#i feel like there's nothing new that i can add and i staked so much of myself on writing 'different' types of fic for snk

[ladykailitha]

Staking a Claim Part 2

Hello! We get a resolution to the last cliffhanger and add a second less dire cliffhanger.

I will be posting this on Sundays and Tuesdays until it's completed for a total of six parts. Thursdays will be reserved for whatever story I want to update that week. It might be the soulmate AU, the werewolf AU, or even omega AU. Wednesdays are still for WIP Wednesday.

Part 1

***

Steve woke up with a pressing need to throw up. He sat up in a hurry and looked around. He didn’t recognize his surroundings and didn’t know where to go to empty his guts.

Someone thrust a bucket into his hands and he gratefully puked into it. A warm hand rubbed his back and that person began muttering encouraging inanities.

Finally he was able to stop and he looked up to see who his rescuer was.

“Eddie?” he murmured. “What happened?”

“Hey, babe,” Eddie whispered back. “Don’t worry about that right now. I just need you to keep throwing up whatever’s in your stomach, okay?”

Steve blinked at him a moment before he was forced to vomit again. It came out through his nose as well as his mouth. His nose was raw and his throat wrecked. But he couldn’t stop.

Tears ran down his face as he body continued to reject whatever it was that was causing this.

“That’s right, let it all out.”

Again Steve stopped and he looked up at Eddie mournfully. “I hate this.”

Eddie pulled him into his arms and held him tightly. “You think you can make the short walk to the bathroom?”

Steve nodded and went to go set down the bucket but Eddie stopped him.

“You might want to hold on to that just in case.”

Steve looked at Eddie then back at the bucket. He nodded.

“You hold onto your new friend Mr. Bucket,” Eddie said lightly, “and I’ll hold onto you. Okay?”

Steve nodded again and let Eddie help him to the bathroom. Eddie took the bucket and set it in the bathtub. He opened the toilet seat so if Steve needed to throw up, nothing would impede that and went in search of a spare toothbrush. He didn’t think that any of the guys would want Steve touching theirs and he wasn’t about to let him touch his.

“Eureka!” he whisper shouted. “When you feel up to it, you can use this to brush your teeth.”

Steve stared at him blankly like putting anything in his mouth would be a nightmare right then.

Eddie took a deep breath and held it for a moment. “Right, that’s not important at this moment. Got it. Priorities, Munson. Get it together.”

Tears streamed down Steve’s face and he whispered, “I’m sorry. I tend to ruin everything.” And then promptly began throwing up again. He started to shake as the vomiting and the cold got to him.

Eddie walked out and Steve really began to sob.

Then there was a warm blanket placed around his shoulders. “You didn’t ruin anything, Stevie. I promise I’ll tell you all about it when your well enough to hear it, but it wasn’t your fault.”

Steve sobs became hiccups then the hiccups became sniffles and then Eddie looked down to see that he had fallen asleep.

Eddie rocked him back and forth on the cold bathroom floor, trying hard to not fall in love with this man.

*

When Steve woke up a second time, he was in a cramped bathroom, wrapped in a warm blanket and pressed to Eddie’s side.

Eddie must have felt him stir. “Hey, baby. How you feeling?”

Steve buried his face into Eddie’s neck. “Like I’ve been run over. I didn’t think I drank that much to get this hungover.”

Eddie carded his fingers through Steve’s hair. “Do you still feel like you need to throw up?”

Steve lifted his head as he thought about it. “No. I feel like shit, but not like my guts are going turn themselves inside out.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad. Why don’t you take a shower and brush your teeth and I’ll set some clothes for you to change into on the toilet seat, okay?”

Steve nodded.

Eddie helped him to his feet and got the water in the shower started for him.

Steve stripped out of his clothes and got into the shower. He closed the curtain and just let the warm water wash over him. He thought hard about what happened last night.

The only thing he remembered was that he had been having a great time and then nothing. He heard the door open and then close quickly. He peeked around the curtain and saw the clothes on the toilet seat as promised.

Steve relaxed with a sigh. He looked around the shower and was surprised to see how neatly organized it all was. But he didn’t want to take anyone’s shampoo or anything so he just rinsed his hair instead. The body wash on the other hand was something he had to use. He opened each one to smell them, not wanting to grab something that would give him a migraine later.

He settled on the third one. It was woody, like pine. But not super strong or fake smelling. He got to work scrubbing himself down.

Once he no longer felt as though he’d been dragged out of hell by his balls he stepped out of the shower and dried off with the big fluffy towel that was on the hamper.

He dressed in the clothes Eddie had set out for him, complete with underwear. They still had the fold lines and wrinkles fresh from the pack. They were black boxers but then Steve couldn’t really see Eddie wearing anything else.

He slid them on and they were warm and comfortable. Next went the warm sweats and then finally the band shirt. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked and felt like shit. There was nothing for it. He had to go out and face the music.

Or at least Eddie Munson, which as far as Steve was concerned was the same thing.

When he walked out into the main part of the apartment, he could tell it was still early enough that everyone else was in bed, but not so early that it was obscene to be seen awake after a night at the bar.

Steve slid into one of the bar stools at the counter and watched as Eddie made breakfast. Eggs, link sausage, bacon, and hashbrowns.

“That’s a lot,” he murmured. “I’m not sure my stomach is going to appreciate your effort.”

Eddie grinned. “It seems really counter-intuitive, but greasy foods tend fair better on hangovers and upset stomachs. You’d think it’d be the opposite, but nope.”

Steve cocked his head to the side. “Huh, I never would have thought it either.”

“Why don’t you call someone to let them know you’re okay, while I go rouse the boys?” Eddie suggested as he turned all the heat on the stove to low. He nodded to the phone on the wall.

“Robin!” Steve cried. He looked around for a clock for the exact time. “Shit! I was supposed to be at work twenty minutes ago!”

***

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

@spectrum-spectre @estrellami-1 @zerokrox-blog @artiststarme @swimmingbirdrunningrock @gregre369 @pyrohonk ​@a-little-unsteddie @chaosgremlinmunson @chaoticlovingdreamer @maya-custodios-dionach @goodolefashionedloverboi @messrs-weasley @val-from-lawrence @i-must-potato @danili666 @carlyv @rozzieroos @wonderland-girl143-blog @justforthedead89 @emly03 @bookworm0690 @itsall-taken @vecnuthy @bookbinderbitch @redfreckledwolf @littlewildflowerkitten @yikes-a-bee @awkwardgravity1 @scheodingers-muppet @mira-jadeamethyst @cinnamon-mushroomabomination @genderless-spoon @anne-bennett-cosplayer @irregular-child @lololol-1234 @r0binscript @monsterloverforhire @mugloversonly @live-the-fangirl-life @f0xxyb0xxes @lublix

#my writing #stranger things #steddie #ladykailtiha writes #tw throwing up

[merakiui]

simply business.

yandere!azul ashengrotto x (female) reader cw: yandere, unhealthy behaviors/relationship, slight nsfw, misogyny, power imbalance, workplace misconduct, abuse of authority, ceo azul, secretary jade note - you'll do anything for this job. mr. ashengrotto wonders if there are limits to your anything.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you in person, Mr. Ashengrotto. Thank you for making time for me today. I can’t begin to imagine how packed your schedule is,” you admit with a gentle laugh.

Just as you practiced with Trey and Riddle, you shake his hand firmly and confidently. Even if most of your poise is feigned to hide a mountain of anxieties, it manages to fool the CEO of Mostro, for he mirrors your amiable greeting with one of his own. Or maybe he sees right through your act and is choosing to remain quiet. You’re not going to think too deeply about that.

“The pleasure’s all mine. You have no idea how startled I was when your application found its way on my desk. Why, I thought I was dreaming.”

If he brings up childhood memories, talk about it. Why not? Trey advised hours earlier, serving you and Riddle individual slices of strawberry tart. Friendship is just as good a connection as the one made through sweets.

Which is very solid guidance coming from a baker.

Even so, she shouldn’t rely solely on past connections. In business, that means nothing if the connection itself isn’t stable and worthwhile enough, Riddle, ever the realist, added with a grimace. We should know. We went to school with him.

Hey, don’t sweat it. You’ll do great, Trey added when he noticed the despairing look you’d given your tart. I’ll bake you something to celebrate, so do your best, be yourself, and bring home good news.

With his and Riddle’s encouragement, you had been so certain of your abilities before, in which you proudly proclaimed you’d get the job and charm Azul in the process, but now you’re not sure. Standing here in his office, thirty-something stories in the clouds, you can’t escape the suffocating fear as it saps the oxygen from the room and renders your lungs vacant.

“I aim to surprise.”

“And surprise you have. Pleasantly, might I add.” He motions for you to sit, to which you comply and lower into the seat across from him. A mahogany desk separates you from a sparkling future. Your gaze pans from him to the man standing a few inches behind, a clipboard and pen held in both hands. Standing isn’t the right word, actually. With his height, all lithe limbs dressed darkly, he looks like a bodyguard ready to escort you to your execution should you make the wrong move. You can handle one pressed suit, but another is too much. And this one looks even more intimidating than Azul with his sharp, stoic stare. “Pay him no mind. Jade’s merely here to make note of our discussion.”

“Ah, I see. Nice to meet you, Mr. Jade.”

He nods his silent acknowledgement, two-toned eyes filling with light.

“Shall we begin?” Azul gathers a few documents, straightens them, and then dives right into the rigmarole. “I must preface this by stating our past friendship has no influence on my decision or the outcome of this interview.”

“Completely understandable,” you blurt, trigger-happy with agreement.

Don’t be a yes-man, Riddle’s words from before float through your head, stern like a parent. You’re human, not some gear meant to strengthen their corporate machine. If they can’t see that, then that’s no environment for you.

“I… Actually, it feels a little awkward talking like this,” you add with a nervous sigh. “With the stakes being so high and everything… It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, but I’m happy you’re doing well for yourself. Oh! I’m not saying that to butter you up or anything! That’s my honest opinion.”

He chuckles. “I’m also pleased to see you again. Although going forward I would like to keep this matter separate from the task at hand.”

“Right. Sorry. We got off topic.”

He flips through the papers—likely your resume and application and any other information he has on file—and hums. “It says here that you have experience managing an online platform. Would you care to elaborate?”

“Oh, that. It was for my friend’s family business. He’s a baker. The shop has a nice reputation in the neighborhood, but they don’t really have any social media presence. My friend and I thought his family could benefit from a website and a Magicam account, so we put both together. I was in charge of creating and managing the website.”

“I see.”

You notice Jade scribbling something and your heart drops into your stomach. “S-So I have experience in design and…stuff.”

Relax. Don’t pay attention to him.

“Then may I assume you’re passionate about photography and graphic design?”

“Very.”

“It’s good to have an eye for aesthetics. I can clearly see that from the samples you submitted. Your portfolio is impressive.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ashengrotto. I take pride in all of my work.”

“In that case, would you mind walking me through your portfolio?”

“I’d be happy to.” You scoot closer to his desk without thinking, gesturing to the prints he’s laid out for you. “That’s the website I designed for my friend. He wanted something simple, family-friendly, and easy to navigate. I had to appeal to both customers from the neighborhood and customers who might be visiting for the first time. Finding a balance was a little difficult, but I made it work after lots of dedicated effort.”

He gestures to another sample and you delve into the lore behind it. This carries on twice more before he indicates his satisfaction with a beaming smile.

“Aren’t you diligent?”

The delivery is more backhanded than you’d care to hear, but you choose to brush it aside. “Thank you.”

“Your baker friend… Are you employed?”

“Oh, not currently! It was just a side gig. A one-time thing.”

“Is that all?”

You open your mouth to reply and then stop. Did you hear him correctly? “Is… Is what all?”

“You may not work for him in that capacity, but you might in another capacity. ‘One-time things’ could snowball into—”

“It didn’t and it never will,” you interrupt. You realize your error seconds later and smooth out the abrasiveness in your tone. “My apologies. I meant to say that I’m not affiliated with him in any of those ways. I’m merely a friend who helped out where she could. Nothing more and nothing less.”

Azul hums flatly, as if disappointed. Jade scribbles. You swallow mounting dread.

What was that about?

“Very well. Moving swiftly on… Can you tell me about yourself? What drew you to this job?”

“I’ve always wanted to manage a social media account for a business like yours. There are so many branches. I think it’d be a very fulfilling experience.”

“Is there a particular branch you’re interested in?”

“Definitely one of your restaurants. I’ve worked with food websites and accounts before, so I have the necessary qualifications you might be seeking.”

“Social media is no easy task. It can be stressful to manage any platform in which you have a following. With that in mind, may I ask how you normally handle stressful or challenging situations?”

“I don’t get stressed very easily. I’m normally very level-headed.”

Liar. I’m so stressed right now. Sweating like crazy and everything!

As if listening in on your thoughts, Jade drags his pen across paper.

“But in the event that you might face such a situation?��

“If such a thing were to occur, I’d take a step back, analyze everything objectively, and see what I can do to mitigate the stress or difficulty that’s cropped up. If it’s a team effort, I’d gather everyone involved for a meeting so that we could discuss together.”

“And if it was an individual effort?”

“It depends on the severity of the stress. If it comes down to it, I’d have no problem notifying my supervisor or manager of the issue firsthand. The sooner you’re made aware of something, the easier it is to draw up a plan of action, right?”

“That can be true, yes.” Azul shuffles his files. “How would others describe you? From the perspective of a friend, perhaps? Or a spouse? Are you married?”

That’s…way too personal. Is that even an interview question? So far he’s asked everything Riddle went over in our mock interview. What’s up with this sudden shift?

You force a stiff laugh. “Not married yet, no…”

“Do you plan to be?”

“Um… I…don’t know. I’m focused on my career right now.”

“Ah, a career woman. Most women your age often settle down. Not you, though. Ambitious thing, aren’t you?”

Your lips twitch into the beginning of a scandalized grimace, but before you can allow your tactful façade to slip you hurry to paste an unruffled grin on your countenance. “I’m passionate,” you smoothly correct. You don’t miss the way Jade’s pen halts before he continues his duty as scribe. “If I may, Mr. Ashengrotto, did you not say you wanted to keep work and personal matters separate?”

“Forgive me. I was only testing you.”

Just what kind of test is that?

“O-Oh. Well, I hope I passed.”

“With flying colors.” He clears his throat. “Now then, what motivates you, Miss (Name)?”

“My friends and family. Myself. The food waiting for me at home.” He quirks a slight smile at that. “I always strive to do my best.”

“A fine attitude to have.”

“Mhm! I like what I do. Every day’s exciting and I love a good challenge.”

No, I don’t. I almost cried on the way here. This is too much of a challenge for me. I didn’t even think I’d get an email back from you…

“You seem like quite the optimist.” He straightens the papers once more and then clips them together. “I appreciate your insightful, honest answers.”

“Oh. Oh! Yes, right! Of course! Thank you for your time.” You practically jump out of your seat to shake his hand.

That was good, right? It felt so fast, but I did well. Right?

“If I may ask one final question…”

“Sure thing!”

Azul smiles. “Just how badly do you want this job?”

More than anything. I need this job. I’m unemployed and desperate. Please, Azul. You have to help me out.

Obviously you can’t phrase it like that, even though the spineless side of you wants to.

“I…would benefit greatly if I was hired. Working for you and your successful company would be an amazing honor.”

“Is that right?” He releases your hand. “All right. The job is yours.”

You blink at him, shocked. “Wait. It is?”

“On one condition.” Azul sits back in his plush office chair. It’s the expensive type. The one with cushions and reclining abilities. “Strip for me.”

Your blood crystallizes in your veins; your heart almost stops. “Excuse me?”

Surely he didn’t just say that. Surely he meant to say something else. Something like…strip all of your worries and accept this position? Your eyes drift over to Jade. He blinks back at you, a razored smile hidden behind his clipboard.

“If you’re willing to go to extremes for this job, prove it.”

“Mr. Ashengrotto… I…” You laugh, but nothing about this is funny. Bile rises in your throat, scalding with sickening acid. “I…”

“Go on then.” Azul waves his hand impatiently, deceptively youthful features twisting with annoyance. “I haven’t got all day.”

Your hands curl into fists, and you dig your nails into your palms so roughly that you break skin. He can’t be serious. He really can’t.

And yet he’s watching you like he expects it.

