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thefirstknife · 3 years

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Born of Wrath - Ruins of Wrath

I want to elaborate on this post because I think it's important how the whole boss area is set up.

First of all, the whole Shattered Realm this week feels different. It's just a vibe and some aspects of the whole area. But the boss room is definitely the most interesting.

It's in a Hive warship and the centerpiece of the room is something like an elevated podium from which you have a good view towards the big Taken ball in a strange device hovering in the air. This was shown during the reveal trailer as well.

The rest (with pictures even!) under the read more:

This is the same device located in the Shrine of Oryx:

It almost appears like the one in the Shattered Realm is positioned to look into the Shrine of Oryx from above. This structure, btw, is a communication device that the Hive on the Moon used to talk to Oryx. Now, obviously, no longer used to talk to Oryx and instead, they most likely use it to talk to Xivu Arath. This would also make sense as the Shattered Realm is Xivu's domain. That room is a place from which the Hive in the ascendant plane can communicate with the Hive in the Hellmouth, vice-versa and beyond. Presumably.

And of course, there's the elephant in the room.

A strange dark crystal bound with chains overlooking the Shrine communication device structure. I'm not the only one to be unnerved by this, nor am I the only one to have the thought that this is Osiris' prison. A place where real Osiris is suspended in some sort of hellish Hive version of cryo. The chains are what really sell it to me. If this were bigger, I'd probably say it some sort of a Hive creature being held here for some future boss fight, but the size just doesn't fit.

Furthermore, I've said a few times now, but I am beginning to suspect that Xivu Arath and Savathun are not really the enemies they're trying to tell us they are. It's important to know that the Hive have a very strange and utterly alien social structure. To them, murder and torture are expressions of love. They believe that this is what gives them strength so if you kill someone a lot, it means you love them a lot because you're helping them grow stronger.

Of course, Savathun is legitimately an exile to the Hive. She has practiced heresies. Goes without saying. The problem is that we kinda took her word for a fact that she is being hunted by her sister while not really thinking about how we have no confirmation of this from the other side. We don't know what Xivu thinks. Is she tolerating her sister's heresies for a grander plan? It wouldn't be the first time that Savathun is scheming in order to strengthen the Hive. Xivu knows her sister. I am finding it harder and harder to accept that Xivu would simply hunt her down on behalf of the Black Fleet without thinking it through.

After all, their last known interaction was Savathun preparing Torobatl for Xivu's invasion. They were on good terms. Savathun helped Xivu to obliterate the Cabal. And what was the whole plan with Osiris if not Savathun preparing OUR system for Xivu's invasion? These two are mirrors of each other, but with slightly different execution due to the fact that humanity has something the Cabal do not: Light. So obviously, infiltrating the Guardians required a more careful and insidious plan.

I believe this plan started a long time ago, but was finally fully put in motion, you guessed it, in Immolant. In Immolant, Osiris is exposed to the whispers of Xivu Arath, is drawn out to fight her and is eventually stripped off his Light BUT he is left alive.

There are two points I have to mention that do not align with what we know from Immolant (and Immolant is the most reliable source out of them all):

1. Savathun's speech from week 1 - specifically, the cutscene. Quote: “I found a form more pleasing to your eyes. Osiris was lost. Lightless. I saved him from Xivu Arath and assumed his shape.” This is a lie. Savathun did not save him from Xivu: Sagira did. Sagira's sacrifice is what pushed Xivu's influence away: "Blinding Light erupts from Sagira's core as she splits apart. A wave of Light surges and tears across the chasm. Her sacrifice cleanses every trace of Xivu Arath's presence. The sigil: erased. The cryptolith that supported her projection: destroyed." 2. Page 3 of the new lore book Ripples (still not on Ishtar as of writing this so I'm linking to my post with the relevant bit) - For easier reading:

"Savathun was weak to allow their deaths. To cede ground to the Celebrant; to Guardians." - This is not what happened. Xivu Arath lured Osiris to the Moon, Xivu Arath spoke to Osiris, goaded him into killing everyone and LAUGHED while he did so, because Osiris' rampage gave her tithe. Not only that, but Immolant describes the Celebrant carving a ritual to drain Osiris' Light away and let him die. The Celebrant then leaves. So it wasn't Savathun who ceded any ground.

"The Celebrant steps forward. A massive cleaver dangles from its hand, weightless. The beast carves a rune into the stone on either side of Osiris, its eyes locked with his. It nods to him, and then turns to the sigil.

"All tithes to Xivu Arath. War Dominant. Endless." Its tone is soft rasp and soot."

And:

"The Celebrant drives its sword into the cliffside stone above Osiris's head. The cryptolith erupts in neon flare.

"Die well, Osiris." The Celebrant bows and withdraws from sight into Luna's depths.

Wisps of Light hemorrhage through his skin, trimmed in blood and drawn around the blade embedded above him as if it were a nostepinne spike."

This is very odd. There's a lot of inconsistency and lying going on. Hell, Xivu didn't even take Osiris' Light at all. The attempt was made but Sagira made sure the ritual isn't finished by sacrificing herself. Kelgorath was lied to, both by Savathun AND Xivu Arath to whom he pledged himself (and died for in the first mission during Season of the Lost: Kelgorath was the Wrathborn we fight just before we enter the portal to the Mara & Osiris cutscene).

This, to me, implies that they're in on this together. It's important to note that when it came to the Cabal, everyone thought that Umun'Arath was being influenced by Xivu, but it was actually Savathun doing it on Xivu's behalf. It is possible that all the voices Osiris was hearing were actually also coming from Savathun on Xivu's behalf. But if that was the case, then Kelgorath wouldn't have felt the need to renounce Savathun because she was the one who helped Xivu, instead of "ceding ground" as he claims. This inconsistency makes me believe that Savathun's and Xivu's courts don't really know the full scope and details of their mutual plan. The Hive sisters are literally lying to their own people for the benefit of the plan.

We only have Savathun speaking to us, but never Xivu Arath. What are her thoughts on all of this? What are her thoughts on Savathun? Is she really hunting Savathun at all? Obviously, Xivu would know that Savathun will most likely betray her, but if Savathun lays down the ground work for Xivu's invasion (like on Torobatl), why would she care? She knows her scheming sister well enough. As long as there's war, Xivu will be fed her tithe, making herself stronger and stronger. Savathun's schemes are benefitting her.

Which leads me back to the chained crystal in Shattered Realm.

Savathun's bargaining chip, Osiris. Where is he? Who is looking after this most valuable prisoner while she's trapped in her own crystal? Who would she trust to make sure he stays bound until the time is right? Who has the power to keep him bound while she's playing the game on the other side?

Well, it's Xivu Arath of course. So it would not surprise me for this crystal to really be him, bound and chained in Xivu's domain, under her watchful eye and kept in place by her power.

And, of course, where did we find "Osiris" on the Moon when we went to rescue him? In the Shrine of Oryx. The same place that the chained crystal is located in, on the other side, looking down to the Shrine from the ascendant plane.

I didn't mention it until now, but the post's title is a reference to both Immolant and Shattered Realm. "Born of Wrath" is the name of the first chapter of Immolant pt. 2, where Osiris first encounters the cryptolith, visions and voices of Xivu and gives her tithe. It would be fitting if Osiris' wrath that was "born" in that moment led to his "ruin" and eventual imprisonment in the "Ruins of Wrath."

I am looking WAY too hard into this, but it really isn't a Destiny lore analysis unless I'm a little unhinged. :)

#destiny 2 #xivu arath #shattered realm #savathun #osiris #lore vibing #long post #xivu pspspsps speak to us #bestie please answer my calls i have questions

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supremeinlilac · 3 years

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A Winter Surprise

Prompt: Something like where reader is an airline pilot and they haven't seen each other in a long time due to reader's work. So reader is coming home for the Christmas holidays and goes to pick up Cordelia from the academy in her pilot uniform coming straight from the airport. Maybe the people there don't know about reader so they're hella confused.

Reader takes Cordelia to Switzerland or somewhere else snowy to celebrate intimate Christmas together. Maybe the reader proposes there? Could you add some snowy walks, hand holding and window shopping and something else hella mushy and sweet? Like Cordelia has hearts for eyes 24/7.

Pairing: Cordelia Goode x Reader

Word Count: 4725

PART 2 HERE

A/n: Thank you once again for this AMAZING prompt!! I loved writing it, and I think it turned out even better the 2nd time lmaoo :) anyway this is going to have only 2 parts because I ran away with myself but I decided to merge the first 2 parts into this one lololol, the second part is a little soft smut because why not.

Also, I really haven’t proof read this, so please let me know if I’ve accidently left a note to myself in this haha. Anyway, I hope this is okay <33

You loved your job wholeheartedly, there was no denying that. It gave you room to experience everything you wanted, from travelling to new places that you could explore on days off, to seeing different cultures and learning languages. Plus, the feeling of being above the line of clouds, watching the earth move slowly beneath you never failed to draw in a breath of admiration. It gave you so much perspective, and helped to keep you grounded, for lack of a better word. Seeing the world below you, so small in the grand scheme of things made you appreciate everything.

You missed your girlfriend selfishly though. Your work as a pilot meant you might have to go months without seeing her and feeling her soft touch. It meant you’d both be frustrated and lonely in these times; which was starting to put a massive strain on your relationship. You’d argue while together about your work schedule, prompting you to take more shifts which never helped in the long run.

Christmas was coming up and you’d not seen her since the start of November, having been mercilessly booked with flights that left you across the world from her. You had planned to surprise Cordelia at Christmas. Well, it was more than one surprise you had up your sleeve; but the first was returning two days early to collect her. Zoe and Mallory were in on your heist, fully committed to handling the school’s affairs for two days for Delia to up and leave.

At your arrival at the academy, girls’ eyes lingered on you as you walked up to the heavy front doors. You supposed they weren’t aware of your job, having only seen you in civilian clothing. Smiling at their confusion, you rang the doorbell, falling backwards slightly to wait. Madison opened the door after a few seconds, eyes widening at your uniform and giving a short whistle. “Damn girl, looking good!” she chided, eyes flicking down your smart navy uniform. Her lips tugged up at one side and she waved her hand so you could enter. “I bet Delia loves a woman in uniform.” She teased; smirk set on her face as she swatted the back of your slacks when you passed. “She’s in the kitchen, I’ll go and get here.”

“No don’t. I’ll find her.” You stopped her with a hand on her wrist, wanting to find your girlfriend yourself. Madison straightened up immediately, hand coming up to her face in a mock salute. “Yes Ma’am.” She spoke seriously, before giggling and pulling you into a hug.

“I’ve missed you Y/n. You have a good time with Cordy, kay?”

“Missed you too Madison.”

Watching her disappear up the stairs before turning and heading for the kitchen. Seeing Cordelia’s shadow on the wall as you approached, you smoothed down the lapels of your uniform and stood against the doorframe. Delia had her back to you, stirring a drink and swaying to the music from the radio. You watched her, waiting for a time when she’d put the mug down so you could make your presence known without the fear of her burning herself on the drink.

Clearing your throat, her head lifted and she turned quickly, gasp leaving her lips and a momentary shock making her freeze. Snapping out of her trance, Cordelia practically threw herself onto you, arms around your neck as she took in your familiar scent.

“You told me you weren’t coming back until Friday!” she accused, grip not faltering on you as you held each other. Her hands stroked your hair when she finally pulled away, just enough to allow you to still hold her.

“I managed to get off early, I thought I’d surprise you.” You smiled when she pressed a lingering kiss to your forehead. Cordelia hummed in response, letting you know that she was most pleasantly surprised by your early return.

“Speaking of surprises… We’re going away for Christmas. I managed to pull some strings and get us some tickets” you started to dance with her, pulling her into a light rhythm as you laughed. “We’re going to Switzerland Delia!”

“A white Christmas?” She beamed at the vigorous nod of your head, head falling backwards and eyes closing, picturing the both of you in a warmly lit café by the snowy mountain.

“I love you and your surprises my dear.” She breathed, pulling you by the back of the neck into another kiss she spoke through the chaste kisses, “I’m glad- that- you’re- back.”

A group of the young girls came giggling into the kitchen, forcing you to part, blushing with your hands still together. They stopped when they saw you, silence falling over the space as they didn’t know what to do having interrupted your reunion. “Girls.” You spoke warmly to them, sensing their discomfort, and you pulled the Supreme behind you, past them.

Ascending the stairs to your shared room, you felt Cordelia’s gaze on your back, making you sway your hips slightly to tease.

“You look so good in that uniform baby girl.” She purred, eyes on your butt as you walked in front of her. A quick glance behind you saw the familiar glint of lust in your girlfriend’s eyes, and the smirk that painted her lips.

“But I think I still prefer what’s underneath.”

You change into a favourite top of yours and jeans while Cordelia busied herself with packing on the bed beside you. She rambled about the happenings of the academy, everything you’d missed in your months absent, pausing on the packing when she’d reach an exciting bit, arms coming up to exaggerate the story.

You told her about the new countries you’d visited and which little romantic places you wanted to take her when she didn’t have so much business to care for anymore. You didn’t want to linger on the thought of what actually had to happen for the title of Supreme to be passed on; focusing instead on the beautiful places that you longed to take her, but probably never could.

After her initial shock of being offered a white Christmas abroad with you, her responsibility to the school ebbed her back into her senses. “But how am I going to run a school if we’re abroad?” she questioned, her perfectionism spiking as she started to worry, “not to mention my duties as Supreme. There’s just too much to think about. What if-” you’d cut off her upcoming rambling with a lengthy kiss, which she relaxed into; eventually giving in to you.

Describing how Zoe and Queenie had offered to run the school in her absence, insisting how competent they’d become and that Delia had helped form them into wonderful young ladies during their time at Miss Robichaux's. Myrtle had spoken to the board on your behalf, stating how Cordelia needed a break in order to be at her best for the order, and how this would be the best thing for everyone. She’d goaded at the men who’d disagreed, saying sarcastically that it was only for two weeks and if they couldn’t control things for that amount of time then they should rethink their position there.

Closing her case with a snap of the clasps, she smiled, having made up her mind. “It is only two weeks.” She agreed with a nod of her head, sliding up to you and tilting her head. “But we can do a lot together in that time” she kissed you, hands at your waist and a glint in her eyes before walking away. You whined at her pulling away, grasping at the fabric of her blouse.

“There’ll be plenty more time for that, sweetheart. Now where did I put my shoes?” She asked, squeezing your chin once before ducking to look under the bed. You picked up the shoes by the door and pushed them into her hands, lifting her case and wheeling it through the door.

Cordelia insisted on speaking to the older girls before you departed, quizzing them on the class rota and giving them a folder which she said contained detailed lists of what needed to be done, which some of the girls shared knowing glances at one another at. You had to practically pull her away lest she overwhelm the girls; or get too anxious over what may happen in her absence and decide it would be better to simply stay.

On the plane Cordelia sat by the window and you beside her; you had the pleasure of such a view on a daily basis. The plane was relatively quiet for this time of year, almost half the seats remaining unoccupied as it took off, meaning you had the row empty, and where somewhat private.

