi-Wan. “Would you mind getting her there?”

He didn’t think, just nodded. With a second thought, he didn’t really want to, he didn’t want to talk with her right now. He was just so tired and there was much to do but he knew it was right. Walking over, he helped Padme up and walked her out of the door. He led her through the halls towards the medical bay, appreciative for the silence.

He didn’t need an argument right now.

As they got to the small room, he unlocked and opened the door. “I will have some of my handmaidens come and bring things from the ship,” she whispered.

He hadn’t realized that she had brought anyone. Oh, he hoped she hadn’t brought Jar Jar. He didn’t mind the Gungan, almost liked him really, but he had a tendency to get into trouble and that was the last thing they needed.

He was about to leave when she pulled him back to look at her. “There is good in Anakin, Obi-Wan,” she announced, although her voice stayed rather quiet, just firm. “You must see it. And I will prove it to you,” her tone reflected her eyes, something fiery and passionate.

This was always going to be a tragedy, he realized suddenly.

There was very little he could say to that. He didn’t believe her but then again, he was trying hard not to think of Anakin right now. His thoughts were dominated with the survival of his people, both jedi and clone.

He had to put them first.

“Okay,” he croaked.

And then whisked himself away as quickly as he could without making it seem like he was literally running from her.

He was entirely exhausted.

The talk with Padme had last longer than he had anticipated and honestly, all he wanted was to sleep. Could he though? How much was there left to do? Then again, at this point, he wasn’t sure if there was anything specifically, he could do, aside from perhaps trying to research? Maybe?

His brain just felt full. He wasn’t entirely sure if he would be of any help.

“There you are sir,” the familiar voice and tonal individuality of Boil registered to Obi-Wan’s ears nearly a beat too late. He turned to see the clone walking up to him, a small youngling on arm.

Waxer was the one who was outspoken about loving little ones but anyone who knew anything about Boil knew he loved being around them just as much.

The thought made Obi-Wan smile and his chest warm.

Presence of people that he cared about, that perhaps cared about him, ones that he didn’t constantly have to fight tooth and nail with, were something of a relief. Just a presence to fall into that wasn’t consistently looking for lies or secrets or to tear his head off.

“How are you, Boil?” he asked, trying for a smile.

It must not have worked very well because the clone gave him an odd glance but, in the end, he just shrugged. “I’m alright, just taking this young’in to the modified creche,” he explained, gesturing to the young jedi child on his hip. “He accidently got lost and I’m bringing him back before my allotted hours of sleep.”

“Allotted hours?”

How late was it?

“Sir, it’s quite late,” Boil pointed out, answering his unasked question for him, and gesturing lightly for the general to follow. He did so without pause or thought. It was interesting, he believed, how easily and unthinkingly he would follow them. Perhaps it was foolishness but perhaps it was just trust and faith. He was in a rather short supply of that these past few days. “The daytime officers and workers are getting ready for sleep. The Jedi are hunkering down in the creche places and barracks along with the children and troopers. I never realized how cuddly Jedi could be when they sleep together,” he added with a bit of a half laugh.

The child laughed alongside with him, although a bit louder and fuller.

“We slept in piles a lot,” Obi-Wan replied.

“We like to do that too,” Boil shrugged to keep a hold on the little one hanging from him. “It’s good that your sleeping arrangements are around the men, it’s good for morale, especially at a time like this. Everyone is a little freaked out, I think it helps there is someone they can trust around during those times.”

Obi-Wan narrowed his eyes. Who taught Boil manipulation tactics?

He paused, nearly tripping at the realization.

Oh right. Hedid.

Accidently, of course. It wasn’t like Obi-Wan was giving lectures or classes on how to manipulate or negotiate yourself out of situations. But still, his behavior would be seeming to be biting him in the butt now, as his troopers were now using it against him.

Part of him almost felt impressed.

“Right,” Obi-Wan muttered.

The child hanging off of Boil, giggled knowingly. As the two of them dropped the child off at one of the places set aside for the children, Boil offered to escort him to the barracks for sleep. Obi-Wan tried to back out of it but Boil was rather adamant and then….

And then Rex showed up.

And Obi-Wan knew he was completely was doomed.

He couldn’t say no to Rex right now, not with what his troops had gone through.

“Hello, general,” Rex greeted with a bit of a wavering smile. He was trying hard. Obi-Wan suspected he had spent most of his day with the survivors of the 501st. He knew it wasn’t pretty and they were trying very hard to make sense of what had happened to them. “People have been wondering where you have been.”

“Is that so?” Obi-Wan hummed in response.

“Yes, the 501stsurvivors have been curious to know if you are coming back tonight,” he added in, thinking himself rather sly. Survivors; wasn’t that what they all were now. Survivors of a genocide, survivors of brainwashed slavery, survivors of being unmade into a vacant body.

“As a matter of fact, Boil was just escorting me to the barracks,” Obi-Wan shot back. He kept falling into this trap, he knew it. But at least this time he would not be caught floundering like the day before. “It has been quite the day, full of… colorful conversations.”

“Oh? Who did you talk to?”

“I had to have to talk about Senator Amidala and her pregnancy.”

Obi-Wan could practically just feel Rex’s stomach drop. “You…you know about that sir?”

“I probably knew about it before you did,” he muttered under his breath. As if Anakin could keep a secret like that from him, as if Padme could. Any Jedi that came across her would have known; would have sensed her pregnancy. He, of course, was the one who knew it was Anakin’s child because honestly, who’s else could it have been. But louder, instead he tried, “Yes. I’ve known about Anakin and Padme for quite some time. It is not difficult to sense her pregnancy. I do not know why Anakin thought he was being subtle or discreet. And you, captain, well, I think you could work on your acting skills a little.”

The captain just blushed hard. “My apologies sir.”

“No worries. It hardly matters,” Obi-Wan shrugged. “But talking with her, about what we had to, was rather exhausting and I will, quite frankly, be a bit glad to get some rest before the next day comes about. Because soon, we will be at Kamino and a whole new situation will arise.”

“We don’t know how much time it will be before the Empire comes after us,” Boil realized with a deep frown.

