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masterwords · 2 years

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the silence drowns pt.5

Summary: Morgan interrupts Foyet in Hotch's apartment. Bad times are ahead.

Warnings: mentions of hospital, surgery, vomit, Foyet

Pairings: Hotch/Morgan

Words: 1.6k

Notes: Nothing too bad here, it's pretty tame.

Chapter List

Read on AO3: The Silence Drowns

“He's in surgery,” he looked like he'd seen a ghost. “They don't...”

Finishing that sentence wasn't going to happen. He couldn't form the words, couldn't fathom putting them into anything solid. They don't know if he's going to make it, he thinks, but he can't say it. On the table, Aaron's heart stopped twice, he was bleeding out, his life nearly extinguished. His mind wasn't there, though, not in the room. He was far away in a forest; thick, mossy evergreens with sharp undergrowth so thick it sliced his bare feet. Somewhere around his childhood home, he recognized it only barely, wandering through and wishing he'd thought to wear shoes. He was overcome with the very big feeling of not wanting to be there in those woods that always scared him, his legs scraped and feet sore. Hoping for a way out but only getting further in, he thought maybe he was looking for something specific, something he could remember and feel but not find. The sun was sinking over the tops of the trees, it'd be pitch black soon. In the distance, getting closer as night crept up on him, he could hear the animals he'd romanticized in his books, feel their eyes on him, their sleek pelts shimmering in the shadows. He'd be carrion soon, and then they could feast.

He woke to find JJ in the room with him. No one else at first, just JJ sitting there with her phone in her lap, thumbs desperately tapping at the keypad. He blinked and realized it was all he could do; all he was capable of. His limbs were heavy and his head was swimming, everything in the room floated in and out of focus like a house of mirrors. Immediately a sneaker wave of pure nausea hit him, and he could feel JJ's instant panic at his sudden movement, the whine that excaped his lips, his limbs paralyzed and his head became a swirling vortex. He was sick immediately, and he felt JJ's fear and panic as she pressed the call button. She needed nurses, wasn't prepared for that. There was swirling chaos around him as they cleaned him up, the sick coming so fast and so violent that she'd had to back up out of their way. He cried and she turned toward the door, pretended not to see.

The team flooded the room after he was cleaned up but he didn't feel any better and he couldn't speak, his lips and voice wouldn't obey his thoughts or commands. He searched their faces until he lit on Derek standing in the back, made of wispy shadowy features, fear flickering in his dark eyes. He blinked and thought about Derek watching as Foyet poked his holes, slipped the knife through his skin. Derek taking in the full sight of his violation, forced to keep his eyes open, to see what he could never unsee. Slowly, fiercely, he tried to form his lips around some sort of apology that only turned to arid dust and decay on his lips. You were early, he thought. If you'd just come when I thought you would. If you'd just been late like always...

This sight would always live between them. Derek closed his eyes against the intensity while the team spoke quietly to Aaron, told him he was going to be alright, offered whatever empty comfort they could. It wasn't much, it could never be much, not when they hadn't seen it. They didn't know and they'd never know, Aaron would never tell the truth. He'd find a way to talk around it, duck and parry and deflect, all the words that built up to the same thing: no one would ever know what happened in that apartment. No one but Derek who saw everything. Front row seat to Foyet's knife catching the light as it plunged into the body he loved. Forever changing its landscape.

The team left one by one, until it was just him staring down at thick wads of iodine soaked gauze, blood under his fingernails and smudged in missed places beneath his chin, behind his ears. There were bruises at his temples, splashing purple and blue against pale skin. Hoping to stay, he stood over the bed, watched Aaron breathe shallow and quiet. He'd been sleeping through most of their visit, only opening his eyes once or twice and barely there when he did.

“Visiting hours begin at 7,” the nurse announced, poking her head into the room. This was her second time, and he wasn't sure he'd get a third as nicely but he simply didn't have it in him to walk away.

“With all due respect, he was nearly killed by a serial killer...I don't think he should be alone.”

“We have hospital security, sir. There are cameras everywhere. He'll be perfectly safe here tonight.”

Derek could see that he was going to get nowhere with her. She wasn't brand new, easily pushed around or eager to please; she was a time hardened nurse working the overnight shift in the ICU and she didn't make the rules but she was more than happy to enforce them. The lack of visitors made her job a lot easier, keeping things quiet, monitoring patients who were knocking on death's door without interruption. Still, Derek couldn't fathom going far, so while he was willing to leave the unit, he made it only as far as the small waiting area. The nurse, feeling some remorse for having to follow the rules, brought him out a pillow and blankets and a glass of water. “This is the only entrance,” she assured him. “No one will get by without you seeing them. You can see everyone coming and going.”

Everything went still, the nurse at her computer sipping a cup of coffee and monitoring her patients in silence. How lonely her job must be, he thought, but in a unit like this quiet meant a good night, quiet meant no crash carts and no death rattles. Every now and then she came out with a cup of coffee for him, sat beside him in late night companionship.

“You should try to sleep,” she said, patting him on the leg and he forced the weakest smile.

“I know.”

“But you won't, I understand. He's doing fine, you know.”

Derek huffed. He didn't mean to, he knew it was rude but there was no stopping it. Not at 3am. She nodded, toying with her Styrofoam cup, digging her fingernail into the soft rim.

Pacing the hallway, glaring at the clock in an effort to make the hours tick by faster became his life. Staring intently at the wire mesh between double paned glass, he watched as phantom tracers of light, sunbeams timid and pale began trickling through, casting out the shadows.

His eyes burned raw and tired as he splashed cold water on his face, blinked it from his eyelashes. The mirror threw a reflection back to him that seemed tarnished, a little more broken than the last time he'd seen it. Over his shoulder he thought he caught a flash of something moving in the shadow of a stall, Foyet and his knife, and he knew it wasn't real of course he did but the phantom moved and set his nerves on fire.

Handing Derek a coffee, Emily looked him up and down and wondered if she should have brought him a tranquilizer instead. “You look like shit,” she said instead of good morning. “You didn't sleep.”

“How could I?”

“He needs you to sleep you moron.”

Derek's features were somber and drawn. He couldn't say Foyet's name, not in this hallway but she could read it on his face, that he'd been standing some sort of guard all night.

“He wouldn't be so bold.”

“He walked right into Aaron's apartment. He walked him into this hospital.”

“Okay. Okay...” She couldn't argue with him. As the visiting hour ticked closer, Derek's phone rang. Emily watched, already knowing what the call would entail...she'd been warned, they all had. Strauss was placing Derek on leave pending an investigation into what happened, he couldn't hear everything through a loud angry whining in his ears, his blood pressure rising dangerously. You may not be in a bed, but you're a victim too, she said and he felt his grip tightening dangerously on the phone.

“I don't know if you've been to the hospital yet,” she continued, her voice grave and quiet, barely audible over the screaming in his ears. “But The Director and I think it best if you don't go and see him. There is some concern that Foyet could once again have you both in one place...” He didn't wait to hear the rest before his fist connected with the wall, teeth gritted together in his fury. Emily took the phone from him before it ended up reduced to nothing but crushed bits of metal and glass in his palm.

“What's the plan now?”

“I'm leaving.” The statement gutted him, stole all the air from his lungs.

“Where will you go? Derek?” She handed him back his phone and tried to guide him down into a seat, placate him. When had they ever listened to what Strauss said when it came to their teammates being in trouble? “You're needed here, damn what they say.”

“I can't stay here, Em. Strauss is on her way and if I'm here when she is...I don't want to make things worse.”