“Why do you have a list of things you do everyday? When you do them everyday?” you grinned across at your organised Supreme who had opened a Sudoku puzzle and was staring at it with concentration, tongue poking out between teeth.

“You never know when your lady knight in shining armour is going to whisk you away on holiday, now, do you?” bumping her shoulder with yours, eyes still on the puzzle. “Helps to be organised, is all. And hey! It came in useful didn’t it?”

Leaving the airport, you pulled your coat tighter around yourself, a shiver prickling over the exposed skin at your neck. The view was already breath taking, you heard Cordelia gasp next to you as she set her case on the ground and raised her head. The snowy mountains peaked in the distance over the buildings of the small city which held the airport. Everything was bright; blindingly so as the sun breamed onto the snow covering the house and pavements.

“It’s gorgeous, my love.”

“Just wait till we get to Zermatt, D.”

You’d booked a small cabin house in Zermatt, a quiet town in Switzerland that your co-worker had recommended. He’d said it was never too busy, which would make it perfect for your intimate winter trip with Cordelia that you’d gushed about. You took the single mountain train that took you into the town, faces pressed to icy windows at the views.

The train journey was short into the town, filled with surprised gasps and pointing out animals that passed. You let your head rest on Cordelia’s shoulder, fingers laced with hers as you both took in the passing snow topped trees and vast frozen lakes. After about 20 minutes of stretching mountains, the train pulled out to reveal your pretty little town of lights.

“There it is.” You pointed to Cordelia, and she let out a small noise at the sight of where you’d be staying. In the dusk of the evening, the town was illuminated by a warm orange glow of cabin house lights, mountains looming behind and enveloping the town in a calm nook of the valley. Pine trees scattered through the cabins, leading to a forest off to the side of the town, climbing into the mountains.

“It’s so beautiful. How did you know about this place?”

“My co-pilot, Mark, do you remember meeting him at that fancy Houston party?” Cordelia nodded, eyes still trained on the town we were now looming in on. “He saw me searching for places and recommended a few places that would be quiet. Said that it pays to be a pilot; you know about the most beautiful places that no one else does.”

When you arrived at the cabin, giddy with excitement from the built up of the trip, Cordelia wasted no time with using her magic to transport your bags inside so that you could look around. The wooden floors creaked beautiful under foot, socks slipping slightly in your haste to see the rooms. There was a cosy living room with a fireplace and a note saying that wood had been stocked out the back, and soft sofa’s with plush red throws draped over the back. The kitchen was old fashioned with a wooden island, and the walls decorated with wintery scenic photography.

The house was warm, and through the door towards the back of the floor you were met with tiled flooring and large wooden beams covered in hanging fairy lights. The hot tub sat in the middle of the room, the ceiling a gaping glass sheet so you could look up to the sky, framed cinematically with snow dusted trees and the shimmering lights.

Cordelia called you back from your slight daze at the rooms, to follow her voice through to the bedroom. She was lazed on her side in the middle of the bed, seductively stroking the blanket and winking. You laughed at her antics, “we’ve only just got here D, you can’t always be in the mood.”

She grinned, sitting up and pulling you down to straddle her, bopping you on the nose and squeezing your cheeks. “For you, my darling. I am always in the mood.” You blushed, squirming on her lap before forcing yourself to move off her and grabbing her hand.

“Come on, you have to see in this room!” you voiced enthusiastically, practically dragging her after you in your hurry to show her what you’d found.

After having explored the cabin thoroughly you both showered, scrubbing off the feeling of travel from your bodies, before pulling warm clothes on and skipping out of the door with hands held to explore the small town under the hood of the afternoon, sky just beginning to darken as the sun dipped behind the mountains.

The town was so peaceful and warm, despite the snow, due to the glow of the lights and the eery lack of the quiet hum of traffic and bustling crowds. Houses looked too perfect with the undisturbed layer of snow that coated the rooves and painted a scene of perfect calm. You and Cordelia had your faces pressed against the glass of one of the small shops, watching a intricate wooden music box tinkling on the display stand, hands linked as she pulled you inside.

The tiny high street contained a small selection of these shops, selling little trinkets to the few tourists that found themselves inhabiting the cabins in winter. Cordelia had bought you a little pendant necklace with your birthstone embedded into, which she’d told you she’d get engraved back home with your initials. You couldn’t help but go back to the store the next day, alone under the guard of getting alcohol from the shop while she ran a bath, and purchasing her the same necklace with her own stone in. You thought she’d appreciate the notion that you both held something so close to your heart that the other also had next to theirs; a reminder that even when you were away for work, you’d always be there.

Eventually, you both found yourself in a cosy little café, nestled in the back in a two-person booth, warm in the glow of the wooden cabin. In an attempt to rid your bones of the deep chill that had settled throughout the day, you ordered steaming hot chocolates with cream and marshmallows. They’d come promptly, and you thanked the waitress before sinking your chin into your hands to stare admiringly at the woman opposite, only to find her in much a similar position, having been beaming, watching you interact with the serving staff.

Cupping the mug with both her hands, shoulders hunched under her chin, Cordelia sipped at the drink, leaving a small line of cream on her upper lip as she set it back down on the table. You smiled goofily at her, reaching to thumb the offending cream from her face, before setting it between her lips to clean off.

“You’re cute.”

“Says the one with a whipped cream moustache.”

You bickered playfully back and forth, feet kicking under the table as you sipped your hot chocolates and ate flapjacks. A warm fuzzy feeling settled in your stomach at the two of you simply relaxing and drinking together; you realised it had been a long time since you’d both been so carefree and without worry to just enjoy the others company.

The morning sun shone onto the tracks left by your boots in the deep snow behind you, as you both trudged down the unkept pathway towards the secluded train stop. Excluding the small indents of a foxes paws; yours are the only prints that marred the otherwise perfect snow, creating the eery illusion that you were the first to have stepped foot there at all. Cordelia's hand found yours in your coat, fingers linked in the pocket of warmth in the surrounding freezing air. Wisps of condensation danced in front of you at every shivered exhale.

Snow fell peacefully around you as you both talked, speaking in hushed voices as if you would disturb the tranquility; like a pebble into a glassy pond. The sounds around you almost seemed muffled by the soft pillowy snow that enveloped the tree branches and make them bow towards the ground. Delia gushed about how she'd never seen such beautiful views and how she couldn't get over waking up next to you and seeing the snow counted mountains in the distance out of the window.

You bit back the desire to reach down and pack the snow tightly into a ball, or fall backwards into the blanket and make a snow angel right there, smile wide as you’re returned to a childlike state of excitement and innocence in the presence of snow.

The red paint of the train peeked through the trees ahead of you, stark and conspicuous against the bright white of everything else. Cordelia let out an animated giggle as she set of towards the clearing, pulling you behind her with breathless mumbles of encouragement.

“Come on, what do we want? Front or back?”

The carriage seats were soft and plush as you settled against them, breath steamy against the cool glass when you pressed warm cheeks against it. It was peaceful, you were both among the silent few on the first train of the day that lead to the summit of the looming Gornergrat. The train rumbled beneath you as it became alive, shuddering as it slowly pulled away from the stop, wheels moaning in ached protest as it began its ascent.

Your fingers tingled at the change of temperature on the train, colour blooming back into paled cheeks at the comforting warmth. You both shed gloves and scarves to the seat opposite, hands brushing lingering snow from hats and shoulders as to avoid them melting and seeping invasively into cold clothes. The Supreme took your hand between hers, cupping it and bringing it to her face to blow warm air into her palms, rubbing the numbing cold feeling from one hand before repeating the action on the other.

Out of the window, you could see the rest of the train curl around the corner of the mountain in front of you, the drop into the valley below steep and dangerous just to the side of the track. Cordelia loved to look down into the vast space below, seeing the miniaturized trees and cabins, just the thought of the sheer height made your stomach clench uncomfortably and your head spin, clutching to your girlfriend’s hand. You knew that this feeling was irrational; you spent everyday up thousands of feet above the clouds, piloting planes, but then you had full control of the situation, knowing that nothing could go wrong. This was different.

It started to snow just before the train pulled up at the peak of the mountain, giant dancing snowflakes whirling through the air and turning the sky white with their abundance. You both shrugged hats and scarves back on and shoulders hunching protectively as the door swung open, leaving at the mercy of the elements outside.

Algid winds nipped sharply at your cheeks as you stepped off the train, spontaneous tears forming at the invasive breeze on your face. Cordelia’s hair whipped wildly around her face, only stilled slightly with her hat, framing her excited eyes as she turned to you, smile wide and hands up in the air as if reaching for the sky.

The snow was deep as you trekked the short distance towards the viewpoint, snowfall easing as you reached the edge, clearing the sky in front of you to reveal the clear views that spread before you. Cordelia reached the fencing first, turning to wave a hand to hurry you up and join her.

At the viewpoint, you both let collective gasps leave your lips at the panoramic scenery. 5000 feet above the tiny orangely lit town where you’d been mere hours before. Necks craned to see better, your finger pointing and enthusicastically shouting that you could see your cabin below; a pinprick of brown against the background of overwhelming, white-washed landscape.

Breathless at the sheer view you’d been gifted with of the Alps and the Matterhorn, you both fell into a deep silence. You knitted your brows together, looking forward as you felt in your pocket, breathing deep and building yourself up in your mind to do what you had planned this whole trip for.

“I am so sorry that my job causes me to be so absent.” You mused, elbows coming to rest on the bar of the viewpoint. You both continued to stare at the views as Cordelia mirrored you, elbows leaning on the bar. “Baby, we all have to work. I’m just glad we get to-”

“I quit my job.” You blurted out, causing her to stop and turn to face you. “You what?” Staring at you from behind wide eyes, you repeated yourself, finally tearing your eyes from the winter view to glance at Cordelia. The surprise on her face was not well hidden, neither was the fact she was saddened to hear that you’d quit the job you’d once dreamed of.

“You don’t need to that my love. I know it makes you happy.” Her gloved hand came to hold yours, eyes sincere as she squeezed your hand in hers.

“I got a new job. Its seasonal so I only have to work January through March and then September. Its better than what we’re doing now, right?”

Cordelia nodded, turning to face you. “That gives us so much more time together; thank you.” You fiddled in your pocket to retrieve you phone, having to strip your hands of the warm gloves that covered them to unlock it. You had told Delia that you wanted to show her something on it, but you accidently let the device slip from your fingers and into the snow by her feet, disappearing into the layers of snow.

“I’ve got it.” She assured you, and you let her crouch down to retrieve your phone, slipping down yourself behind her. She straightened up and turned around, smile faltering as she took in your position. “Y/n.” She warned, voice wavering and eyes darting to look for other people that may be nearby. “What are you-”

“I love you Delia. I love you so much and I know that you love me too.” Her hands came up to her mouth when she realised that you weren’t joking, eyes filled with adoration as she listened.

“The moment I knew that I would follow you anywhere, and that you were the one; my only one, was when you looked after me in March when I had that Spanish flu. I couldn’t leave the bedroom in case I passed it onto the girls, and you stayed with me the whole time, caring for me when I was too weak to do it myself.” Cordelia was crying now, beaming through tears which she kept wiping away with gloved fingers, and nodding along with you words.

“Well this is me staying, D, I want to stay with you for the rest of our lives. I love you.” She mouthed ‘I love you too’ back, head leaning to the side slightly as she wanted nothing more than to pull you into a hug and never let you go.

“I love that you make me whole, and that when you smile, I feel like I might actually die, because you’re so beautiful Deils. I love that you are nothing like Fiona, and that you stick up for me, and that we make memories together and that my most beautiful moments are with you.”

“I can’t wait to have moments just like right now for rest of our lives. Will you marry me?”

You slowly opened the box to reveal the ring that glimmered against the harsh light of the sun; eyes lifting to meet Cordelia who was staring at you unwavering, hands clasped at her chest. She was nodding fervently, laugh bubbling out through her smile as she pulled you up into her by your hands.

“Yes, my darling. Yes of course I will!”

After shakily slipping the ring onto her finger, relief and happiness drawing fresh tears upon both of your cheeky; you let Cordelia admire it against the background of the mountains. Rising onto toes to press a lingering kiss to her temple, her fingers sprayed apart as she held them up to the light.

“Come here you.” She coaxed, fingers wrapping round the back of your neck and drawing you into a passionate kiss. It was the ultimate memory, to kiss, now newly fiancés at the peak of a snow-capped mountain in Switzerland.

Returning from outside, Cordelia lit the fire with a dexterous flick of her wrist, settling down on the couch with a sigh. Her legs spread across the whole couch, back resting at one end. Her eyes searched for you, twisting to look down the corridor at you walking towards her.

“Come here baby.” She cooed; arms extended towards you in invitation for you to settle between. You gave her a quick peck on the lips and a gentle squeeze before lying between her legs and resting your head against her shoulder, nuzzling your face sideways into her neck, inhaling the lingering smell of her perfume on her pulse point.

She wrapped her arms around you, and you let out a surprised squeal as she pressed her cold palms suddenly against the warm skin of your stomach, muscles rippling instinctively under her touch. “Sorry baby.” She apologised, placing a kiss to the hair on the crown of your head before letting her chin rest there.

“It’s okay, I just wasn’t expecting it” you giggled, relaxing again as her fingers drew absentminded patterns on your torso, her breath tickling the hair atop your forehead as she exhaled.

You both sat in the comfortable silence that enveloped you, having been apart for so long you basked in the fact you can simply hold one another and just exist. Cordelia’s thumb brushed softly against your own knuckles and you hummed in appreciation at the candidly loving action.

That night, Cordelia found herself propped on her side, head lying on her bunched-up pillow and allowing herself a quiet moment of observation. She missed these simple aspects of your presence. The comfort you brought her, even in sleep as she watched your chest rise and fall evenly and undisturbed.

You stirred slightly, face scrunching up momentarily before relaxing into a peaceful expression again, making Cordelia hold her breath to not wake you. Hair had fallen to block you face so she reached out delicately to tuck it back behind your ear, her eyes brimming with tears that she gets to simply watch you sleep like this.

Overwhelmed with her love for you beside her; she fell into a rhythm of her thumb on your cheek, tracing the freckles and light marks that marred your skin beautifully. You always expressed your dislike for these, but Cordelia would always silently shake her head in objection, knowing you would believe her voiced adoration.

“When did I get so lucky?” she whispered, leaning forward to brush lips lightly over yours before returning to her pillow and hooking an arm over your hip.

Dipping into sleep, she found herself vowing to prolong her reign as Supreme for as long as she could, never wanting to leave you alone and vulnerable. Especially while you slept, she thought. You look so pretty when you sleep. So pretty. She drifted off, arm draped protectively over your waist, pulling you closer in sleep.

#sarah paulson #cordelia goode #sarah paulson x reader #cordelia goode x reader #ahs #american horror story #ahs apocolaypse #ahs imagines #sarah paulson imagines

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murasaki-murasame · 3 years

Text

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep22

All of this ‘the culprit’s motives are super shallow and they’re just unhealthily obsessive’ discourse is giving me war flashbacks to . . . . basically every other part of the entire When They Cry franchise, lol.