Again, you look to Jade for help. He lowers his clipboard. “It’s not polite to make one wait, Miss (Name). We pride ourselves on timely efficiency here.”

“But…” You swallow thickly, your hope slowly waning. “But this… This is absurd! I… You must be joking. I can’t possibly—”

“You can,” Azul interjects. “If you want this job, you will do just as I’ve said. Well? The choice is yours. I’ve played my hand.”

Warmth drains from your person until all that’s left is creeping cold.

Oh, you think with devastating resignation, it’s this kind of management. So this is how everyone survives here.

Inhaling through your nose, you steel yourself. Your fingers twitch towards the buttons on your blazer.

“Will I truly get the job?”

“That depends.”

“On what?” you ask, dreading the answer.

“On how far you’re willing to go.”

“C-Can he leave?”

Azul glances at Jade, a sticky smile spreading his lips wide. “Oh, you’ll hurt his feelings with that. How cruel. I can already see the tears brimming in Jade’s eyes.”

“Heartless,” Jade echoes with a sniffle.

You school your scowl into something friendly. “I… I’m sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable with him here…”

“And you do with me? I’m flattered, but our past has nothing to do with this. I’m grateful you bothered to give me a Valentine every school year, but those days are behind us. So stop wasting my time. It’s money, and every second you spend stalling is a Madol lost.”

Your lip trembles, but you don’t cry. You won’t give either of these rotten monsters the satisfaction.

“H-How much do I have to undress to get the job?” You toy with a button, regret pooling in your stomach.

It’s not worth it. I should leave.

You should, but can you?

“We’ll see. I’m feeling generous today, so your fortune may just be favorable.”

Hopeless, you shut your eyes, exhale a defeated breath, and harden your features into something unshakeable.

I’m sorry, Riddle. I’m not a gear here. I’m not even human.

Slowly, while holding unbreakable eye contact, you undo each button on your blazer. You shrug out of it seconds later, dropping it to the floor unceremoniously. Azul and Jade follow your movements like expert predators ensorcelled by prey.

Here, in this hellish bathyal zone, I’m just a whale fall.

From there, you move to your blouse next. You untuck it from your pencil skirt, allowing the fabric to fall freely. Deft fingers work at the buttons, traveling further down until there’s nothing left of the garment protecting your nudity. That, too, joins the slowly forming heap on the floor. The action leaves both men transfixed, and they eye your lacy white bralette as if attempting to sear the sight into their retinas. At one point, Jade decides to write something down. You fondly contemplate all the ways in which he should die.

“Will that be all?”

“Keep going.”

“Haven’t I done enough?”

“If you have room in that mouth to voice complaints, you can stuff it with my—”

You yank your pencil skirt down, silencing the sin that was ready to spill from Azul’s lips. Jade doesn’t muffle his snicker. Again, you fantasize about pushing him out the window.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

With trembling hands, you reach behind your back to unclasp your bra. It’s peeled from your chest then, exposing your tits for their ravenous leering. Their silence says enough. After what feels like an eternity, Azul stops you when you start to slide your panties down.

“I’ve seen enough.”

“On the contrary, I’ve yet to have my fill.” Jade smiles at you, hiding behind his clipboard like the coy bastard he is.

You stand there, clutching your bra so tightly your knuckles ache. “Is… Is it over?”

“For now.”

At that, you fall to your knees, wrap your arms around your chest, and suck in great gulps of air. Fixing your stare on the floor, you find yourself unable to meet his azure hues. If you do, you may just vomit. Footsteps click their way over to you. He pauses; you can feel his gaze burning through you. And then his fingers ghost over your bare shoulder, dancing like playful puppets.

“You start Monday. Bright and early,” Azul says. There’s a detached, clinical edge to the fluff. “I expect wonderful things from you, Miss Marketing Manager.”

As if his words have materialized to topple you—to shatter what’s left of your dignity—you almost collapse. Your arms shoot out to catch you; your palms press against the icy tiles. Still, you don’t cry. Jade’s leather shoes enter your line of sight, which immediately dries your ducts. You don’t have to look to see the satisfied smirk sharpening on his lips because you hear it.

“I must thank you for the entertaining show. Perhaps you should have considered a career in acting.” He drapes your blazer over your shoulders for added effect.

It’s the loudest fuck you in the quietest sentence.

I hope you die a million painful deaths, you despotic, disgusting dickhead.

When you finally stagger out of the building—fully clothed and gutted—dropping thirty-something floors from heaven to the sensible earth below in a compact lift, you fish your phone out of your bag. You’re moving on autopilot when you press his contact. Trey answers on the third ring.

“I was waiting for this call. So what’s the news? Am I baking a celebration cake or a consolation cake? I’m ready for either one. Just say the word.”

The tears are already streaming down your face. You wipe them away, smudging your makeup in the process. “No consolation needed. I… I got the job…”

“See? I knew you’d get it. This’ll be the best celebration cake you’ve ever tasted. Just you wait and—hey, you okay? You don’t sound good.”

You open and close your mouth, unable to pull a reply from the dry depths of your throat. For one minute, Trey listens to your soft, hiccuping sobs. “I’m just—” you sniffle— “I’m so happy… I can’t wait to eat cake.”

#yandere twst #yandere twst x reader #yandere twisted wonderland #yandere twisted wonderland x reader #yandere azul #yandere azul x reader #yandere azul ashengrotto #yandere azul ashengrotto x reader #n/sfw

[autisticlancemcclain]

“Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s why your ideas are stupid and we’re all gonna die.”

Keith fumes. Like, actually fumes, making the noise and everything, face bright red and scowl twisting his face so tightly that there’s a genuine concern he’s in pain. Lance, on the other hand, looks completely unbothered, flexing his fingers and checking his nails like he has no stake at all in the conversation.

Hunk exchanges a glance with Pidge. He’s at least glad they know better, if not poor Keith — Lance’s leg is bouncing up a storm underneath the table. He’s just as affected as Keith is, he’s just being a dick for brains because he’s emotionally stunted.

“If there’s something wrong with the plan,” Keith says, carefully enunciating every word through gritted teeth, “then please point it out to me and suggest an alternative.” The ‘otherwise shut the fuck up’ goes unsaid, but Hunk feels the sentiment is pretty clear regardless.

Lance upheaves a big, dramatic sigh, flopping backwards in his chair and covering his eyes with his hand like merely voicing his thoughts is such a struggle.

Keith’s eye twitches.

“You’re going to get a knife thrown at your head,” Hunk warns pleasantly, fully aware that it will do nothing.

He’s right. Lance ignores him.

“Look here,” he says, flicking a hand — with a more than reasonable amount of fanfare, Hunk will add, in fact he’s relatively certain that Lance has painted his fingernails gold entirely so they shine and catch everyone’s attention when he waves his hands around — at the holo blueprints Keith has pulled up of the Empire warship. “I mean, you have a plan that would work well for an EXC-76E-5 ship. Enter through the west hatch, sneak through the side hallways, ambush the gathered crew on the bridge. Except —” he swipes the image to the side, pulling up a file and displaying a photo sent by the Blades of the ship they’re currently planning to infiltrate — “the ship we’re infiltrating is an EXC-76E-4, dumbass. The hallways available to the west hatch opening don’t lead to the bridge, they lead to the armoury. If we mosey our way to the one place on the ship loaded with bombs and trigger happy Empire soldiers, it’s bye-bye Voltron.” He raises an eyebrow, smirking slightly, before parting his hands in faux surrender. “Of course, you’re the leader, though. If you say it’s time to go boom, I say sayonara, cruel word. Your wish is my firm command, Oh Fearless Leader.”

There’s a moment of tense, shocked silence. Hunk hurriedly pulls out his own file, noticing peripherally that everyone else does, as well, and hurriedly scans the report — the Blades have mistakenly noted in the write-up that the ship model is the EXC-76E-5, but the photos show, very clearly, an EXC-76E-4. Lance is right, and is the only one to notice — he must have all the models memorized. It’s a very Lance thing to do.

So is being a smug little shit about it, Hunk knows that for certain.

Beside him, Allura is biting her lip hard to keep from laughing. Over the past few months, her and Lance have gotten much closer, and while that has done wonders for team dynamics, it has also done wonders for Lance’s ego, which is.

Well.

It just is.

Pidge is also notably hiding her face with her hands. Hunk himself has several years of practice keeping his face in check when Lance is right, as is his duty as the number one Lance humbler (and as Lance’s duty with him — Hunk will admit that he can be a cocky shithead when he wants to be), so he’s looking straight at Keith.

Keith’s face has dropped to a deadpan stare. He grinds his teeth, glancing at the file and then back up at Lance, who smiles sunnily as if he’s not the absolute king of being as irritating as possible as often as possible.

“You know what your problem is?” Keith mutters, angrily swiping his hand through his battle plans to delete them and pulling up new blueprints.

Lance grins smugly, placing his hands under his chin and his elbows on the table. He blinks slowly, then opens half-lidded eyes towards Keith.

“Enlighten me,” he says.

“You,” Keith continues, as if Lance had not spoken, “are really cute, so no one ever told you to shut your fucking pie-hole.”

For the second time in the last ten minutes, the briefing room rings with shocked silence. Keith doesn’t seem to have noticed that he said it, or even that he said it to Lance’s face — he’s muttering grumpily to himself, crossing out every other thing he writes. He’s not even looking at Lance.

Lance, on the other hand, looks completely shocked. Shocked does not begin to cover it, honestly. Startled, maybe? His hands have dropped from under his chin, and his brown eyes are wide, looking at Keith in disbelief. His mouth is open slightly, gaped, at a total and complete loss for what to say.

Allura loses her battle. She clamps her hand over her mouth, trying her damnedest to muffle her laughter, eyes tearing with the effort. Pidge’s shoulders have started to shake, too. Hunk, for his part, can’t decide who to stare at, flicking wide eyes between Dumbass #1 and Dumbass #2.

Suddenly Lance’s expression shifts — the shock evaporates from his face, and in its place is something smug, something unbelievably satisfied, like a cat that knows it has its prey exactly where it wants it.

Hunk is generally a mature person, but drama is his weakness. He is straining every part of him so as not to miss a word.

Lance allows Keith a couple more moments of frustration, then starts tapping a nail on the table, a sound that is well known to annoy Keith quickly and reliably. When he, as expected, whips his head towards the sound and glares, Lance smirks, eyes honestly a little salacious between fluttering eyelashes.

“You think I’m cute?” he purrs.

It takes Keith maybe half a second to clock what the hell Lance is talking about, and then he goes so red that Hunk is sure he can feel the heat of his face, from exactly where he’s sitting, ten feet away.

Seriously, he’s glowing.

“Shut your pie-hole!” he snaps. “God!”

Rapidly, he turns back to the holoscreen, enlarging the proper blueprints with his new plans so everyone can see.

Lance cackles, continuing to snigger as Keith tries valiantly to outline his new plan and not die of self-induced heat exhaustion.

When Hunk peeks over Lance’s shoulder to look at his notes, though, he sees that he’s been dotting his i’s with hearts.

———

comic this fic is based on

#someone sent me an ask with this link i KNOW it but i can’t find it 😭😭 #vld #voltron #lance #lance mcclain #keith #keith kogane #klance #pre klance #hunk #hunk garrett #hunk & lance #team as family #post s3 #banter #smart lance #observant lance #pining lance #pining keith #hunk is so done #lance is a little shit #my writing #fic #longpost #dramatic lance #brown-eyed lance

[sokkastyles]

How do you feel about the live action so far? Personally, I like some of the changes they made but I miss Katara’s whole character and I don’t think Ozai’s characterization works very well.

I'm enjoying it as an adaptation. There are also things that disappoint me about it as an adaptation, but I still think I am enjoying it as an adaptation more than i would have if I had just watched it as if were an original story, with no knowledge of the original series. It lacks a lot of the things that made the original series stand out. It kind of pains me to say it, because they tried, they really did. They tried with the bending, and a lot of it is impressive and clearly inspired by the original. But it still is not as impressive as the original. Part of that is because of the fact that it's not new, part of it is the change in medium. Part of it is just that the magic isn't there.

I keep thinking about, for example, Aang's fight scenes. Don't get me wrong, the LA does a great job. They clearly thought everything out. Gordon is great. The martial arts moves are nicely choreographed and clearly inspired by the original. The effects are nice. But Aang still doesn't feel like an airbender the way he did in the original. A large part of this is that they are working with real people and a more realistic medium. The actors just can't be as naturally dynamic as animated characters. Every airbending move Aang does has to be done with special effects and deliberate shots and there's just so much work that needs to go into it that a lot of the casual airbending Aang does in the original is gone. And this isn't so much a criticism because I recognize that this has to come with the change of medium. But, as I said, it does diminish some of the magic of the original. The same reason we don't get, for example, Zuko blowing smoke through his nostrils. The side effect is that he doesn't feel as connected to his element.

I'm a big fan of animation as an art form, and the things I mentioned about the original ATLA? That is animation as an art form at its essence. We get a sense of who a character is just by their stance, or how they move, and the artist uses their medium to convey it without words. The actors do a lot to try and make up for it, but you're still inevitably going to lose something in the translation.

See my previous post for my thoughts about Ozai based on the first four episodes I've seen. Katara is another sore point for me. She feels like such a non-character here, there's nothing really memorable about her. She's not offensive, but she's not anything special, either, and it is a shame since she's such an iconic character for the series as a whole. I'm not here for discourse about how she needs to be more feminine or more angry or more etc. etc. etc. But what they've given us is just so bland that if I didn't already know the character I probably would think nothing of her at all.

As an original story, the live action series seems to lack direction. As I said, if I hadn't watched the original show I would probably have gotten bored by now because of having no real sense of who a lot of these characters are or where they are going or what the stakes of this story are.

I'm mostly enjoying the show as an adaptation that can bring me some new perspectives on these characters, the way I would a fanfic that has its hit or miss moments. Then I can take those things and add them to my own fanfics and metas and thoughts about these characters and this world.

#atla live action

[featherymalignancy]

Okay like if you agree, but….

here are 3 trends that I wish the fantasy genre would take a break from for a little while.

*Quick disclosure, this isn’t meant to feel overly negative, I mostly want to hear other people’s opinions on these trends and others!*

Hungry Games-esque “a competition with deadly stakes” plot lines. On the one hand, I get it, because like the rest of the world, I was totally enthralled by this premise when it was first introduced in the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale and later, the Hunger Games. However, at this point the idea of the main character entering into a deadly competition feels a little tired and predictable, and unlike Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, the many of the latest iterations lack the searing social commentary which made the premise so compelling. Notable Examples: Serpent and the Wings of Night, Lightlark, The Jasad Heir

Motherfucking EPIGRAPHS. You know, that line or paragraph of text which proceeds every chapter. In the fantasy genre, often it is an except from a historical or religious text from the world in which the book is set. And here’s the thing—it’s not that I hate epigraphs, or that I don’t understand their purpose. They can be an elegant way to add context to the story without burdening the main narrative with too much exposition, and they can also help the created world to feel more “lived in”. Having said that, I feel like they are starting to get way overused, and for me, they’ve gone from feeling like a cool way for the author to provide context and add meta commentary to their story to serving as a slightly less clunky vehicle of info-dumping. Like…am I supposed to be remembering the characters of this lore which I only ever hear about through these epigraphs, because I can assure you, I am not. In other instances, they can feel like an authors lack of faith in the reader, as if they are afraid we might miss the point if they don’t include an unsubtle cue as to where we ought to focus our attention at the start of every chapter. I respect the role epigraphs have played in fantasy classics like Dune and Wheel of Time, but I currently feel the number of novels employing them has become fatiguing, and I hope the trend of including them decreases, at least in the short-term. Notable examples: Fourth Wing (Empyrean Series, Swordcatcher, Furyborn (Empirium series)

A [Blank] of [Blank] and [Blank] Not much to say here other than…when are romantasy authors going to let this go?? 😮‍💨😮‍💨 While you could argue the true genesis of this title naming convention could be GRRM’s A Song of Ice of Fire, I think we can all agree that—for better or worse—it was the popularity of ACOTAR that sent this title style into the stratosphere, and at this point, it has become ubiquitous to the point of literal disorientation. To me there is nothing inherently wrong with this title style (though I would also argue there is nothing particularly gripping about it, at least not enough to warrant a trend of this size) but it basically renders all of these books—which are already of a similar vibe and style—virtually indistinguishable. As a reader on the hunt for new books to scratch that romantasy itch, it’s nearly impossible to tell the dozens of titles bearing this title apart, which means I have no sense which which ones I’ve read, which I haven’t, which caught my interest, which I started and didn’t care for, etc. I have idea how much of this is a consequence of publishers trying to capitalize on a known entity in order to make the most money and how much is just the fact that naming a book is really fucking hard, but good lord, what is it gonna take to stop this madness? Notable examples: quite literally too many to name

What do yall think? Do you agree, disagree? What are some fantasy trends you’d like to see go away/make a comeback

#feathery asks #fantasy genre #fantasy trends #iron flame #SJM

[quaranmine]

The Incandescence of a Dying Light (Chapter Eleven)

This is a story about grief and fire.