Emily watched him leave, baffled by what she was watching. He was tired, she'd allow for that, him not thinking this through but whatever happened with Foyet in that apartment had obviously done more damage to Derek than she'd initially thought. The clock struck 7, and she was alone in the lobby when the door was unlocked by a nurse whose confusion was apparent on her own tired features.

“He left?”

“He uh,” she started, folding her arms over her chest. “Yeah. He'll be back.” She hoped.

Tag List: @ssa-sarahsunshine, @arsonhotchner

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#aaron hotchner #derek morgan #criminal minds #hotchgan #mortch #fanfiction #george foyet

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linkspooky · 5 years

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he flies he lies hawks realizes that he has been telling the truth to the villains and lying to the heroes / For @villainmonth /edit by @inumaqi fic by @linkspooky

“Listen I want you to trust what I’m about to say.” “Those are some pretty serious words you’re saying…”

♘

If you have wings, you should fly. That is what Hawks always believed. Feathers were designed by god to catch the air, they did not fall, they floated down. He could pluck one of his feathers, throw it into the sky and watch it dance.

That was what freedom looked like. But looks were deceiving. His quirk manifested at four years old. He still remembered, terrified of the bulges that had formed on his back, but they could not afford a doctor. Trash that littered the floor, and parents that did not look his way because they considered himself like the garbage that piled up, something that needed to be thrown out. Hawks remembered thinking several times as he looked up at the sky, if he could escape to the sea or the sky, he would have flown away from here in an instant. His pain was prolonged for an entire month as something budded from his back. It felt like vines were growing out from him, and he felt every single thorn as they snaked out in the layers between his skin, and wrapped around his spine. He was cut, again and again, inside and out. Then one day, the skin on his back broke. He woke up with two long rivulets of blood streaming down from both sides of his back, an injury that made him look like an angel who had both wings ripped away from his flesh. Then at his upper backs, two large bones had emerged covered in feathers.

On that first day he pulled those feathers old with a pair of rusty gardening shears out of fear because he did not know what was happening. A mess of blood, and feathers, and two wings plucked raw, but they grew back. It was when he spread his wings for the first time, that he realized he could not leave the ground. There was nowhere for him to fly. Nowhere he could escape to.

♘

Hawks always had a feeling that he was lighter than air. That there was not enough of himself to fill up his own body. Birds needed to be that way in order to fly, their bones were hollow, and their lungs took up most of their body mass filling them with air. He had the same feeling, nothing inside of him, deep down to his bones.

Wherever he walked his feet didn’t touch the ground. He was not flying so much as floating, transparent, hollow, he simply hovered there like a ghost with no substance. It was easy for him to smile, because there was no feeling behind the gesture to him.

When he was younger he never smiled, he found no reason to, and one day he noticed the adults around him were a bit softer on him if he forced the muscles in his face to pull back his lips. Whatever was inside of him, he was sure it was not a hero. Not like All Might, never like him. He was hair, feathers, talons, scars, and bones. He was all of that, and he was still nothing. He was the blood in his body, but maybe only air flowed through his veins. There were holes in his bones. No, there were holes in Hawks. The air simply passed right through him. He was someone who was simply there. He was there and yet not there. But Hawks used this quality of his. Useless children were like trash piling up in the Takami Household, they were knocked down to the floor, and then they were eventually thrown away. He could smile when he did not feel like smiling. He could always continue to smile, even when there was no reason. He just needed to keep flying. Fly up, up, and up. And forget about crashing down back to earth.

He just had to keep smiling, even now. That was what he told himself, as Jeanist turned his head back to look at him. “It’s rare for you to come visit me like this.” “How are you feeling?” Hawks, dressed like a model, his hair combed back and feathered, his wings stretching to relax. He took nothing seriously, he never had so much as a heavy thought cross his mind. Burdened by nothing, carefree, that was the “Hawks” that he showed to Jeanist. “Much better than before!” “Didn’t you ask that old lady over at UA for help?” “Unfortunately, she can’t recover something that has already been lost.”

Hawks knew that already. For example if you sever a limb, an arm, a leg, or maybe your own heart. It’s impossible to recover, the only thing left is the phantom pain from something that is no longer there, and a feeling of missing something.

Nothing held any weight for him. Not even a human life held that much in his hands. What he was about to do did not show on his face at all, not even a twitch of regret and Hawks wondered for a moment if he could do this and feel nothing if he was someone really worthy of being called a hero.

Heroes saved other people. Hawks could not save anyone, not even himself.

“Even with a missing lung, we humans can continue to live. I’ll probably go public with this soon. There are many awaiting my reformation.” “I see!”

Liar. Humans could not continue to live. They were so fragile. They died so easily. That always weighed on his mind. The more weight he had, the harder it was to fly. When he saw butterflies, all he thought of was their fragility. He could let a butterfly land on his hands, and at any moment, tear both of his wings from his body and rip them to pieces, then scatter them like a flower. The faint beating of a butterfly’s wings. The paper thing wings, the fragile line between life and death, so easily torn up and full of holes. It moved in time with the quiet murmur of his heart. His wings flexed and spread behind his back.

He always wondered when his feathers grew, why they turned from white to red. His feathers were bleeding, red with streaming blood. His feathers were burning, red as the flames.

Like a white flower. Spilled blood would dye it red. It would glow red with flames.

“That’s quite unfortunate.” Hawks wore, a predatory smile, a bird about to devour carrion. He held his sharpened feather in his hand cutting his fingers on the edges. He was killing someone already as good as dead. He felt nothing, but also he felt -fragile.

More scared than the butterfly. His bones were hollow and soon they would shatter like glass.

He was not flying, not at all. His feet did not touch the ground because he was hanging in suspension. The rope tightened around his neck, but he took a step forward off the chair to fall. The wind whipped him back and forth. All he could do was sway, and hope when this was all over someone would take his body down. He died by slow suffocation. He was free, surrounded entirely by air, and he could not breathe.

Hawks knew, killing Jeanist would be as good as killing himself. In that moment he would die. But, he would not be allowed to die either. Even after sacrificing his life there was more he could sacrifice, more the hero commission could take from him. Hawks thought it was funny, he never thought he had much to begin with, no connection to his name, no nest to roost in, and nothing inside of him but hollow bones and yet somehow the hero commission always took more. Being a hero was all he had. He brought the feather up, and slashed it behind Jeanist’s back, killing him like a coward. But, he could not call himself a hero anymore.

♘

The only piece that matters on the board is the king, the rest are all considered disposable. In shogi a player could still win as long as their king remained. Hawks was a useful knight, even a general, but he was someone who could never become king. A king had worth, and he was damaged goods, recycled and put to use by the hero commission after his parents threw him away. He flew through the air, trying to forget the body he had stuffed in a bag. If Jeanist was still here, if he could hear him, Hawks could only say that whatever happened to him in the end would be far worse.

He saw this image in his dreams so many times. His feathers burning up in front of him, he watched them combust. They fell away from him like glittering stars. Sparkling, sparkling, sparkling. His wings melted and he realized he could no longer fly. Without wings he would just be a broken thing, a damaged kid. When would it be his turn to fall apart? When would it be his turn to crash back down to earth? It was as inevitable as gravity.

Then, there was no flying. There was only falling. Maybe he never once flew. Maybe he was just falling slowly. Dabi’s skin is torn up and sewn together from pieces, and he smiles even though it rips his lip. Hawks wonders if it’s painful for that man to smile too, his eyes linger on the lips as he tihnks of his own. His every smile was a lie. To live here, he needed to breathe lies. “I’m curious why this guy? You could have picked someone lower on the list.”