Thoughts under the cut. [Plus spoilers for Umineko]

I feel like at the end of the day we’re all just gonna have to agree to disagree about how we feel about how Ryukishi is handling Satoko as the culprit here, since I don’t really think any amount of social media posts detailing our interpretations of her character are gonna change anyone’s minds, lol. But I’m still gonna give my thoughts on her anyway because it’s fun, even if I’m basically just preaching to the choir.

To be honest, this feels pretty much in line with how Ryukishi already wrote characters like Takano and Beatrice, in terms of them having unhealthy obsessions that lead them to mass-murder. The amount of violence Satoko has caused is arguably worse than either of them, but they’re all pretty awful if you think about the reality of what they all did as villains.

Sorta like with how a lot of the old-school Umineko discourse went, I think people are too focused on the whole idea of Satoko hating studying, and ignoring everything else about her character and her circumstances. Although even then I feel like people are being kinda unfair toward Satoko about how strongly she feels about academics, but maybe I’m just biased because of my own history with schooling and the intense levels of anxiety and self-hatred that can go along with it.

Plus the fact that Satoko already has a long history of sever abandonment issues, and has basically always had HS that amplified her feelings of paranoia and persecution. It’s pretty obvious at this point that she never really got ‘cured’ in the first place, though it’s less important to think about HS as an in-universe fictional disease with it’s own rules, and more important to just think about it as a representation of real-life mental illnesses which aren’t bound by the rules of made-up brain-worm parasites and aliens or whatever.

Also, the Satoko that started all this looping in the first place was one who never dealt with Teppei returning to the village, and thus never went through her whole character arc related to that. The series is kinda ambiguous about how it handles the idea of people’s character development carrying over between loops, but it explains a lot about Satoko’s attitude here if you go with the idea that she never really had to overcome any of her trauma or coping mechanisms in the “good ending timeline”, and this is the consequence of that taken to it’s logical extreme. The idea of her view of the world being skewed by the fact that she only remembers the “good ending timeline” is also kinda lamp-shaded by the part where she hears about Rika’s looping and is like “oh yeah, that’s the month where we had that cool action movie stand-off with the Mountain Dogs :)”. By the time she really got to understand exactly what was going on beyond the specific timeline she had experienced, she was already way over the edge.

I get why people don’t like the idea of Gou ‘tainting’ the VN’s happy ending, but I honestly like the idea that it’s examining the consequences of how Matsuribayashi was such an overly-specific timeline where basically nothing bad happened and everyone just banded together to beat Takano. It kinda glossed over a lot of the personal problems that the main cast had in the rest of the series, and this really goes to show the effects of some of that stuff not getting properly addressed. It also reminds me that Minagoroshi is a timeline that even in the VN, Rika completely lost her memories of, so I can see how even post-Matsuribayashi she might have never let Satoko know about the details of that one timeline where she overcome her abuse.

I also feel like it only really got to this point because of Featherine’s meddling. In the original Matsuribayashi timeline, Satoko just started drifting away from Rika and ended up wandering into the Saiguden and meeting Featherine before anything actually serious happened in that timeline. I think that if she had just been left to her own devices and that timeline had just kept going, Satoko probably would have either found a way to reconnect with Rika, or they would have just slowly drifted apart for good. But then Satoko got given the power to time travel, and only started going off the deep end after going through another five years of identical suffering.

And on that whole note, it reminds me of how in Umineko, Lambda had a whole conversation about the idea of an abused person becoming an abuser themself if they’re given the power to lash out. Which is basically what’s happening here. Satoko is being given the tools to completely detach herself from reality and try as many times as she likes to get what she wants.

Which also reminds me that this episode in particular REALLY lays the Umineko parallels on thick, lol. Particularly the whole ‘Satoko is turning into Lambda’ thing, which feels just about 100% confirmed now. They straight up have Featherine bring up the exact same ‘monkeys using a typewriter’ analogy to explain Rika’s situation that Lambda uses in Umineko to explain Bern’s situation.

I know a lot of people don’t like the increasingly blatant Umineko tie-ins, and that a lot of people still think it might just be misdirection, but considering how much stuff in Gou has been surprisingly straightforward and predictable, I think it’s pretty much exactly what it seems to be.

Though to be more specific, this is probably more about the start of Lambda and Bern’s relationship, and their appearances in Umineko, rather than the very first origins of them as individuals, if that makes sense. Obviously the concept of Bernkastel as an identity has been around since Higurashi itself, and we’ve known for a long time that Lambda was the one who originally gave Takano her blessing of certainty, but we’ve never known the full details of how those two started their relationship, and Featherine’s whole series of name-drops in the last episode makes it seem like Lambda as a meta individual more or less already exists, with Satoko being an iteration of her. So I think they both technically already exist, but this is how the two of them come into contact and start their whole unhealthily obsessive relationship.

I guess it’s still possible that, even if she’s already existed for a long time as a meta individual, she hasn’t actually come up with the name ‘Lambdadelta’ for herself yet, and this might be where she does so. Even with the list of names Featherine referenced, she didn’t technically bring up Lambda’s name directly. So in that sense this might be ‘Lambda’s’ origin story, even if she already exists.

Considering how basically the entire story at this point seems to be acting in service of setting up the whole LambdaBern relationship dynamic no matter what, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this will end with Satoko and Rika fully embracing their codependency and mutually ascending to the meta plane so they can stay together once and for all. There might still be human versions of them that stay behind in the real world and continue living normal lives, though.

At the very least, it feels like that’s the logical outcome of the whole Chekov’s Sword Fragment plot device that’s been hanging in the background for ages now. I think it’ll just be the in-universe explanation they use to show the mechanics of how exactly that process works. It’ll probably be used to ‘sever’ Satoko and Rika’s meta consciousnesses from their physical bodies and allow them to basically become witches.

Mainly I just can’t really see this having a ‘happy ending’ at this point, aside from the whole idea that maybe the severing process leaves behind ‘normal’ versions of the two of them who stay in Hinamizawa and go back to their normal lives. I dunno if that’d make people happy, but it’d at least be a way for Ryukishi to have his cake and eat it too, lol.

I just don’t think that there’s any real chance of this ending with them just talking to each other and agreeing to put an end to all this, though. For one thing that’d just feel kinda anticlimactic and honestly make Gou’s story feel even MORE pointless, if it just ends with literally the exact same ending as the VN with nothing really being changed. But I also feel like Featherine wouldn’t be willing to just let Satoko ‘give up’ without having one of them definitively win their current game. In general I just feel like Ryukishi should just commit to the story he’s setting up at this point, instead of just backing out at the last minute and circling everything back to the same ending we already had like nothing in Gou ever happened. If we’re gonna have this whole new story to begin with, it should at least have some lasting consequences.

Anyway, I think in the next episode we’re finally going to loop back to the Damashi arcs and see how they played out. At this point I don’t care too much about getting answers to the ground-level mysteries of those arcs, and I doubt the story will spend much time on that, but I’m curious to see how it progresses Satoko’s whole development through these loops, since I think she goes through some changes with her motives and methods over the course of them.

Specifically I think that the actual experience of being physically present in her own set of loops and causing so much pain and suffering started to get to her, and she might have almost given up in her own way during Tataridamashi and wanted to just stay in that arc, but things went south anyway. Maybe, if that’s what happened, Featherine basically let her know that she won’t let her give up, and will force her to keep looping until one of them ‘wins’ no matter what. Either way, I think that arc was a turning point for her. Like how she asked Featherine to arrange things so that Satoko can make sure that she and Rika’s loops are synced up, she probably asked Featherine after that arc to change the rules again so that Rika will start remembering the details of her deaths. At this point it’s pretty obvious that the Hanyuu fragment Rika was talking to earlier in Gou was more or less just Featherine putting on an act and manipulating her, so the scene of Hanyuu giving her the power to remember her deaths was probably just Featherine telling her about the rule change.

And going by how the Nekodamashi arc went immediately afterward, I think that rule change was related to Satoko becoming increasingly desperate to put an end to the loops as soon as possible. And considering how she was willing to spend so much time reviewing Rika’s hundred years of looping just to prepare for this, it’d make sense to me if she becomes desperate because she basically gives up, but realizes that she isn’t actually allowed to give up, so she has to try and make Rika give in as fast as possible. Either way it’s pretty obvious that Satoko’s methods start becoming more violent in that arc, and she basically tries to brute-force Rika into submission, leading up to the loop where she just spawn-camps her and straight up starts screaming at her to just stay in the village while tearing out her guts. It’s still possible that her attitude in that loop was just one big act, but I think that was the result of her being genuinely desperate to just have Rika give up once and for all, and her starting to crack under the pressure of doing all of these things with her own hands across so many loops.

So now we’ll just have to see how the confrontation between them at the end of Nekodamashi plays out once we get back to it. In the long run I just think it’ll lead to the ending I talked about before, with them using the sword on each other. The exact nuances of how that sorta ending might play out are up in the air, though.

Either way, I think there’s probably enough time to wrap up all that in two more episodes, but there’s still reason to believe that there might be some kind of sequel in the works. I don’t really want to bet on it, though, so I’m just gonna assume that there’s two episodes left and base my theories on that. In which case I think the next episode will go over the Damashi arcs and end with Rika and Satoko’s confrontation at the end of Nekodamashi, and then the final episode will wrap everything up. Considering that they both more or less know exactly what’s going on with each other by that point, there isn’t really that much that needs to be wrapped up. I think that will be the final loop we get, so it’ll all just come down to how their confrontation plays out, and what decision they come to about how to handle each other.

I honestly don’t really know how I think a full sequel would go, if it’s at least one cour long. Assuming that it’s not just a new Umineko anime that more or less continues Rika and Satoko’s arc via Lambda and Bern, but is a straight up ‘Higurashi Gou Season 2′. It just feels like there isn’t really that much that needs to be done to wrap things up, now that everything’s being laid out in the open, and Rika and Satoko are both aware of each other’s looping. They might switch it up so that they both end up teaming up to take down Featherine, but I kinda doubt that’ll happen.

I’m still hoping this is leading into some kind of new Umineko anime though, lol. That feels like it’d be the main reason for putting so much effort into this whole elaborate LambdaBern origin story we’re getting here.

I’ve heard rumors that there’s been listings for a 25th episode of Gou, so it’s possible that rather than another full season, there’s just one extra episode at the end. I’m not exactly sure what the point of doing one extra unannounced episode at the end would be, though. It might end up being a bridge between Gou and a new Umineko anime.

At the very least, if it’s just ‘Satokowashi Part 8′, it makes me wonder why they haven’t announced it yet, and why they didn’t just split that arc into two BD volumes with four episodes each, instead of having it be one big volume with seven episodes, and one random episode at the end for some reason. But if it’s more of an epilogue or a bridge of sorts between Gou and something else, with Gou’s story concluding with episode 24, then I guess it’d make some sense to do it that way.

We also know there’s gonna be a panel for Gou at a convention around when ep24 comes out, so if anything gets announced it’ll probably happen there.

Anyway, this whole episode can be summed up as “Satoko does a gay little psychological torture that pisses Rika off”, in the most morbidly entertaining way possible, lmao.

#murasaki reblogs #higurashi #higurashi gou

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rk1kheadcanons · 3 years

Note

smol hc: Being the only RK models, CyberLife used some of Markus's base code in Connor's program. Emotions & empathy for social integration, and also some caretaking protocols in case emergency repairs/first aid are needed on the job (IE reactivating the Traci at the Eden Club, or diagnosing & "treating" Hank's ethylic coma LOL). I love the idea of Con getting to take care of Markus for once if he gets injured doing Rebel Leader Things™

🥺 Anon. I love this HC so much. Connor having some caretaker protocols is...yes. Absolutely. The jury is out and they find the defendant correct.

___

When Markus limped into his office, practically hopping on one foot every other step, all he wanted to do was bulldoze through his paperwork so he could go home and forget today ever happened. He’d taken a pretty hard hit earlier when a counter protester at their rally thought it was just a capital idea to hurl a brick into the crowd. Much more surprising than the sudden brick to the knee, though, was the (almost terrifying in it’s rapidness) reaction from the crowd. The guy was immediately apprehended and cursed out by human supporters and androids alike. It was wild. His bodyguards barely had to do any work. Markus swore he heard a human yell that thirium shots were on them after this, amidst a chorus of responding cheers. Nothing brings people together like a communal ass whoopin’? Apparently??

God he really hoped that human didn’t drink any thirium. Markus still had nightmares about Leo accidentally mixing up his blue raspberry jello shot with his drink, nevermind the fact that thirium consumables smelled like laundry detergent and poison as purposeful deterrents.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go see the technician?” said Simon who, as his designated babysitter while North and Josh handled the fallout of the rally, followed into his office after him.

“Naaahh,” Markus drawled, waving the hand that was grasping a pen as if he could wave away the problem altogether. Not for the first time he wished the government would catch up with the rest of the world and just go paperless. Reading over and signing these tedious documents would be a lot less painful to do if they would just let him download it into his mind like a sensible person would. “I barely feel it, plus my Regenerative Program has already kicked in. By the time I get to the med bay it’ll probably be all fixed.”

“Uh huh,” Simon unconvinced at him. “How long till you’re repaired.”

Markus pulled up the damage report in his HUD. “About six…” he stared at the readings for a moment longer and, much to Simon’s chagrin, went back to doing his paperwork.

“...six what?”

“Bahhh,” Markus waved his hand again unhelpfully. Truthfully, he didn’t know how to make this sound better. Hopefully, his innate charm would cover for his trash convincing. “Ya know…”

“No. I do not know. What is it? Six minutes?”

Markus grunted.

“Hours!?”

Markus slumped lower in his chair. “Mmmhumph.”

“....Markus,” Simon started in a low warning voice. “If it’s days so help me I’m going to take out your other knee - ”

The door slammed open, startling Simon out of his threat, which was definitely about to escalate to more than Markus’ other knee once he found out it was six weeks.

“Connor!”

“Good morning Simon,” Connor greeted briskly, expression stormy as he made a beeline for Markus like the man possesses on a mission that he usually was. He was swinging a rather large, rather ominous looking tool box with a red medical cross painted on it. Markus didn’t even stop doing his paperwork. He knew the drill by now. “I heard about what happened and came as fast as I could.”

“Wow, the news has only been out for an hou - wait. Weren’t you in Ohio?”

“Yes. I would have been here sooner but traffic was heavier than usual and the family driving the Escalade was surprisingly insistent on going the speed limit. A majority of police officers won't cite drivers for going between 1-5 miles per hour over,” Connor rolled his eyes and scoffed, like he didn’t follow some laws down to the letter while blatantly disregarding others at any given time.

“Wha - did you hitchhike all the way here!?”

“Oh no of course not! There is a 46% chance of violent or criminal conduct committed against people who hitchhike.”

“Then how - ”

“I was sitting on top of the aforementioned Escalade.”

Markus gave him his best ‘why are you like this’ stare while Simon gaped in perplexion. “You didn’t need to car surf just to come all the way down here, hon.”

“After hearing about the state you were in, with all my love in the world I violently disagree.”

Markus sighed like a man whose knee wasn’t sparking and twitching at this very moment. And...hm. Maybe it did ache. A teeny bit. Whatever. He was still of the opinion that rubbing some dirt on it and a little stretching was enough to get him through the rest of the day.