Chapter eleven: 13,460 words

<< Chapter Ten | Masterpost | Chapter Twelve >>

Hello everyone! I’m so sorry for the wait. But chapter 11 and 12 together add almost 20k words to this fic, and I actually ended up redrafting and restructuring parts of these chapters a lot. I wanted them to be as perfect as possible, because these chapters are it: the core of the plot paying off. The bad news is it’ll probably devastate you, the good news is that I will be releasing chapter 12 a few days after this so there won’t be a wait.

There's several content warnings that apply to this chapter. It's not obvious because this is the tumblr copy of this fic, but it's marked as CNTW on AO3. CWs: general mental health/breakdown, dissociation, vomiting, death, suicidal ideation (of the abstract kind), fires/burn/injury. I don't think it's too graphic but it is…unpleasant imo.

July 1989

Grian hangs up on Scar with a flick of a button. It’s a lot less dramatic than the satisfying clack of slamming a telephone receiver down into its base, but the effect is just as instant. With a press of a button, he silences the faint static of the radio and Scar’s worried voice forever, bathing him in nothing but the silence of the forest. 

There’s him, the wind in the leaves above him, and the way his hands tremble as he sets the handheld radio down. Nothing else. 

He’s unsteady. It’s a good thing he’s already sitting on the forest floor. He clamps a hand over his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut. He sits there for a moment, trying to regain control of his ragged breathing, as if he can by just breathing through his nose instead. It’s not working. His thoughts are racing. He breathes faster instead. 

He feels—

Broken. Betrayed. Bitter. Burning himself over and over with the same mistakes, pitfalls, and dangerous hopes as always. 

He feels like an idiot. 

He feels like an idiot, because why should he assume someone was in his corner? Why did he ever say anything to Scar? Why didn’t he shut up? Why did he trust that when Scar helped him, it was because Scar believed him? Why did he fall for it? 

He should have known better. He’s alone out here. It’s been like that since the beginning. It was kind of the point, actually. To come out here and be alone, because that’s the only way he’ll fix anything. He failed that goal by making friends with a stranger instead and now he’s suffering for it. It hurts too much.

But perhaps worse, perhaps the most insidious thought that keeps snaking around his mind is—

What if Scar is right? 

The thought is like a giant, flashing billboard in his mind. He can turn away from it, but he knows it’s behind him. He can close his eyes against it, but the lights still blink against his eyelids. When he opens his eyes, he sees the stark truth of it all in each miserable outline of leaves against the sky. There’s some sort of wave crashing over him, and he isn’t sure which way is up anymore. 

Everything is unavoidable, constantly present. Unpleasant. 

He tries to find his logic again, but the bright, clear throughline he’s been following since day one is frayed. It shouldn’t matter what Scar thinks, in the same way it doesn’t matter what Pearl or Jimmy or any of his other friends think. It shouldn’t matter that Mumbo hasn’t been back to collect his things, because this is not proof that anything happened to him. This is only proof that Mumbo got lost, and that’s something Grian has known since day one. There is nothing new here, except proof that Mumbo was in this location at some point. That should be good news, a new puzzle piece for him to worry over.  

It shouldn’t matter, but—

He feels very small in the forest suddenly. The trees around him have no stake in who lives and dies. They stand tall, a witness to the happenings of everything beneath them, but they cannot interfere. There are miles and miles of wilderness around Grian. There are mountain streams and creeks and gullies and canyons and caves that no human has seen for years. There is an almost infinite number of trees and flowers and grasses and shrubs and mammals and birds and bugs that populate this little world, and Grian is but one tiny speck in the midst of this. So is Mumbo. 

He can’t find meaning in this. He can’t dig up some special exception, some reason that Mumbo is uniquely special in this ecosystem and it will all solve itself happily because the very ground itself will vow to keep him alive. This is a place filled with life and death and cutting wind and sharp stones. This is a place where fires raze down forests, mountain lions kill straggling deer, and people go missing. 

These thoughts send him spiraling again. 

So instead he tries to bury the feeling again, with desperate shaky hands. Like a zombie apocalypse, it just won’t stay dead. He’s dizzy. He stands up suddenly, leaving his own pack on the ground next to Mumbo’s, and takes a staggering step backwards to gain some distance from it all.

He has to find the rest of Mumbo’s camp before he moves on.

He tells himself not to dwell on it, but every other thought is punctuated by it. He tells himself to stop freaking out, to keep going, to just move forward, to keep his feet on the ground, but his laser focus is burnt out. These are all the things he’s told himself before, and it worked then. Why won’t it work now? 

He finds Mumbo’s campsite easily through the trees, since it’s only a few hundred feet from where he left his food. The campsite is totally empty. Mumbo clearly packed everything up before he left to make sure he didn’t tempt any curious wildlife. 

It’s rather anticlimactic, really, the way nothing is left here. There is an open space on the ground begging to have a tent set up on it, and a ring of stones encircling the ashes of an old campfire. Maybe Mumbo made that fire. When he went camping in early June of last year there wouldn’t have been any fire restrictions in place yet, at least not until the disastrous Yellowstone fires started shortly afterward. Or maybe it’s just as likely that someone else made it, since this campsite has clearly been used by other people in the past. 

It’s a beautiful place, he realizes. For some reason the realization puts a lump in his throat. Mumbo chose this spot because it was beautiful, and it is beautiful. It is beautiful. 

They’re in an aspen grove, surrounded by stark white trunks and bright green leaves. The aspens always have the brightest green leaves, compared to the darker green of the spruce trees. Grian has learned their colors well after spending so long examining the landscape from his tower. He loves how the different types of trees form a patchwork of different colors on the slopes. These trees will glow even brighter in autumn, when they paint the hillside in gorgeous golden yellow. 

Scar told him once that aspen groves are actually all one tree. An aspen can reproduce by essentially cloning itself and sending up shoots to sprout as a new sapling. All of the clones share a root system, and their leaves will turn color at the same time. But to the person standing in the middle like Grian, it looks like an endless amount of trees instead of a single entity. It looks like eternity, just like the mountains and hills look like eternity from the high point of his lookout tower. 

Aspens also like to grow in recently burned areas. This one, though, hasn’t seen fire for some time. The colony is mature, and from Grian’s perspective the trees are uncountable. He’s surrounded by them, and he’s alone, but the trees aren’t alone. They’ve got all their twins next to them. But there’s nobody to stand next to him. There’s nobody here but him. 

He turns around, and stares at the pair of backpacks on the ground. He needs to figure out what to do with Mumbo’s pack. There isn’t any way he can carry it. He has his own weight to carry, and he has no room to add anything else. For the distances he needs to travel, he can’t afford to add more weight. He chokes a little on this realization. This is just another thing he’s going to have to leave behind. 

There’s a hierarchy of things, and finding Mumbo himself is more important than keeping his belongings. 

Finding Mumbo—

In any way. 

Grian said that once earlier in the summer, about another missing person. He hoped they were found, in any way. For some reason, he remembers saying this now. He remembers finding the poster for that missing person, and thinking so fiercely how much it hurt that nobody was still in his corner after all these years. He remembers the ache that settles in around lost causes, and the deep sadness in Scar’s voice when he talked about how long that man’s case had been unsolved. 

He’s becoming that person who gives up on lost causes. 

No! 

He shakes his head sharply, like it’s going to rattle the thoughts right out. He isn’t going to do that. He can’t do that. He isn’t like that. He isn’t giving up on Mumbo, because there is nothing to give up. This is just the test of faith at the eleventh hour. He needs to press further, because this is just the next step in his case. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. 

What evidence is there, really, of Mumbo being dead? A missing persons report? The endless months on the calendar? The harsh winters? The abandoned survival equipment? None of that is physical, tangible proof. None of that is, is—

None of that is a body. That means he needs to keep going. That means he needs to keep going, even if he hikes until his feet bleed. 

But…what evidence is there, really, of Mumbo still being alive? 

This thought is a cliff, and Grian is stumbling over the edge into the abyss. At the last moment he turns back, flinging out a hand and grasping whatever he can find to keep himself from falling. Going over the edge means opening up a world of possibilities Grian doesn’t know how to deal with, or even begin to approach. It violently resets every facet of his life into something completely different. Something that can’t, and won’t, ever be the same. He doesn’t know how to live with that, and so before the yawning maw of these thoughts can eat him, he shoves them away. 

He scrambles away from the edge into safety.

But once you know the edge is there, it never leaves. 

He has to go somewhere else. He must go forward. The thing about life is that everyone must always go forward. When Grian couldn’t get out of bed last year, he still woke up the next day even if he didn’t remember falling asleep. When he skipped work, the bills still arrived. When Grian took this job, every mile he walked was another piece of the mystery shaved down into something slightly more manageable. 

No matter if Grian is being dragged there or not, all he knows how to do is move forward. The only way to stop is to be dead. Did Mumbo stop? Did Mumbo stop going forward? 

Where would Mumbo have gone? What would his goal have been? 

He must have hiked further upward. The Pinnacles trail is named for its interesting rock formations, and this trail gets much more difficult the further one hikes. There is a pass at the top where it dips down the other side of the mountain and joins the old river trail that fur trappers used to use. Mumbo would have had to hike this trail instead of ride it. That's obviously why he left his bike. There’s too many steps and too many rocks to do anything else. 

So, up he goes. Before he leaves, he places Mumbo’s pack against the tree it was strung up in, upright like a crude headstone. It’s a brightly colored, out of place marker in this natural setting—something crafted and sewn by human hands, carried by human bodies, and left behind consciously by a human mind. 

Grian leaves. 

He barely thinks about where he puts his feet, even when the trail starts to get fainter beyond the pinnacles it is named for. He barely thinks about anything grounded in reality at all with the way his thoughts circle relentlessly. He stumbles a few times, missing steps, but it doesn’t matter. 

The Pinnacles trail is not actually just an out-and-back trail; it’s a spur trail that connects into a larger network of wilderness routes. It’s as well-traveled as a highway up until it reaches the main landmark, and after that it drops off to a route only marked by the occasional cairn. It is clear that most hikers turn around after reaching the stones. Grian knows Mumbo kept going, because Grian knows Mumbo. 

The top of the mountain is not far from here.  It seems like something that would have drawn Mumbo to keep going further. It’s some sort of tangible achievement, with a view to match. Since Mumbo was camped along the trail, it wouldn’t have taken him long to reach the pinnacles, unlike visitors who likely started much farther down by Jonesy Lake. Why stop and waste the rest of the day? 

Mumbo had taken this time off last year to get a break from his job. He used to come home from it looking hunted—chased down with too many demands for too little reward. He used to talk about quitting. He had wondered if it had been worth it to even take the job. He moved to another country for it, after all. 

Whether it was worth it or not wasn’t something Grian could answer for him. He’d just listen to Mumbo complain instead, and then maybe change the subject to something more fun, something distracting. It always bothered him to listen to Mumbo speak like that. 

The answer to the problem was more complicated than just quitting, though. Grian could stay in the country as long as he wanted thanks to his dual citizenship. He was essentially there at a whim, following Mumbo so that he didn’t have to move to another country alone. Mumbo, however, was on a working visa that required him to keep a job in order to legally stay. His job was sponsoring him, allowing him to apply for the visa in the first place. As such, it wasn’t as simple as merely quitting. 

Maybe he just wanted some sort of achievement to take back home, like climbing a mountain. Something he could think about when his boss tried to make him feel worthless. 

Grian keeps going, and carries the pain and the pointlessness of it all as heavily as his bag that bites into his collarbones. 

»»———-　　———-««

It isn’t until Grian is forced to stop, coughing and hacking so violently he feels like he may break his own ribs, that he even remembers Scar’s plaintive admonition. 

Keep your radio on. Switch to the main frequency. Be aware. Come back, please. Be safe.

This message was lost to him in the noise his brain filled with as soon as he tried to think about Mumbo’s fate, but the more he coughs the more his mind is brought sharply back into physical reality. He coughs painfully and keeps coughing, unable to stop at all, until finally he is gasping for breath and fumbling with the water bottle he keeps in the side pocket of his backpack. He drinks half of it down in large, greedy gulps. 

He’s above the treeline now. Somewhat alarmingly, he barely remembers getting here, but the pain in his throat has brought him squarely back into the unfortunate land of the living. He leans against a nearby rock, head spinning from the sudden clarity. 

It’s the smoke that is the problem. It seems everywhere now, even though earlier it was just the faintest scent on the wind now and then. Now it clings everywhere in his nose and mouth and throat and lungs. 

This also dawns on him with slow horror: He can’t see his tower from here. 

Given the elevation he’s at now, there shouldn’t be any reason that he can’t look across the horizon and find the tiny man-made angles of his former home. He’s far enough away that it will be extremely small, but it should still be visible to the trained eye. The entire point of a lookout, of course, is its visibility. He cannot see it, however. Even more worryingly, he can’t even properly see the mountain it sits on. 

Instead he sees nothing but haze. The air to the east is dense and orange. Before, the smoke was in a specific direction. Now, it seems like it’s everywhere. 

The air itself seems to have an orange cast to it right now. It feels like a dusty sunset, where the light is intensely copper, and thus Grian’s mind keeps trying to tell him it’s later in the day than it actually is. It’s somewhere around 6 PM in reality. In the middle of summer like this, the sun won’t set for another three hours. And still, the light is so exceptionally orange. 

Dread grows in the pit of his stomach as he tries to pick out where the fire is, and realizes he can’t. Alarm flares in him. This fire is not like the leisurely slow-burn of the Trout Fire last month. It is a behemoth of thick billowing smoke that seems like it has doubled since Grian first spotted it this morning. The intense smoke right now is what keeps Grian from seeing its edges.

How big is that thing, actually? And what direction is the wind blowing? 

The answer settles over him like the particulate matter he’s already inhaling: the wind is most likely blowing towards him. He smells the smoke now. He couldn’t smell it earlier. 

For good measure, he starts coughing again and hangs his head while he does, waiting for the fit to pass. When he finally stops, he digs a bandana from somewhere in the depths of his bag and ties it around his face. It’s a poor excuse for any sort of proper protection, but it limits the amount of smoke making its way into his lungs the best it can. At the absolute minimum, he has a placebo effect working for him. 

He pulls out his radio again, and stares at it for a moment, before caving and turning it on. He dials it into the main Forest frequency, at least the one for the Wapiti District. For some reason, it’s full of static. Is it the distance? He isn’t sure. He knows his tower serves as a repeater, but he doesn’t understand how it all works. This only adds to the mounting dread and he fiddles around, trying to make it sound stronger. He can pick out about half of what is being said, and tries to fill in every few words by context clues alone. Dispatch is clear. The ground crew is garbled. He’s only really getting one side of the picture, and not the side he needs the most. 

While he listens, he watches. 

Jonesy Lake is part of the Two Forks district, his district, and it’s to the west of his tower. The Thorofare district, Scar’s lookout, is north of his tower. This fire had started somewhere on the other side of Jonesy Lake, a little southwest. Pinnacles is further northwest, out of Grian’s district and into someone else’s. 

What is concerning is that this fire, the southwesterly fire, has grown. It is more of a northwesterly fire now. He can no longer see where his trail originated, and he should be able to see it given how high he is on the mountain. His view is unobstructed by trees or hills, and he still can’t see it. He started in a meadow far below, and now he’s at the top. He can’t see the meadow anymore. 