“So, we should get as much rest as we can until then,” Obi-Wan nodded at the two of them as they neared the barracks. “Because who knows how much real rest we will get once the new conflicts arise.”

***

It was the middle of the night when he had heard it.

Obi-Wan had been stuck in the near middle of a pile once again, surrounded on all sides by mostly clone troopers, the main force being the de-chipped 212th and the 501st survivors, with a few others they had rescued within the Temple before and during the siege. He could make out Inkspot somewhere, leaning against Trapper and Gearshift.

Many of the survivors, mostly those of the 501st specifically, had horrible nightmares, even so soon after the events. He couldn’t blame them; it was a horrible ordeal they had gone through. He tried to shield them the best he could, to help them sleep with less nightmares. He did his best. He didn’t dare take a look into what they contained, he feared they would just feed into his own.

For some reason or another, the scratching woke him up.

Shifting his body up carefully so he wouldn’t awake the troopers surrounding him, he glanced around at the barracks for the sound. No way he was just hearing it in his mind.

There. Some movement in the corner.

Carefully he cleared himself of snuggling troopers and got up.

Obi-Wan moved through the bodies, making his way to the edge of the pile of clone troopers until he found one of the 501st in the corner, frantically trying to scrub his armor. Not just his armor, the jedi realized, but the blue paint off of it. And there was quite a bit of it.

The trooper nearly jumped feet in the air when he realized Obi-Wan had sat next to him, his eyes wide in fear and panic.

“At ease,” he assured quietly but it did very little to ease the trooper’s anxiety. Obi-Wan reached out into the Force towards his presence.

Calmpeacesafe

It helped more than words had.

“Are you alright, Graffiti?”

The trooper looked at him, a little surprised. “You…know who I am? Y-You remember?”

Obi-Wan nodded. “Yes. Would you like to tell me what is going on?” he asked gently.

The trooper swallowed, staring down at his armor before tearing his eyes away. He couldn’t seem to keep his eyes on it for more than a moment.

“Everyone has nightmares, it is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I do, sometimes,” Graffiti admitted, hesitant with his voice choked on tears. “It’s not even the fighting or the war or anything. I just see blank faces, marching blue, so much blue. People…people always think when terrible things happen, when blood is shed, everything is in a haze of red because blood is red. But for me…for me it was a haze of blue. Not just any blue. The 501st blue. It’s…its supposed to be something proud of, a color we should be proud of.”

Obi-Wan just waited patiently.

“I woke up shaking this morning,” he continued, his voice quivering with tears already accumulating in his eyes as he shoved the piece of armor that was in his arms away. “It was so bad I couldn’t even put my armor on. One of my brothers had to do it for me. But even then, I…. I felt so awful. I kept making excuses to go to the head and then my brothers kept making excuses for me, just in case.”

“You do not have to wear it if you do not wish to,” Obi-Wan replied gently. “Things, I imagine, are going to be different now.”

“It’s…it’s not the armor itself,” he confessed, staring down at the piece that he was holding. “I don’t think it is the armor. It’s…it’s the color,” he looked confused when he glanced at the jedi, as if he wasn’t entirely sure why he was saying this or even the reasoning behind it. “Every time I see it, I keep getting sick. I keep remembering when we were marching towards the Temple, all the blue of the amor, creating a sea of soldiers, all in time and not even…not even hesitating on what we were going to do.”

“You couldn’t move.”

“I couldn’t even think until afterwards,” Graffiti admitted the quiver in his voice growing. “I just wanted to scream. Even after we got into the Temple, I remember everything but…it’s all in this horrible blue haze that I choke on. Something I was once proud to bear, a color that I was proud of, was twisted into something horrible and evil. I know it doesn’t make any sense but…”

“Sometimes things like this don’t make sense to others or even ourselves,” Obi-Wan’s voice was quiet and calm as he looked over at the trooper. The latter had a difficult time meeting his gaze, but he finally had, tears welled up in his eyes, certainly obscuring his vision.

“I think I would rather have no paint, just be a blank set of armor like a no-name shiny again before I wear something that has been so twisted,” he whispered, running a hand along his helmet, half scrubbed of blue paint. “And isn’t that awful? I was brainwashed into being no one and now, I want to go back to being a no one again, just…slightly different type of no one.”

The jedi’s heart shuttered in his chest.

“Would you mind waiting here for a moment?” he asked, placing a hand gently on the soldier’s shoulder. “I will be right back. I think…I think I have something.”

Graffiti looked quite confused but nodded.

Obi-Wan stood up and made his way through the maze of people, towards the door. As he got to the halls, his pace quickened. There weren’t particularly many people around, but a few had caught him gliding through the halls quickly, often giving him looks that made him want to shrink back into the pile in the barracks.

Some did not seem happy to see him out and about.

He got to a storage room and opened the door. Upon finding what he was looking for, he grabbed it and hurried back. Obi-Wan came back, worked his way through the maze of sleeping men again, and set down a large can on the ground as quietly as he could. The trooper just stared at it, wide-eyed, a bit confused and certainly a lot speechless.

“It’s yours, if you want it.”

Graffiti took a moment to realize what it was. At first, he didn’t look entirely sure, like it might be a trap, but it took only a minute before he burst into a quiet sob, covering his face with his hands.

“It may not stop the nightmares,” Obi-Wan explained quietly. “But know that you will always have a place with us.”

Eventually, when he got a little more control of himself, Obi-Wan could make out a nod from him.

“I think I might need something new,” Graffiti rasped out, just barely.

“Perhaps you should make a visit to one of the creche groups,” Obi-Wan offered, shooting him a quick, warm, glance. “They are full of ideas. And they would love to see you.”

Graffiti met his gaze, his eyebrows scrunched together. He didn’t verbally reply but the jedi master had a feeling he would anyways.

Obi-Wan spent the rest of the night with him, quietly scrubbing off the blue paint and replacing it with shimmering gold.

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magnoliapip · 3 years

Text

The Storm Inside

Title : The Storm Inside

Book : Open Heart series (Choices - Pixelberry)

Description : Casey has been pushing everyone away and spiraling since the attack on the hospital and her loved ones are concerned.