“Well, maybe you can help me convince him to go to the technician,” said Simon.

“No need.” Without preamble, Connor plopped the heavy med(?) box on the floor and gently lifted Markus’ leg, hiking up his pants up to the thigh. As he examined it, intense as any jeweler examining a rare diamond, he hooked the back of a nearby stool with his foot and pulled it over, resting the leg on it. Markus neither struggled nor visually reacted; just kept stringently doing his paperwork like nothing was going on.

When Connor pulled out a collapsible creeper seat and rolled under Markus’ leg as if he were a mechanic working on a car, Simon went from passive observer to concernedly going around the desk to see what all the RK800 was doing.

“H-hey wait a second! Connor - it’s a pretty serious wound, maybe we should let the professionals handle it!”

Connor rolled slightly from under Markus with a large drill in his hand and an unimpressed look on his face. Surprisingly, Simon was not reassured by this in the slightest. “I assure you Simon that I am fully equipped with the latest caretaking protocols now could you please pass me that monkey wrench.”

“What seriously- UHH! I mean...” Realizing how insulting that sounded, Simon hurried to hand Connor the tool, clearing his throat. “I didn’t realize you had such uh...versatile programing.”

“It’s the same base code used in mine, actually,” Markus added, using his free hand to pat Connor’s soothingly when he heard him grumbling things like “I can do more than kill things” and “No one has been irreparably maimed in my Knitting Circle”. Damn right honey, Markus thought, Greta and Patrica have had nothing but nice things to say about you’re wool socks.

“Oh riiiiiight. You two are from the same model line, I…” Markus could practically Jedi Sense Simon about to say ‘I forget that sometimes’, so he looked up at the PL600 and shook his head firmly with glaring eyes. Simon, sheepish, held up his hands placatingly and held his tongue.

“The code...has been streamlined to cater more towards field and emergency repairs,” Connor admitted reluctantly, but then quickly added, “but combined with my own personal research outside of my programming, it is no less effective.”

Eager to keep his foot out of his mouth, Simon merely nodded in agreement. He couldn’t, however, keep the growing alarm showing from his face as Connor pulled more and more absurd tools out of his box (the electric saw was particularly disconcerting), and started contorting around Markus so that he wasn’t interfering with his work in ways that at first, seemed normal, but were steadily becoming more on par with a cirque du soleil act. That alarm changed into bewilderment when he tilted Markus’ chair back, put a car jack under his desk so that it tilted forward at the perfect writing level, put a pillow behind his head and a fizzy thirium drink (complete with a fun crazy straw) in his mouth. His standard office setup now suddenly a mini spa.

When Connor started working a polisher to his knee Markus practically melted back into the chair. Oh that sneaky bastard. He knew Markus wouldn’t be able to get anything done by administering the android equivalent of a deep tissue massage.

Bewilderment now firmly settled on amusement, and thoroughly reassured that his friend/boss was in good hands, Simon started to take his leave. “Alright, I’ll leave you to it Connor. If you need back up to make sure this guy takes it easy we’re all on stand by.”

Connor nodded. “I will escort him home for further recuperation as soon as I have finalized his repairs.”

Markus, eyes closed as he happily sipped at his Particle-Colada, grunted in response to Simon’s farewell. He was a little annoyed that everyone was treating him like a toddler over his small injury, and a little more annoyed that Simon had felt the need to hover around Connor, as if he were bracing for the RK800 to do something violent, before trusting his good intentions. Granted, Markus (begrudgingly) could admit that Connor’s methods certainly weren’t...standard caretaker protocols, and that his bedside manner was well...much like the android himself; aggressive, confusing, and, most importantly, well-meaning.

“‘Can’t go home,” Markus murmured around his straw, very convincingly and not at all like he was about to ascend to a higher plane. “Still got work to do.”

“Hmm. Do you now?” With a fond, humoring, smile, Connor cranked up the power on the polisher. Markus swore his soul was straight vibin’.

Yea, actually. Maybe work could wait till tomorrow.

#Detroit Become Human #Markus/Connor #RK1000 #conkus #emiliaf25 ask reply #RK1K #Dr. Connor Medicine Woman #Connor and Markus both have caretaker protocols

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bokunoheroanalysisforthefuture · 3 years

Text

And the last chapter of the first volume! Though technically there’s after-chapter content that will be in a separate post from this, but for now, what matters is finishing up the quirk assessment and getting into the battle trial!

Honestly, it’s a good thing that I just shoved all the opening arcs from before the USJ together into one tag, because this chapter literally goes from the quirk assessment into the beginning of the battle trial stuff, and trying to separate them out would have been a mess and a half. Better to just have it all in the ‘opening arcs’ tag.

...weird title for something that only comes at the end of the chapter, but whatever, it’s not like we don’t see that happen later on in the series as well.

[No. 7 - Costume Change?]

And we immediately come back to where we left off, with All Might realizing what just happened and what Izuku did and even why! One of those little peeks that remind us that All Might is very smart! Also god, him with a small fanboy moment over how proud he is of his kid and how cool that workaround was, mmm this is the Dad Might content I signed up for.

Izuku is still standing firm, even with his finger swollen and damaged, biting back the pain. Ochako is cheering about that record, Tenya notices Izuku’s finger is damaged and thinks back to the entrance exam, calling it a ‘strange quirk’, Aoyama says it’s stylishly done, and Katsuki is brain broke.

I’m sorry that’s just so fucking funny. He is such a goddamn gremlin, but he’s also completely shook. He thinks about how quirks never manifest past age four, but somehow Izuku has a quirk.

He then recalls Izuku saying ‘he earned this’ and gets pissed, blasting forward to demand an explanation while Izuku freaks out-

Only for Katsuki to have his quirk cancelled by Aizawa and also get caught up in the capture scarf.

Beauty. Grace. He’ll bite off your face.

Katsuki notes the cloth is stiff, while Aizawa tells him that it’s a capture weapon made of carbon fibers and a special alloy wire, then tells Katsuki to stop using his quirk already. Which is interesting; can Aizawa sense when people are trying to use their quirks while under the effects of his? If so, is he sensing the aborted movement of whatever quirk factors exist, or ???

(All I’m saying is that that is some possible fuel for a Dad For One connection but for Aizawa instead of Izuku… you know, just in case.)

As we sort of saw from the last chapter, Aizawa’s quirk has the side effect of giving him dry eyes (he was putting eyedrops in his eyes after using his quirk on Izuku). Izuku thinks that sucks since his quirk is so awesome. Aizawa lets his quirk and scarf drop, telling the class to prepare for the next event.

Katsuki is standing where he was stopped, glaring at Izuku who is holding his hand while Ochako worries over him and his finger. He’s caught up in a flashback (which again, reminder that this is chapter 7 and we already have flashbacks), thinking about how up to then, Izuku was just another pebble in his path. We get a brief cut to a memory flashback (not a chapter flashback) to when Izuku and Katsuki were still friends, and Izuku was waiting for his quirk to come in still, and then repeats that Izuku was only supposed to be a pebble. Single track mind, much?

Discord:

Ah, that good Bakugou discourse. This is why you do this stuff in a server with friends.

Izuku narrates a short passage of time - over the rest of the events - while handling the pain of his injured finger. Aizawa tells them it’s time for the results, with Izuku thinking about how he’s going to get expelled because the only record worth mentioning was the throw, and how the endurance running failed hard because of the pain. Aizawa says he won’t explain the process behind the scoring process, just that they reflect performance.

And then he reveals he was lying about expelling someone.

The trio’s faces. Aizawa’s manic smile. The trio’s faces. And Momo there like ‘what did you expect?’ God, I can’t help but giggle.

Izuku just fucking ascending to a new plane of existance here.

Aizawa turns to leave, saying they’re done there and that the documents about the curriculum and whatnot are back in the classroom. He then calls out Izuku, who is shaking in panic (probably about Aizawa changing his mind again - I wonder if teachers before UA pulled that sort of ‘syke’ on Izuku… yikes.)

Instead, he just gets handed a pass to the nurse’s office (not even filled out fully, incredible) and then turns and walks off.

The class is left to stare after Aizawa in bafflement, with Izuku’s narration noting that he’s safe for the moment, but still has too much he can’t do, and that he’s literally starting from the bottom - but here’s there to learn so he can get closer to his dream!

Class rankings:

And- ah, he walked past All Might, who calls him out as a liar. Aizawa either didn’t notice him watching or didn’t know it was All Might specifically who was watching, but either way calls it ‘wasting time’ - which makes sense when all the teachers know about his time limit that he’s spending there watching Izuku the kids do their trials.

All Might notes that April Fool’s was over a week ago, and that the ‘rational deception’ thing falls flat when he expelled an entire class of first years the previous year. Aizawa discards those with zero potential, but he went back on his word here, and then asks if he sensed Midoriya’s potential as well. While giving Aizawa finger guns. Have I mentioned this man is a complete dork yet?

Aizawa catches onto the ‘as well’ bit, and determines that All Might’s supporting the kid - which isn’t his usual style. He then starts walking off again, saying Midoriya doesn’t have no chance, but that’s all he’ll say on the matter. He then says that if the kid had no prospects, he’d cut him loose, since it’s crueler to let someone chase half-baked dreams.

All Might determines quietly that it’s Aizawa’s way of being kind, but out loud states that they can agree to disagree. Meanwhile, in the background, Sero and Sato notice All Might, which probably leads to class 1a going after him and him fleeing for safety.

We transition to when Izuku is heading home, with him exhausted because of his trip to Recovery Girl. Tenya checks in on him, and Izuku says he’s fine, with us seeing a temporary flashback to the nurse’s office. Izuku notes his finger’s better, but he’s exhausted all of a sudden (he doesn’t remember last time since he was unconscious).

A couple of things:

Kamui Woods pez dispenser

Oh, so if he doesn’t have stamina he’ll die! Good to know! :)

Anyways, Izuku thinks about how he can’t keep going on like this and has to figure out how to regulate his power fast. Tenya goes on to talk about how Aizawa had fooled them, making them think that was how it was, only for it to be a deception. (The irony that the mercy was actually unplanned all along gets to me.) Izuku is more relaxed around him now that he realizes Tenya isn’t scary, just super serious.

Ochako rushes over to catch up, asking if they’re heading for the station. Tenya calls her ‘Infinity Girl’ and Izuku repeats it mentally in surprise. Ochako introduces herself, and then brings up their names - though she mistakes Izuku’s name for ‘Deku’, because of what Katsuki said during the test. Izuku corrects her with awkward hand gestures, saying his real name and that the ‘Deku’ is just Katsuki being a bully.

Tenya and Ochako both acknowledge this, with Ochako apologizing, and then mentioning how ‘Deku’ sounds like ‘do your best’, and that she likes it. Izuku goes beet fucking red and immediately replies that Deku is fine, with Tenya chastising him for not showing backbone while Izuku calls it like the Copernican Revolution and Ochako questions who Copernicus is.

The narration takes over, noting that even if there’s a lot he can’t do, he’ll do his best, but having All Might and even some friends behind him… it’s more than he could have asked for.

Good children. Best friends. God, these were the good days… more OG Dekucrew content please and thanks.

We get one panel of Toshinori that Izuku’s got no time to rest, and that tomorrow the real test begins. Then we’re onto the next day, aka the first day of actual classes - and oh, right, UA has clubs, that’s something that’s easy to forget when we never see it with the hero classes. I mean, considering that the actual hero training classes probably overlap the usual club hours, not surprising, but still.

Present Mic is shown to be the English teacher, trying to get the kids in the spirit of class, but pretty much everyone is finding it boring - asides from Izuku, who is actually trying to answer the question mentally, even if not out loud. The narration notes that the mornings are for normal classes, and that lunch is top-notch food for dirt cheap in the cafeteria (as cooked by Lunch Rush), and then hero training is in the afternoon… possibly after lunch? Which isn’t great when people could end up throwing up. Ah well.

These fucking dorks. Two peas in a quirkless-to-superpowered pea pod.

And of course, more meta from the class on how All Might’s drawn differently.

Anyways, All Might gets into Hero Basic Training, how it’ll mold them into heroes, and that there’s no time to waste as he shows off a card reading ‘battle’ before stating that they have battle training.

Have I mentioned he’s a dork? There’s more ham here than in Shatner’s performances in the original Star Trek series!

Katsuki is thrilled with battle training, of course. All Might notes that for battle training, the class will need - as the wall clicks and opens several drawers with numbered cases, each with contents in accordance with the quirk registry and the special request forms fill out before admission - costumes! Which the class is super hyped about. Izuku is holding his backpack in excitement, and All Might orders the students to come out to Ground Beta in ranking order once they’re changed, to which the class agrees.

As he takes his leave, he notes that looking good is important, and to look alive, because from today on, they’re all heroes! We also get some nice transition moments showing pieces of people’s costumes, with Izuku being the last one out as the rest show theirs off.

So cool! And what a way to end a chapter and a book! And a nice nod to the prototype costume for Izuku. Time to say goodbye to it before the end of this arc.

Next time, I’ll try to get through all the bonus stuff for the end of the volume, and then we can get into the battle trial proper! Looking forward to that.

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echo-three-one · 3 years

Text

A Forgotten Memory

An Alex x OC fic

Link to chapter 1 (here)

Prev (XI - Alex)

Next (XIII - Alex)

Reviews Appreciated. Enjoy the fic!

XII - Samantha

She never expected Alex to handle the situation maturely. She expected him to badger him into going with him on that vacation. She wanted to go for closure's sake, but that would be too unfair for him. He wouldn't want that. Alex was a perfect boyfriend material for her, it's a shame he's a CIA agent.

She gave him a thumbs up as he raised an olive green shirt he tried on, honestly she thought he'd look good on any outfit. She opted on simple clothing as all of this were just temporary and Alex already made the call and would extract them to safety the day after tomorrow. A deep sigh as the idea that it's all over.

They spent the rest of the day at their room. The tv tuned in to local news, talking in a language she found incomprehensible. Alex seemed to be intently watching, guess he's the kind of person who's really into current events, translating headlines for her, which she found kinda sweet.

Samantha plopped her head on her mattress, they apparently rented separate beds, making her think this was another sign from whatever Fates were weaving their destinies, to which she almost want to believe in.

"Real for your thoughts?" Alex joked, offering her a coin from the country they're in. Samantha once again laughed at him for it, he really knows how to cheer her up.

"Say, if you weren't a "CIA Agent", what would you be?" she asked, mouthing the term CIA Agent.

Alex hummed as he thought of an answer.

"Dad always said I'm good with people. That's why he wanted me to pursue Sales or Marketing or any Business course." he chuckled at the idea.

"I bet you'd look good in a suit." Samantha chimed in, mentally fighting herself not to imagine him in one. She has to let go of him, for her own heart's sake.

"Yeah? I wore it a few times. I actually feel like a hundred grand when I wore it." he smiled as his eyes trailed off to memory lane. Samantha tried her best not to admire the scenery infront of her. This was harder than she thought.

"I wonder if our paths would cross if we were somebody else..." Samantha asked another follow up question.