Grian falls back onto habit, and begins to watch the fire like he was trained. His heart beats in his chest like a hammer though—it is far more exhilarating and terrifying than it is from the safety of his tower. He’s going through the motions in his head, listening to reports and checking the wind speed the best he can and tallying the daylight hours remaining and the cardinal directions and running the mental calculations. He’s—

He’s scared. He’s utterly terrified. 

This is a new type of panic, distinct from the call of the abyss he felt earlier. That panic had been earth-shattering. This panic is primal, but it creeps over him slowly. 

The man from dispatch is directing a fire crew on the ground that must have either been flown in or hiked in after Grian did. He says the fire is moving deeper into the backcountry, away from Jonesy Lake. This is both a blessing and curse. A blessing, as it protects the main tourist attraction of the area and historic structures such as Grian’s lookout. A curse, because the deeper a fire is in the backcountry the more difficult and expensive it is to fight. 

It’s also a curse because Grian is on the wrong side of the fire. It’s between him and getting back out. It wasn’t like that earlier in the day, or maybe he wouldn’t have bothered to try to find Mumbo’s campsite after all. He’s not that crazy, he swears he isn’t. He would have waited another day, he would’ve figured something out. He wouldn’t have walked purposefully toward a wildfire. 

The wind has changed direction.

“I can’t go back the way I came,” he realizes, and it’s this spoken-out-loud sentence that finally snaps him into action. It’s like a bucket of ice water was dumped over his head.

He snatches up his bag. He can’t stay here and wait to figure it out. He needs to go now.

Immediately, he turns his back on the fire, looking at the steep final pitch he needs to scramble up in order to cross the mountain pass. If he can make it to the other side, he’ll be deeper in the backcountry and away from the fire. Maybe Mumbo went over there too at one point—further into the beyond that Grian can’t save him from. Lost in the hills of a different set of valleys. 

He takes one step forward, but this isn’t right. This isn’t right at all. He feels information come to him like an uneasy prickle on the back of his neck. It’s a barely uncovered thought, something he heard once while Scar was talking about the Trout Fire and filed away somewhere in his brain ever since. 

Wildfires move faster uphill than they do downhill. 

Like, insanely faster. Deadly faster. 

Scar had told him this, and then he’d made some sort of joke about the irony of their lookouts being perched on the highest hills in the area. He told Grian that sometimes lookouts needed to be evacuated from wildfires via helicopter, and that if a fire reached the base of either of their mountains they would be in imminent danger. Grian, of course, reacted to this much in the same way he did when thinking about lightning striking his tower or meeting a grizzly bear on the trail: fear. Scar laughed in that infuriating way he did sometimes, where danger didn’t really exist and risk seemed to be something he played with ease. 

The danger does exist. Grian’s run his allotment of risk-taking dry. Scar wasn’t laughing anymore about this on the radio earlier today. It’s not just his elevation at play, here. It’s also the wind blowing toward him. 

His heart pounds. 

He should go…down. That’s something people do in these situations. He should go down, and away, as far as he can and as fast as he can. 

He nearly makes a move to switch his radio back to the frequency he and Scar share, just so he can ask. He doesn’t though, stopping himself at the last second. His finger hovers over the button, but he doesn’t press it. It stings more than it should. Right, he’s—

Failing at finding Mumbo. An idiot. In danger. 

—going to have to go downhill. 

His brain snaps onto a new plan immediately: valleys. 

Water runs downhill. Every valley and canyon was carved by water. The snowmelt off these peaks form hundreds of ephemeral streams each spring, most of which flow downhill into a bigger stream. Those bigger streams often flow between the mountains and form the tributaries of the Yellowstone River. He’d crossed a stream earlier in the meadow, a nice little makeshift log bridge covering it. 

Water and fire don’t mix. If he goes downhill, he’ll probably find that stream at some point—nearly a sure bet in this type of topography. He’ll be safe if he goes down. He’ll be safer if he’s next to water. He needs to find water. 

Don’t they use streams as temporary fire lines? Could the fire cross that? He isn’t sure, but he’ll take the unknown over the certain danger he does know. 

Grian picks a direction away from the fire as far away as he can possibly angle himself, gives it a long final look, and nearly flees downhill. 

The route is, to put it lightly, rough. The trail was already steep, but at least it was cut into the mountainside and worn from many feet crossing it. At least it was marked, tried, and tested. The open slope of the mountain is more random under his feet, and every time he steps onto loose scree he nearly falls as it rolls under his boots. He does end up falling one or two times, and it’s more like his feet gently sliding out from under him. He doesn’t run, for fear of tripping, but he lightly hops down and over rocks and pushes past bushes. As he drops in elevation, the amount of vegetation surrounding him increases and the hiking gets more difficult. 

Soon he’s back into the forest, disoriented again. He can’t really see the fire anymore—all he knows is that he was going this way, this way, so he keeps going that way. The air is thick and burnt, heavy with haze. He knows he’s still going the right direction by picking whichever way the air is the clearest. Still, every time he has to go around an obstacle, there’s a fear in his chest that he won’t find his chosen direction again.

The mountain is getting steeper the further he goes down. It is not leveling out like he expected it to. There was a meadow at the bottom, wasn’t there? Or was that—was that more to the southeast? After scrambling down a short drop he stops again to catch his breath, wheezing through the bandana. He pulls out the topo map he took out of Mumbo’s file, tries to look at the lines to find the safest way down, and—oh. 

He doesn’t know where he is anymore. 

He knows what direction he went when he left the trail, and what direction the fire was in, but there’s no way for him to tell which little ripple and bump in the topography has his current location. He doesn’t know how far he has gone, or where on the slope he is. This is concerning, but truthfully it barely registers in his mind. He’s still smelling smoke. He can sort his location out afterwards if necessary. 

He puts the map back into his bag. Right, this isn’t good, but he just needs to keep going down. He needs to keep going down. He shouldn’t think about the smoke he can smell, or the lack of visibility, or his own stupidity. Does it feel hotter or is his mind playing tricks on him? Is he having a heart attack or is he just out of breath? Is he going to die?

Is he going to die? 

The way this question takes over his brain is almost fascinating. He hasn’t—he hasn’t focused so much on himself in a long time. He’s focused every ounce of energy he has into finding Mumbo. And Mumbo—Mumbo isn’t here, but he is, and is he going to die?

Does he mind?

No, of course he minds. The fire might as well be lit beneath his feet instead of further down the mountain with the way he’s running. 

Grian is so busy contemplating if he is going to die or not—and really, his brain shouldn’t be running these two scripts at once, he should be fully focused in the moment, but even now there’s that string of panicked thoughts—that he almost misses it when the ground goes from kind-of-steep to dangerously steep. He scrambles to a stop, disoriented, and finds himself looking over an edge. 

Calling it a cliff is generous. It’s not really a cliff, not in the “hundred foot straight drop” sense. He looks to the side, but there isn’t a clear way to avoid the drop by going down the side. It’s rocky, and he can probably climb his way down if he’s careful about it. 

He swings his legs out of over the drop with the intention of lowering himself a little slower to the next spot to put his feet. He lets the gravity take him, but the backpack he’s carrying is heavy and unwieldy enough to throw off his balance, so—

“Ah!” he shouts, and then lands sharply on his ankles. There’s a split-second of pain before he’s falling to the side, the weight on his back dragging him down when his feet don’t stick the landing. 

And he’s going down again, much faster than intended. 

He’s sliding now, taking dirt and gravel with him, because the rock he’d been intending to land on wasn’t really that stable of a spot to begin with, it was just one piece of a controlled descent, but he’s out of control now. And he can’t stop. 

The rocks tear at his clothes, his limbs, his backpack. 

He lands several feet down, stopped by the merciful branches of a prickly bush. 

He’s okay. He’s actually okay. His heart beats wildly, and he takes a moment to tip his neck back, resting his head on the top of the pack that still sits on his shoulders. He doesn’t even extract himself from the branches immediately. He just sits, and pants for a minute.

There’s another drop just in front of him, a lot further than the one he just fell from. A little less “second story window” and a little more “probable severe injury.”  He stares at it. He could’ve fallen down that. The more he starts to come down from the adrenaline rush, the more his ankle starts to throb. It doesn’t seem to be broken though, just sore. It’s just background noise to him at this point. 

He balls his hands into fists, fingernails cutting into his palms. This is just—this is just adding insult to injury, at this point. This is all stupid. He’s making stupid decisions, stupid lapses in judgement, and he doesn’t know how to stop.  

Can’t he do anything right? Can’t he just do this one, one thing? After all this time, all this effort?

Can’t he just find his best friend? Can’t he do this without damaging all his other relationships, with the people at home who care about his well being? Can’t he do this without upsetting Scar? Can’t he do this without hurting himself, or putting himself in danger, or hurting everyone else? Can’t it just stop?

He just wants it all to stop. 

Something picks him up off the ground, anyway. 

He dusts off his pants, a futile motion for a person who’s been hiking for a day and a half straight. He tests his weight on his ankle which, while definitely feeling weak, holds him. He takes stock of his new location: still somewhere on the side of this mountain, still lost. He dropped from a further height than planned, and the only thing that awaits him is more rock scrambling. Above him are rocks, and below him are…rocks, with maybe a tree or two. 

He thinks he spies some sort of ledge, or at least something he can walk laterally down, so he heads for it. Hopefully he’ll find a spot that’s easier to go down than the one he landed in. He doesn’t really have a choice to figure something out. 

There’s something off about this location though, and he doesn’t know what it is. He almost feels silly for noticing it, and writes it off as his head still spinning from the overwhelming amount of input he’s parsing. His heart still hasn’t calmed yet, and there’s no way he’s getting a good amount of oxygen for his exertion with all the smoke in the air.

He reaches the ledge, and realizes it is part of an overhang. At one point in time, this rock shelter weathered when the softer stone eroded faster than the harder layer of stone above it. Today, it’s just one more feature in the steep northeastern slope of the Pinnacles mountain. 

He looks to the left, and then—

That’s when he spies it. 

He’ll remember it, just like he remembers the day he told Mumbo it was a good idea to go on his trip alone. He’ll remember it, just like he remembers the day the ranger told him Mumbo never made it back to his car. He’ll remember it, just like he remembers when the search was finally suspended after three weeks. He’ll remember it, just like he remembers lying in bed in a daze, thinking about how deep the snow gets in Shoshone National Forest over the winter. 

He’ll remember it, just like he remembers the first time someone told him Mumbo was probably dead. 

There is a figure under the overhanging rock. It’s so random it almost seems comical, if it weren’t for the way Grian immediately feels sick. There’s a figure curled in this tiny spot of shelter on the mountainside, as far as one could possibly get away from the rain or sun or cold.

It is not another rock, or a tree branch, or an animal. It’s—it’s a person. Every contour and slightest variation in shape matches. Grian knows what a person is shaped like, he knows it deep in his DNA, where he’s programmed from the inside out into knowing what another human looks like. It’s instinctual. It’s something he was born with. 

This isn’t an animal, this is something much more important. This is a human. 

And just as instinctually, he also knows that this is no longer a human. It’s a corpse. What once was no longer is, and what lies before him on the stone is something he’s not meant to see. There is a primeval part of his brain, concerned with survival and avoiding danger—concerned with avoiding disease and all those other medieval problems—that tells him he should avoid this at all costs. It’s danger. It was human, but it’s not anymore. He should go, but he’s rooted to the ground. 

It’s—

He’s—

Time stops. The thick scent of smoke still hangs in the air, just as it has all evening, but the wind doesn’t blow in the treetops. The flames in the forest don’t lick any higher. Time folds in on itself until it’s this one, small moment, incapable of folding any further and bursting with unreleased potential energy as everything else holds still. Nothing else matters. There is nothing else but this and this and this, and this and this and this. 

This isn’t Mumbo. 

Mumbo doesn’t exist anymore, and the person Mumbo was before doesn’t exist anymore, because the person in front of him was alive once but is no longer, and the person in front of him is a corpse. It’s a thing, it’s an object, it’s disgusting, it’s—it isn’t Mumbo. Mumbo isn’t like this. Mumbo has endless potential. He’s smart. He’s nervous. He’s kind. He’s silly.

And yet—he knows it’s Mumbo. It is him. It cannot be anyone else. He knows it better than anything he has known before, and he recognizes it immediately even when Mumbo is unrecognizable. He knows Mumbo well enough that he can recognize him even when he isn’t himself anymore, even when he’s something else. 

Even when he’s dead. 

That’s all. It’s a horrifying, horrifying, finality. He’s dead. Two words, one sentence, everything. It’s not real, because it can’t be. It cannot be true, because if it is, then nothing else is true either.  

He’s dead and, and, this is it isn’t it? This is it. This is all there is and all there was this entire time. This is the breaking of everything he believes in, split down the middle, carving into his chest with a sharp knife, cracking open his ribs until there’s blood spattered on the floor. The world sort of spins in his purview, dizzying, and he drops to his knees without noticing or caring about it. 

He wants to touch him, but he can’t. He wants to hug him one last time, or hold him, and tell him it’s alright, but he can’t. He recoils at the sight and stops just short, still kneeling on the ground. It’s been months. It’s been—a year, because Grian knows what he’s always known, what he’s always ignored, what other people have told him over and over again, which is that Mumbo never had much of a chance anyway. He was dead long ago. He didn’t hang in there for a few months and succumb to the winter. He didn’t survive the winter and then fail to find the resources to live through the spring. 

He’s been dead this whole time. 

He’s been—

Grian has been so stupid. And yet, he’d rather be stupid than look at this now. He’d rather not know what he knows now. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to do anything. He doesn’t want to be here at all.

Mumbo might have already been dead when Grian walked the trails by Cloud Lake last summer. He might have already been dead by the time the helicopters were sent out. He was likely already dead by the time the searches were suspended, just like the incident commander had regretfully informed him. He was probably still alive when Grian reported him missing, though. 

He was dead this entire summer, and most of last summer. Grian’s stomach lurches.

It’s been months. It’s…obviously been months. The elements aren’t kind. The winters are harsh and the summer sun is cruel, even in the mild shelter this overhang offers. Rocks can’t protect from everything. The animals haven’t been kind, either. None of the elements know. The wilderness doesn’t know. They don’t know—they don’t know that this is Mumbo, Grian’s best friend, his everything. They just don’t see—

Grian sees. 

Bones. Insects. Desiccated flesh. Eye sockets. No hair, no face, stained ripped clothes, broken and gnawed bones—

He turns to the side and vomits, barely yanking the bandana off his head in time. He nearly chokes on it, spitting miserable bile and unable to take a breath, and thinks, I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be gone, like he is, so that I don’t have to see this, or feel this, anymore. 

When he’s done he drops his head between his knees and screams. And with that, something breaks inside him, and he’s no longer kneeling but laying on his side, curled in the fetal position. It’s the same position Mumbo was in. His entire body trembles.

The air is thick with too many scents. There’s the ever-present smell of burning, and the smell of his vomit next to him, and the smell of other things he’s never wanted to put a name to. He gags again, and somewhere along the way that heave turns into a cry. 

He sobs. He sobs so hard his whole body shakes with the effort. He sobs so hard that he can’t breathe, and he starts to feel a little dizzy, until that primeval part of his brain concerned with survival takes over once again and drags the breath from his lungs. He wants to, though. He wants to cry so hard he actually passes out. He doesn’t want his brain to force him to take a breath when he doesn’t think he can. He wants to be anywhere but here. He wants to be gone. He wants to be dead.

He can’t live with this. 

He doesn’t want to live with this. 

There’s no point to it, is there?

There’s no point to anything, is there?

His sobs turn into coughing after a while, his throat and lungs dry from the large gulps of air he’s been taking in. It’s painful deep in his chest, but it eventually subsides leaving him exhausted. 

He lies still. His body still shakes. With every shallow inhale and exhale he trembles. His face feels waxy and foreign and his limbs like lead. He uncurls slightly. No part of his body feels like it’s attached to his mind anymore. 

There is him, and there is his body, and there is Mumbo, and none of them are in the same place right now. 

He watches the light move imperceptibly on the cave wall, as the sun slowly gets dragged back down the horizon and the shadows lengthen and bend. Darkness comes early to the mountain hollows, when the trees and the rocks and hills block the sun from view. It was late afternoon when he found Mumbo’s camp. It was early evening when he started back down the mountain for his own safety.

Does his safety matter anymore? Does he want it to matter? Does he even care? He doesn’t know what time it is anymore, but still the sun moves slowly along the walls. 