Hawks just needs to tell another lie. The Hawks in front of Dabi right now, is someone who sympathizes with the cause of the villains, an unwitting pawn, but also too valuable a piece to throw away.

He smiles and realizes nothing. He knows nothing. He does not know who his real enemies are.

“Because he was useless.”

That was his own voice. “Useless heroes get thrown out.” He heard the sound of his own voice. Why was he... “They’re only worth the results they can produce for the commision.Despite everything he’s done for them, the second he became a burden they would have let him take the fall anyway.”

Why was he telling the truth? Lie to the villains, deceive the villains, report back to the heroes. The mission was so simple, except for this one complicating factor. A knot in the rope he tied around his neck. Dabi will laugh at him. Just like in front of Endeavor, just like with the hero he killed, he will play it all like one big joke. Dabi is just a murderer. To kill people he must have felt nothing at all.

Just like me.

Hawks feels himself grinding his own teeth when he did not mean to. His mask is cracked, and Dabi was going to see him for what he really was. He was going to die now, burned up in Dabi’s sun. He saw Dabi reach his hand forward and closed his eyes in anticipation. A hand. On his shoulder. Someone holding him, touching him. He was touched and he did not break, even though he was fragile. Heavy, far too heavy. “We don’t do that here.” Dabi said, his fingers clasping, tightening around him. His hands are, so unbelievably warm and birds are cold blooded animals. ��Don’t worry so much, you look like the kind of useless guy that’s always worrying.” “No way, you’ve got to have brains to have the headspace to be worrying. I’mlike a chicken with his head cutoff.” “Yeah, whatever.” Dabi said, not believing him. “You’re such a shitty liar.”

♘

He was a bad liar. Those words remained in his head, even after he left Deika city. Back on his home turf, he took up roost in a high place. Whenever Dabi asked him to meet he always picked somewhere up high if he got the choice. So idiots prefer high places, huh? Dabi would mock him. His head was empty now. He wanted to cut his head off and throw it into the sky. Maybe then he would finally become a bird. He was thinking of that, and he was thinking that they sky in front of his eyes seemed endless. But there was nothing to see. He jumped down and wondered what would happen if he did not spread his wings. He would fall, obviously. And then he would splat. But after that he would be free. He just needed to let go and fall. He had been waiting his whole life for the rope to snap.

He was born with wings. He had no idea why. There was nothing in the sky.

He spread his wings out to catch himself at the last minute, and the people around him clapped and cheered. As he landed on a stop sign, a child asked him. “Hawks-san, what’s it like to be a hero?” “You save other people.” “I bet you can save anyone! I’ve always wanted to be a hero, is it fun? Are you happy?” His hands. Bright red. Jeanist’s blood. He shoved them in his pockets. “Mm, being a hero is all I ever really wanted -” His mouth moved. He was the one talking. And somebody else’s voice came out. He could not hear his own voice anymore. A lie. “I’m really happy like this.” You’re such a shitty liar.

#zeldi drabbles tag #hawks #takami keigo #dabi #villainmonth #villianmonth2019 #my hero academia fic #my hero academia drabble #hawks fic #tw: suicidal ideation #tw: abuse mention

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oldearthcartography · 4 years

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💙 for Cara,🔹for Coda, 💧for Juniper

Cara

💙 What would your OCs last words be (or if they’ve died what were their last words)? What were their final moments like? How did they die?

well… she’s died twice (or really like 1.5 times because the second time she wasn’t really alive)

Death 1:

Was a really horrific situation and there weren’t really any last words just desperate fighting. She was part of the attack force trying to breach the wall into Dockmarsh to allow a small group led by the Lady Blackcrest a chance at taking down the Lich Manrothir and his undead army (her father was acting as the Lich’s general).

They successfully breached the wall but she was flung away from it and right into the path of a carrion collector - a horrific construct whose spiked body was already covered in the bodies of the dead and dying, she knocked several of her cohorts out of the way but the stench of the thing left her paralyzed and unable to do anything as it picked her up and impaled her on one of its many spikes.

She doesn’t remember the details but while she was dead was actually probably the most happiest she’s ever been. She remembers feeling safe and peaceful and content.

Until (a year later) she woke up in the mass grave in which the fallen of Dockmarsh were interred and had to claw her way out into the mud and rain and stumble her way into town, confused, in pain, and scared… and with the scars of her death wound still on her body… when the party first came together it was less than a week after that happened… so…. yeah.

Death 2 (or 1.5):

Was with the party as witnesses. She was controlling an undead army at her father’s side after he used the power of a dead(ish) god to subvert her will.

She had found out that he had brought her back as a necromantic construct and that if he died she would too. The party managed to remove the effect that was tampering with her brain and after confronting him hoping for answers or some sign of emotion and getting nothing her final, very angry, words were:

“You killed me. Then after bringing me back tried to kill all the parts of me you didn’t want. At least now I know exactly what you wanted from a daughter an obedient unthinking tool. You killed me. Now it’s my turn.”

Then with the undead army surging with her she attacked and they both went down and fell, just two more bodies on that field as the undead fell with them.

Her first words after the party convinced her to come back, once again abandoning that peaceful place, during a resurrection ritual were a soft but heartfelt, “fuck all of you”

Future death?

For the next time… I honestly have no idea… despite everything she’s not the sort to go looking for it (as she’s said multiple times she doesn’t “do things the easy way) and she’ll fight to her last breath, but she also knows (or hopes at least) that that peaceful place will be waiting when it comes.

She’s not a dwarf of a lot of words so unless there was some reason for it she might not even say anything. If she thinks that the things/people she’s come to care about were taken care of she might just go with a wry smile, that death had caught up with her again. If they hadn’t been though, she would be just disappointed in herself for being unable to pick herself back up and continue to help, in that situation maybe a soft, “I’m sorry”.

_________________________________________

Coda

(portrait by the fabulous @hattedhedgehog )

🔷 Has your OC ever had to leave something behind or abandon something they didn’t want to? Have they ever had this happen to them? How has this effected them over the years?

Oh boy howdy has she ever. Okay so buckle in, I have a lot of Coda feelings (big surprise I know). Also to those in the Friday night game this is why Coda reacted so strongly to the mention of the Puppet Master and that thrice cursed temple.

Firstly:

She resigned the dwarven military (to her mother’s unending chagrin).

She didn’t regret that but she also had gone into the life of a soldier for a specific reason. She had wanted to help and she had wanted to protect others. It just turned out that duty as a soldier didn’t give her much opportunity for that so much as just patrolling and following orders (which she really found she didn’t have the stomach for).

BUT that also meant that she wanted to find a way to use her skills to help people (And prove to her mother that her chosen path was just as worthy as the one she had wanted Coda to take). So she left Stonehaft to become a mercenary/adventurer and when she left Stonehaft she also left behind her best friend, Jesper, on whom she had been “secretly” crushing for like… a REALLY long time (she was convinced that Jesper couldn’t possibly feel that way about her too, and even if she did, given her chosen life she also didn’t think it would be fair Jesper to be with someone who would be away so often, like her mother had been).

Coda didn’t regret leaving Stonehaft, but it absolutely hurt to leave Jesper behind. She knew Jesper’s wanted to study magic, to become a great artificer and enchanter and Coda always admired Jesper’s skill at creating (feeling that her own skills, leaning more to destruction, despite her mother’s opinions were of lesser value and should be in service of protecting those that create things). But Jesper was not from a wealthy or well-positioned family and a childhood illness had left her weakened so her chances of affording or getting an apprenticeship were slim. So Coda used the first proceeds of her new adventuring life to “secretly” get her the chance to apprentice and actually follow that dream.