"Maybe, I'll get sick and I'd be admitted to a hospital you're stationed to." He replied, amused at the story he's forged.

"Yeah, what are the odds." She dismissed, laughing at the absurdity of his imagination.

"I'm gonna miss you." He stated, completely off topic and completely serious. Samantha thought she already cried everything she could for today, but tears started welling once again. She felt that her movements were automatic, as she quickly dove to Alex's bed and tackled him with a hug. Alex didn't hesitate and quickly gave her a kiss. It felt hot, wet and longing. As if they were deprived from each other for a very long time, their tongues clashed inside their mouths, as they held their breaths neither one of them wanted to break free from each other.

Their hands started grazing against each other, desperately longing for each others touch, his rough palm against her smooth thigh. Each slide sent shivers throughout her whole body. She convinced herself that this could help her move on, even though she believed it would just worsen their case, but she was only human and this what what she yearned for ever since last night. She was willing to add one last memory of him, one she convinced herself to be the final one.

Alex was very responsive to her, he couldn't deny that he liked where this was going. Besides, he was the one who bargained her for an extension. He lied down and let her take the lead, following what she wanted to happen and letting her take over. Following every order she whispers without hesitation. He understands what she felt and he feels the same. They'll be away from each other in two days, it's only reasonable to make these count.

###

Samantha traced Alex's cheek with her index finger, feeling the thick beard brush against it as she slides it up his hair, spreading her palm and feeling his head with it. She never felt this sexually contented in quite a while, a feeling she's deprived of after the loss of her long term boyfriend. Her touch seemed to startle him as he slowly opened his eyes and smiled, letting out a sexy groan and reaching for her. Samantha shifted her position so Alex could spoon her from behind, letting his warm body heat up her naked back. She let out a contented sigh and slowly urged herself to sleep.

The sound of children lauging and running outside the streets woke Samantha up, with a quick glance she found out that Alex was nowhere to be found. She hastily put on her clothes and looked at the window. A sigh of relief escaped her nostrils when she found him playing with the children. It was a heartwarming view, adding fuel to the flame labeled "My love for this Man", a flame slowly being extinguished by time. The kids stopped playing and started pointing out to the sky, waving like excited people when Titanic left the dock. She saw Alex turn to her and gave her a sad frown.

"I thought it was tomorrow." Samantha asked as soon as Alex entered the room, quickly picking up the little things they owned.

"I'm also worried why we got extracted earlier." Alex replied, holding her shoulders and staring at her. He's CIA but Samantha could actuly feel the sadness in his aura, despite him good at concealing emotion.

Samantha followed as they make their way to the aircraft.

"Why is it a day earlier?" She heard Alex yell as the loud whirring of the propeller filled the area.

"It's secret orders. The Head believes that the assumption that someone within the CIA is in kahoots with Nero is still in play." the pilot replied. Alex tapped his shoulder and escorted her to the plane. She couldn't believe it, but she's flying home. A plethora of mixed emotions overwhelmed her as they slowly ascended from the little town which housed them for a day, the view of it getting smaller and smaller as they flew farther away back home.

As soon as they descended and stepped out of the plane, she quickly pulled Alex for one last message. He's going to be busy now as she overheard the mole they're trying to catch.

"Hey. Guess I brought you home safe, after all." He laughs, tapping her shoulder.

"Yeah. You're a man of your word after all." She smiled and hugged him tight, not minding the people around them. Then from the corner of her eye, a tall intimidating figure stood. It was her father.

"I guess this is goodbye." She whispered.

"We could still talk after the briefing." Alex countered, still hopeful.

"My Dad's here. He's going to send me away. Thanks Alex... For everything... I'm sorry I can't be there for you..." she sobbed.

"I fully understand, Samantha. You're a memory worth treasuring. Heck, maybe when I retire, you're still ummm available.. so why not?" he joked. A joke he wished would be half true.

"Don't get your hopes too high, Alex. I don't want to live waiting for uncertainty. I'm done with that." She smiled and bid him one last goodbye. Tears were shed and hearts were broken... but life must continue to go on and experiences will then become teachers for the future. Samantha thought, the idea of moving on from two men in a span of a month was tiresome and heart aching, but she believed that she's strong enough to face it all in due time.

Alex walked away to the briefing room not leaving his eye on her, Samantha did the same as she walked to his father. They're both going to miss each other a LOT.

"My beautiful Sammy! You're safe!" Richard Coleman, her father, hugged her dearly. She could feel his worry fade away the moment he saw her in one piece.

"Dad." she cried.

"I'm sorry I brought you in this mess... I tried to make your life normal but-" the head apologized and Samantha cut him off.

"It's okay Dad. I could handle the experience. Besides, the CIA did a good job protecting me. And that's on you, right?" She laughed, trying to hide the pain.

"I see you've acquainted yourself to my general duties." he replied.

"Yeah. A little bit."

"I've come to make amends, as a father and as the Head of National Defense." The tone shifted seriously, Samantha's heart raced at what's going to happen next.

"MK Ultra's successful memory alteration serum." The doctor proudly said infront of the head of defense and his daughter.

"Directly injected to the subject along with a narration of a certain script, made by our scriptwriters, we are able to implant, alter or delete selected memories from our patient." he added. Samantha shuddered at the idea, it's somehow cruel and inhumane but also what she might need to live a normal life.

"This means we could remove her memories of the IP address and everything that's happened to her in the past weeks?" Richard queried.

"Yes, we could make it look like she had a vacation somewhere." the scientist replied.

"She has to make a detail of events that we could forge. If she cooperates, this will be a 100% success." The scientist supplemented once again.

"So, what do you say, Sammy? Is this enough for you to start a normal life?" Richard asked, Samantha was overwhelmed at the decision she's going to make. It was too hard for her to let go of Alex's memories, but then again... they weren't meant to end up together anyway. A huge price to pay for a shot at a new life.

"Before I go, can I atleast have one last request?"

She spoke, determination filled her voice.

"Sure, what is it?" Richard agreed.

"A pen and paper." She said, tears falling out of her eyes.

#at this point I don't even know anymore #codmwfic #Alex x OC #ah yes

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sat-soft · 4 years

Text

@purpulineraven

HCs for the brothers being submissive(NSFW)

Good idea. Thank you. Sorry this took so long for me to write...

Note- I use as ambiguous of language as possible in regards to penetrative sex, is it a strap on? Could be. Is it MC's dick? Could be. You choose.

Lucifer

It takes a lot of trust before he'd even consider being submissive to MC, it's a privilege

He guides MC the entirety of their first time with him on the bottom

MC is allowed to suck/kiss his chest but they can't leave marks

He's made himself vulnerable to MC so if they choose to spoil him with kisses and rubbing his shoulders/back/chest, he will melt

During penetration, he will instruct MC on how to do it properly

May even go so far as to guide MC's hips

The only sound he makes when he cums is a deep exhale

After sex, he wants to hold MC and pet their head and tell them how good they did

Mammon

Being submissive comes naturally to him, he wants to make MC feel good because he wants their appreciation and praise

Spank him, he likes it, he'll deny it, but he likes it

If MC tells him to get on his knees and give them head, he's more than happy to follow their orders

He's very shy about being submissive at first because he's embarrassed about it but his embarrassment is always overpowered by his desire to please MC

He's very used to being tied up because of Lucifer's punishments but may actually stay put in his restraints if it's MC

Who knows though cause he is still a big brat of a sub

Leviathan

The best sub

He's obedient and makes cute, bashful expressions the entire time

Overdramatic grasps and squeals

Likes edging, apologizes after he cums because he'll usually cum before he was supposed to

Enjoys being dressed up in cutesy clothes like maid dresses or school uniforms and frilly panties but only MC is allowed to see it so NO PICTURES

It's canon that he likes degredation so y'know...

He's really noisy when being penetrated, squeaks and squeals and he can't seem to control himself at all

Satan

Really uncomfortable being submissive at first, he's insecure about himself and feels like submission is for weaker demons

MC can absolutely melt him with compliments and hair petting

Only after being fully calmed will he let himself submit and he's still very shy

Not into pain but wouldn't mind being tied up and teased

He can't relax his muscles to the point where being penetrated doesn't hurt so MC doesn't need to bother with being gentle since it'll hurt all the same

He bites, not on purpose, he's just not used to pain and that's his natural response

Needs good aftercare because if he's left feeling gross there's no way he'll ever let MC play with him again

Asmodeus

More than happy to submit to MC, just happy to get to try new things with them and explore their desires

Gets dressed up for it, some over-the-top, pink lingerie to tempt MC

A bit of a brat

Gives top tier head but will insist on having a pillow for his knees

Has skin that would easily take on many marks but won't allow hickeys or bruises or to be given a red ass from spanking

Likes to be dirty talked, groped, edged, and used for MC's pleasure

His favorite position to be fucked in is doggy style because he knows he looks especially cute from that angle

Beelzebub

Clueless but obedient, has an attitude of "you want to do what to me? ?? Why??"

Can be bribed to do anything for MC with food

Will get on his knees and beg for whatever treat MC holds hostage

Normally he enjoys being on top because he knows what he wants and enjoys MC's body

But he doesn't mind being submissive as long as he gets to perform oral on them

Will also get on his knees and beg to be allowed to taste them

Fairly non-reactionary while being fucked, doesn't make a lot of sound

Will only let MC penetrate him in positions where we can kiss them while they're 'in the act'

Belphegor

If Asmo is a bit of a brat, Belphie has ascended past brat to an entirely new plane of bratiness

He'll insult the way that MC does every little thing, if they hesitate or struggle to find his prostate or if they're blushing is obvious

He pretends like he doesn't enjoy it, but he likes being slapped around a bit and forced to behave

If he's spanked, he'll whine that he's being punished for nothing and be a baby about it, even if MC isn't rough, and even if he's visibly aroused from his spanking

If MC is strong enough to hold him, he likes to straddle their lap either while getting fucked or afterwards

Physical affection and cuddles after he's been submissive is like... not optional at all...

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musicismysafety · 4 years

Text

Comforting Silence

Summary: Reader has had some traumatizing experiences, and after a certain moment with Rowoon triggers some bad memories, he spends the evening taking care of and comforting them.

Pairing: SF9 Rowoon (Kim Seokwoo) x Reader

Warnings: Vague mentions of sexual abuse, mentions of sex, swearing, mentions of sexual trauma.

Genre: Angst that morphs into fluff

Word Count: 4,416

It started like any other make out session Rowoon and I had, passionate but rushed, trying to avoid being noticed by his parents, who were only a single story below us. However, this session went further than any previous one, and despite Rowoon’s gentle maneuvers and his constant attentiveness to my comfort, one wrong move sent me into a panic.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Rowoon’s words were sudden and surprising when he stood up and left from where he was kneeling in front of me. My breathing went erratic as memories came flooding back, triggered by Rowoon accidentally pressing his fingers into my hips. Supporting myself by the bed frame as I went, I crawled into the opposite corner of the room when I felt as though Rowoon wouldn’t be coming back. In that corner I folded my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them as my hair secluded me away from the rest of the world. I sat there while insecurity overwhelmingly swept over me, but no tears came out. I simply sat there, shaking and trying to catch my breath, trying to wrap my head around everything that had just happened. Had he really left me to just recover by myself after realizing how broken I was? Did he think I was that pathetic that he felt embarrassed for me and just left? I couldn’t find an explanation for anything that was going through my head, but my brain refused to let me cry. And so I sat, in silence, for the longest ten minutes of my life.

As I suddenly heard footsteps ascending the stairs near the entrance to Rowoon’s room, I wrapped my arms around myself even tighter, attempting to curl into the tightest, smallest ball possible. My head fell to rest on my knees as I tried to still my breathing, avoiding any sort of human contact in my moments of absolute weakness. The footsteps came into the room and I just pushed myself as far into the corner as possible. They stopped near where I had been sitting previously, and I heard the sounds of someone carefully cleaning up the floor before the person left. A second later, that person returned and came in my direction. My entire being wanted to disappear from this plane of existence, be it by melting into the floor or just vanishing into thin air, it honestly didn’t matter how. I heard something soft land on top of the bed beside me. Through my veil of hair I saw them lower down to my level, and as soon as I heard them let out a breath, I knew it was Rowoon. I felt one of his hands rest on the top of my head, gently gliding down my hair to the side of my face as he tried to get me to pick up my head.

“Look at me,” he said, gently placing pressure on my cheek in attempts to reach my chin. I shook my head, only further folding in on myself. He sighed again before standing back up. Whatever he had dropped on the bed earlier he picked up, before walking around to stand beside me. I couldn’t quite see what he was doing, but the next moment I felt a massive blanket being wrapped around my entire body before his arms went to pick me up. Holding me to his chest, he moved to sit on the bed, fixing the blanket around me as he adjusted to sit comfortably, and placed me in his lap, his arms still wound tightly around me. One of his arms went to hold my head to the crook of his neck while the other rested around my waist, holding me as though he feared I would crumble at any moment.

“Breathe, sweetheart, just breathe, you’re safe, you’re okay.”

At those words my entire demeanor crumbled as I grabbed onto his shirt through the blanket, trying to bury my face in his chest once I felt the tears begin streaming down my face. We sat that way for what felt like a half hour, his hands rubbing both my back and head as I simply clung to him like a child, trying to expel the insecurities running through my head. He was completely silent, save for occasional reminders to keep me breathing and to keep me fully present. Only when my grip on his shirt loosened did Rowoon speak up again.

“God, if I knew you would be this shaken up I wouldn’t have started anything,” another heavy breath escaped his lungs as I felt his chest rise and fall from beneath me.

“No, no, I’m fine-”

“You’re clearly not. Come on, you’re staying here tonight, let’s get you dressed and get you a proper bed,” Rowoon once again pulled me into his chest, standing up with me in his grasp. Once standing, he placed my feet down as gently as possible, fixing the blanket around my shoulders so it covered me entirely, like a massive cape. My eyes were still stuck to the ground when he took a step back from my still trembling form. He turned around, picking up the clothes that had been thrown to the ground an hour earlier, straightening them out and placing them on the bed. “Can I take this?” he turned back around to face me, gesturing to the blanket, the only thing covering my entirely bare form. “It’s only for a second, I promise,” he reassured me upon seeing my grip tighten on the blanket. “With how much you’re shaking I doubt you’d be able to put these on yourself.” I continued curling in on myself in response.

“I can do it myself.”

“Hey, hey, listen to me,” he took a step forward, his large hands rubbing my arms reassuringly before a hand rose to lift my chin to face him. “You’re shaking like a leaf and I don’t want to leave you alone with the way you seem mentally right now. Let me help. Okay?” I suddenly felt overwhelmingly dwarfed by him, but his gentle eyes and the way his thumb was sliding across my cheek kept me looking directly at him. I nodded. His hands went to where the blanket was resting on my shoulders, and in one swift movement but still, gently, he pulled it off of me and placed it behind himself. Just as quickly he had me raise my arms and pulled the shirt I had on earlier over my arms, not a single ill-mannered gaze within his actions as he continued dressing me, one hand constantly on my waist to make sure I was able to stand. Once dressed I was stood back in my summery outfit with exposed arms and midriff, but as he looked me over carefully his head suddenly tilted disapprovingly.