Pairing : none established / ambiguous

Characters : Open Heart FMC (Casey Valentine), Sienna Trinh, Bryce Lahela, Jackie Varma, Rafael Aviero, Elijah Greene, Aurora Emery, Kyra Santana, Danny (mentioned), Bobby (mentioned)

Warnings : mention of death, mental health

Prompt : “What’s the weather outside your window doing right now?...”

Casey stared vacantly out the floor length windows into the night sky above Boston from her seat against them on the living room floor. The sky was as clear as could be, a rarity for the area, but in a city as populous as Boston seeing the stars was a gift they were never granted. She stretched out her cramping legs to a different position as she leaned her head and left shoulder against the cool glass.

She looked out of windows with alarming frequency now. She had never really done so before, preferring to always be doing other things. She’d always thought of herself as a social person who enjoyed others company, though she could be either out dancing in a packed club or relaxing away a quiet night in with the same level of enjoyment. Friends and loved ones was all she really needed.

The attack on Edenbrook had changed everything, down to her very bones.

Some days her mood was somber but calm, like a cloudy day. Those were her best days and the ones she liked best. The cloudy days could be darker with threat of rain or lighter with the sun just missing the opportunity to come out. It was the closest to her old self she could feel. Unfortunately for her, those days were not only fleeting and the least common, they were becoming a rarity.

More often, her moods were a range of levels of sadness. All the way from a misting drizzle, enough to coat everything in water and make the air humid, to a torrentially pouring rain. Buckets from heavens and flash floods. The only thing those floods never seemed to leave clean was herself.

Other times she was cold. So, so cold. The best of those days were accompanied with a blizzard. Cold, but manageable with a shovel. On the days where she left her heart covered in an inch thick layer of ice and brandished her words like weaponized icicles, frigid and sharp, the people around her knew to steer clear. She was getting a little too good and stabbing them where it hurt.

Her worst moods felt like she should alert the National Weather Service. Tornado warnings and hurricane evacuations were a courtesy she never felt up to extending, adding to her already astronomical guilt. Like a twister, she could feel so angry and out of control she would tear through everyone in her path with no regard for who or what was in it. She had hurt people, especially the ones she loved, deeply but couldn’t bring herself to stop. It was like watching her body act with someone else at the controls.

It was just one more thing about herself to hate lately, and it had a long line to stand in.

The weather in reality never matched what she felt inside. It fascinated and disgusted her in equal measure. It had been sunny (mostly) since the funeral. It was repulsive.

Bobby was dead. Danny was dead. Raf had almost died and would have god knew how many long term problems ahead because of the illness. She had nearly died. And the world just kept spinning.

Couldn’t they see? Couldn’t any of them see that she was stuck there in that room. That she had never recovered. That she couldn’t recover.

At first, when her friends had noticed her strange new affinity for gazing outside for hours every night, they tried to pull her away. Distract her with things like herbal teas, chocolate ice cream and support. They tried to shower her with her favorite pastimes from before. They tried dancing around the apartment to silly pop songs and playing video games with her. But they didn’t understand. And they didn’t stop.

So she bit them. Hard.

Now they left her alone.

She was an awful person. She shouldn’t have been allowed to live. Someone should have realized it at the hospital and just let her die.

She could feel the tears well up again, stinging her eyes as her inner clouds started to rain again. The night sky outside stayed perfectly cloudy.

It was going to be a long night.

Sienna stood around the corner, watching her best friend shatter silently, as she had done every night for over a month. She whispered to those behind her, “Don’t you all see? Nothing is helping and she’s getting worse. After the last time she panicked when I reached out, I thought I’d give her space. We all did. But it’s not working. Does anyone have any suggestions?”

The gathered assembly of those in the cramped penthouse hallway who loved a young doctor named Casey watched her crumble, weeping without making a sound...and no one said anything. Some of the smartest doctors in the nation, and no one had an answer.

Not Bryce, who stood off to the side watching the pain on the face of the first true friend he’d made while at Edenbrook. Someone who had looked past the brash, self-confidence he used as a shield. The first person he hadn’t been afraid of discovering his past.

Not Rafael, who stood at the back of the crowd, down the hall, not able to stand to look at the person who made him believe he was worth as much to her as these intelligent, talented and more well off friends of hers. Not as she could no longer see how much she was worth.

Not Jackie, who was used to facing her problems by cackling at them until they scurried off with tails between legs or tearing them out with her teeth. But this was a problem that required delicacy, the type she had been shown by the very woman who now needed it.

Not Ethan, who leaned against the wall as he saw his protégé, the first person he’d ever believed in this much, destroy herself. She had forced herself, her goodness, into his life and helped fix his hurt self. Now it was his turn and he, for the first time, found himself at a loss.

Not Aurora, her rival turned friend who showed her at her loneliest that having friend was worth something after all. Not Elijah, a beacon of positivity who felt entirely inadequate with this situation that left her emotionally impaired. Not Kyra, desperate to find some way to give Casey the support she had given. Not Sienna, whose heart broke as she watched her very best friend, her dolphin, her rock in many ways fall further and further into herself.

Each one of them loved her. Each one of them cared for her. Each of them had a purpose and a reason to be at Edenbrook, but Casey was the glue that had held them all together. That glue, their foundation, was compromised. This time, they needed to find a way to save her. This time, she couldn’t waltz her way into a miracle seemingly handed down by the divines themselves to fix the situation.

Giving voice to their silent thoughts, Bryce whispered softer than before, “She needs us. She has to know it. She has to know we’re here somewhere inside, but can’t ask. Won’t ask.”

“We’ve already lost so much because of the attack,” Sienna said quietly. “We can’t lose her now. I can’t.”

“None of us can,” Rafael replied softly.

There was practically a flashing beacon over Casey’s head, screaming help me please. It was long overdue for them to stop ignoring it. For a few pregnant minutes, they all looked around at each other and back to her. This mismatched band of misfits and nerds, bound this night by their affection for one single woman. They stared at each other, desperate for answers…

Until the one who loved her most went rigid. Then stepped toward the rest, speaking slowly.

“I...may have an idea.”