Note: I keep putting secretly in quotations because Coda is canonically a terrible liar, and it turns out Jesper knew all of this the whole time. But seriously she only succeeded in a deception check once in the entire game and it was a Nat20 that followed the narrative SO DAMN WELL, sometimes the dice really make the narrative…. which leads to the second major situation which ALSO has to do with Jesper

Secondly:

Jesper went on an expedition to a recently discovered ancient temple in the desert and that expedition disappeared, no sign no word. So Coda and company (with Coda mildly panicking) went to go and find and hopefully retrieve them. What they found was a storm of time and space warping magic around the temple and once they were in it, they were trapped. The remnants of the expedition were dead, apparently attempting to flee the temple… but they found Jesper and one of Coda’s previous squadmates (who she’d ask to watch out for Jesper) still alive, the only survivors of the expedition, terrified and hurt but alive.

The temple turned out to be dedicated to Mudon, an ancient god of dwarven runecrafting who was brought down by a being known as the Puppet Master who had chained Mudon’s essence/soul to themselves for power but had then been trapped within this temple.

It turns out a cultist seeking to release Mudon infiltrated the dwarven expedition and when we run into him and confront him he trapped our cleric in a force cage, killed Coda with a power word kill (I had 99 HP! IT WAS SO CLOSE TO NOT WORKING! IF I HAD RAGED ONE TURN EARLIER!). The cultist’s original target was Elektra, our mage (the Puppet Master needed a spell-caster to bind to in order to escape) but when Jesper poked her head in at the shouts to see Coda down and ran in, he switched to the easier target and nabbed her instead.

The rest of the party had to wait for the force cage to drop before Dieron could get out (much, much past the time Revify could work) so they had to wait until the next morning to attempt to bring Coda back. Meanwhile because of the weirdness of that place Coda ended up in a sort of limbo with Jesper whose soul was also only loosely tied to her body at this point because the ritual to bind her to Mudon and the Puppet Master had already started. They had a really painful discussion and Coda learned that her love was not so unrequited. But Jesper, also told her that at this point the only thing they could do to stop the Puppet Master was to kill her… Coda, of course protested, looking for some way to take Jesper’s place, but given the timeline and what was happening she had to accept that Jesper knew what she was talking about. Plus Jesper kinda shamed her into it a bit “you have always been willing to die to protect everyone else, are you going to say I can’t make that same choice?!”. Jesper also told her that she MIGHT be able to protect Coda from the massive blast of energy that would be released if the ritual was interrupted but that she definitely couldn’t protect more than one.

The next morning the party managed to (barely) resurrect Coda and Coda, resigned to what she had to do let them in on the barest bones of the plan, fully planning to go down with Jesper (here was her single successful bluff check of the game, telling the party she would be safe if they all got out at the end).

Long story, long the battle was long and hard and hearing Jesper scream as the ritual progressed Coda couldn’t keep tight enough control on her rage to maintain her ties to her ancestral guardians (she lost her subclass), but it came down to just Jesper and Coda alone and Coda did it. She killed Jesper, she stopped the ritual and because of several escalatingly difficult constitution checks (every time she hit 0 she bumped to 1HP instead) she survived the blast.

When the party rushed in to find her, badly burned with all of her non-magical gear melted or incinerated, cradling Jesper she desperately asked Dieron to try to bring her back. But Jesper’s voice reminded her that her soul was bound to Mudon and if she came back so would the Puppet Master. And so… Coda carried Jesper’s body out of that place but left behind her best friend and love.

That was the hardest thing Coda ever faced, not facing down Mythinax (think Lolth), not facing down the Lich Manrothir came close to that moment for her when she had killed Jesper and couldn’t even attempt to bring her back.

It was basically the most profound turning point in her life and so many things followed it:

1. She lost her subclass (path of the ancestral guardians) becoming a Juggernaut barbarian instead, learning to let go of her feelings and not keep them so tightly coiled, and also no one is keeping her away from anyone or anywhere she wants to go (siege damage)!

2. She learned the importance of sharing how you feel when you have the time to do so, before it’s too late

3. It was her first step in deciding that wanting her mother’s approval of anything was bullshit (especially given her mother’s reaction to their return and Jesper’s death)

4. It was also her first step in learning not to hold so tightly to other people’s choices as her own failings. To let them also make the choice to go into danger and that it wasn’t her job to protect people from their own choices and that claiming it was, kinda disregarded some of their own agency.

5. She also returned home to find that Jesper had left her a gift, a greataxe she had enchanted as her journeyman submission, it was called Memorium and held enchanted runes only sometimes visible “love” “remember” “always” “Jesper+Coda” and Coda will not accept any replacements, ever.

__________________________________________

Juniper

(portrait by the talented @artblaster )

💧 What’s the worst pain your OC has ever been in? Mental or physical? What was the cause of this?

Well, I’m not sure this is canon anymore due to certain developments (i.e. campaign ended early and Ellie didn’t really want to leave these events just hanging in their world or fake how they turned out). She’s been hurt physically a lot, just a hazard of the job and she’s even died but honestly Juniper’s pretty tough and able to shrug it off when it comes to that sort of thing.

What hits and cuts far deeper for her is when it gets emotional, she feels very deeply and completely. She’s very resilient and very cheerful, but she doesn’t take failure well and not being able to DO anything is something she is absolutely not equipped for. Her guiding principle is “If I go in with the best of intentions I will be able to make it turn out well!”

Her lowest point was when they entered that town that had been attacked by the Herald of The Destroyer (an extraplanar entity of destruction and chaos). The town had turned on itself and everyone there was either dead or terrified and unwilling to trust or accept any help from the party or anyone else no matter how hard Juniper tried. They rescued a young girl who also fled from them into an abandoned building barricading herself in. The rest of the party was like “We can’t kidnap her Juniper, and we’re likely going to be going into more danger at least here, things have passed by” BUT Juniper HATED EVERY MOMENT of that and of having to walk away without making sure that that little girl was taken care of. THE ONLY reason she gave in was they were heading to Haven and she was sure she could get her mom to put together a group who would go back and help.

That was the angriest she’d ever been, at herself for being unable to DO anything. At the party for not letting her keep trying. At the entity that would DO that to people.

(She almost had it worse a few days later when The Destroyer partially broke through near Haven, but her luck held… though not the world’s luck because a Nat1 on a saving throw by like THE most worshipped good-aligned god meant The Destroyer literally vaporised Antheron (instantly removing him from the world and rendering impotent all of his clerics and paladins). The Destroyer apparently thought that was a big enough statement that would sow enough discord and fear ahead of its ability to fully break through, and withdrew to continue gathering power.