“This isn’t enough. Give me a second,” in a couple of long strides he reached his own wardrobe, and after rooting around for a second he pulled out one of his own hoodies, one that was oversized even for him. With it in hand, he had me raise my arms again before pulling it over my head and smoothing it out over my form. The bottom seam sat nearly at my knees, covering me in warmth and drowning me in his scent. “Is that more comfortable?” he looked at me expectantly. I nodded.

“Thank you,” It was as though my voice had decided to completely abandon me.

“You don’t have to thank me, this is my fault, let me fix it. We’ll talk about the details later.”

I shook my head in response, trying to impose on him the lack of blame I held against him.

Reaching behind himself, he once again grabbed the fluffy blanket he had previously wrapped me in, throwing it back around my shoulders. He bent over, sweeping me from the floor and holding me to his chest as I let out a quiet squeal. With me swaddled like some kind of small animal, he carefully made his way down the stairs, turning the corner into one of the many rooms in his home. This particular room had two twin beds, one on either side and his father was standing at the other end of the room fixing the sheets on the bed opposite the entrance. Upon coming in, Rowoon somewhat haphazardly let go of me so that I landed on the bed nearest to us, and then launched himself to land right behind me, an arm immediately resting around my waist as he rested his head, his cheek pressing into my own.

“Can (y/n) take this room tonight?” Rowoon spoke up from beside me, tucking me further into his chest.

“Of course. How are you feeling, ‘woon said you weren’t feeling too well earlier,” his father said, turning to face the two of us. “I’m sure my wife can whip something up to eat if you’re hungry, it might make you feel better.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Kim, I’m alright, I feel better,” I responded as well as I could while having Rowoon trying to imprint me into his body, his face gently rubbing against mine despite his father staring right at us.

“Okay, if you say so,” Mr. Kim chuckled while glancing at his son, before continuing speaking beneath his breath. “I’ve never seen him this attached to someone, I wonder what happened…”

“Dad, relax,” was the only thing that Rowoon said in response, instead rolling onto his back as he turned me in his grasp so that I lay halfway on top of him, diagonally spread over his chest as my legs fell onto the bed while I had no choice but support my head on his jaw. His dad laughed but said nothing. We stayed that way, all three of us in silence as Mr. Kim finished cleaning up the room, and Rowoon and I lay there in silence even after he left the room. I closed my eyes for a bit, trying to memorize the feeling of his skin against mine, but still grateful for the layers between us that allowed for me to hide from my own fears and from the heavy weight of doubt in my chest. Everything felt strangely familiar yet new at the same time, his soft skin providing a gentle source of grounding for me, yet it allowed for my mind to float separately from my body. Unsurprisingly, he was the one to break the silence.

“How are you really feeling?” his tone was tentative, cautious, and I felt his arms around my waist loosen slightly as he shifted backward, leaning against the wall beside the bed as he sat up slightly.

“A lot better, thank you.”

“Are you sure?” I felt him try to catch my gaze with the uttering of that phrase, but I kept my eyes closed, trying to maintain the sensation of floating as long as I could. I hummed in response, pressing myself back into his chest and resting my head back in the crook of his neck.

“Although it is getting a little warm both in your hoodie and this huge blanket…”

He chuckled before letting go of me enough so that I could disentangle myself from the fluffy mass wrapped around my body. “Is the hoodie okay?”

I hummed in response again, pulling the sleeves over my hands before grabbing Rowoon’s wrists and placing his arms back around my waist, hugging myself in the process as I turned my head and nuzzled back into him. He let out a contented breath, leaving a small kiss on my temple before relaxing entirely himself.

“Can we stay like this a little while?” I asked as loudly as my voice would allow me, still focused on the movement of his chest beneath me.

“Of course, just relax,” he responded as quietly as I had spoken, and simply fell back into his slow rhythm of breathing, slow enough almost for one to think he was asleep.

When I opened my eyes again, the light that had been previously seeping through the window behind us had dulled to the light provided only by the moon. I rubbed my eyes, trying to physically force the sleep from my mind, only to realize that a pair of eyes was staring at me in the darkness.

“Jesus Christ!” I jumped, but Rowoon’s arms kept me in place as he erupted in quiet laughter.

“It’s just me, just me, relax.”

“Don’t do that!” I smacked his chest lightly, turning in his hold to face him as I sat up in his lap.

“Do what?”

“Stare at me like that, you scared me.”

“No promises, lovely.”

“Mm-hmm, whatever you say.”

Silence, his eyes still resting directly on mine. “What time is it?” I asked, reverting my gaze to my fingers, where I played with the sleeves of his massive hoodie.

“A little after eight. Do you think you’d be able to do dinner right now? We don’t have to if you can’t. Whatever you’re comfortable with,” His hand gently rested on my thigh, toying with the seam of the hoodie, making sure it lay entirely flat, without riding up.

“I’m kind of hungry but I don’t know…”

“What about eating without my parents? Would that be okay?” His eyes were persistent in trying to catch my attention.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be okay.”

“Alright, give me a second, I’ll convince them to let us eat in my room, I have a small table there,” he moved to stand up, about to let me rest by myself, but I latched onto his arm, effectively letting him pull me up with him.

“I can come with you, I’ve been lying down too long,” I kept a hold on him, trying to prevent him from disagreeing. Instead of a confrontation, to my surprise, he simply nodded.

We walked to the kitchen together, his arm still resting on my back as reassurance for him, and once he let his parents know we were going to eat alone, we each took a serving of what his mother had made earlier and disappeared back into his room. Rowoon took my bowl from me once we walked in and placed both bowls on his desk before emerging from his closet with a makeshift mini table. I sat down as he grabbed our bowls, making myself as comfortable as possible on his hardwood floors. However, instead of sitting across from me as I expected, Rowoon closed the door to his room after putting our food next to each other and suddenly picked me up by my waist, easily lifting me enough to sit down and place me in his lap in the process, directly in the hollow of his long crossed legs.

“Uh, Rowoon, what-“

“Shh, just let it happen, let me—let me hold you,” he pressed his nose into the back of my neck once, his arms tight around my waist for a split second before he reached for his bowl and just began eating. Meanwhile, I took another second to comprehend his actions, stuck with my hands resting on the table, empty and clueless. “Eat, lovely, it’s been ages.”

“O-okay, yeah,” I stuttered out, reaching for my own bowl and finally beginning to eat myself as Rowoon shifted to keep himself from spilling food into my lap. Only then did it hit me that ever since he had initially wrapped me in that blanket, not once did his touch leave me. But despite the sudden overwhelming discomfort I had felt earlier, now he felt safe, protective, an entirely different human being to the one I had witnessed between the sheets. It was as though he was trying to prove to not only me but to himself that he was capable of being protective without being scary or intimidating. With that thought process floating through my head, I once again allowed myself to let my guard down in his hold, leaning back against his chest while I slowly dug through the rice dish his mom had made. Ever so often, instead of taking a bite of his own food, he’d lean down to rest his lips against my head, breathing in as though trying to memorize my scent. Once he did it the fifth or sixth time, I called him out.

“Dude, what are you doing, do I smell good or something?”

“Yes, you do, lovely, and you’re clearly feeling better if you’re calling me ‘dude’,” he laughed at his own words as I let my head drop out of embarrassment, joining in with laughing at myself. “No, no, it’s cute, you being tough. I’m glad you’re okay, though.”

“Thanks…”

I raised my head back up, turning to look at him. Rowoon had placed his now empty bowl back on the table, and his hands gently lay at my hips, his fingers just barely pressing into the fabric of his hoodie. I watched his eyes scan the entirety of my face, starting from my hairline and the way my still ruffled hair lay unevenly over my ears and hung in my face, shifting to my eyes for a split second before looking from cheek to cheek and finally landing on my lips. His eyes reverted back to my hair for a moment, and his left hand came to gently push away a few strands, attempting to smooth out my bed head. Once satisfied with his visibility of my features, his hand gently rested on my jaw, tracing my cheek and the corner of my lips, his eyes following his own slow movements.

“I’m so sorry, lovely,” he frowned.

“What for?” Despite the events earlier that day it hadn’t ever clicked in my mind to blame him for my discomfort, it all felt as though I was the one that was too incompetent to say “no” and stop the progression of events.

“For earlier today. I shouldn’t have pushed, and even though you didn’t say no I should’ve seen how uncomfortable you were… You were so strong but I didn’t even realize just how much it took out of you until you just started shaking… Alone… Looking like some kind of frightened animal… And that was my fault. Mine,” he suddenly looked directly at me, a steel look in his eyes. I shook my head again. “Don’t you dare take any part of this upon yourself because you did nothing wrong. Nothing, you hear me?”

I nodded, shocked at his sudden change in demeanor.

“Can you say it out loud for me, lovely? Can you say ‘I did nothing wrong, it’s not my fault’ for me? I just want to hear you say it,” his words pressed gently, and I nodded again before repeating the words back to him. We both paused.

“Rowoon, could you do the same for me? It wasn’t actually your fault, there are just things I haven’t exactly told you about…” Rowoon’s eyes took a moment to understand. He seemed to question his realization, but I nodded. As soon as I did, he closed his eyes and tucked himself into the crook of my neck, letting down his guard for the first time that day. His arms wound tightly around me, so tight that I was forced to abandon my bowl of food and fold myself into his grasp.

“I’m so sorry…” he continued muttering those three words over and over, rocking back and forth slowly with me in his arms. This time it wasn’t me that needed the physical contact, it was him. Although he didn’t audibly cry, there was a moment when I was sure that a drop was rolling down my collarbone and into his hoodie, and his breathing staggered for a second. I wrapped an arm around his head, threading my fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, trying to comfort him in my own way. Upon feeling my hands at his neck his head lifted, looking me directly in the eyes. I placed both hands at his cheeks, now taking my own time to scan over his face, trying to feel as much of his skin with my smaller hands as possible. I felt his eyes once more rest on my lips when he breathed out a quiet question.

“Can I?”

Immediately understanding what it was he wanted, I nodded. With that he released a breath of relief, his left hand returned to push away my hair and gently pull me towards him. Within a split second his lips came to rest on my own, soft, trembling, and extremely cautious. For a moment neither of us moved, before he gently deepened the kiss just a little bit, moving at a slow pace, pulling away only a few moments later.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I said, laughing quietly at his overly concerned expression.

“Yeah. I’m okay. I’m good,” he breathed out, once again pulling me in as tight as he could as if terrified that I was about to disappear at any moment. I shifted, placing my knees on either side of his hips as he continued squeezing, our bodies entirely flush with each other. I felt him tuck his face into my collarbone, slowly rocking side to side with me in his arms. We sat that way for a little bit, him continuously trying to tighten his hold on me, despite already having not a single hair of space between the two of us. With me in his grasp, he suddenly lifted his head, maneuvered himself onto his knees, and stood up with me wrapped around him like a koala.

“Rowoon, what are you doing?” I gasped, wrapping my arms tighter around his neck out of fear of falling. He was freaking tall.

“Getting more comfortable.”

“But what about my food?”

“Did you not finish?” He stopped in his tracks.

“No, you dumbass, I don’t eat as fast as you do!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mx “I’m-on-a-diet”, I thought you didn’t eat as much as a small horse,” he leaned back, loosening his hold to look at me.

I gasped, smacking him on the chest. Immediately I detached my legs from around his waist, hopping down to the floor.

“You don’t get to hold me with comments like that.”

I crossed my arms, turning my back to him and marching pointedly back to the table to sit down and finish eating.

“Oh, shut up, of course, I do.”

With that I was scooped back up, shrieking, as Rowoon once again had me in his hold, one arm beneath my back, the other supporting my knees. “But I’m sorry anyway.”

“You better be, mister.”

He smiled to himself, just watching my expression. He then set me back down on the ground gently, now sitting across from me as we sat back down at the table. He watched me silently as I finished as much of my meal as I wanted, looking away whenever I raised my eyebrows to question him. At some point I had done it enough that he ended up continuously looking down at the ground, mindlessly rapping his knuckles against the wood floor. When I was sure he wasn’t going to look up if I shifted, I stood up and simply threw myself in his lap, effectively knocking him over and ending up lying on his chest on the floor as he scrambled to make sure neither of us got hurt.

“What was that for?!”

“I don’t know, just felt like it,” I smiled at him from my somewhat awkward position, holding myself up by my arms, with my weight placed on his shoulders.

“Well, if that was just because you felt like it, then just because I feel like it, I’m not letting you go till we have to go to sleep.”

With those words he managed to somehow stand up without knocking anything over with his absurdly long legs, walked over to the bed with me in his arms, again wrapped around him like a koala, and fell, nearly crushing me under his weight.

“I-I can’t- I can’t breathe,” I stuttered out.

“Mm-hmm, that’s what you get,” he simply nuzzled further into the bed, wrapping himself around me. Despite his words, he rolled over a second later, letting go a bit and allowing for me to make myself comfortable by latching onto his side and laying my head on his chest, listening for his heartbeat.

“Can I ask you a question, lovely?” About five minutes later Rowoon spoke up once more. I hummed in acknowledgment. “Are you still afraid of me? And were you afraid because of what happened to you?”

I lifted my head from his chest, trying to understand the thought process by getting a glimpse of his face.

“What do you mean?”

“When I first met you, you seemed to be intimidated by everything I did, even if I was just talking to you. Even today, when I came back upstairs to check on you, it was as though you were genuinely afraid that I was going to do something, as if I was going to… going to hurt you.”

His voice trailed off quietly, his eyes avoiding my own. Both of us fell silent for a moment.

“Rowoon?”

He hummed in response, looking back up.

“I wasn’t scared, I was just- I don’t quite know how to put this, I guess you could say I was overwhelmed? I don’t really think there’s an accurate word to put in place of what I felt. It was a lot all at once, but you also shouldn’t feel guilty. I was never afraid of you, either, just intimidated. You’re nearly a foot taller than me, broad and built, with an attitude, so anyone my size would be intimidated,” I said. As I spoke, I could see his features visibly relax and slacken, the tips of his lips rising in a slight smile, a drastic improvement to the frown previously weighing down his face.

“Okay. I’m glad.”

I hummed in agreement.

“Now, can we please, please, cuddle and take a nap, I’m fucking exhausted,” Rowoon wrapped his hands around my wrist and wrapping it around his waist, tugging like a small child. I laughed, burying myself further into his chest.

“Of course, I was just thinking of that,” I mumbled, a content sigh leaving my lips.

“Great minds think alike, don’t they?”

I hummed in agreement. And then once again, comfortable silence.

#i'm weak for rowoon #Kim Rowoon #kim seokwoo #rowoon x reader #seokwoo x reader #sf9 fanfic #sf9 scenarios #rowoon fanfic #sf9 seokwoo

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coffeeandcalligraphy · 4 years

Text

Holy Obedience | Feeding Habits Update #4

Hey People of Earth! Today we’ll be chatting chapter five of Feeding Habits, aka Holy Obedience. TW: animal cruelty, blood, suicide, toxic relationships.