[BREAK]

Notes : I left the ending open for interpretation on purpose. This story is not intended to be expanded on or have a second part. Y’all can decide who the person who loves her most is (and if that person isn’t presently named in my story, you can put them there yourself :D)

Also, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to the amazing writers I’ve talking to lately. Due to some truly awful comments and the way they were affecting me mentally, I recently purged all of my works but a few from fanfiction.net, AO3, and here on tumblr. Talking to, interacting with, and just seeing you lovelies in action has led me to believe I should start to do this again.

Huge shout out to @jerzwriter and @lovealexhunt for being the lovely souls they are. You may have no idea who I am, especially on this blog rather than my main, but I will never stop being grateful for the positivity you put into the world. Thank you.

#choices #open heart #choices open heart #open heart mc #casey valentine #ethan ramsey #bryce lahela #jackie varma #rafael aveiro #sienna trinh #elijah greene #aurora emery #kyra santana #magnoliapip

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whumperscorner · 3 years

Note

Hello, my dear Rasko. I would like to order a bit of Pinned to the Wall for the bthb, thank you. 👀

Hello, my dear :3 Your whump is here as ordered

With Nyx, because I know you like him :>

BTHB #4- Pinned to the Wall

Fandom: Final Fantasy XV

Characters: Nyx Ulric, Crowe Altius, Libertus Ostium

Whumpee: Nyx Ulric

Word count: 2775

Warnings: None

Can also be found on ao3

The plan had been very simple. In short: infiltrate the building, get the hostages out and defeat the bad guys. The usual. And admittedly the first two steps had gone pretty well, but if Nyx had learnt anything from being a glaive for as long as he had been it was that plans rarely went off without a hitch, even the simple ones. A small team of Nyx himself and a few others had entered the building undetected and assumed position to await further orders. They had been called to go in, which they did, and that was about when things had gone off the rails.

Nyx's eyes scanned through the chaos of the compact hall they were now in, and chaos really was the word for it. Glaives and members of the opposing group scuffling over each other in disarray. Different weapons shooting from every direction, fists and feet hammering against each other, and residual glimmer from warping still hanging in the air. Nyx cursed under his breath; this was a lot more difficult than it should be. It had gone so well up to this point too, the hostages were all evacuated now, but there were more members of the group than anticipated. Some had been disguised as hostages and some flat out hiding around the building. His team was outnumbered, which meant a change of plans. Ducking under a fist thrown his way, Nyx brought his hand up to the comm in his ear and it crackled to life.

"So how long did backup say?" He asked, voice breathy as he swiftly grabbed the arm of the man who'd punched at him and brought him down. He landed hard on the wooden floor as Crowe's voice sounded back over the comms.

"10- maybe 15 minutes?" She said, her voice also slightly strained from the fighting on her own end. "They want to bring these guys in for questioning, so keep them in this room."

Nyx hummed back in affirmation, swirling around in time to see Libertus a good few feet away felling one aggressor, and two more charging at him. Adrenaline rushed through Nyx's veins as he prepared himself, aiming his kukri above the moving crowds to ensure an uninterrupted warp. In one quick throw he was there, bracing himself and taking one of the assailants down with him as he landed. The guy's head smacked hard into the floor, and he stayed down. Libertus let out a bark of a laugh and brought the second one down himself with couple well placed punches.

"Never a dull day at work huh?" Nyx posed, to which Libs shook his head and chuckled a response. Though Nyx could barely even hear that, narrowly ducking as some blurred projectile whirred past their heads. The two exchanged smug grins and a quick handshake, before turning back to the task at hand and warping their separate ways through the mayhem.

Nyx made his way over to the leftmost side of the room, where one of the few exits were, thinking that if their current objective was to keep the group's members contained that would be the best place to be. And he was right. The area was swarmed and the amount of people there, both friend and foe, made it very hard for anyone to get a proper view of anything. Nyx held his own though, even as his breathing quickened and he was starting to get tired, probably bleeding from various cuts and scrapes as well. Having just finished dealing with one of the many foes Nyx turned, but didn't have time to react fully before someone else jumped forward and tackled him to the floor. The back of his head made contact with the hard surface and he groaned, slightly dazed, but gathered himself soon enough. Using the momentum from the person's tackle to roll back and kick them off overhead, Nyx was quick on his feet again. They just had to keep this going until backup arrived, and he was not going to let up before that.

"Oh, we've got a runner!" Libertus' voice sounded through the comms. "Nyx, he's headed your way."

Nyx swirled around to look and sure enough there was a large, burly man quickly making his way through the crowd, eyes fixed on the exit closer to Nyx. Without a second thought, and without acknowledging the aching of his body, Nyx began running. Ducking and evading fists and weapons as he did so. Someone else charged at him from straight ahead and blocked his way, but Nyx didn't stop, throwing the kukri in his right hand across the floor where he saw an opening. It slid along under multiple pairs of feet, some even jumping to avoid getting nicked by the blade, and Nyx warped after it. He landed only a few short feet away from the open exit, just in time to see the man running ahead down the narrow hallway outside of the room.

"Shit, I'm on it!"

"Nyx wait!" Crowe yelled for him through the comms. "Stay with the team, he's-" but the rest of what she had to say was cut off, and Nyx had already taken off down the hall.

His heart pounded in his chest as he ran, and he was getting a bit dizzy. Nyx cursed inwardly at that, maybe that last warp hadn't been such a good idea. He would need to wait a bit before the next one. Nyx caught a glimpse of the man up ahead right as he took a sharp left turn into another room, and he followed suit. It only took him a few seconds to enter the room after the man, and it took him even shorter to realize what a colossal mistake that had been. He saw it right as he crossed the threshold into the room. As if in slow motion, out of the corner of his eye, bouncing a few times on the floor as it rolled towards him. He realized on instinct what it was, and not being able to warp Nyx's eyes widened and he threw himself to the side. The hand grenade went off, and though Nyx had thrown himself as far away as he could in such little time the blast hit him almost head on.