But again, due to other circumstances, a lot of this is no longer canon and never happened… or at least not yet)

#sleepyqueermess #ask meme #long post #my characters #Cara #Coda #Juniper

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ofpolariis · 5 years

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life is about more than just s u r v i v i n g.

more than anything, lorna hoped that to be true. she hoped that wanda, the sister she’d only recently discovered but who had already shown her more kindness than most of the world ever had, was right. the prior destruction of genosha still loomed heavily over her, the guilt and regret – the hopelessness and isolation. her newfound sister became among the first she could connect with again, she exuded warmth and support but so much more. neither had led simple or easy lives, but from lorna could see of her, wanda had managed an impossible feat – to still see good in the world, to hold onto kindness and strength. but the truth in what they shared was something else. the world saw monsters in them – but there was fear in the moments where they thought the world was right.

you can’t save everyone. i can’t save anyone.

except for herself. even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to, that was the one truth lorna knew – she would survive. the new threat of galactus moved steadily towards them, but her mind dwelled into the past. curiosity brought her to genosha, word of a father she never knew establishing a safe haven for mutants. she’d spent so much of her life hating the man, only knowing what the news told her of him – that he was evil. but a place where mutants could be safe, where her daughter could live without the shadow of hate? that hardly seemed evil. in a short time, the people there began to hail her as a princess – regardless of her discomfort with the notion. a part of her wanted to be what they saw her as, and god did she try. then the snap of thanos’ fingers took half the island’s population. it wasn’t long after that the sentinels came for the rest.

no place is s a f e. we kill for it and die for it, but we’re fighting for something that doesn’t e x i s t.

she remembered when they came. she remembered laying in bed with dawn, trying to get her to take a nap when a bomb dropped in the distance. she remembered hearing her daughter cry in fear as she realized a moment too late what was happening. evacuation began immediately, a mutant able to create portals got as many out as she could, dawn being the first as lorna sent her with the trusted friend to get her to safety. soon, it was too dangerous to keep the portals open – but lorna stayed. a magnetic pulse obliterated a sentinel into scraps but there were too many and the screams were too loud. lorna woke to rubble and bodies.

it changes you.

she was flooded by their last moments, the screams and pleading of the already dead. the confusion of walls that shook, the realization that this was the end, the desperate i love you’s to those they loved – all moments electromagnetically recorded in her. the blood curdling scream that ripped through her in that moment as she laid on the ground surrounded by the bodies of those she’d failed was laced in pain and fear. she couldn’t remember how long it lasted, her mind overwhelmed and breaking with every voice until eventually, her body gave out a pulse that covered the island, unintentionally binding herself with the island but the assault on her mind ceased. now she only saw ghosts.

we need you because you’re strong, don’t break on us now.

she heard the first as she finally came too. lorna didn’t know if they were real ghosts, evident to her because of the electromagnetic field now connecting her to the island they died on, or if they were hallucinations, brought on by the deep guilt that sunk into her bones. it didn’t matter, they were real to her. the old woman that used to bake bread spoke to her, her gaze going through her – but her body was feet away. she had to bury them, it was all she could think, if they were buried, maybe they would rest in peace. she owed that to them.

you think that you deserve this pain, that it’s your cross to bear. it’s not. you deserve m o r e.

maybe she did. her own injuries went ignored, her own grief as she pushed forward. a clear and determined goal kept her moving because if she stopped – lorna wasn’t sure what would become of her. she dragged every body she could find the desserts of carrion cove at the upper section of the island. it was an ideal resting place for the dead, she assumed, as the heat made sure nothing could survive out there. and there, one by one, she buried them. the heat made her stagger, her hands bled from dirt and sand and she wasn’t sure what was her own blood and what came from the dead she’d moved. speaking to the ghosts kept her determination strong, some were kind, urging her forward, that they still believed in her. others were not. they blamed her, told her to dig a hole for herself. for a moment, she thought that maybe they were right.

i’m not the one who dies.

it wasn’t okay. her life wasn’t of more valuable than those she was putting in the ground. her body crumbled, the last of her energy spent in dry sobs that raked through her. dehydration caused her mouth to go dry, her eyes unable to produce tears, but as the last body was buried, she let exhaustion take her over. she could remember the way the sand burned her back as she laid there, everything fading into darkness. maybe dying out there, alone in the desert, allowing dawn to grow up with the aunt that had raised her, maybe that was how things were meant to be. maybe it was better that way.

we didn’t die just so you could kill yourself.

the familiar voice of a deceased man barely made it to her ears. her eyes couldn’t open again, she didn’t have the energy. lorna thought maybe she was already dead. yet she recognized the feeling of her body being carried. ghosts couldn’t do that but there were no other mutants left there. she could feel her body laid down when a rush of cold water poured onto her, her mouth being forced open to drink. able to finally gather just enough strength to look upon her saviors, realization crept over her features. the mountain people. they’d inhabited genosha long before her father created the safe haven, they weren’t mutants but they kept to themselves and were admittedly the sort that gave enough of a discomforting feeling that they were left to reside in the mountains as they’d so chose. the long running warning had always been not to accept dinner invites. yet, they offered her food and water, and lorna didn’t have much else of an option. though, she was too afraid to ask what the meat they fed to her was.

“why did you save me?”

they’d never cared much for mutant business before, hid safely away in the mountains during the attack. why not just let her die? one stepped forward, index finger pushing against her chest, directly over her heart, before gesturing to the desert. her rough translation gathered that they were impressed with what she’d done. her attention turned to them again, her voice breaking as she was finally able to produce real tears. “why did i live?” once again, she felt their finger press against her heart. the gesture of kindness, of humanity, from the most unlikely of places stirred something in her she didn’t think was still possible. hope. the attack on genosha only proved how important it was. she could start over, make it better. the world needed better. she would either make it or die trying.

even if you live, the pain will still be with you.

it was the last ghost she’d heard before she broke the pulse that had trapped her on the island. she needed to leave, to see her daughter and know she was safe while she rebuilt genosha so that countless others could be safe. the pain would always be there, the guilt. but life could be there too, to live and not just survive, so one day dawn could have a life where she’d never need to make that choice.

there had to be m o r e.

#u: wp 01 #⊹ 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕚𝕤 𝕙𝕠𝕨 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕝𝕕 𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕤 ; 𝕚𝕟 𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕓𝕝𝕠𝕠𝕕 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖. ⊹ — polaris.#( this got ridiculously out of hand )#tw; death #tw; genocide #tw; suicidal thoughts

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othercat2 · 6 years

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Fic: Build a Life from Scratch 1/?

In which Bro has an existential crisis, the Grand Highblood is in the middle of having a Crisis of Faith and the Demoness is going to cut the next bitch who calls her “Handmaid.”

Clan of the Cave Hobbits

So, the first thing is, you wake up. Starting a story with someone waking up is a cliché. It’s not a thing you’re supposed to do. But this is you. Waking up and blinking at the sunlight between the trees. You are lying on the ground, which feels soft and damp. At ground level are ferns, various shrubberies, mosses and flowers. You don’t know the names of anything you’re looking at. The trees are not easy trees; maple, or oak. They are definitely deciduous though, and the climate is temperate (as far as you can tell from ironically watched nature programs).

You are as naked as some short asshole in a fantasy novel where citizenship means you can wear clothes.

Your head is empty.

You have to think about the latter for a moment. And maybe the former, because well, naked in the middle of a mysterious forest. This is generally a thing that happens in certain fantasy novels you may have read when you were a kid in your favorite foster home. (Not that you’d ever admit it out loud since that foster home also involved getting dragged to church every Sunday. Also, Pam kept trying to get you to give up Cal.) You will go to great lengths for talking unicorns, horses, and bizarre sexual interactions. The games may have also piqued your interest in the series.

You’re wandering in your head, and nothing is pulling you back to the subject, which is naked, in the middle of nowhere.

You sit up slowly, taking stock. You are entirely in one piece, no scars, and your hands free of calluses. (You remember being run through with a sword, the knowledge everything had fallen apart, the thing in your head snarling.) And your head is completely empty. And Cal is nowhere in sight.