He watches the light get dragged away from him. 

Grian stays there for a period of time he can’t measure. The shadow drifts along the wall as the light fades more, but the light in the cave doesn't necessarily dim, it just grows more golden. He shuts his eyes against this. Orange might just be his least favorite color, the way it permeates everything from the setting sun to the hazy evening air. 

But—it’s Scar’s favorite color, isn’t it? 

He still has his radio. His pack might be discarded up top, but he has kept the radio in his pocket no matter what. Its yellow light was blinking earlier, back when he was at his towers this morning, hours ago, lifetimes ago. It’s still alive, however. It’s there, just a button press away. He could do it, but it’s like the radio doesn’t even belong to him anymore. 

He fumbles in his pocket with a hand that’s not his. He brings the radio up to his face, dirty and scraped and resting on the rocky cave floor. It’s a foreign object. Slowly, with a thumb that’s not his own, he depresses the side button and hears a voice that’s not his own rasp a single name. His lifeline. 

“Scar.”

The effect is immediate. “Grian!” the radio crackles, but Grian’s head is still funny and none of this is happening in the real world, so he loses most of the next sentence to the growing static in his mind. The connection is clear, but the words are not. “I was trying . . . ages ago, are . . . still . . . Do you . . .”

“Scar,” Grian says again, and this time the voice sounds more like his, and he says it because it’s all he can say. 

“Are you okay?” Scar says. “Please tell me you’re okay, please, you stopped responding hours ago and I—I’m worried, I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation. What’s going on?”

Grian drifts again. He stares at the delineation between light and shadow on the wall, and contemplates the smell of smoke. It’s more acrid than the smell of a normal campfire. It smells like plastic, which is crazy, because shouldn’t the only thing that’s burning be wood and leaves? It’s so strong it threatens to suffocate him. He wishes it would.  

Finally, he formulates something else. “He’s here,” he says, and his voice breaks. 

“Who’s here?” Scar says. 

“It’s Mumbo,” Grian says, with a strangled noise. “He’s here,” and the present tense sounds so wrong and right in his mouth, because he’s not really here but he should be. He’s not a person anymore and Grian is. He’s sitting right next to Grian, but Grian is here and he isn’t.

Nothing about this is fair. It shouldn’t have been like this. It shouldn’t have been like this. 

“Oh, Grian,” Scar says, and his voice is infinitely gentle. Grian could lose himself in that voice, let it cover him and sweep him away to a place where he doesn’t have to think about this anymore. His voice is a facsimile of reality, though. The real world hurts more. It doesn’t mean Grian wants to listen to him any less. 

Scar is still speaking. He somehow knows the things Grian doesn’t say. He knows the things that linger in the air and smoke between them. All he says is, “Oh no.”

Scar’s voice is—Scar’s voice is familiar in a way that breaks Grian all over again. It’s this little bit of sympathy, this person who might come even the slightest bit to understanding, that makes him feel like he can’t handle it anymore. What little he’s doing to compose himself in this situation needs to be handed over to Scar completely, because Scar knows. He can understand. 

Grian breaks at the sound of Scar’s voice. He starts crying again, as hard as before, and he depresses the button on his radio again, nearly delirious and unintelligible, and starts talking to Scar. 

“It’s not supposed to be like this, Scar,” he cries. “I was su-supposed to be here too. He asked me to go with him, and I said no, so he came out here alone, and it’s—it’s my fault. And I never found him in time, and it’s my fault, he’s dead now, and he’s been dead for months, and, and, this wasn’t supposed to happen!��

He doesn’t say You were right. He doesn’t say The search and rescue team was right. He doesn’t say Jimmy and Pearl were right. He doesn’t say any of that at all. He just cries. 

“Shh,” Scar says. “It’s okay, it’s okay. No, it isn’t. I would never lie to you, G. Nothing is okay. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I can’t take this, I can’t take this, I can’t take this,” Grian babbles. “I need to—I can’t—I can’t take this. This isn’t real.”

“Grian—” he doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to. He lets go of his radio’s button, turning control of the tragedy back over to Grian. 

“He was everything, Scar!” 

Grian feels like his chest is a black hole, sucking his body into itself and rending it apart into shattered pieces. There is nothing left. There is nothing left but this, and there is nothing more important than this. 

He’s silent for a long time, with tears slipping down his face and a body too tired to sob any longer. He’s silent for probably too long, because his radio incessantly crackles and warbles, but the words Scar is speaking don’t make sense any longer. It might as well be white noise, like logs burning in a fire on a cozy evening. Grian’s checked out. 

He hears nothing but the distant rush in his ears.

He’s too tired to engage, so he turns the radio off and stares at the light moving across the wall again. In the time he’s spoken to Scar, the shadow has made it to the next crack in the stone. For a while there is nothing but him and the fading light, and the corpse just outside his peripheral. 

There’s him, his best friend, that thick artificially golden light, and the smell of vomit-inducing failure. 

He deserves to die here next to Mumbo. It’s how it should have been, if he’d just gone with Mumbo like he was supposed to have, instead of working instead. Whatever issue Mumbo experienced, Grian should have experienced it alongside him. This is all his fault. It’s all his fault, and he deserves nothing more than to spend the rest of his days right here. 

How could he be so selfish? How could he let his best friend in the world go? How could he know his best friend so little that he couldn’t even find him when he was in trouble? How could he do anything right now except stay?

The air in the overhang is stuffy, and Grian wraps a hand around his nose and mouth like it will help. He expected there to be more of a smell—but that implies he suspected Mumbo’s death at all. Maybe the smoke has wrapped itself around the smell and overpowered it. Or maybe he’s always smelled this, the pungent odor of his failure. The scent of a future he refused to acknowledge. It’s hard work having to breathe when the air is hot and acrid. 

He wants to vomit again, but he doesn’t. Instead his mouth runs wet with extra saliva, a mild comfort to his raw throat, if he ignores the way his stomach twists. 

Eventually that silence rings in his pounding head just a little too loudly, and Grian flicks the radio on again, because he selfishly needs more. He needs that voice again with its promises of something being okay in the end. After all this time, he still can’t accept that this is completely his fault and that he deserves whatever punishment happens. He needs more, like he needs air to breathe. 

 “Scar,” he says again, and it's a plea. It is a life preserver thrown into the dark, inhospitable waters. 

Scar is miles away. He’s always been miles away. He has never been, and will never be, a comforting presence to wrap his arms around Grian. But his voice is familiar and warm. His voice is a constant Grian hasn’t had for months until he took this job. His voice is a constant that might save Grian right now, if he’s lucky enough. 

“Thank god, Grian, when I saw you turned off your radio—are you okay—” the rest of Scar’s sentence dissolves into static once more. 

“No,” he whispers. 

“I know,” Scar says kindly. “That was a silly question, huh? Grian, I’m going to help you. Do you know where you are? I can send someone out. They’ll come help you, and, and—Mumbo.”

“Okay,” he says. Help sounds good. He’s so tired of being alone. 

“Are you hurt?” Scar asks. 

Grian’s ankle smarts from where he fell on it earlier, right before finding Mumbo. It’s the first time he’s even noticed the pain, because the moment he saw Mumbo everything else on his mind was wiped clean. He doesn’t think it’s important, though, so he responds, “No.”

“Where are you?” Scar asks. 

“I don’t know.”

Scar prods gently. “You found Mumbo’s bag and campsite up on Pinnacles.” He says the sentence precisely, and doesn’t mention the way Grian fought with him. He also does not say I told you so, or criticize Grian’s decision. “Are you still on Pinnacles?”

“No,” he says. “No, I left the trail. I went—”

Grian tries to think, but his brain is sieve, leaking information out onto the floor. It’s as dense and unrelenting as the tan smoke blanketing the sky. He remembers being told he lost his job, but that seems so pointless now. He remembers finding Mumbo’s campsite, but he doesn’t remember how high he hiked on the trail beyond it. He remembers the searing jolt of fear he felt when he saw the wildfire’s new positions, but he doesn’t remember a single step he took off trail. 

It’s all a blur of rushing and blankness until he’s here. He can’t think of anything else, because there isn’t anything else. There is nothing else to define about the day, except for the presence lying on the cold stone next to him. This is the only thing Grian will remember about today, and he wishes it was all blank too. There is nothing and there will be nothing else for the end of time. 

Grian can’t think.

The radio crackles again. “Grian, are you still with me?”

“Mm,” he says, because full words are hard. 

“Do you remember the way you came?”

“I was running,” he says. “I went…away. I went down. It’s really steep.”

Scar’s voice is suddenly much more serious. “Grian, what made you leave the trail? Why were you running?”

“The fire,” he responds. “I saw the fire. I went downhill. I wanted to get to the water.”

The Nitwit fire, named for the idiots who started it, is rapidly growing in area and risk. The memory of it trickles eerily back into Grian’s brain. When he’d been closer to the top of the mountain and realized the danger he was in, he’d been absolutely terrified. He knew he needed to move or it would kill him. Depending on the environmental factors, outrunning a fire is impossible.

He doesn’t think he can move anymore, though. Fleeing doesn’t sound so appealing, not when there’s nothing left to run towards. He turns over this thought with detachedness. It’s over now, so what’s the point?

“The fire? Are you in a safe spot right now?” Scar demands. “How close was it when you saw it?”

Grian doesn’t really process this question. Scar is being insistent, urgent, but nothing seems that way to him anymore. He didn’t see the fire at all, just its smoke. He doesn’t care about a safe spot. This is the only spot he needs to be in. He doesn’t respond. 

At his silence, Scar continues. “I’m guessing you went northwest,” he says. “That’s the opposite direction of the fire and there’s a creek in the valley on that side.” There is a rustle of paper on the other end, like he’s pulled out a map. “Does that sound right? I need to figure out exactly where you are.”

Scar asks a lot of questions.

“Grian,” he says sharply, almost rudely. “Grian, come on. Talk to me.” 

Where is he? That doesn’t matter. 

The internal compass in his brain isn’t working particularly hard right now, since every time he tries to stretch his consciousness beyond this overhang he gets snapped right back. Mumbo is just lying there, slightly out of his peripheral vision. He can’t even turn his head without catching a glimpse of it, and it feels like dying every time. How could he think of anything else?

Mumbo is just lying there. 

“Scar,” he says, ignoring everything he was just asked. “Scar, I don’t get it. What is he doing here? Why did he come here? Why is he here? Why isn’t it me? Why wasn’t I here? I think he fell Scar, I think he fell just like I did. I think he hurt himself and couldn’t get back to his camp. And I wasn’t even there to help him.” 

“You fell?” Scar urges, like all his attention is zapped on that word. “You didn’t say that, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says automatically. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Kind of hard not to, G.”

“I’m fine,” he repeats. “I’m just—Scar, I can’t go anywhere! I can’t leave him. What if I never find it again? What if this is it? I don’t want to go anywhere else, I’m staying here! Next to him!”

“But you need to go,” Scar says. “Come on, I need to know where you are. Help me figure it out.”

“No, no, no, no,” Grian says. “I can’t leave. I—if I go, what if I can’t come back? What if I can’t find it? What if I lose this place, and he’s really gone forever?”

“I won’t let that happen! Hey, if I figure out where you are, then I’ll know where he is too. We can tell the rangers, and, and the search and rescue people or whatever. They’ll find him again. It’s okay. You did your part. You found him. I wanna do mine.”

“I can’t leave him again,” Grian says. “I never should have in the first place.”

“I don’t think you ever left him,” Scar says softly. “He always had someone who believed in him this whole time. Some people don’t have that.”

“I can’t leave.”

“I need you to.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I do.”

And it’s difficult to keep arguing the matter when there’s someone in his ear who won’t take no for an answer. Someone who is desperately pleading with him over his own life and his safety. Maybe Grian is to Scar what Mumbo is to Grian. Maybe Grian can’t inflict that type of pain on someone else, even if he’s perfectly willing to inflict it on himself. Maybe if he does this he’ll be guilty of hurting one less person. 

Grian screws his eyes shut. “It hurts,” he says finally. “It feels like everything hurts.”

“I know,” Scar says and—

Grian knows that he does know. 

Somehow, at that point he makes a decision. His brain still feels slightly untethered and foggy. He isn’t himself anymore, not really. He doesn’t care about that person, the one who was a best friend and an architect and then a fire lookout, anymore. He doesn’t care about that person’s outcome. But he does care about not causing any more harm than he already has, even if it means keeping that person alive. 

For once more, and the beginning many more once mores in his life, he rallies himself to go forward again. 

“I don’t know where I am,” he says to Scar. “Or how close the fire is. I think I was going northwest, but…I got lost. I don’t know if I always went that direction, because I had to move around things sometimes. I just went down.”

He sits up. It’s a monumental effort, and his head spins again like the world is tipping instead of becoming right-side up. He has his back to Mumbo and it sends prickles down his neck.  

“It’s really steep here,” he continues. “Like a cliff below me, maybe. If I fall I would get really hurt. It’s rocky above me too but not as bad. I’m sort of in the middle of it. I was—I was looking for a safer way to get down when I…” He trails off. He can’t finish that sentence. 

“Okay,” Scar says. “That’s helpful. I can—I can probably find that a little easier, it’ll show up on the topo map that there is a big change in elevation. Can you see any other landmarks?”

“No,” he murmurs. “Too smoky.” 

“How smoky?” Scar asks, and that edge is back in his voice. It’s worry.

He swallows. “Worse than earlier.”

Scar doesn’t respond for a long time. Grian regards his radio while he waits. Its light is red now. It blinks. That’s not good. He has no idea how long it’ll last before it dies. This reality still seems sort of distant though, like he can’t quite muster up the energy to care about it. Oh look, there’s a little blinking light. Oh look, there’s a fire. Oh look, his best friend is dead. Oh look, he might die too. It’s all just…pointless. There is so much potential danger in his situation and he’s numb to all of it. 

He just watches the little light blink over and over again. He feels like a statue. 

Grian doesn’t really like the silence Scar has left him, nor does he really understand why. Except it’s not really silence right now, is it? He tilts his head. There’s been sound this entire time. What he assumed was just the blood rushing in his ears is actually a very real roar. 

He pieces together what it is the moment Scar gets back. 

“I found it!” Scar cries suddenly, the radio exploding into noise again. “I found you, on the map I mean, which I guess means I also found…him. But I know where you’re at! I think!”

And Grian simply says, “I think I hear the fire.”

“What?”

“They’re loud, aren’t they?” he says. “Wildfires.”

“What—yes, they are, they’re super loud,” Scar says something that gets a little lost in interference, “you need to go now.”

Despite making the decision to go, Grian somehow feels rushed about it, like he said he was ready but he wasn’t actually ready. He stands up, and nearly stumbles back down again. When he goes to put a hand out to support him, it’s shaking. “Which way?” he whispers into the radio.

“Anywhere,” Scar says. “Um, down. I’m gonna—” he sounds distant like he’s leaning away from the radio’s mic again, and it occurs to Grian that this is what has been happening with his voice the whole time now. “—gonna try to see if I can relay your information to the hot shot crew. Like, uh, a nava—navi—whatever they’re called.”

Grian realizes, abruptly, that he has to leave his pack as well. There isn’t any way he can move quickly while carrying it, it’s far too heavy. He holds his radio, and looks out into the smoky air and trees. Then, pulled back by forces unseen, he looks back behind him. This place they’re located, it isn’t even a cave. It’s hardly an overhang, too. It wouldn’t have been a comfortable place to shelter. 

He wants to say that he can’t leave again, because his boots might as well be filled with lead. But they’ve already had that argument, haven’t they? He made his decision to leave without even looking at Mumbo. It’s the least he could do to spare him the courtesy of looking at him now. 

He lays his bag down closer to him. Then he pulls out his jacket and, carefully, gently, reverently, the closest he’s gotten to Mumbo so far, lays it over his head. 

With tears slipping down his face, he steps back into the harsh warm light.

»»———-　　———-««

Grian fights his way down the hillside, and fight really does feel like the applicable word. 

The first thing he has to do is a fair bit of boulder scrambling, since there was not, in fact, a good way down the cliff. It’s a maneuver that would have been greatly impeded by his backpack, so it’s a good thing he left it behind. Grian’s apathy actually does him favors for speed: he hops onto a rock he isn’t sure will hold him before testing it. He uses worse handholds in favor of spending more time finding safe ones. He doesn’t falter even when he slips; he leans into it instead. He’s down after only a few minutes, leaning on a tree, wheezing in the smoke, wishing he hadn’t abandoned his water bottle along with everything else. 