He felt himself being flung through the air, then hit the floor hard. White hot pain shot out from his right shoulder on impact, and the kukris clattered out of his hands and across the floor. The force of the blast sent him rolling for another few meters until he came to an eventual stop. Nyx was breathing hard and coughed as he tried to gather himself. Shit, his shoulder really hurt when he moved, that was never good but especially not now. With considerable effort Nyx staggered to his feet, clutching the shoulder with his other hand. There was a ringing sound in his ears as he tried to steady himself, and it took him a moment to realize it wasn't just from the blast as Crowe's disjointed voice came through the now busted earpiece.

"Nyx! What… as… at?... yx-" then a head-splittingly loud ringing came from it, and with a low curse Nyx removed it and tossed it aside. It wouldn't be of any help to him now anyways, he decided.

He had just began searching along the floor for his kukris, when the man he had followed appeared out of the shadows by the door where he had been standing, and presumably where he had thrown the grenade from. Nyx's body tensed up, despite how much that hurt. Now looking at close range Nyx recognized the man's face from the mission briefing earlier in the day. He was one of the designated leaders of the organization they were fighting now, hostile to the Crown and reportedly a highly dangerous individual. Not to be engaged with alone if Nyx remembered correctly. Well, he thought somewhat bitterly to himself, bit late for that now.

The man approached slowly and carefully, and Nyx retreated in the same way, careful not to lose sight of the man or lose his footing. The he charged, and Nyx let out an involuntary gasp. He was fast, unfairly so, and Nyx's injuries would only hinder him if he tried to fight. So Nyx dove to the side, hissing in pain and trying to roll on landing to minimize any further damage. Then ensued something Nyx could only describe as a horrific kind of dance around the room. With the man on the offense, rushing at Nyx and attacking repeatedly and himself retreating, ducking and evading as fast as he could. Nyx would pride himself on managing to evade this man in particular for as long as he had but he was growing more and more tired, his injured shoulder was getting progressively worse, and at every turn his exit was blocked. There was no way he could keep this up in the long run. Then finally, Nyx thought he could see an opening. Cornered against the far-right wall of the room, Nyx readied himself again and ducked under and to the side of the man.

For one glorious moment he thought he had made it too, then something tugged harshly at his hair and he was yanked back. Nyx felt is back hit the wall behind him hard and let out a pained cry through grit teeth. A hand was quick to grab around his throat, and when Nyx instinctively pushed back against it, sharp dizzying pain shot out from his shoulder.

"As much as I've enjoyed our little cat and mouse game, I'm going to have to end it here glaive." The man started and tightened his grip on Nyx's throat until tears started prickling in the corners of his eyes and the edges of his vision grew blurry. Then something new came over his face and he loosened the grip just slightly. Something Nyx was grateful for as he coughed and wheezed in the grip. It looked almost like a flash of recognition or a realization of sorts had washed over the man's face, and his expression changed. It got somehow more dangerous. Like he had something planned, and Nyx did not like it. Then he spoke again, and his voice was lower, but no less dangerous. "Nyx Ulric. Of course it had to be you of all people giving me trouble, Hero of the Kingsglaive."

Those last words were almost spat at Nyx and his heart picked up its pace, but he was determined not to let that show. "Ah, so my reputation precedes me then!" he spluttered, putting on a defiant smile and somehow managing to sound way more playful and confident than he actually felt. In response the man put his other hand against Nyx's wounded shoulder threateningly, and before Nyx could protest or struggle hot glowing pain exploded down his side and arm. It radiated from his shoulder. Nyx's head jerked back. The smile dropped almost instantly from his face as he shut his eyes tight and groaned. He didn't open his eyes again until the pressure was let up, and the pain had calmed down to an uncomfortable warm throbbing. What met him then was a stone cold, calculated face, with the mouth twisted into a gross pretend-courteous smile.

"Pleasure." The man said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. Then, with seemingly no warning except the slightest twitch to his face the man clenched his free hand into a tight fist and let it collide violently with Nyx's stomach. Nyx's eyes went wide on impact, but he couldn't see, the pain and shock reverberating through him was blinding. Without Nyx even realizing what happened his knees gave out and buckled under him, but the hand around his throat didn't budge. It kept him upright and firmly pinned to the wall as he gasped for air that wouldn't come. His vision was getting blurry, with the man's facial features swirling together into an unclear blob of colour. He felt himself being shook slightly, then a sharp pain across his cheek.

"Oh no no, you don't get to pass out just yet Hero." Nyx heard the man speak as if under water. The voice seemed unclear and far away, and he scrunched up his nose in effort, trying to focus on what was going on. "I can still-"

Then something happened that caught the man's attention, and he stopped talking. The blob that was his head turned. Nyx followed suit and saw more blobs entering the room, blurred swabs of black pooling in from the door. Then multiple things started happening all at once, leaving Nyx no time to be relieved that backup was finally there. Noise exploded through the room. Voices yelled over each other. Nyx was let go of, and with the only thing holding him up now gone he slid unhindered down to the floor, where he stayed. Clutching his shoulder and heaving for breath. Then there were sounds of a fight, and something in the back of Nyx's tired mind told him to get up and join in, but his body wouldn't do what he wanted it to. So he winced and instead opted for trying to gather himself and blink away the blurry edges from his vision.

It worked somewhat, and when two of the blobs broke off from the main blob group's fight and rushed towards him it didn't take him too long to see who it was. And finally, finally Nyx let the tension in his body go, and sighed heavily as Crowe and Libertus reached his side. He offered them both a tired smile and an attempted laugh that was interrupted by a coughing fit.

"Let me look at you," Crowe said as she knelt down next to him, not wasting time waiting for his response before moving Nyx's own hand away from his shoulder and examining it herself. "How is it?"

"Bad." Nyx said, cringing slightly as her hands moved over the throbbing shoulder. "Dislocated maybe?"

"Oh definitely, we're going to have to set it properly before using any potions. Can you manage until then?" Came her answer. Nyx sighed, but nodded. Of course he knew she was right. Crowe kept going, moving on from the shoulder after noticing the blood filtered through Nyx's hair. "And the head?"

"Fuzzy." said Nyx, no point in hiding that. He was managing, but now that the adrenaline was disappearing ignoring the throbbing pain became near impossible. Crowe clicked her tongue and sat back a bit to look him in the eyes.