Your chest tightens and you fold up, you feel hot and sick, sweat sheening your arms, sliding down your back. Cal is gone and your head is empty. You think you’re maybe going to throw up, but there’s nothing to throw up so you just gag on acid and try to breathe while it feels like your gut has turned into a nest of snakes. Your face is wet with sweat or tears and you rock back and forth for a while.

The moment passes, the feeling of sickness fades. Vague thoughts surface: the kid, where was the kid? There was a kid, right? The kid and the weird floating bird kid who tried to help you against the chessman-bird-dog-thing. You think of Texas summer heat and the roof. And you think about the kid.

(You think about Pam frowning over the lack of food, the lack of safety and security. Pam is long dead and wouldn’t understand what you were trying to accomplish. Wouldn’t understand the game that would render everything she believed in irrelevant. You don’t know why you’re thinking of her. You haven’t thought about her in years, but now you can almost see her; a short, round woman with thinning hair going gray at the temples. She’d had brown eyes.)

Where was Cal? Why does your head feel empty?

Your stomach also feels empty, and you aren’t sure what’s safe to eat around here. You rise up on legs that feel shakier than they should. The ground is uneven, but you try to walk. The undergrowth prickles against your skin, and you hope you aren’t brushing through the equivalent of poison ivy or sumac. There’s insects and birds, and the occasional fast, bounding shape heading away from your presence.

(You are more than a little worried about predators, and about lacking any kind of protection from same.)

Downhill leads you to the sound of water and the thirst that had been burning away at you for the past however many miles makes you hurry toward the sound. When you reach the bank of the stream you drop down to your knees. You’re about to scoop up a double handful of water when someone throws a fucking rock at you. It hits you in the back and you yelp, whirling around.

There’s a girl. Something like a girl standing a few yards away. She’s tall, has gray skin, huge curling horns that look too big for her to be standing under their weight. She has short black curly hair that looks like it had been mostly hacked off with a knife and dark eyes--you’re too far away to make out their color as anything other than dark. She’s wearing a leather skirt and tunic that has a feeling that’s more functional than sexy. There’s a bundle of some kind at her feet.

“What the fuck?” is the only thing that comes to mind to say.

“I should say that,” the girl says. Sort of says. Under the words you’re hearing in English are words in some other language you don’t know. “You want to be sick, go ahead and drink, foul yourself from both ends.” She smiles like a razor.

“Water’s clear?”

“Upstream a big prey beast fell in the water, too big for hunter beasts or carrion beasts to carry off easily. It rotted and sent foulness downstream. You drank and then gut pains started. You took fever and saw shit and broke your head falling down.” She says it not like it’s something she’s predicting, but like she’s telling you that this is something that already happened.

The realization is somehow more disturbing than anything else at the moment. “Well aren’t you a Good Samaritan,” you say slowly. “Think you coulda told me instead of throwing a rock?”

“No,” the girl says, smiling like she thinks she’s said something that’s fucking hilarious. You would definitely beg to differ on that. She picks up the bundle at her feet and tosses it gently toward you. It lands about a foot away. It’s a bundle of leather. You stoop to pick it up and find it’s a leather skirt and tunic like the one the girl’s wearing, and an honest to god flint knife. The blade’s about six inches long, and the hilt is wrapped in a leather cord. “Use ties,” she says, showing you a place in the waistband of her skirt that has a “ties” and a flint knife similar to yours held in place by them.

“Okay.” So the skirt ties off with a leather cord draw string. There are ties in the waist band for apparently knives and you think maybe also pouches or something. The tunic sleeves end at about the elbow, and it laces up the front with more leather cord. No shoes are included in the ensemble, and you can see that the girl isn’t wearing any.

“Come with me,” she says.

“Sure why don’t I follow the mysterious gray demon lady off into the unknown,” you say, even though you don’t have a lot of--any--options right now.

“You have somewhere else to go?” She asks, and heads off into the woods.

At a loss for anything else to do, you follow her. Up close her eyes are a warm garnet red and her sclera area gold yellow. It turns out she has a waterskin. The water is warm and tastes like ass, but is hopefully free of anything that sounds like dysentery from hell. You try to hand it back to her, but she lets you--makes you--keep it.

You walk, and the sunlight above the trees shifts considerably. Your feet hurt, your legs hurt, and you go uphill and then downhill at least three times, and then turn something like a bend that opens up into a clearing. The ground dips down and then back up again, and where it comes back up there’s something like a roof sticking out of a hill. Near the house is a garden, and what’s either a well or a cistern. “You’re kind of tall to be a fucking hobbit,” you tell the girl.

“Sleep under trees, if you don’t like,” she says, and heads down to her house.

You follow, because you might as well, having gone this far. The door is pretty big, so is the actual house. As you get closer, you realize food is being cooked, and you are even hungrier than you were when you first woke up.

The girl opens the door to her house and ducks inside, saying something loud that’s just a buzz in your ears. When you follow after her you have a moment of disorientation because there are two girls, absolutely identical standing by a fire pit in the center of the room. Then there’s just one girl. “Of course leave me to explain to the stupid clown,” the girl says glaring that the space formerly occupied by the other girl.

“Hard crowd tonight,” you say.

“Not you,” the girl says. She tilts her head deeper into the house. “Stupid high blood clown.”

This doesn’t explain a lot. The room’s lit by the fire in the pit, and the room is ventilated by the smoke hole and what look like a wicker grille covering holes in the roof. Meat is cooking on skewers over the fire, and something’s bubbling away in something like a leather pot. “Hot rocks from the fire,” she says, though you’d already figured out it was something like that. She shows you where to find what passes for dinnerware in the Neolithic: horn spoons and leather bowls, flat wood planks. (“I’ll figure out clay eventually,” she grumbles.)

She has you wash your hands twice before you touch the dinnerware or eat. (Cleanliness level: several hundred points above Clan of the Cave Bear.) The soap is soft and horrible and it feels like it’s trying to eat the skin off your hands. She only gives you a little of whatever had been cooking in the pot, a nutty smelling mush. “Wait, see if it makes you sick.” The meat is apparently safe for you to eat. You sample the food and wait a while to see if it makes you sick. When it doesn’t make you sick, you eat all of it.

You both eat in silence at a table that’s basically a section of tree trunk polished smooth and set up on smooth river rocks. She doesn’t ask questions any more than her twin sister had. It’s some variation of either she’d not curious or she doesn’t care. You don’t ask any questions either. It’s quiet, except for the crackling of the fire, and the sounds of whatever kind of crickets and frogs live out in the forest. You jump a little and then pretend you didn’t at the sound of something howling off in the distance. (The girl doesn’t react.)

The interior walls of the house are flat slabs of stone fit closely together without mortar. The floor is loose, coarse grained sand. It looks like someone took a piece of charcoal and sketched wild, abstract images on the walls. “Sooner or later he stop bitching about pigments,” she says. “Then my house look like fucking clown temple.” She rolls her eyes.

“Shit hole could use some color,” grumbles a voice like a bass drum for the dark of the next room. (Rooms.) “You bitching about my art again, Handmaid?”

“You call me that again and see how I serve, Highblood,” the girl snarls.

The voice laughs, and a skittering feeling runs over your skin and down your spine. “Who fuck’s out there?” the voice asks. “That ain’t you Demoness. That ain’t a fucking troll. This mudball have sentient life after all?”

“Has sentient life, just not here,” the girl--Demoness apparently--says. “Not yet.”

“Then who the fuck you breaking loaves with, geographically inclined rustblood?”