This chapter is the last in Lonan’s POV and a direct continuation of chapter four. I was getting a little burned out as this was toward the end of my 10k word week a few weeks ago, but overall, it definitely achieves what I was hoping for!

Scene A:

Eliza and Lonan chat about secrets which gets intense when Eliza prompts Lonan to burn Harrison’s guardian angel necklace & a few polaroids that were taken as a small easter egg from one of the mini stories!

Lonan grabs everything out in time with minimal damage

Scene B:

Lonan finally burns down his father’s darkroom.

Scene C:

Lonan emerges from the woods and approaches the cabin. Eliza sits on the veranda tending to a dead rabbit she claims she “found”. What happened in the previous memory in ch. 4 of Lonan and his father utilizing the ikijime technique to kill the fish mirrors with the rabbit, despite it actually being dead.

Lonan and Eliza take a drive and talk about the very different lessons they each learned from Lonan’s father

Eliza hits the accelerator and drives the car into the lake. Her fate is left unspecified, whereas he gets out relatively unscathed.

Excerpts:

Here’s this very tender romantical description because I indulge myself obvi:

The last time he saw Harrison, he knew they would not see each other for a very long time after. Sun haloed him. Pinged of his eyes so they shone like gemstones. The earring he’d gifted him from his mother’s collection twirled, mindless, like the surface of a mirror ball. He didn’t forget that image—his lover a painting of the sun, an offering he was lucky to have, if only temporary. As he gurgles at the face of the fire, he doesn’t forget that feeling—the warmth not against his face, but in the pith of his throat, jittering like the wings of a hummingbird. As he shifts forward, closer to the fire, a hand secures around his shirt collar. At first, he’s convinced what he’s seeing will be the last he ever sees—the magnificence of heat. But it’s when he feels its heaviness with a clank against the stone as the clasp comes undone that he understands.

When he turns around, Eliza holds Harrison’s guardian angel in her palm. The chain noosed carelessly around the angel’s throat.

This kind of epic sequence of Lonan yeeting away the darkroom ft a subtle Houses With Teeth reference??:

Lonan will burn down the darkroom one-handed. He hustles through the rain and forest brush with the gas can, the flashlight pricked between his teeth. The woodland seems so irrelevant at night; moonlight pares through clumps of deciduous trees; rain blisters from the opaque clouds; a ground animal, perhaps a raccoon, or squirrel, scampers up a redwood and into its hollow. It’s lost its energy, replaced with irrelevant, forgettable details. But still he moves with conviction, weaving between tree trunks like he’s the one who put them there.

His second reunion with the darkroom is not something of the fantastic. He’s done his time staring at it like it’s got teeth, strong incisors that will nick him if he looks at it the wrong way. When he arrives at its pathway, rain prowling down his cheeks, his left hand wrapped hastily in the eucalyptus towel, he has not come for reconciliation.

Gasoline could substitute the Pacific, he thinks as he unscrews the bottle’s cap and lugs liquid onto nearing brush, smothering the wildflowers needling through the shed’s concrete platform. It moves the same, sounds the same, does the same thing—spreads. He leaves no square foot untouched with fuel. He douses the doorway, its shattered windows, even the individual holes in its hardwood floor. He dresses the darkroom in gasoline and doesn’t blink when he pulls his lighter from his pocket and sets it on fire.

Here’s when Lonan approaches the cabin and first sees the dead rabbit:

Lonan arrives back at the cabin a half hour later, smelling like soot and wet earth. He expects to see Eliza inside, turning over the last bits of scorched wood with the fire iron. Drinking a bottle of red wine turned to vinegar by herself, the cork neatly pushed in the centre of the hearth. But when he approaches the cabin, tracking up rain and dirt, Eliza is not inside.

She sits on the veranda, stooped over the glass worktable, her hands fumbling against the head of a rabbit. There is no question the animal is dead. It’s small, just bigger than the length of her palm, its grey fur gone cobalt with rain. Its head lolls against the frost of the glass. There is no bringing it back to life.

“Where did you find that?” Lonan asks. He wrings his hair of rainwater knowing it will get soaked again before another minute passes.

“It washed up.” She strokes its ear, examines its fur with her thumb and middle finger, as if tending to cashmere.

Lonan impales the rabbit in the same way he impaled the previous chapter’s fish and this is what happens after that. We also get a hint at why the chapter is called Holy Obedience:

“Do you do everything in the name of your father?”

“Obedience is an act of love.”

“Burning down his darkroom is not what he would’ve wanted.” Eliza pulls her arms close to her chest, gnaws on a bloody hangnail.

“That’s what I wanted.”

“Then you have two conflicting agendas.”

“Isn’t killing the rabbit what you wanted? Aren’t you vegetarian, Eliza? Aren’t those two conflicting agendas?”

Eliza taps the hilt of the knife, fully upright in the rabbit’s skull. Her lips purse. Her posture straightens. She wipes her mouth with the clean plane of her forearm. When she deescalates the veranda’s steps and walks past him, he doesn’t follow her at first. He watches her back, the way her hair flutters before sinking with the rain. How blood drips off her fingertips and onto the dirt driveway, pinkish, like the colour a child might want their wall.

And the fateful drive begins, ft. a scene I repurposed from the old ch.2:

Loam gives under the car’s wheels, sputters up onto the windows as she backs the car onto a dirt path. He does not ask where she’s going. Even as they drive deeper into the thicket of trees, branches combing the windshield, paths he’s never been, he does not ask.

“What other things did your father teach you?” she asks after some time dozing through the woods.

Eliza’s hung a lucky rabbit’s foot from the rear-view mirror, tannish fur that whitens when Lonan reaches and turns it over.

“This isn’t vegetarian,” he says, scales the foot with his fingernail, bloodying it just as the rabbit on the veranda. Its ball chain clatters with every brush of his finger, the sharp jut of its cap, neatly carved into the head of a rabbit, prickling against his finger. Rain clatters against the window, each drop’s shadow inking his jeans, arms. “Genesis. How to kill a fish. The easiest places to be caught when you run.”

Me leaving the city haha:

They parse through trees, bushes, and Lonan knows each species even without looking, and the longer she doesn’t answer, the more insistent he becomes at stating them aloud. “Red alder. Pacific dogwood. Cascara. Ponderosa pine,” he says.

Here are the final two paragraphs. Fun fact, I stole “holy vengeance” from myself which appears in one of the later chapters in Rewired.

The next time Eliza presses the accelerator, it’s with a holy vengeance. As if something guides her, her heel gorging into the pedal. They move so quickly, Lonan doesn’t know when the forest ends and where the beach starts—it all melds, a mosaic of vague landscapes. He doesn’t know when he reaches for the rabbit’s foot hanging from the mirror and holds it to his chest, like he knows what she’ll do. Even before she says, “I always wanted to be buried by cattails,” even before the car’s wheels whir over sand, driftwood, strings of kelp, even before they dive head-first into the lake, he knows.

Crashing into water sounds like rising to heaven. He doesn’t know why this is the first connection he makes, or why all he visualizes as the car sinks is the wisp of white clouds, the balmy lift of air that hikes him through the sky. Even though the water is dark, all he sees is light, crisp and glittering from above. As he ascends, he turns to look for Eliza, and there she is, slumped over the wheel, a stroke of blood dripping into her mouth. He is weightless when he stabs the cap of the rabbit’s foot into the corner of the window so it splinters. Weightless when he inhales and pushes through the broken glass like it’s Peter’s gate and he’s a step away from salvation. Weightless when he paddles through the water like a sunfish, his body ready for this, good at this, as he holds his breath. Weightless when the car sinks, and his head breaches the water like an orca, weightless when he opens his mouth to the storm and exclaims his hallelujah, his new beginning, his ultimate baptism.

That’s it for this update! I will be back sooner rather than later as I recently completed chapter six, but that’s a wrap on Lonan’s POV y’all!

--Rachel

#writing #amwriting #writeblr #writerblr #writingupdates #fostered #mothwork #feedinghabits

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buirbaby · 3 years

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The Wardens: Death Is A Cruel Mistress

Summary: Tabitha's time had run out on Earth, consumed by flames. When she wakes up in her new hell, she discovers that not only is it cold, but it's a hell of an entirely different meaning. She is in Westeros, with the knowledge to change the tides of future, but without the ability to speak it aloud. Tabitha must carve her path without fame, fortune, or noble titles in order to save characters from their deaths. All she has is a sword in her hand and the ability to warg.

Rating: M+ Mature themes, language, and violence

Masterlist | Next

The end of the work day was like any other. Tabitha was misting a few plants in the lowlight of the fading afternoon as evening encroached on her small storefront. Jingling jovially, the door tinkled open with just five minutes to spare on the clock before she'd lock it. Lifting her head, her fingers listed up toward her glasses to see who had entered. Originally, she had believed it to be a customer in search of a last minute plant or clippings she sometimes arranged into floral bouquets. However, rather than a customer, her stomach dropped to the floor at the cursed visage of a man in a finely pressed suit.

He wasn't there for a plant, she knew this. Just as she knew many others that had been harassing her and a few other remaining shops on Main Street. A new development wanted to take control of this block and turn it into an impressive condo complex on the rustic street that garnered attention from tourists and locals alike. Wiping her hands off on her apron, which was dusted with dirt and pearlite, Tabitha cleared her throat and approached. If he thought there'd be a mousy garden shop owner, he was sorely mistaken. Tabitha's family had own this storefront for generations and she wasn't about to hand it over, not when she'd fixed it up with her own blood, sweat, and tears. She was a successful business woman, the shop was in stellar condition and thriving despite the pause in society due to COVID.

"Can I help you?" she asked sharply, coming around the polished wooden counter to assert her place.

"Yes, is the owner or manager in?"

The fated question, one that made her blood boil each time the casual, yet scathing glance was set over her, as if a woman in her late twenties couldn't be said person. It happened yet again and Tabitha forced herself not to snort in indignation. "I am her," she replied evenly.

"Wonderful," the man drawled, withdrawing a manila folder from underneath his arm. "As you're likely aware, my company is purchasing property in the vicinity. There are a few stores, this one included, that are refusing to sell. I've come with an offer-" he opened the folder, images of the supposed development and work ushered beneath a contract and a hefty sum with quite a few zeroes.

"Then you would be aware that I, like the other few businesses, are still refusing to sell. Listen, this street prides itself on historical shops and architecture. I know that we're prime water view property, but I'm not selling, and I know for certain that my fellow business owners are just as adamant in our position. I don't need the money," Tabitha didn't touch the paper. He could have added more zeroes and she wouldn't have cared. This was principle, her family's lineage, and she wouldn't be a sell out.

"Please, these prices are negotiable. My company is really eager to develop here and keep to the charming architecture on the street. Won't you consider it? You could always reopen in a much larger shop down the road," the man suggested.

"It wouldn't be on Main Street," Tabitha pointed out. "Look, sir, I've got nothing against you, but I don't appreciate being badgered to sell. I will never sell. Your company should either take what they've got or look elsewhere. Now please, I'm just about to close."

"Nothing is going to change your mind, miss?"

"Nothing," Tabitha assured him, closing the folder and sliding it back over toward him.

Escorting the man to the door, he paused to glance at the fire alarm posted near the entrance. It was a bit old, but the pipes had been updated within the last decade. "Old system here," he commented.

"The shop is as humid as a rainforest, I'm not too worried," Tabitha shrugged, opening the door. Perhaps she should have thought about the oddness of the comment more, but she didn't. A lot of things in the shop were old, considering how long the building had been standing. She had put a lot of money into reinforcing the structure and replacing the old with new so that the beautiful piece of history could be continuously preserved. Shutting the door behind him, she locked the glass door and flipped the sign over to ‘closed’.

There were a few chores to finish up around the shop, to include changing out bug sticky tape and sweeping up dirt. After balancing the register, she locked up the cash, and shut the lights off. Through the back of the store, there was a locked door that led to a staircase, revealing a set of stairs that ascended into her apartment that was situated above the shop.

Her head ached, them pestering at least twice a week to sell her home and livelihood just to relocate. That wasn't it. Aside from the principle of it all, she would also have to find a house and a new store. Who knew if she'd be able to buy it outright or what she'd be getting. Then the stress of moving alongside of wondering if her typical clients would follow her elsewhere. No, it was too much and she wouldn't do it, even if she was the last one on the frontier against this condo company. Maybe if she had some family to help her she would've grudgingly considered it, but already she was spread thin between all her work.

A loud meow greeted her as she pushed open the door to her flat and she smiled, the tension of the day slipping away as a fluffy black cat stood on the arm of her couch and beckoned with his tail to be given attention. Letting out another shouting protest, Tabitha chuckled and brushed her palm over the feline's head, the long hair cat pressing into her hand as she raked down his spine. "I know, I know, I kept you up here all day. I'm sorry Balerion. Bad cat mommy," she hung her smock up and bent down to pick the fluffy monster up, the baby curling into her arms like a babe as he mewed in content. "But you know I'm going to make it up to you. Tomorrow we're going on another trip, aren't we? Hollis is gonna take care of the shop while we're gone."

The plan was to head up to Iceland for the hike and climbing trip that Tabitha had been saving for for years. Balerion was her partner on all escapades, a willing participant in hikes and her little buddy even in rockclimbing as he'd be situated in a special backpack where he'd be fully strapped in. Already the feline had been with her to the Amazon, Alaska and Denali, Scotland, the Azores, and Hawaii. He seemed to love the adventure, which was uncommon for cats, especially given the strenuous conditions they were sometimes subjected to. However, even if Tabitha was miserable, Balerion was always kept warm, dry, and safe. She had friends, but Balerion was her soul mate.

"Let's go through our packing list one more time, we don't want to forget anything," she said, reminding herself more than him as she brought him into the bedroom and plopped him down onto the bed. Balerion flopped down, hanging his meaty paws over the edge as she opened her suitcase and hiking pack to double check the supplies. "Now it'll be summer there, so lots of hours of sunlight, but still quite mild. Want to make certain we're warm enough at night. Shouldn't be as bad as Denali though."

After checking the list thrice more and comparing it to what she had laid out, Tabitha decided that the two of them were ready for the journey tomorrow. Dinner was simple to prevent much to clean before the two of them settled in for the evening, a book on her lap as she re-read through one of her favorite series: A Song of Ice and Fire . The place where she'd gotten Balerion's name from. She barely managed more than a chapter, too excited to board the plane at the crack of dawn to Iceland with her furry companion.

Tugging the blanket up, Balerion curled up by her side, Tabitha set her alarm on her phone and tried to get some shut eye. It was difficult at first, the anticipation clawing at her, but eventually she slipped away from reality. Cascading into a dreamless sleep, she was awoken by the worried yowl of her cat, which roused her. Eyes burning, Tabitha turned over in an attempt to grab her phone to check the time. It wasn't often that Balerion made such an awful noise. Usually when he wasn't feeling well and was going to vomit. However, as she turned on the night lamp, she noticed a thick haze permeating the room. Balerion was no longer beside her, but she could hear his crying, loud and insistent.

Smoke. It was smoke.

"Balerion?" The moment she opened her mouth, she drew in a copious amount of smoke and choked on it. Sputtering, she rolled off the bed and crawled, looking for her pet. "Bale, come here baby. Come here!"