"Should be fine." She said dryly. The she kept going, deeming Nyx's physical state good enough for her to jab at him. "Now, what was that! The hell do you have to go get blown up for?"

"It's not like I did it on purpose!" Nyx laughed back. He looked up at Libs, who had been watching from the side with a worried crease to his brows, seeking verbal protection of some sort. But his friend just snorted out a laugh and shook his head.

"Jackass." Crowe said, finally letting her expression soften a bit. "Medical team's just outside, can you stand?"

Nyx sucked in a sharp breath. He wasn't entirely sure he trusted his legs to carry him, but he did give it a valiant try. Though as soon as Nyx was standing upright the world started spinning around him and Libertus rushed forward to steady him. They stood still like that for another short moment while Nyx breathed heavily to gather himself before Libertus asked if he was ready to go, and he nodded.

"So what'd you do to make that guy so angry?" Libs asked as they slowly and carefully made their way froward. He gestured his head towards the centre of the room, where the rest of the glaives they'd entered with were working on taking down the man Nyx had fought.

"Well, you know me and my dashing charms." Was Nyx's answer. He sent Libertus a smug smile, to which Libertus groaned and rolled his eyes.

"In that case I'm surprised the worst you got was a dislocated shoulder." He shot back, and Nyx laughed. A genuine laugh despite all the aches of his body.

"Oh, screw you-" He began cheerfully, but another coughing fit interrupted him.

"No, screw both of you," Crowe chimed in. She huffed and shook her head. Though Nyx could swear there was a small smile on her face as she joined in supporting Nyx on his other side, careful not to further aggravate the injured shoulder.

#whump #bthb #bad things happen bingo #final fantasy xv #pinned to the wall #rasko's bthb #ffxv kingsglaive #ffxv whump #nyx ulric #nyx ulric whump #crowe altius #libertus ostium #my writing

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hellowkatey · 3 years

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Febuwhump day 18

Prompt: “I can’t see”

Read on AO3

A World on Fire

When heat waves settle over Coruscant, the citizens tend to retreat inside. On this planet, though, Obi-Wan can see that isn't the case. The usually mild climate of Helkit has been overtaken by a stretch of sticky heat. Without cooling systems in their complex of open-air homes, it's like the entire city has taken to the streets.

He was assigned to come here to aid with some intergovernmental disputes over aid packages. A rather trivial reason to be arguing, but Obi-Wan pretends to understand. They pretty much wrapped up the negotiations a day early, so Anakin suggested they do a quick patrol of the city to see if anyone needs some help. So now he walks through the streets, stripped down to his thinnest inner tunic and pants. Anakin ran ahead while he changed out of his stuffy robes, so he figures he should go find the padawan.

The Jedi Knight passes by some kids playing in an open water valve and he revels in the brief mist of cool moisture that hits his cheek. It seems to him the people are making the most of the heatwave, as troublesome as it's been. The vibrant streets are a sight he doesn't see often on missions, so it's quite refreshing.

But as Obi-Wan turns the corner, he feels a disturbance shoot through the Force. A horrific crash of durasteel against durasteel and something hollow against the pavement shrieks through the hot air. He picks up his pace, noticing a crowd at the end of the street has formed, many people yelling in urgent tones and the distant noise of public safety sirens quickly approaching.

A pileup of speeders. At least four crumbled into one another as well as a transport and many more vehicles strewn at awkward angles that clog up the entire street.

And then panic. Potent and clear in the Force with the confirmation of a shrill scream that he could identify anywhere.

Obi-Wan runs.

"Get out of my way," he yells, pushing through people who cross his path. As he dodges a protocol droid that he nearly falls over, he spots short, dark blonde hair and a mess of beige laying at an awkward angle on the pavement. "Get out of my way!"

Someone is standing over him, saying something to him along the lines of help... coming, but Obi-Wan's hold on serenity has broken and everything is tunneling as the full view of his padawan laying on the ground shaking in absolute terror. He skids to a stop, and for a moment he stands there over him, his eyes wide with shock. Anakin lays in the center of the accident, between the storage vessel and the rest of the speeders. The pattern of the cars makes it look as though he was what they crashed into and subsequently crumbled against.

"Ani," he says under his breath. A nickname he hasn't used in nearly two years, but it feels right at the moment. As Obi-Wan drops to his knees beside his apprentice, the only thing blaring through his mind is I already failed you, Qui-Gon. I already failed you.

Anakin is shaking, his eyes flickering back and forth in shock and panic. The twelve-year-old looks as though he's trying to speak, but it only comes out as blubbering, thick with pain and tears. He tries to sit up, and the knight has to press his palm against the center of his chest, holding him still.

"No, Anakin, don't move. You need to stay still," he says in as calm a voice as he can muster. Frantically, Obi-Wan looks up, scanning the crowd for the emergency services he heard coming. "We need some help here! I need a healer!" He seems to only receive stares to those who hear him through the chaos, so he turns his attention back to Anakin. "Just don't move, Anakin. Don't mov--"

"What happened?" Anakin rasps, his eyes screwed shut as he looks to be feeling around. Obi-Wan grabs his hand, encompassing it between both of his. What happened?

If he were doing his duty, he would have already deduced this. Obi-Wan shakily looks up from the boy and finally takes a good look at the epicenter of the scene. People are scattered about, leaning up against walls with clothes pressed against their jagged wounds, or being helped out of the area. The speeder pileup looks bad... but it's what is slowly leaking through the streets that catches his eye and puts a pit in his stomach. The transport. The hold split wide open and its contents scattered across the street.

Large jugs of thick goo with warning labels plastered across their container spill more and more by the second. And suddenly Obi-Wan realizes Anakin is soaking wet and smells distinctly of strong chemicals.

A blaster shot or a lightsaber burn are things that Obi-Wan are prepared for, but this... he reaches for guidance in the Force and finds that he is alone.

"Your boy," a bloodied man a few meters from them who is being pulled to his feet. Obi-Wan looks and sees he's pointing at Anakin. "He pushed me out of the way. Saved my life."