“Stupid fucker who breaks his head open three weeks from now,” Demoness says with an indifferent glacier coldness you can’t help but admire. “Just woke up, so takes too long to make him right.”

“Woke up. You mean like you and me woke up?”

“Come out and see, or are you sticking to your pile all spring like you did all winter?”

“Like you were traipsing out and about in the dark season ice,” the voice grumbles.

“Come out,” Demoness says. “I would threaten to give him your pile, but the rot from your maggot filled corpse would kill him, and my work all gone to waste.”

“You are the nastiest little bitch,” the voice says.

“Weak, hiding in your miasma all winter made you weak,” Demoness says.

“Motherfucking pale for you too,” the voice replies. There’s movement coming from the next room, followed by grumbling and cursing.

“Demoness” is pretty tall. Six foot eight, and not thin. She’s big and curvy with a lot of muscle mass under a pad of fat. Her skin has a kind of armored look to it, and had a smooth gleam that made you half expect to see your reflection in it. What comes out of the back room is maybe ten, eleven feet tall, and that’s not including the towering horns and wild, long hair like unto an eighties hair band. This guy is also broad as a house and his eyes are an indigo-purple that almost seems to glow. He’s wearing the same kind of skirt the girl is, along with something that’s more like a vest than a tunic. The armored look Demoness has is even more evident with him. He looks hard, almost segmented, though he doesn’t have the same gleam Demoness has.

“Highblood,” Demoness says.

“It’s a soft little thing, isn’t it?” Highblood asks, looming over you. He reaches out a hand and--

--you try not to be there--

--but he’s faster than you--

--And you freeze while he manhandles you. You’re frozen stiff and anything you might say is frozen behind a stone in your throat. Your heart however is going like a jackhammer. He moves your arms and legs, studies your joints, he touches your skin. He is so, so much colder than you. It’s weird and clinical, and it is way too much, he is way too close and he is manipulating your limbs like he wants to figure out the best way to tear you apart.

He lets you go finally, and you just kind of drop in a folded up heap on the floor. Highblood starts to rumble something to Demoness, but you don’t understand what he’s saying. Everything is a white washed blur and there’s a knife in your hand and you don’t understand anything. You uncoil at Highblood and lunge knife first--

And he isn’t there. You whirl, knowing, and this time you connect. It’s just a scratch, barely a scratch for this giant, blood thick and weird purple-blue. Then you are flying in the air and land on the far side of the firepit and Demoness holding back the giant with two slim white wands that are flickering a deep and furious red. “Yes poke at a damn sting tail and you’re surprised it stings! Stupid highblood fucker!” She screams up at the giant.

The big guy backs up, hands up and palm outward. “Not touching him, not touching you,” he says. “See, this is me backing right the fuck up. No need for the ashen conciliations”

You would very much like to abscond, but you’re knocked breathless and your mind is still crawling and shuddering from the giant touching you, from attacking the giant. You don’t think anything’s broken; it was just one hell of a belly flop. Anything you might say at this point is stuck behind the stone in your throat. You fold up and shake, your brain a tangled mess, listening to the shouting that is only occasionally comprehensible.

Demoness is snarling at Highblood. Highblood is talking fast and low, and under it is this deep humming sound that you are feeling more than hearing. You have no idea of what is going on or why he’s gone from fighting with you to trying to calm Demoness down.

You realize that’s exactly what he’s doing. It hadn’t been the giant who’d knocked you across the room, it had been the Demoness. The giant, Highblood, treating him (you) like a curiosity, like something to be studied, taken apart, broken. She’s angry because she hadn’t brought Highblood a toy, she’d taken in someone who was like them. (You don’t see how. You really don’t see how.) She’s angry because Highblood had been fucking around and underestimated someone because they weren’t another troll. Weren’t another highblood. Highblood was a fucking moron who could have been killed and he was just fucking around like he thought it was a game.

Demoness was right, Highblood is saying. He’d acted like the creature was tribute instead of a person. It had been so fascinatingly trolllike. He hadn’t planned on scaring it. He wasn’t going to hurt it. He had definitely underestimated it. Breathe girl, put down the fangs. Go check on the human, he’ll get his penitent ass out to the well for an ice cold scrub up.

“Go drown,” Demoness growls, and Highblood absconds. Then she comes over and pokes you with one of the white wands. “You alive?”

The stone is still pretty firmly lodged, so you grunt in more or less an affirmative, and bat at the wand. She steps back, and walks into the back of the house and emerges with a huge pile of bones, furs, rocks and who the fuck knows what else hovering behind her. This is not any more weird than anything else that’s happened since you woke up this morning. She opens the door and tosses all of it outside. “Clean your stinking pile!” She screams out the door, and shuts it. She glares at the door, and then turns back to you. “You tired?”

“Yeah,” you manage to croak.

She helps you to your feet, and takes you into the back, which is deeper into the hill, and a little lower than the main room. It’s a short tunnel that turns branches left and right. She goes right and the tunnel widens out into a room. Same stone walls and sand floor. Against one wall is a pile of dry grass covered by furs. There’s also a couple of shelves set in the wall with baskets full of clothes, bone, stone and wood tools. A few feet away from it is an area that looks like it was previously occupied by a similar pile with similar shelves and baskets. The light in the room is from little round candles set in niches in the wall.

Demoness grabs some furs from the shelf, measures out a space about three steps away from her pile, and dumps the furs on the sand. “Sleep here,” she says.

You collapse down into the furs and drop right over the edge into sleep.

#homestuck #bro strider #the handmaid #the demoness #the grand highblood #build a life

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the-real-midnight-society-blog · 7 years

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Rabbits in the Creek

I’m writing this because my family won’t talk about it anymore. I’m the only one who can’t seem to forget.

I was raised on the outskirts of Preston, a small town in southern Idaho with a population of around 5,000. My more immediate community was an isolated, dead-end dirt road called Bear Creek. Less than twenty families lived on the Bear Creek. I didn’t mind being so isolated. I grew up in the comfort of wide fields and close neighbors that only rural people know.

We were a Mormon community. Very church centered. Very community centered. All the young girls, myself included, were part of the Young Women’s group. And all of the boys were members of the local Boy Scout troop (which doubled as a church group in our area). We had 4th of July parties at the local ballpark and swam in the nearby reservoir. It was a good, quiet community.

My house, a 92 year old farmhouse built by my great-great-grandfather, was situated on a small hill surrounded by a wide grass field on one side, and a snaking dirt road on the other. Across the road was the creek bottoms. Southern Idaho is categorized in a desert climate, so not much grows outside of the irrigated fields besides sage brush and burrs. The creek bottoms were the exception. The creek fed the growth of a thick tangle of pussy-willow bushes. In the late fall we used to go down into the bottoms and pick the white, cottony pussy-willow seeds to decorate the fences of our driveway.

Being so isolated, it wasn’t uncommon for animals to come down from the mountains. We had a female moose who brought her calf down and lived in our orchard every winter. And the occasional lion wasn’t unheard of either.

The summer when I turned eight (I remember because it was the same year as my baptism), a smaller mountain lion was spotted several times in our area. We weren’t worried. The big cats stayed away from the farms and usually moved on when the area didn’t yield enough food.

The same summer my neighbor, Payton, was working on his Eagle Scout project. He loved National Geographic, and thought it would be pretty cool to try putting together a National Geographic submission on our little creek bottoms. The young lion that happened to be in our area at the same time made him especially excited. He decided he wanted to try and get pictures of the lion and e-mailed the National Geographic team for advice.