The noise continues to rage around him. 

Scar tells him to keep going down. Scar tells him that there is a temporary fire line at Sulphur Creek and that the hot shot crew is focused on manually digging a line on the other side of the valley. Scar tells him that they’re aware he’s trying to evacuate. Scar tells him it will be okay, because a lot of people are working on this now. Grian isn’t even sure where Sulphur Creek is. It’s not like he can see anything, after all. 

“Run,” he says, “I’ll tell you where to go.”

Grian looks back up to where Mumbo is, and realizes he can’t see him either. It all blends into the rocks and bushes and trees. How was anyone supposed to have ever spotted him? His heart clenches at this, stuttering for just a moment. None of those helicopters would have been able to see him. People on the ground could barely see him. He’s being swallowed into nature again, a final resting place to entomb him. 

Then, he glances up to the left and realizes that for the first time all day, and in fact all summer, he can see actual flames. 

They’re weirdly beautiful. He watches them lick up around the trees, greedily eating up the brush. He fell down there earlier, and now everything he touched is being steadily converted to ash. He sees the flames in the tops of the trees forming bright halos. There’s little, if any, separation from the fire on the ground and the fire in the sky. Active crown fires are the most dangerous, he remembers. No wonder it’s so loud. How much combustion energy is happening right now, as these trees ignite?

He tells Scar. 

Scar tells him in no uncertain terms that he needs to be going the opposite direction as fast as he can right about now. He urges him to run. 

Grian obeys, but the heat and sound licks at his heels anyway. 

How fast do wildfires run? How many miles can they cover in an hour? How many meters high can the flames go?  The units mix in his head as he tries to work it out, but the calculations are mostly a background narration to the sound of his boots crunching gravel. Scar wants him to run, so he will. 

He stays ahead of the fire, or at least he thinks he does, until suddenly a spark is thrown onto a tree in front of him. The needles, dry from weeks without rain, catch instantly. And Grian just…stops in his tracks, and watches it ignite. He watches the baby flame grow, greedily sucking in oxygen and new found fuel. 

He thought he’d been going opposite the wind. 

He can’t help but wonder if Mumbo felt like this. If he felt this same sudden door slamming shut in front of him, trapping him somewhere he had no hope of escaping by himself. If he had, when he’d found himself stuck and lost, had this realization that he wasn’t going to be able to make it out. The thought resonates through his body, aching in every part. It’s the fear. It’s the hopelessness. 

Grian can’t outrun this anymore. 

He goes to call Scar on the radio, to ask him for any advice or even to just talk to him again, but when he presses the button on the radio it does nothing. He presses it, again and again and again, but there’s nothing. No lights. No transmissions. 

It’s dead, because he didn’t bother to charge it since before he left for the District Ranger’s Station, three days ago. 

“Idiot,” he mutters to himself, “idiot, idiot, idiot!” He hits the button again and again and again, as if that’ll somehow work. Then, he hits the entire radio hard into his other hand, hard, as if he’ll shake and abuse the thing into submission, but it still doesn’t work. The screen is black. The lights don’t turn on. 

The fire is even louder now, and even hotter. It’s howling. He’s losing his sense of direction. The trees and rocks around him are only shadowy figures in the smoke. 

And maybe, in his deepest thoughts and miseries, Grian doesn’t want to live. Maybe, if you asked him, he’d say that he was fine with this, because there was nothing left for him here. There is no Mumbo, so there is no point. He’s okay with that—at least, he’d say he was okay with it if there were anyone around in the world to ask. But there’s Scar listening in on a dead radio miles away, who can’t even know if he’s safe right now, or why he isn’t responding anymore. And there’s something deep within Grian that isn’t his dark thoughts, something written into his very cells, that pushes him to look for shelter anyway. 

Because he’s scared. Because this is a truly terrible way to die. 

The only things around him are rocks and more trees. He goes for the rocks. Instinctively, they feel like a more solid option: surely something that’s already millions of years old can survive another million years.  

He finds a spot beneath a boulder, and wedges himself as close as possible between it and the ground. It lies between the fire and him, but his eyes already burn so badly it might as well already be here. He pulls his shirt up so that it covers his nose and mouth, but that does little, so he tucks his head in near the ground, near the rock, like it’ll be protected in this tiny space he’s carved out of nothing. He inhales dirt anyway. 

He screws his eyes shut, as if it’ll help, and waits. 

It isn’t hard to tell when it’s here. 

Everything feels like eternity. When he tries to breathe, there’s nothing there—no air at all to fill his lungs. Instead, everything is hot and stuffy, suffocating, astringent, wringing all the oxygen from the air. His chest burns like he’s being squeezed. It makes his head feel funny, his thoughts slipping right out before he can register them. The heat is overwhelming. It’s like being baked in an oven. It’s like the first time he got a sunburn as a child, his mother wringing her hands in dismay and guilt over his face. It’s like he’s being strangled and peeled and stripped and decimated at once.

He wonders if maybe the concept of hell was just written up by someone who’d walked through fire themselves.

It feels like it’s been hours, but eventually the white-hot heat fades into something warm and passive. It can’t have been hours, because he’s still here and feeling all of it. Grian twitches his foot, and then tries to curl in on himself afterward. The movement seems to trigger something in his body, something that says I’m not dead yet so now it’s your problem, and he begins to cough again, violent motions that shake every part of his being. He coughs for a while, choking on the ash and lack of air, before finally controlling it enough to breathe. His nose and throat feel raw. 

He opens an eye. It immediately waters in the presence of thick smoke and heat, so he closes it again, the feeling burning hot beneath his lid. His cheeks are sticky with the feeling of tears from his watering eyes that dried just as quickly as they were produced. His teeth are gritty, even though he never even remembers opening his mouth. He runs a tongue over them, tasting the char. Every minute change of facial expression causes the grit to rub against his teeth. 

A few minutes later, he stirs again, this time pushing himself up off the ground in one motion until he is sitting up—he’s not a quitter like that. 

The world spins for a moment, and then swings back into place. 

He opens his eyes again, looks at his hands. They’re red, but not badly burned. Of course, how would he know that? How would he be able to tell? He clenches them once, twice, three times, and his fingers stiffly and painfully move to obey him. The rock next to him is singed and blackened. The vegetation immediately next to him is sparse, but burned completely through. The pine needles are gone. The area is thick with dark smoke. Somewhere ahead of him, the air glows orange still, a beaming, glowing beacon in the gathering darkness of evening. 

He’s…

Still here. 

On the other side of the fire. 

Alive. 

Alone.

His brain works sluggishly, taking several moments to take in the information around him before it computes. Then, without any ceremony, he bursts into ugly tears. Or, there would be tears, if tears were falling from his eyes. He’s so dehydrated now that nothing is being produced anymore. Instead he just sits there, sobs wracking his body, taking deep gulping breaths of dry, dry air that keep his already sore throat rubbed raw. He cries until he’s too tired to do it anymore, and everything is just rough and painful.

Some people would rather be brave. They’d rather face each challenge head on, and not let it get to them. They’d rather never cry in order to save face. 

But Grian? Grian just wants it all to stop. Who does he have to be brave for? He wants to not have to deal with this anymore. He wants to be safe. He wants his best friend to be safe. He wants his best friend to be alive. He wants someone, a real person, to place a hand on his shoulder and tell him he’s okay, it’ll be alright. It won’t be alright, of course, but he wants to be told that. It’ll make things, at least, a little easier. 

He’s tired of it being hard. He’s so, so, tired of it being hard.

Grian stands finally. It takes a lot of energy to do so, and there’s a faint feeling of pain that radiates through his body like a high fever, coming in waves every time he moves. His fingers smart as they brush the fabric of his pants, the barest hint of a touch sending needles along his nerves. At least he’s got nerves. 

The forest is gray. 

The greenness is gone, and what has settled in its wake is white and gray ash. There’s a still, grim curtain that hangs over everything. There is no sound except the fire’s roar—not even a single bird. Grian pushes the dirt with his boot a little, and everything crumbles and flakes apart into fine dust. A glowing ember is uncovered beneath it. It looks vibrant against the pale death of all his other surroundings. 

The bottom of his feet feel hot. These boots will be trashed by the time he gets back. He’s sure their rubber soles are all messed up now. He’ll have to buy a new pair. 

The real meaning of the thought hits him just a moment after. When he gets back. Like he’s already accepted that it’s part of his plan, that he’s going to leave here. And then what? He doesn’t really know but…he’s going to have to get back. He will. 

He heads toward the fire line. 

He isn’t sure where it is, but the fire being in front of him now affords him the time to make mistakes. Down is still the best direction to head, so he goes that way, kicking up fine ash and dust as he goes. The trees are blackened husks, rising into the sky. Some of them still have leaves at the top, but some were less fortunate. All the ground brush has been burned away. 

The forest looks like a wasteland. He knows it’ll be green again in a year. 

It doesn’t actually take that long for him to walk into an unburned area. He wonders if this is a mosaic, like Scar taught him all those weeks ago, but he doesn’t find another burned area just beyond this. It’s full of green trees. He can hear the distant roar of the fire, but now he can hear birds again, too. 

It’s twilight when he sees movement in the forest ahead of him, and he squints to identify it. He steps a little closer and—yeah, it’s a person. It’s another person. It’s actually another person out here, dressed in eye-shocking yellow. 

He raises a hand, and starts to call out to them, but he doesn’t make any sound. His throat is completely hoarse. He’s not sure he could make a sound if he tried. 

The person spots him anyway. The next few events sort of blur in his memory. The other man shouts something to his colleagues, whom Grian hadn’t seen in the trees around him. They call someone over to him. They say something to Grian. He doesn’t respond. They ask if he’s Grian, and he nods. They tell him that someone on the radio had said to be on the lookout for him. They give him water. They assess his injuries. 

Grian thinks he’s fine, but they seem to think otherwise. 

He’s still standing. His heart is still beating. That’s more than he can say of Mumbo. The thought of it makes him want to crumple and curl into a tiny ball, but he stays standing still. As long he’s upright, he’s okay.  

“Martinez is going to walk you out,” one of them says and Grian nods. Martinez is a guy with a kind-looking face and broad shoulders. He doesn’t even seem phased by the idea of saving a stupid civilian who got caught out in all this mess. He looks like it’d be his pleasure to help Grian out. 

This plan does not, for some reason, happen. Maybe it’s because Grian stumbles when they try to make him walk again, his ankle that he fell on hours earlier finally deciding to revolt. Maybe it’s his utter exhaustion. Maybe it’s because one of the wildland firefighters is especially concerned about Grian’s breathing, and the way his chest sounds funny. Maybe it’s his cough. Maybe it’s because he can barely speak to them, only hoarsely answering their simple questions. 

Night falls fully while they talk it over. The sky is dark, no stars, all blocked out from smoke, but a glow still sits on the horizon. Most of the other members of the hotshot crew have moved on, continuing their jobs in the noble quest to keep the fire from spreading to this side of the valley. 

Grian hears the radio crackle at various intervals, but none of the voices talking are Scar’s. At first he strains to try to hear him, trying to listen with his entire body. He hears nothing but strangers. His own radio is heavy in his pocket. It’s just a paperweight right now. 

The firefighters are probably giving information about him to someone else back at the dispatch office. They’re probably asking for some outside evaluation on what his condition is, or an order on what to do next. He zones out while they speak. He finds it difficult to care about anything else that happens to him now, least of all to him. 

Instead, two of them—Martinez included—walk him to a meadow, and tell him that one of the helicopters is going to pick him up and take him back to town. 

“It’s the fastest way to get you back, that’s all,” Martinez says brightly. He keeps trying to cheer Grian up, which is sweet of him, but failing. “Don’t worry about it, it’ll be fun!”

“I think we have different definitions of fun,” Grian rasps. 

He doesn’t tell them about Mumbo. Right now it feels like his own little burden to carry, an anchor suspended around his neck for him and him alone to drag. He’ll have to tell someone, as soon as he’s back in town. He’s sure that Scar has already told someone. But right now, at this moment, he carries the weight by himself. Alone. One last private moment with it all, waiting in the dark meadow with two strangers. 

He closes his eyes.

He thinks about the first time he and Mumbo met, when they were not even preteens yet. Grian was a new kid in a new school and a new town, and mad at everything in his life. Mumbo was the partner his teacher assigned for him to work on a project with. But more importantly, Mumbo was kind.

He thinks about evenings spent at Mumbo’s house, or the times they spent roaming around the town doing errands for Grian’s mom. He thinks about the time they both got detention because Mumbo—not Grian!—had a terrible plan to prank one of their teachers. He thinks about the miserable two years that they went to different colleges that led into a purposeful coordination of which university they would study at. He thinks about the emptiness of their apartment the week they arrived in Colorado, and how they ate takeout together while sitting on the boxes. 

The helicopter arrives some indeterminate time later, and Grian blinks his eyes back open to rushing wind chapping his face and lips. The noise is loud, but it’s not as loud as the fire was. Nothing will ever be greater than that sound. He’ll never forget that sound. 

The firefighters bid him farewell. He only knows one of their names, but he waves back. He’s taken into the helicopter. 

As it takes off, he looks through the window straight past a woman who is talking to him, but he isn’t able to see the forest like he anticipated. This forest, this wilderness he’s spent half a summer living in, isn’t visible. Instead the total darkness of night wipes it into a blank slate of inky blackness, punctuated only by the Nitwit Fire in the distance. No other lights. 

Miles and miles of nothing, and Mumbo. 

<< Chapter Ten | Masterpost | Chapter Twelve >>

#grian #goodtimeswithscar #hermitcraft fanfic #hermitcraft #hermitcraft au #quara fanfic #hc_firewatch_au #ummmmm. 0.0 dont kill me

[prismaticpichu]

POTENTIAL (spoiler free) HOT TAKES; DO NOT TOUCH STOVE 🔥

~

As I continue to scarf down Rebirth food like a rabid chimpanzee, I’m starting to come to an interesting realization:

I think I discovered a new reason as to why I love CC so much among the compilation. And that is bc it is debatably the easiest content in all of the 7 series to follow/digest. Don’t get me wrong- the writing is still messy and holey and did throw a bit of a wrench into pre-established canon. But chopping all of that off and looking at the game for what it is…? Idk! It’s not too rough to swallow. We have our steady main character who we see develop/grow tragically jaded, we have a villain we relatively follow till the end, we have our side character who we also see progress/regress/however you wanna put Seph’s cheese falling off the cracker. The only really boggler in the plot imo is admittedly Angeal, with his wishy-washy good guy-bad-guy conscience, but his sole presence is still not enough to completely muddy the story if you ask me. CC’s still a fun and memorable and enjoyable ride, and the plot beats are easy to process and hit just as hard as any other game in the compilation.

Now, OBV, Crisis Core has some canonical reasons for being more linear and objective: this is technically the “real” story, with Zack’s memories and all, and so it’s freed from all that ambiguity and haziness of Cloud’s journey in OG. But at the same time……. that’s kinda my point, lol? Like, again, don’t get me wrong- on one hand, og does a phenomenal job in creating tension and uncertainty and capturing Cloud’s identity crisis by making scrambled eggs out of his memories. But on the other hand, it’s also… a taaaadd much? Like to the point where it’s nearly impossible to actually understand the story on the first go. And there’s nothing wrong with it taking a few playthroughs to fully grasp things! It adds a sense of replayability. But if you don’t have that kinda patience, the whole thing can be a tad frustrating and confusing. And, idk, Ig my point is that Remake/Rebirth kinda falls into this same trap. The games are such, such, SUCH a fun ride (really! <33), but boy do I feel like I’m untangling tangled earbud wires trying to understand some of the game- especially in the homestretch. It’s just a real big meaty sandwich to swallow, and it can be a bit overwhelming lmao. Not to the point where it ruins its enjoyability- cause again, the story’s mainly a blast- but it’s admittedly hard to get 110% immersed in the world when I’m left trying to actively break down what’s going on. I won’t go into any specific details for spoiler reasons, tho I’m sure y’all understand from Remake alone where most of the confusion lies/in which elements.