He doesn't know what to say in response. He doesn't have time to say anything anyway, because an alarm begins to blare through the streets urging immediate evacuation and hazmat protocols, and the man is whisked away before he can muster a single syllable.

"Master," Anakin winces. He looks down to see his hands tensed, shaking, hovering over his eyes like he's getting ready to claw them out. "It burns."

Force. Obi-Wan is already pulling off his outer tunic. "Close your eyes, Ani!" he says as he uses the sleeves to attempt to wipe away the radioactive substance sloshed across his eyes. "Close your eyes."

"Master!"

"Close them, Ani, you can't it in them."

"Master... Obi-Wan." he gasps as his voice breaks. "Obi-Wan," he breathes. "Obi-Wan.... I--"

"Anakin!"

"I-I can't see..." the statement begins in disbelief. "I can't see," quieter now, merely a whisper. Obi-Wan cradles his head gently, numbness spreading through his body as he watches Anakin's shock shift into devastation and uncontrollable hysterics in a matter of moments. "I can't see!" he cries. Wails, over and over again as his voice goes hoarse and cracks. Tears are forming in Obi-Wan's eyes because there's nothing he can do except give into his padawan clawing at his shoulder and lift the boy into his arms. "I can't see! Obi-Wan, I can't see!" he sobs.

To his own horror, Obi-Wan can't find a single word to say. He just clutches Anakin against his chest, letting his screams tear through his every cell and the agony conduct down their bond like an electric shock. If he can't find words, at least he can act. Obi-Wan scoops Anakin up, ignoring the tingling burn of the substance that now coats his arms and he runs from the scene. The only thing on his mind is to find Anakin safety. Find him a healer.

This cannot be the end. This cannot be his end.

#febuwhump #febuwhumpday18 #i can't see #daredevil au #blindness #blind anakin #anakin skywalker #obi-wan kenobi #daredevil #chemical burns #car accident #it's funny because both anakin and daredevils are considered the heros with no fear #but they fear e v e r y t h i n g #me bringing my other niche interests into things

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murdereraisuha · 3 years

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screaming about chapter 5 but more coherently this time

This is gonna cover 1. the recent update’s events in comparison to my previous theories & expectations, 2. the winner of the VDC and Vil’s character development 3. Kalim & Jamil’s character development, and 4. the main story moving forward

Spoilers for everything up to 5-67. Word count: 2117

So, in my “Jamil is Snow White” theory post, I used the events of the original Snow White to try and guess how TWST chapter 5 would correlate to it and what characters would fill what roles (Snow White, huntsman, prince, etc.) in the story.

Originally, I kind of assumed the beginning of chapter 5 would line up to either the beginning of the movie or halfway through when the Queen is already hatching her plan to get Snow White with the poison apple. However, it seems like the movie events have actually been compacted into 5-57 to 5-67.

After the NRC rehearsal, Vil becomes the most beautiful, corresponding to the beginning of the movie when the Queen is still the most beautiful. Then, Neige, out of his natural cuteness rather than hard work and practice like Vil, usurps him, representing the point Snow White becomes the fairest in the land. The next part with the apple juice and Rook coming to the rescue is a mix of the next part of the movie, when the huntsman tells Snow White to run, and the part of the movie with the poison apple. Then, the MC and the rest of the dance team kind of act like the dwarves by fighting the Queen/Vil. However, other than that, everyone follows their corresponding role: Neige is Snow White and Rook is the huntsman.

I think the story as it has played out makes sense. I was initially startled by Vil suddenly going murder mode, but. To work so hard on this song and choreography and training up your team, only to have the media love your lifetime rival who’s only brought an arrange of a kid’s song with clumsy singing and dancing to the table, potentially crushing your plan for victory here... I understand Vil’s feelings here and the sudden, desperate decision to curse Neige.

Rook’s actions after that don’t seem too out of line with what we know about his personality and his unconventional beliefs/actions regarding beauty and Vil’s beauty. Seriously though, wtf please don’t just drink poison. Anyway, I really enjoyed Kalim coming in then. The way he noticed Vil’s face being like Jamil’s before his overblot? The part when he tried to remind Vil that no one drank the juice so Vil hasn’t hurt anyone yet? Good stuff right there.

However, the way things played out also disappointed me somewhat. Though we had a Kalim & Jamil interaction, we still haven’t had a good resolution to their character/relationship development, so hopefully that’s in the final part of chapter 5. Furthermore, though Kalim did slap the apple juice away, I really felt like he and Jamil would have had more involvement with poison/curses in this part considering all the stuff in this chapter about Kalim being poisoned in the past.

There’s also the fact that all Jamil did was evacuate the area, it was Kalim and Rook who were around when Vil overblotted. The pattern of the previous overblot causing the next has kind of been broken. It could mean that the pattern was actually the dorm leader causes the next overblot?? Anyway, I’m hoping that Jamil will have his time in the spotlight in the next part.

-----

So that kind of brings me to the future. First off, who will win the VDC? Personally, I think that it will be NRC. With everyone so enthusiastically proclaiming in 5-67 that they’re going to win the championship, it would feel off for them to fail. From things that Vil has said this chapter, like in 5-37 when he admonishes Deuce that effort isn’t enough to succeed, it seems like the bad route/worst case scenario of Vil’s outlook is to lose hope that his efforts will ever give him success or a happy end. Therefore, the good route would be for him to keep hope, to keep the belief that he can get his happy end, and I think winning the VDC would be the thing that would support this belief. I do not think he would learn much from losing; if he has already lost and got relegated to the role of villain so many times before, one more time would not mean much to him.

Other people have said that Vil also needs to learn to chill and stop holding people to such high standards, which is something I agree with. Though Epel’s beliefs on masculinity and power were pretty harmful, Vil’s methods of trying to correct those beliefs were also harmful. Vil’s treatment of Epel at the end of Epel’s ceremony robes story seriously left a bad taste in my mouth. The thing is, something or someone would need to prompt a change in Vil’s beliefs for a change to occur. After Deuce and Epel’s outing, they seem to be pretty chill with Vil, so there aren’t any conflicts in the group. I can’t think of anyone in the team other than Kalim and maybe Ace who would have a strong enough opinion on not pushing yourself too hard that they would try and give that opinion to Vil, and Kalim’s already had a big interaction with Vil in 5-62.