They recommended setting up an automatic camera that takes shots every couple of seconds in an area the lion was known to visit. They also recommended setting some kind of bait so the lion was more likely to come by. No one in the creek liked the idea of live bait or carrion, so we came up with a different kind of bait.

We decided to set up an audio recording of a dying rabbit and play it on a loop through a set of speakers hidden in the willows. I remember when everyone was down in the bottoms testing the speakers, and I heard the noise for the first time. The sound of a dying rabbit is horrible. It’s been described as being almost identical to the sound of a screaming child. If you’ve never heard it yourself, there’s plenty of recordings available online. It’s worth a listen.

The camera was set up. The speakers were set up. Everything was perfect. Payton explained that he would allow the camera and recording to play uninterrupted for a week, and then he would go check on it. This would give time for our scent to fade from the bottoms and encourage the lion to come closer.

At first I was worried about the noise. It was a truly horrible noise, and our house was the closest to the set-up point in the bottoms. My father assured me that the noise wouldn’t reach as far as our house, and I was relieved when we arrived home that night and he was correct. The bottoms were far enough away that I couldn’t hear anything.

I remember Payton the next day at church. He was fidgety and excited to check on the equipment. But he had to wait a week, which everybody kept reminding him. He couldn’t risk going down too early and scaring the lion away for good.

That night I woke up to an awful noise. I sat ram-rod straight in my bed with my eyes wide in the dark, hands clutched so hard my palms bore the indent of my fingernails for hours after. I knew that noise. It was the recording of the rabbit. It sounded faint, and far off, like it really could have been coming from the bottoms. But that was impossible. Because the recording had been going all night the previous day and I hadn’t heard a thing.

I didn’t sleep that night. I was too scared to get out of bed and wake my parents. The recording played over and over again. I had the loop memorized. In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. My mom and dad were sitting at the kitchen table. They too had dark rings under their eyes. I hadn’t been the only one who’d heard it.

Mom was convinced that the equipment must have been broken. She wanted to go down into the bottoms to check it out. Dad refused. He was a kind, gentle man and didn’t want to stir up any unnecessary drama. He was sure there had been a strong wind last night, and the wind was carrying the noise farther than it’s natural reach. He told us to listen. We did. He was right, we couldn’t hear it now.

We forgot about it and went about our daily goings.

The next night, it happened again. I stayed up in bed with my back to the wall. The screaming was even louder than before. But this time something was different. It was lower pitched than I remember. And parts of the loop were slowed down, as if the recording were warped in places. At times the loop did not loop naturally, and instead picked up at a random place in the middle.

My mom didn’t mention anything at the breakfast table. But both her and my dad seemed tense.

The third night I mustered the courage to stand beside my bedroom window and look out into the yard. For a moment I stood, rooted to the spot, my hands shaking no matter how hard I clenched them. The noise sidled in through the cracks in the window. I watched the outline of the trees in the yard. Perfectly still. Not even the slightest breeze stirred their branches.

My mom announced that she would be going to visit her sisters in town the next day, and would probably spend the night there. She invited me to come along, but I was a daddy’s girl at heart and chose to stay at the farm. I took mom’s place beside dad in their bed that night but even that didn’t help. I don’t think my dad was asleep either, for he was unnaturally still the whole night.

We began to hear the noise during the day too. I was drawing with chalk on the sidewalk when it happened. My shoulders tensed and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. There was only one scream. A short, high pitched one. And then the recording fell silent. It happened again several times throughout the day, but never the whole loop. Just clips from it.

Later that evening Payton’s dad came up the driveway on his 4-wheeler. He said he was looking for their dog, a sweet yellow lab who had been missing since that morning. Dad said he was sorry, and that we hadn’t seen her. I stared at him, silently begging him to mention the recording. But he didn’t. He was a quiet man after all. He didn’t want to bring up any unnecessary drama.

Mom stayed away the whole week. Dad and I didn’t sleep. By Saturday the screaming could be heard constantly, though it seemed to have deviated from the familiar loop entirely. I didn’t recognize any of it. Sometimes the screams were thin and long, other times they were hardly more than growls. Once, while my dad had been heating up meat loaf for lunch, the noise rose into such a rancorous din that he dropped the plate and it shattered. I pressed my hands over my ears where I sat at the table and squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn’t help. The noise forced its way in through the cracks of my fingers and pinched my throat and rattled in my ribcage. The din lasted for a whole minute, then fell silent.

Dad was shaking. That was the last we heard of the noise that day.

Payton came by Saturday evening to ask permission to cross our road to collect the equipment. He was so excited. I watched him disappear into the creek bottoms with a sense of tired relief. After the equipment was gone, it would all stop. I couldn’t wait to get a full nights sleep.

Not a minute later I spotted Payton coming back up from the creek. I was confused. It had taken us much longer to set up the camera and speakers, so I’d only assumed it would take just as long to collect them. My breath stilled when Payton came closer. He didn’t look right. His eyes were wide and his face pale. Something wet dribbled from his chin and onto his shirt; I later realized it was vomit. My dad caught him before he fell and demanded to know what had happened.

Payton couldn’t speak. He just cried.

We called his dad. I looked after Payton as both my dad and his dad went into the bottoms. They were gone a long time. When they returned, their faces were grim. And they smelled funny. I noticed red on my dad’s hands. I asked what was wrong but they brushed right passed me and immediately called the police.

Nobody would tell me what had happened. I sat on the couch as a blur of neighbors and police officers swirled around me. At one point an officer placed something on the kitchen table and left. I looked into the kitchen curiously. It was the camera from the bottoms.

I wish I hadn’t looked.

The camera was a little banged up. Tiny scratches and dents covered the plastic casing. When I lifted it my hands stuck to the plastic. Something tacky and odorous covered the screen, but it turned on fine.

The first set of photos were normal. Just the pussy-willows cast green in the glow of the night setting. As I continued to click through them they quickly became strange. At one point the camera angle changed, as if the camera had been knocked from its post. Grass now obscured most of the frame. Flecks of red appeared on the lens and remained for the rest of the sets. One photo made me pause.

There was a figure in this one. Or half of a figure as most of the upper torso hadn’t made it into the frame. I thought it could be human. But it didn’t look like it should be standing upright. It’s legs were twisted, like an animal, and it seemed to be having difficulty supporting itself in an upright position. Beside the legs a long, thin arm hung. Whatever it was must have been stooped over, for its fingertips hung below its crooked knees.

The next set was different. It was as if the camera had been picked up, and was now being held. The first photo was of the bottoms at night. The next startled me. I had to look closely before deciding what it was. A rabbit had been laid in the bushes, but its ears and most of its scalp had been peeled away. The next was of the same rabbit, but a thin, dark hand was holding it up against the sky. It’s limp body hung like something from a nightmare.

In the following photos more rabbits joined the one, each with their ears and scalp removed. Then a cat. Then more cats. Then a dog, the yellow lab. Then the lion. The following photo was of seven rabbits, three cats, one dog, and the lion all laid out in a row facing the same way. Their arms and legs had been arranged as if they were marching. Like some parade. All of their scalps had been removed and tiny white glints of their skulls could be seen.

The last photo was overly bright. Like the photo had been taken too close with the flash on. An eye dominated the frame, but it was yellowed and crusty, and had a bar pupil like a horse. In the bottom corner the edge of a mouth could be seen. No lips. Just teeth. Sharp and little, with wide gaps of red gum between them.

I wish I hadn’t looked.

I heard my dad talking to the police outside. They said the speakers had malfunctioned. The recording had only played the first night.

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