The last thing I wanna do is be too negative tho. Needless to say these games and franchise is incredibly special to me, and I adore so much about Rebirth so far. The character interactions are near perfection, the stakes have never ever been higher, and there is soooooooooooo much to explore!! <33 And it’s also prolly worth mentioning that I’ma person who gets confused VERY easily lol. So it’s very possible that I’m struggling more than usual to grasp everything, and it’s creating some skewed judgment. But I thought it was worth sharing my thoughts regardless.

Thx for listening to my ramblings! Hope y’all are having a wonderful day <3333 Keep up the hype!!!

#ffvii #ff7 #ff7 rebirth #ff7 remake #things #opinions opinions opinions #that no one asked for lmao #final fantasy vii

[doomalade]

Hazbin Episode 2 Review

As usual, here is the swear count:

Fuck - 25

Shit - 9

Bitch/ Hoe/ Whore/ Slut/ Bimbo - 12

Damn - 1

Ass - 1

Cock/Dick - 1

Porn/Sex - 1

Tits/Boobs - 0

Pussy/Vagina/ Cunt - 0

Piss - 2

Now onto spoilers under the break!

The Good:

We got a lot more Alastor this episode and I love him so much. Getting to see how he uses his dark magic, completely wiping the floor with Pentius and not even paying him the time of day to acknowledge him. Alastor’s cruel side coming out on display as he toys with Pentius before ultimately tossing him away like nothing. Really helped show that Alastor has that power like none other, like we saw in the pilot.

One thing I especially love about the scenes of Alastor and Pentius is how petty Alastor can get. How even the smallest rip of his suit coat got him so mad he let out a deer noise (which I think was a neat touch.)

This episode ultimately is just an introduction to the V’s but Alastor steals the spotlight. How you really can tell that he hates the V’s, and especially Vox.

Speaking of who had hypnotic powers (and so does Pentius seemingly) and it would be interesting to explore that more.

Ultimately you really get the sense that the V’s are the outcasts of the Overlords because they’re just total jerks all together, and not so much that they’re powerful like Alastor is. Also Status Quo had a good song transition both start and finish and is a pretty alright song.

Seeing how creepy Alastor got at the end was also a blessing.

Other than that?

I still love Nifty and how she got upset at Pentius trying to be a better person and also we got to see Fat Nuggets. So hurray!

Okay now onto

The Bad:

The overall pacing of this episode was kinda weird? Like it starts off with Pentius, then moves onto the V’s, and then back to Pentius and for the V introduction episode, it felt like that they didn’t get much screen time.

A few minutes on their own, Velvette barely getting any, Val being there only like 3 times, and Vox basically gets his butt kicked around by Alastor without much tension.

I really do wish that there was more of a power balance thing going on and I know that’s kinda weird to say given how Helluva arguably was pretty forward on the pecking order. Imagine three Overlords all having powers near equal to Alastor, that would raise the stakes as it leaves Charlie and Alastor basically being the two between the V’s and the destruction of the hotel.

Ultimately the V’s feel like Overlords only by title and not by actuality. The bark is there but no bite.

As for Pentius? Meh. His little story was alright I guess, but ultimately it more served as a way to start up Angel character development. I know I’ve thrown around the term “- is the Jaune Arc of this show” before and I want to explain that.

You know how James Gunn made Rocket the secret protagonist of the Guardian films? Take that idea and make it bad and add in a dash of misogyny if called for.

I am deeply afraid that Angel will be taking up more screen time than Charlie and will ultimately take over her spot as the protagonist. Which begs the question, why wasn’t Angel just made the protagonist up right?

Charlie is being woobified as is the case with most Viv characters, and now Angel’s focus is increasing. I got the same vibe from Fizz taking the protagonist role from Bitzø in Helluva.

Other than that? It becomes very apparent that this episode was written by Viv given the 25 fucks said during this episode, the most this far in the series. (Spoilers: E4 takes the cake for the most with 35.) Most of those fucks are spoken by Val’s brief first appearance before Status Quo. To call it excessive would be accurate.

Also let me not forget that I only count the spoken swears, and not the ones only shown. If I did, 25 would have become 30 in one frame during Vox’s news segment during the song.

Also during said segment, there is another Blitzø style drawing, which might only be irking me and no one else.

As for the song itself? I think the only downsides would be that Alastor singing about how older technology and ways of doing things are better than the new, uses terms such as “clout”, “podcast”, and “that’s the tea.”

Is this a nitpick? Sure. Does it only slightly exist out of the reasonability of Alastor’s character and how he acts and thinks? Sure. Does it still bother me like mad and make me point to it as a casual example of Viv not really knowing what she is doing with characters? Yes.

So ultimately this episode was like a 5/10. Idk, it exists I guess.

#doom.txt #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel critical #hazbin spoilers #hazbin hotel critique #hazbin hotel spoilers

[txttletale]

bundletober #16: the mystery creature of claytonsville, pa

you thought i'd forgotten about bundletober, didn't you? admit it. no? that's okay. the trial won't be for months. anyway i fell behind a bit but i'm catching up and talking about the mystery creature of claytonsville, pa, a sensibly-named game by nick wedig.

who doesn't love a creature. who doesn't love a game where there is some sort of creature, or beast. the mystery creature is at the heart of this game, and is in fact the only recurring character if you choose to play multiple sessions--you're instructed, if you play this game as anything other than a one-shot, to create a new protagonist for each session and seal the old one's fate (literally!)

this is a diceless and (sort of) GMless game--it operates on cards and questions. if the protagonist's success is in doubt, they draw a card: on red, they succeed, on black, they fail. drawing cards also determine the stakes of any particular scene--at the beginning of the session, the table comes up with four potential fates for the protagonist, each corresponding to a fate. at the beginning of each scene, you draw a card, and set stakes pertaining to that fate--if the scene ends and everyone agrees that fate is creeping closer.

it's a cool mechanic that is communicated somewhat obtusely--but to be fair i think i just communicated it obtusely too, talking about things that are super intuitive as physical objects that you can move around in front of you is just generally difficult to do clearly.

the rest of it should be pretty familiar to anyone who's played a lot of diceless RPGs--setting elements that get passed around from player to player, leading questions creating play--there's a cool detail where after establishing the stakes of a scene, you add details, so a scene can go from 'the protagonist is running for their life' to 'the protagonist is running for their life from the cops', building out the concept of a scene over one or two iteratoins rather than putting pressure on anyone to set up a scene solo.

the setting elements are well-written, giving clear instruction on what the purpose of that setting element is and what agendas to pursue--this is something a few games like this don't give out, so it's nice to see it here. if there's one criticisms i have of this game, it's that it could be clearer in communicating its rules--it took me a twice over to figure out how fates actually get sealed because it's only covered once in the middle of a much broader overall structure of play--and that there's not enough creature! the creatue is one of four setting elements--but it doesn't have any special or unique mechanics, there's nothing in the game that pushes it to be a focal point of the story. and that might work well over multiple play sessions where the randomness of card draw will let you have some very mystery-creature-centric sessions and some where it hangs out in the background--but if you're playing this as a one-shot, i feel like a lack of focus on the creature could feel pretty disappointing in a game named after it. maybe from now on i will always add 'not enough creature' to a game's list of bad points. every tabletop roleplaying game needs More Creature.

the mystery creature of claytonsville, pa is available for purchase as a digital download through itch.io

#tattletxt #bundletober 2023 #ttrpg #will try and get another one out today #and then two tomorrow to be

[cipheramnesia]

Hiii beautiful Cipher!

Recently we were able to watch Nope and absolutely loved it!! Her at home we have a couple of roommates who are not really into horror but Nope worked for them as it is a horror that feels like a western/sci-fi.

So we come to you asking for recommendations on horror movies that work that way.

Nope is kind of a tough act to follow, because it's one of those movies that hits on all levels - story, subtext, character, plot, cinematography. You name it, and Nope knocked it out of the park. So, tempered expectations, there's nothing else which will hit quite the same, I think.

Two movies I think are quite good and complimentary are Prey and Tremors. Tremors in particular comes pretty close to the same scifi western monster movie vibe of Nope, including a pretty similar pace and similar plot beats. While it doesn't quite aim as high as Nope, it's a classic of the horror genre for a good reason, and a whole lot of fun. It leans more into humor, although it's firmly a horror movie. If you or your friends somehow never heard of it, and you don't have "hard out" triggers, my advice is go in fully blind because much like Nope it has a lot of enjoyable twists. Some triggers I'd add would be animal death (sheep), fear of heights, child in danger, and obviously fear of earthquakes or similar.

Prey was all over Tumblr so I don't think I need to add a whole lot. It's one of the movies in the Predator series, and easily one of the best. The original Predator could also work to compliment Nope, but I think Prey fits it better. Watch it in the Comanche dub obviously. It's more of a departure from being directly a Western movie but syncs up enough to fit the vibe and it's likely to find a similar positive reception with anyone who enjoyed Nope thanks to the way it balances character, story, and action while using a deft but light touch with the horror element. This is one that's not really much for twists and turns so ahead and go nuts at doesthedogdie.com if you wanna.

A few others that mash-up horror, science fiction, and western movie tropes or themes, but which don't compliment Nope as well, are Pitch Black, Turbo Kid, and Prisoners Of The Ghostland. Pitch Black is from back in Vin Diesel's early days, and feels like something right in between Aliens and Firefly. It's a low stakes, mid-budget monster movie that doesn't reinvent anything but makes for a fun ride. Turbo Kid is a retro 80s movie more than western per se, which imho leans too hard on the style and not enough on the characters, but it's full of weird mechanical devices and showdowns and standoffs. Prisoners of the Ghostland is something fully different than Nope, but it mashes up the western and samurai genres along with post apocalypse themes and an overall dreamy surrealism that puts it more in line with Mad God. But it sure is scifi western horror, kind of. Content warning: Nicholas Cage.

If we get a little further outside the western area, there's definitely some other films that are a good follow up for Nope. Immediately to mind is the spectacular scifi horror movie Attack the Block. It's another great movie to in blind on if you can, not so much for specific plot twists, as purely the story unfolding is so good and so fun that getting to enjoy it unspoiled is deeply satisfying. It's a fantastic bit of humans versus aliens that illustrates how to masterfully take a very conventional story and tell it in a way so unique that it feels new each time you watch it.

Related and tangential to the western movie is the apocalypse road trip movie, aka the Mad Max genre. One of my favorites is the little seen 80s movie but released in the 90s Highway To Hell. It's a curious bit of film with some bits that aged poorly, but for the most part it's surprisingly smart and chock full of iconic moments, including racing the devil for a soul. More recently I would suggest the Wyrmwood movies (Road of the Dead and Apocalypse), as absolutely balls out zombie movies like nothing you've seen, unless you like Z Nation, but even then they're still unique. In particular Wyrmwood Apocalypse has some of the western movie vibes, but it's uniquely bizarre in execution.

Lastly I wanna give a shout-out to Red Hill, which is not science fiction or horror, but is a banger of a modern day western movie, particularly with how it tricks the viewer into the idea that it's heading one way and then, well... something quite a bit else.

#horror movies

[puckmaidens]

If you are taking requests.....can I request anything soft and fluffy with Oleksiak or Seguin helping the reader with depressive episode?

Better Days - Jamie Oleksiak x fem!reader x Tyler Seguin

WC: .7k

Y/N was exhausted, and both Jamie and Tyler being gone didn't help. Sleep was difficult to come by since the playoffs started but definitely with Seattle and Dallas playing each other for a Western Conference Final spot.

Y/N was torn for a multitude of reasons but the biggest one was leaving the house. Her meltdowns and random irritations made being there for both boys hard.

Why am I not strong enough to get up and go see them at the game? None of the other Better Halves struggle like this, they show up and out. Their minds didn't hate them so much that getting out of bed was the hardest thing all day.

She hadn't slept or left the house in weeks, and basic things like bathing and eating were Herculean efforts, and more times then not getting in the shower didn't happen.

She missed them both, but she couldn't call them. Too much was at stake for them, Jamie on a new team making it to playoffs and Tyler making a deep run with the Stars.

I’m only one call away, Superman got nothing on me

Her phone basically stayed attached to the charger unless Y/N was listening to music to fall asleep to. Her laundry was reaching a critical mass and the smell was overwhelming. Even being awake was too overwhelming some days.

Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow...

Y/N let the phone ring, body finally shutting down for sleep.

The door opens and Jamie walks in to find his (and Tyler's) girlfriend fast asleep and distraught in her sleep.

"You take care of us, so let us take care of you, baby. I'll call Tyler and do your laundry. Don't worry, we'll make up for lost time."

"Segs. She's not doing good, found her asleep in her apartment and everything is a mess. I need your help."

"Rig, I'm on my way. Anything for both of you. I'll grab food too. How did we miss this? Y/N, baby we're gonna make sure you're ok. Ok?" Tyler's voice gets soft as he hangs up the phone.

Jamie starts doing Y/N's laundry, sorting out clothes and in-between loads finding out what food was there.

The door swings open and Jamie hears Tyler's footsteps before feeling him bump into Jamie.

"Is babydoll still sleeping? I've got food and some stuff. Soap, laundry detergent, new pjs."

"Out cold, couldn't even get her blanket off her. I checked her temperature and it seems normal. You can go and try to wake her. Ty?"

"Yeah, Jame?"

"You have a plan? I don't think she's going to without a fight. Or without help." Tyler nods, setting his haul down.

"I'll carry her to the bathroom and you'll start the bath. She needs both of us right now. You think the laundry will finish by then?" Jamie drops the last load of laundry in, adds detergent and gets it running.

"Let's go take care of her."

Y/N wakes up to the smell of lavender and arms around her.

"Mmm hi? Aren't y'all supposed to be with the team?"

"Baby, you weren't picking up. Nobody could reach you. We had to use our keys, why didn't you tell us things were getting bad?"

"You both were so busy and I didn't want to be a burden or too much. You both have been working so hard and I didn't want to bog you down with my problems."

Tyler presses a kiss to Y/N's forehead and Jamie pulls her into his chest.

"You are our baby, our partner. Taking care of you is never a burden. We will love you even when things feel hard. Ty and I will make sure you know we love you every day."

The night wanes on with both boys helping you finish your bath, Tyler scrubbing Y/N's arms and Jamie washing her hair.

The bed is heavy with Tyler pressing your neck to his shoulders and Jamie spooning you from the back.

Everyday isn't perfect, but with both of them loving you, it's at least better even when the dark days arrive.

#tyler seguin fic #Jamie Oleksiak fic #tyler seguin x reader #Jamie Oleksiak x reader #Tyler Seguin Imagine #jamie oleksiak imagine

[fuckmeyer]

something i've been thinking about a lot (besides how unhinged i am for picking apart the Twilight saga again) is the ineffective use of words in Eclipse.

take a look at this honking nugget of text

don't me wrong. i appreciate that it 1) illustrates Bella doing normal stuff, 2) gives us an intimate peek into her personality (stubbornly arranging fridge magnets? questioning one's neurodivergency? cool!), 3) throws in a bit of Bella-style humor, 4) talks about magnets, & 5) gives us a metaphor, however redundant

what i dislike is:

the redundant metaphor. look, i'm a sucker for metaphors (however redundant), but at this point we're a few chapters into Eclipse. Bella's narration and concrete examples tell us Jacob & Edward cannot coexist. the metaphor is as redundant as my mentioning my love of metaphors, redundant or otherwise.

the technicality of the writing. i.e., the hulking parenthetical between the em dashes. "round black utilitarian pieces that were my favorites bec—" that alone takes FORTY-TWO WORDS. nearly 20% of a 226-word metaphor for Jacob & Edward describes fucking magnets. i love magnets too, but damn, girl. stop

the emptiness of the text. 226 words, who cares, right? fluff is part of the saga's charm. yes. but! it's now book 3. we're knee deep in a thematic discussion about humanity & juggling several sideplots. for every 226 words we spend watching Bella push magnets together, we have 226 fewer words to spend developing relationships with Bella's vamp fam or her wolfpack pals. that's 226 words we won't spend fleshing out plots, tying up conflict from New Moon, or setting up Breaking Dawn. are the 226 words useless? no. but do we not already have a sense of the conflict & what's at stake here? can't we be fluffy and economical?

if this was a one-time deal, i would say yes, bring on the fucking magnets (& metaphors). but superfluous text is not an anomaly

this ends chapter 11. instead of hooking the reader to turn the page, Bella tells us which words we're meant to notice, her reaction, then dismisses said reaction.

the broader issue: despite the cool lil rabbit holes to explore in Eclipse, Bella insists on holding our hand for all of them. explaining (& dismissing?) every observation limits our scope & makes the book unsatisfying. Bella can (should!) notice lil details, but making readers draw their own conclusions gives them the freedom to explore the book in new ways & gives Bella the freedom to show us more story

but this worsens as the book continues. don't even get me started on the ~4,250 words smeyer takes to appropriate the history of a real tribe. it is meant to add lore to shapeshifting & give Bella an idea for saving Edward later on in the novel. in doing so it perpetuates racist tropes & stereotypes about certain American tribes.

point is, these words add up. the fluff becomes cloying for how much remains unresolved. it gives us too few opportunities to explore & draw our own conclusions. the overall message becomes muddled because there's too much nothing being said. anything of importance that is being said is repeated over & over.

this ineffective use of writing makes me feel like we're desperately clinging to the "normal yet ✨️supernatural✨️" vibes of Twilight while refusing to acknowledge that this series has become bigger than a simple "girl meets vampire, love ensues" pseudo-fairytale.

that is (one of) my problem(s) with Eclipse.