So, I feel like any further Vil character development this chapter would come from an interaction with Neige. Going back to the debate of who will win VDC, we know that Vil resents Neige for always being the hero. If Neige won yet again, would Vil take what he says to heart? However, if Vil won, that would be a new situation. I think that the first things he hears from a Neige that has finally lost would be impactful to him.

I’m not sure though of all this though because of this line in 5-66:

Vil’s saying that throwing a tantrum and taking it out on other people was awful of him. Though it obviously refers to his attempts to murder before and during his overblot, it could also point to an overall shift in mindset regarding how he treats others. His attempts to mold Epel into a poison apple, for example, stemmed from his own ambitions and frustration at Neige, which you could interpret as a sort of tantrum that he then took out on Epel. Vil may have already learned to relax on pushing his high standards on others.

Regardless of if that’s true or not, I personally think that Vil and Neige still have a lot that they could learn from each other, assuming my perception of Neige as being innocent rather than a white lotus is correct. Vil’s team’s performance had a lot of cohesion and rehearsal put into it, but it was very competitive focused. On the other hand, Neige and the dwarves obviously had a lot of fun with their performance. However, it was clumsy and they were ill prepared. Therefore, Vil could teach Neige more discipline and planning while Neige could teach Vil about how to not lose sight of finding joy in your work.

-----

As I have already said, I’m hoping for more Kalim & Jamil stuff in the final part of chapter 5. I originally theorized that something would happen to one of them, probably Kalim, and that would lead to some sort of reveal about their feelings and the chapter would end with them clearly on the trajectory to repair their relationship and really become friends.

Since nothing happened yet and neither got poisoned/cursed, I think then that the event that sparks the finale of their character development would probably relate directly to the VDC. First off for our possibilities, we have the two’s families watching as Jamil takes the spotlight as a main vocal while Kalim is in the back. Given what we know, I don’t think Kalim’s family would be too happy about that. The conflict from that definitely seems like it could result not only in some sort of understanding between Kalim and Jamil, but also maybe even a change in Jamil or his family’s status. For a less dramatic possibility, we also know from 5-47 that Jamil’s sister will be coming to watch. If she makes an appearance, perhaps she will have some unexpected insight to say that would lead to a discussion & development between Jamil and Kalim.

Finally, my Jamil becomes the most beautiful theory might still be partially true, though idk if that’s just me not wanting to give up on it cause of how funny it would be. Basically, the theory was that, after the VDC performances, the internet/media become super interested in Jamil due to how talented and handsome he is. I originally thought that could serve as a factor for Vil overblot, but now I think it could prompt some discussion & development between Jamil and Kalim due to it serving as a clear example of Jamil finally showing his true ability and by how much Jamil was letting Kalim win. Furthermore, Vil might be affected by an event like that. Though the overblot’s already happened, perhaps something happening with Jamil specifically would lead to something happening between him and Vil, fulfilling the pattern of the previous overblot doing stuff with the next. I’m out of ideas for the Scarabia boys, so let’s continue.

-----

Honestly, I don’t think anything will happen with Idia and Ortho outside of a quick teaser at the very end of the chapter. Considering that we still have to cover all the stuff with the VDC performance and its results and the aftermath of the results, Idia’s presentation thingy might not even happen until chapter 6. ?

Idk, rn I’m more concerned about the overarching plot with Mickey Mouse than I am about chapter 6 Ignihyde shenanigans. So, we had a little flash of the Queen/Hag during the day, and also we finally discovered that Malleus is Malleus. So things are picking up a bit. I’m not sure if something unexpectedly big this chapter will happen though. I’ve seen people saying that the boss was surprisingly easy so there might be another big battle coming up. I don’t actually play the game so I don’t know anything about that, is it intentional or is it just that the chapter took so long to update that y’all had tons of time to beef up your boys? For me, it did feel like the Vil overblot was the climax of the chapter. With all the other stuff like the VDC results and the Scarabia boys’ character development, I don’t know if there’s any more room. There could be some big new info with Mickey Mouse or Grim’s bad eating habit, but I can’t picture something happening that would warrant another boss battle.

I do have some thoughts on Mickey Mouse, but I think I’ll save my memey ones for another post and wait for the end of chapter 5 before getting my serious thoughts together. Anyway, now a little talk on chapter 6. So, we have 4 options: chapter 6 will be something regarding Idia’s presentation, something regarding Deuce borrowing the magical wheel, something combining those two plot points, or something else entirely.

Well, for something combining those two, Riddle was the one wanting Idia to go do the presentation in person, right? So, Idia probably doesn’t like Riddle that much. Maybe he wants to make some sort of plan to get back at Riddle. What can he use?

Uh I just looked back at 5-39 to figure out what exactly is up and one translation says Deuce forcefully borrowed the magical wheel and another says he borrowed it as a huge favor??? The original says 無理言って借りてきた, deepL translates it as forcibly borrowed, 無理を言って means asking for something unreasonable. What exactly are the circumstances here?

Okay whatever, look, Deuce is in some sort of debt to Ignihyde. Idia could use him since he and Riddle are in the same dorm. Idk my train of thought got wrecked by the translation confusion.

But anyway so we know Deuce is probably gonna be Meg. I’ve never watched Hercules and I don’t know anything about it aside from what I’ve just read on wikipedia. The summary there says that Hercules kills a bunch of monsters and becomes famous then Hades holds Meg hostage in exchange for Hercule’s powers and Hercules accepts the trade but then “Hades reveals that Meg was working for Hades all along” ??? And then in the end though “ Hercules chooses to remain on Earth with Meg”. So what happens, is Meg good or what? Alright it might be better to at least wait for whatever sneak peek of chapter 6 we get at the end of chapter 5 before speculating. Let’s end this here before it gets any longer.

#twst #twisted wonderland #twst spoilers #twst analysis #twst theories #vil schoenheit #kalim al asim #jamil viper #update screaming

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