#twilight #twilight renaissance #the twilight saga #twilight eclipse #bella swan #edward cullen #jacob black #eclipse read

[tracingpatternswrites]

The Patchwork of Us | Chapter 10

(I'm just copy/pasting my A/N notes into this post)

My darlings! I'm feeling quite emotional now that I'm about to post the final chapter of this story.

I cannot tell you all how incredibly blown away and happy I am over the reception of this fic. It started as a silly idea and having so many people reading along and commenting has really made this into such a special journey.

In this country, we celebrate Christmas on the 24th so I'm back in my childhood home tonight, and I'm sitting on the sofa in the living room writing/editing/posting Wolfstar fanfic while my family watches telly around me and it's like I'm 16 years old again (and not like it was 16 years since I used to do this, hush).

Anyway, I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has joined me on this journey and everyone who has read and kudoed and commented so far. Without you, this wouldn't be as fun. I'm so humbled and grateful that you have fallen in love with these idiots (and Teddy) the same as I have. Thank you!

Also a special thank you to @heartofspells and @squintclover for being so encouraging, for betaing, for bouncing ideas and for always, always, always being my biggest cheerleaders when I have a new bizarre AU idea. I love you both!

I will post the actual full post for this fic tomorrow, but you can read it from the beginning here.

Snippet below the cut.

“Why can’t I come?” Teddy asked, his bottom lip pushed out in a pout as he kicked his legs against the side of the tub.

He was perched on the edge of it, watching as Sirius was getting himself ready. Sirius had pulled his hair up into a ponytail, studying his face in the mirror. He was pondering whether or not he should add some eyeliner or if that would be too much. He would have to leave in a few minutes if he didn’t want to be late. His heart was fluttering happily in his chest as he thought about the evening. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a date, and he felt quite out of practice. He used to be pretty good at them, but as with everything it seemed to become more and more daunting the longer he put it off. The last one he’d been to had been well before Teddy had come into his life.

He’d hooked up with some guys since then, of course. It had usually happened when his friends (with James at the forefront, cheered on by Dora) had dragged him to a club. It had never turned into anything more than a casual hook-up though, and Sirius knew that was mostly his own fault. He hadn’t felt ready for a relationship, everything with Dora and Teddy had just felt too complicated.

This was different though. Remus was different, and Sirius felt comfortable admitting that to himself now. Remus was already a part of his life, of Teddy’s life. He was someone who was already there and would be there, regardless of what Sirius thought about it. That was a thought that both thrilled and terrified him.

It was a gamble, of course, because so much was at stake, but it still felt like it made sense. Asking Remus out had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, he was floating high in post-orgasm, but the light in the other man’s eyes had told him immediately that it had been the right thing to do.

For a while he had thought that the fight between Remus and James would get in the way, but as Sirius had learnt a long time ago it was impossible to stay angry with James Potter for more than five minutes. Remus had tried his best, Sirius had to admit that much, but in the end nothing ever stood in the way once James Potter had set his mind on something. For the past week he had put every little bit of energy into making Remus forgive him, and by the way he had turned up to celebrate a couple of nights ago he had finally succeeded.

Remus had admitted as much, too. He had said he’d forgiven James for not telling him straight away, and that they’d had a good conversation about it. Remus hadn’t told him any details though, and neither had James, clearly set on keeping his promise to Remus not to spill any more of his secrets. It was okay, Sirius thought, because he figured Remus needed someone in his life that he could trust. Someone aside from Sirius, that was, because he had promised himself that he would be one of the people that Remus could depend on from now on. 

Sirius had asked Harry to come over and watch Teddy while he was gone, and that had seemed like a winning concept up until just now, when Teddy had suddenly changed his mind. Once he had clocked that Sirius was going to meet up with Remus, he had been nagging Sirius’ ear off about being allowed to tag along. Sirius loved Teddy, and he was happy that the boy clearly wanted to spend time with him and Remus both, but had really been looking forward to having some alone time with Remus.

“Padfoot!” Teddy’s impatient voice yanked Sirius out of his thoughts. “Why can’t I come?”

“Not this time,” said Sirius before deciding he might just as well go all in, and he carefully applied the eyeliner before smoothing it out with a finger. “You can see Remus tomorrow.”

“But I wanna see him now ,” Teddy pouted, and Sirius smiled a little as he turned around to look at the boy.

“I know, but me and Remus are going to have dinner alone tonight.”

“But why ?” Teddy demanded with a frown.

“Because,” Sirius replied, and this time he grinned as Teddy gave an unimpressed huff.

“That’s not a reason,” Teddy complained. “You always tell me that’s not a reason.”

Sirius laughed, “Well, this time me and Remus want to have some time alone, we have…adult things we need to do.”

It was the truth, Sirius thought, because he had a feeling he’d spend most of the evening picturing how Remus would look bent over various surfaces.

“What adult things?” Teddy demanded, but Sirius was saved by the knock on the door.

“That’s Harry,” Sirius said. “Go let him in, I’ll be down in a bit.”

Sirius chuckled to himself as Teddy stomped down the stairs, and when he heard the front door being yanked open he went into his bedroom to check himself in the mirror. He smoothed his shirt out, half-turning to check his arse in his jeans. He looked pretty good; he knew that he cleaned up well but it was nice to see that he hadn’t lost it even if he was out of practice.

He slipped his silver rings onto his fingers before throwing one last look at himself and then venturing downstairs. He found Harry and Teddy in the living room, and he had a horrible feeling that he blushed faintly as Harry let out a wolf whistle at the sight of him.

“You clean up good, Padfoot. Hoping to score?” he smirked, and he looked so much like James just then that Sirius very nearly flipped him off before he remembered that it was, in fact, not James but his seventeen-year-old godson and he was sitting next to an eight-year-old.

Continue on AO3.

#the patchwork of us #wolfstar #sirius black #remus lupin #teddy lupin #muggle au #read on ao3 #hp fanfic #my writing

[erraticopeninghours]

Crowley and Aziraphale's Argument #1

Thoughts on 1.11: Crowley and Aziraphale’s argument 

I know that European countries tend to be small, and Britain is also small, but in my mind, Dartmoor is not that far away from London! 

If something terrible is going to happen to Gabriel, driving him up to Dartmoor does not seem like a very effective solution. 

(I also wasn’t sure if it was going to come up or not, but Dartmoor always reminds me of The Hound of the Baskervilles, so I was on the lookout for that throughout the rest of the season.  *ACD Sherlock spoilers ahead* Nothing huge came to mind, but I would like to point out that The Hound was the first story published after The Final Problem, so it was almost like getting a Season 2 for a novel published in 1990.  And just the fact that The Hound is not the problem/antagonist of the story, but other people are!  Which isn’t exactly a parallel, but I feel like matches this season if you squint!  Because in the end, the main problem / conflict is not the dangers posed by Heaven and Hell;  it’s the effects and costs of connections, of relationships between people: Beelzebub and Gabriel, Nina and Maggie, and - of course - Crowley and Aziraphale!) 

I know it comes up repeatedly throughout the season, but I adore how much of an issue Crowley takes with Gabriel’s attempted murder / execution of Aziraphale! 

I also don’t have anything new to add, but the “carved it out for ourselves” line! GAH! 

Also, the whole bit about the “exactlies.”  Even when they’re arguing and the stakes are relatively high, they are both such dorks, and I love that about them.  It is a fantastic demonstration of their mutual incompetence. 

I would also like to recognize Aziraphale’s character growth, even if he may or may not revert to other strategies later.  (Progress is not linear!)  I am so proud of him for being so direct in what he wanted and in explicitly asking for Crowley’s help (with the acknowledgment that Crowley - at least, theoretically - can say no.)  Like, “you're at liberty to go,” “No, I would love you to help me,” “I’m asking you to help me take care of him,” But if you won’t, you won’t.”  I’m not saying that Aziraphale was not still angling for what he wanted / trying to persuade Crowley to see things his way, but I do feel like this is a lot more direct than what we’ve heard from Aziraphale in Season 1 and the Lockdown video. 

“You’re on your own” was so painful, even though I didn’t expect it to last long.  (But I also didn’t expect the end of Season 2…) It reminded me of “we’re on our own side” which Crowley technically says in the preceding episode.  And like, yes, the precious, peaceful, fragile existence is important and, dare I say, nice.  But what about Our Side? 

Lastly, I would like to point out that when Crowley was faced with a similar situation, he did not abandon the loosely innocent and helpless being his side fobbed off to him.  When Hell gave Crowley the Antichrist, he thought about simply tossing “the basket” away, but he didn't.  And some of that was because he was still officially working for Hell and hadn’t semi-retired yet, but I also believe that a good part of that was because Crowley is firmly against killing kids (human, quasi-human, or goat.)  Instead, Crowley hatched a scheme that involved him and Aziraphale watching over the Antichrist as godfathers while they both knew that the fate of the entire world (in theory) depended on their success and that failure would mean an end to their current versions of existence.  They had less knowledge about the terrible thing that could happen to Gabriel, but I feel like there is precedence for Aziraphale's attempt to convince Crowley to help this random, not entirely welcome being together as they desperately work to prevent future Bad Things from occurring. 

(previous) (next)

#good omens #good omens 2 #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #protective crowley #gabriel/jim #communication

[gumi-gang]

SECRET ADMIRER KENMA x gn!reader

wc: 969

someone’s been leaving notes on your desk for a while now. it began a few weeks ago, two days after you cut your hair way shorter than you normally would. ‘your new hair suits you,’ the note read. at first you thought someone had just forgot to sign the note, and that it was from one of your friends that you hadn’t had the chance to see since you’ve been so busy studying for the upcoming exam season. 

that was until you received a second note two days later. this time accompanied by a cartoon of strawberry milk from the vending machine, which you normally get yourself during lunch. the note reads, ‘don’t work yourself too hard. make sure to take care of yourself.’ the thoughtful words don’t fail in making your blush. it’s nice to be reminded that people care about your well being. however, it’s once again not signed, and as you sip on your drink at your desk you go through a mental list of your friends, wondering which one it could be. 

over the weeks you’ve become a detective of sorts. the notes keep coming, now daily instead of sporadically throughout the week. sometimes accompanied by a cartoon of strawberry milk, or the candy you like, but mostly alone. you collect all the notes you’ve received and kept them in a box in your desk, every once and a while shuffling through it. you tell yourself that it’s to analyze the handwriting and to check if there are any clues that give away the identity of the sender. however, from the deep blush and huge smile on your face, anyone looking closely can tell that you’ve begun to indulge in the flattery your admirer provides you. 

you also begin to use your role as class representative to collect information on your fellow classmates. cross analyzing handwriting and writing style between class assignments and notes, you fail to make any consistent matches. eventually, you decide to stake out your admirer by watching your seat from the hallway. 

“what are you doing?” a voice asks you from behind, as you stake out your seat. you jump with fright, but quickly your adrenaline subsides as you look over to see your best friend kenma from two classes down standing next to you. he’d never call you his best friend, but if you add up all the times he’s allowed you to tag along with him and kuroo after school, the times you’ve went over to his house to watch him play video games as you read in the corner of his room, and the times that you’ve spent hanging out on the weekends, you’ve got enough time to foster a friendship strong enough that almost nothing could break. 

“jeez, you scared me,” you tell him. “i’m trying to stake out my seat to see if i get another note.” kenma doesn’t even bat an eyelash at your antics. the fact that you have binoculars doesn’t even faze him. you told him and kuroo about the notes after having received the first one. while you’ve listed theories on who it might be or why they chose to remain anonymous, kenma hasn’t proven to be much help in trying to discover the secret identity of your admirer. kuroo pretends to help by encouraging you to keep trying to find hidden messages in the notes, but you know that he’s just trying to catch you making a fool out of yourself. 

“everyone can see you y/n,” kenma informs you. “no one is gonna leave a note if they know you’re trying to catch them.” you frown at his words, but also put away your binoculars in defeat. 

“don’t look so sad,” he rests his arm on your shoulder. “maybe they’ll confess soon and then you won’t have to act like a spy in between class periods.” you let out a deep breath and nod. kenma’s been trying to get you to stop trying to figure out your admirer’s identity for quite some time, because, as he constantly reminds you, they probably aren’t ready to admit their feelings for you to your face yet, and you should give them some time. “look i got you a strawberry milk from the vending machine,” he opens your backpack and slips it into one of the pockets. “volleyball practice got pushed back a little later today so kuroo and i can’t walk home with you today, but i’ll see you later. let me know if you need anything, okay?” he sends you a soft smile and a wave as he walks back to his class. 

it isn’t until that night, when you’re doing your homework, that you notice a piece of paper sticking out from your math textbook. from the handwriting you recognize that it’s another note from your secret admirer. it reads: ‘i love the happiness in your eyes. i hope one day you look at me with those same eyes and behind them will be love.’ you blush and stare at the note, reading and rereading its words. you wonder how the sender could have managed to place the note in your textbook when you’ve been carrying it all day, but you can’t think about it too much. your brain it unable to process any logic when your heart is filling your body with joy. 

once you’ve regained some sort of control on your emotions you call kenma to tell him about the note. he picks up immediately. before he can get any words out to greet you, you tell him about the note and listens to you gush over how sweet your secret admirer is. he listens to you with his heart full. maybe one day he’ll get the courage to tell you how much he loves you to your face. 

gumi-gang @ 2022

all contents and its rights belong to me. do not modify or repost. 

#this was supposed to be a drabble #haikyuu #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu x reader #kenma x reader #kozume kenma #kenma kozume #kenma scenario

[archer3-13]

been passively watching the latest rick and morty season just to see what they do after s6 being a big cloud of nothing. overall s7 feels a lot more tightly paced and written overall, the meta commentary on story writing and production issues are majorly toned down so far, and the new voice actors are doing an admirable job.

but, like the past few seasons i cant really say im digging much of anything they're doing. and i think the latest evil morty prime rick episode highlighted why. i dont mind the evil morty backstory stuff or the prime rick stuff at the end but...

why a machine that kills all versions of a person across all realities? i can see its theoretical value as a means of adding "le stakes" to whatever comes next but at the same time i feel like it actually does more to devalue whats happened and will happen. ricks search for diane despite its self admitted cliched nature did have some poignant value because it was a man who had access to a theoretical infinite thread of replacement dianes to chose from refusing to do so because he valued his diane, irrationally, more.

throwing in a machine that killed all variations of diane across all the multiverses takes the wind out of that and somehow makes it more cliched, because then its not a case of ricks irrational attachment to a specific version of a specific person instead becoming a case of literally being incapable of accessing any variation of that person because they're all dead.

and in that same vein it ironically, considering how the episode ends, it adds more importance to his search for prime rick because the dude erased someone from all realities. it no longer remains a personal vendetta with disastrous collateral damage, prime rick is just another super villain thanos asshole in terms of the scale of his ambitions.

and its a bad habit of the show where it keeps wanting to have dramatic stakes and in order to get those stakes it keeps kneecapping its characters to get those stakes. meaning i find myself caring less and less for those stakes because its completely hobbled its characters!!

#rick and morty #s7 spoilers #kinda