She didn't hear the fire alarms going off. If there was any sort of fire, the alarms should have been ringing. Ducking underneath the bed, she found him cowering in the corner, reaching beneath to drag him out toward her. Fire escape. There wasn't time to think about what had caused the fire, nor where it had originated. Her mind was fully in survival mode. This was the second floor and the ceilings were quite high, her best hope would be utilizing the escape to get as close to the ground as she could before dropping down.

Tabitha made it to the window where the escape was, standing up enough to try and glimpse outside, but was horrified by what she found. There was a glass pane to look through, but a curtain of fire as the flames had consumed the exterior of the structure first. She had replaced a good portion of the interior, but the outside was still the same old shingles. Wherever the fire might have started, it had lanced up around the outside, beginning to eat in through the roof before billeting up through the flooring of her apartment. It was possible that the wet atmosphere of her shop cocooned the apartment temporarily, but in the meanwhile the rest of the older parts of the structure went alight.

Panic consumed her as Tabitha dropped back down to the ground and hoped that maybe the nearby fire department would get inside before either of them perished. Keep low to the ground, try not to breathe in the smoke.

Crawling away from the window and doorway, Tabitha slid next to her bookcase, glancing over at the picture frames and the years of her early twenties depicted in photos of her when she'd left the confines of her small town home to embark on a journey in the military. Those years, while she'd complained a lot about them, had helped put a backbone in her and set up a foundation for schooling and regiment. She still enjoyed rucking-or backpacking as the civilians called it, never quite trading in her boots in.

Her eyes fluttered, a soft hoarse cough parting her lips again as Balerion's yowling quieted and she felt exhausted. Perhaps she could hear the fire trucks in the distance, perhaps she couldn't. Tabitha's eyes shut to the sound of a formation marching and a cadence being called.

#game of thrones fanfiction #game of thrones fanfic #a song of ice and fire fanfic #asoiaf fanfiction #asoiaf fanfic #reincarnation insert #freeform #added lore #the ability to change the future but with a twist #romance is not the main theme #BAMF female OC #buirbaby writes #The Wardens

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thisiswhatwereupagainst · 4 years

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We come from the land of the ice and snow From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow This is Snowbird aka Narya aka Anne MacKenzie, a founding member of Marvel’s Alpha Flight and one of my faves. Here’s a post all about her!

Snowbird is the daughter of a moral man, Richard Easton, and the Inua goddess Nelvanna. The Inua are the gods of the Canadian north in Marvel canon. While their name is clearly from the term “Inuit” they are not a pantheon (originally a trinity but then expanded) from any real-world culture, but they are drawn in such a way to suggest they are meant to reflect Indigenuous Canadian peoples, and when they are expanded from a trinity to a true pantheon, real-world Inuit deities like Kadlu and Sedna are added to their number. This raises some problematic issues all around, but it is what it is, so moving on--- Nelvanna is the only female member of the original trinity as they appear, and thus was tasked with conceiving a half-human child with Richard Easton when he stumbled into their realm after finding an ancient artifact at a Canadian archeological dig near the Arctic Circle, since Richard was a man. The reason they needed a half-human child was to combat The Great Beasts, immensely powerful entities. They had been trapped thousands of years ago in a prison realm by the Inua, but in modern times the magicks holding them began to weaken. Knowing the Great Beasts would break free soon, the Inua wished to produce a champion, a demi-goddess child born of both man and god, belonging to both worlds, who could fight them on this plane. Nelvanna successfully conceived a child with Richard, but he was driven mad by the experience of consort with the divine, and he lived out the rest of his life as a hermit until he attempted a ritual to summon one of the Great Beasts. This succeeded, but his life force was consumed in the process, and his remains settled on the bottom of the salt lake where the Great Beast called Tundra once stood. Richard’s spirit would live on as an evil entity, which Snowbird eventually faced and put to peaceful rest at last. But back to Snowbird---obviously, the baby that Nelvanna conceived was Narya, who became Snowbird. As Nelvanna was about to give birth, she summoned Native Canadian shaman Dr. Michael Twoyoungmen to a place of power to assist her. The being she gave birth to was unstable, a transmorph, lacking real form, and Michael knew that he had to mystically bind it to Earth or else it would have never been able to possess a human form. He did so, and the baby at last assumed a human form, that of a little blonde girl with alien features who was already a year old. Having been bound to the land of Canada itself at her birth gave Snowbird her greatest weakness----she could not leave the boundaries of Canada without weakening and, if she did not return soon enough, death. Michael raised Narya alone in a cabin in Banff National Park, where she began to learn the customs of Earth and how to use her fantastic powers---specifically, she could shapeshift into a snow-white version of any animal native to the Canadian Arctic lands. She notably preferred to eat what she hunted in her animal form, not joining Michael or his guests, the Hudsons, at dinner. But she had stranger qualities still---at only three or four chronological years, she already looked like a young woman, albeit a strange elfen one. After Michael explained to the Hudsons that Narya was not only a metamorph but a demigoddess, James Hudson invited them both to join Alpha Flight. They agreed, and were given the codenames Shaman and Snowbird. While her primary goal was always to battle the Great Beasts as she had been born for, Snowbird also dutifully served the interests of Department H and the Canadian government, and to this end took on a human identity, that of Corporal Anne MacKenzie. She used her shapeshifting power to adopt a more fully human appearance, and worked at an RCMP post somewhere in the North West Territories of Canada. However, she had the ability to sense whenever one of her enemies, the Great Beasts, awakened, and would leave whatever she was doing immediately to do battle with these monsters. This ended up costing her her job, though she likely cared little. Snowbird had a cold, distant, aloof persona, almost alien, and at one of her teammates expressed that she gave him “the heebie jeebies” to which her foster father Michael said he was not alone in, suggesting that others were regularly unnerved by her. Indeed, Narya was very much as inhuman mentally as she was physically. Alpha Flight (1983) #3 describes her as such: "Her innermost memories dwell beyond human comprehension, and she remembers the oldest snows." She seems to innately know all her own powers, even those she never used before---such as the ability to compel others to aid her against the Great Beasts should she wish--and to know that her destiny is to fight The Great Beasts, which she will automatically do despite any fear she might have. While it is possible Michael taught her the latter, it is just as likely that she simply was born knowing it. Other powers she displayed were: - Flight - Resistance to extreme cold - She's able to sense magical energies, disturbances to the land she's tied to, and the proximity of her teammates - If her teammates invoke the Great Spirit, she senses that and will come to their aid. - Post-cognitive vision, being able to see what happened in the past in a place. For instance, she looked at a plane crash and was able to basically play it back before her eyes as she looks at the wreckage in order for her to figure out what caused it. It seems there's a limit though, as in another issue she can't do it because whatever happened was 12 hours or more ago, which she can tell by tracks, showing she has tracking skills, likely from her wildnerness upbringing by Shaman and animal-like abilities - As mentioned, she can magically/psychically compel others to help her fight the Great Beasts against their wills While Snowbird originally hoped that once she vanquished all the Great Beasts, her time on Earth would be done and she could ascend to the paradise where the other Inua dwelled, her path changed when Doug Thompson, a colleague from when she had been Anne McKenzie, professed his love for her. Though she originally denied him, she eventually revealed her real self, Snowbird, to hi. She tried to tell him that she could not return his affections, but Doug simply grabbed and kissed her – the first kiss Narya ever received. Taken by surprise and filled with human emotions she had suppressed to this point, Snowbird could no longer deny that she was attracted to Doug too, however, she wanted him to fully know what he would get involved in and showed him her so True Fires, her godly form, a strange and terrifying sight to behold. Yet Doug loved her still, and so once all the Great Beasts were slain, she returned to him and wed him, asking him to teach her to be human. But in doing so, she bound herself to a mortal man, and thus the Inua, whom she had longed to join, cast her out for this sin. Eventually she became pregnant, and just as she had grown up rapidly, so too did her pregnancy rapidly advance. The birth was dramatic, with Snowbird rapidly shifting out of control, displaying her True Fires in her agony. The Inua appeared and offered Snowbird one last chance to join them in Paradise; ridding herself of the stench of mortality. They warned her that after the child was born they would have nothing to do with her. Afraid and suffering unbearable pain, Narya almost agreed – except that she was afraid of losing the people she loved and who loved her back. Snowbird told her mother that she couldn’t leave what she had found on Earth and with that, the Gods left. Narya still needed to reach sacred ground before she could give birth, just as she too had been born in a sacred place. Due to her own resentment of her father, Talisman aka Elizabeth Twoyoungmen, Michael’s daughter, tricked her. Dr. Strange had brought her to a place of power, yes, but it was a place of power because there was an ancient sorcerer buried beneath the frozen wasteland. Strange did not know this, but Talisman did---and said nothing. Soon the birth was set in motion, and almost instantly, Pestilence, spirit of the ancient sorcerer, possessed and corrupted the child. Talisman knew this would happen; her plan was to watch her father try and fail to save the day, and then step in to do so herself. Yet she found herself unable to best Pestilence either, and he beat Alpha Flight, including his own “mother”, and fled, taking his new body, that of Narya’s unnamed son, with him. As horrible as this was, Nary considered this might be a blessing in disguise. She thought that perhaps if she abandoned her child and husband, then the Inua might reconsider rejecting her, and welcome her back into their fold. Understandably, her husband was upset by this, and angrily stormed off, vowing to find their son himself. He said he now realized that not being human, he could not expect Snowbird to know what motherly love meant. And yet, it turned out, she did---though it saved neither her nor her son. While the rest of Alpha Flight were busy with another mission, Shaman and Snowbird located Pestilence in the mining town of Burial Butte. Once they got there, the pair learned that Douglas, Snowbird’s husband, had gotten there before, and had been infected with a fatal disease by Pestilence. Pestilence had realized that the baby’s pure spirit was slowly overcoming his influence. Only by it being killed could Pestilence could roam free and possess someone else again. To this end, he controlled Snowbird, and forced her to kill him, releasing his spirit, while the body of the child, her child, perished at the claws of its own mother. Snowbird died too, shot down by Heather Hudson in a too-late attempt to stop her from killing her “son” and releasing the sorcerer. Pestilence escaped, but mother, father, and child were all dead. Alpha Flight laid the family to rest in beautiful glass coffins, and, at their funeral, the Inua appeared, offering the dead Snowbird one last chance to join them in their Paradise. Snowbird’s soul, however, demanded that her husband and child must be allowed to come with her as well, or she would not come at all. Though no mortal had ever been allowed in the Inua Paradise before, her divine family made an exception for the first time, and allowed her mortal one, and all their souls went to dwell there in happiness together for eternity. As with many Marvel characters, death was not the end for Snowbird. Pestilence possessed her soulless body briefly, before being forced out by Shaman, at which point the soul of Walter Langkowski aka Sasquatch, another deceased member of Alpha Flight, took it over. No longer housing a divine spirit, Snowbird’s body became that of a human-looking woman---but still a woman, with Walter’s soul inside. So for about two years, Walter went by Wanda. Yeah, he was walking about in the dead body of his teammate, don’t think about it too hard. Perhaps also due to her divine nature now being absent from her body, “Wanda” Langowski did not get any of Snowbird’s powers with her body, but instead retained his--er, her?--own, that of shifting into a Sasquatch, albeit a white one now. Wanda became Walter again eventually, and years later, Snowbird was discovered alive in an A.I.M. laboratory. Alpha Flight and Wolverine freed her and took her along to Department H, where excessive tests revealed her to be indeed really Snowbird. What A.I. M was doing with her and how she came back to life has yet to be revealed. The canon explanation is that she has regenerative powers that went to work while she was buried, but this doesn’t track at all because, again, her body didn’t stay buried, Walter was running around in it. Apparently the writers just...forgot this, and for extra irony had WALTER of all people be the person who came up with this explanation. Seriously. I just go with the idea the Inua brought her back for God Reasons and she doesn’t know why yet and then A.I.M. got ahold of her before she could rejoin her team. She also lacks being bound to the Canadian lands anymore, and I miss that limit, I thought it was cool. I like a lot of things about Snowbird. Firstly, I think the fact she can turn into animals, that’s really cool, and the limits of them always being Canadian helps temper it, and I think them always being white is a neat touch. I like that she’s WEIRD and INHUMAN and unnerves people, I like that her design is meant to be CREEPY INSTEAD OF PRETTY and I like that she actually FALTERED in being a good mother in a really HORRIBLE way that women (at least heroic/good women) don’t usually get written as even considering without becoming villains for it, I like that when she does show humanity it’s not just compassion or maternal love, it’s also BEING A DICK LIKE HUMANS CAN BE . She’s a pretty cool character and I’d like to RP as her one day. I also have some thoughts about why I think she, as a character who is literally meant as the embodiment of Canada itself, should be rewritten/re-designed as a Native Canadian woman, but those are for another post---this is just about who she is as it is. Which is a neat character with a pretty design! Fun fact: In the Ultimates universe, it’s Danielle Moonstar who is a member of Alpha Flight bearing the codename Snowbird. Instead of the powers of 616 Dani or Snowbird, she wields the ability to create and control blizzards, which she uses to overpower that universe’s Storm.

#snowbird #alpha flight #narya #anne mckenzie #marvel

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gffa · 5 years

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Every time I put together a list of STAR WARS fic recs, I keep wanting to add to it because, here’s the thing about this fandom, people keep writing more amazing fic. I’m especially fond of this set because it contains a whole bunch of novel/novelette length fics that made for incredibly satisfying readings, like, sure, we’re all worried about what TROS might bring, but it’s a lot easier to relax for awhile when I have twenty novels worth of fic to distract me. So, here, have a bunch of crying about some of the incredible fic this fandom has given us, before I decide, no, I’ll wait until I read just ten or twenty more fics (because I have them sitting on my reader to read already!) and cry about them at everyone, too. STAR WARS FIC RECS: TIME TRAVEL RECS: ✦ Legacy by myrlendi (thehistorygeek), luke & leia & obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, time travel, 130k wip Three months after the Battle of Endor, Luke Skywalker goes in search of a rumoured Jedi temple in a secluded part of the Mid Rim. He finds within the temple nothing but a strange artifact, which unexpectedly brings him much closer to the Jedi of old than he ever thought he would be. ✦ The Desert Storm by Blue_Sunshine, obi-wan & jedi & cast (too many to tag), time travel, 409.3k wip The storm screams at him, and Obi-Wan Kenobi screams back. PREQUELS RECS: ✦ One Thing You Lack by maychorian, obi-wan & anakin, ~1k Considering how easily Anakin wins at just about everything, it’s only fair that Obi-Wan have the best of him in at least one area. ✦ Adrift by Ripki, obi-wan & anakin & padme & yoda & palpatine & cast, 32.5k In the aftermath of painful revelations, Obi-Wan and Anakin struggle to come to terms with the heavy price of secrets. But the war gives no respite and soon enemies are closing in, putting the Team’s honesty, loyalty and trust in each other to the test. ✦ Help me, Master by fireflyfish, obi-wan & anakin, 2.4k Obi-Wan Kenobi watched in a kind of numb horror as Anakin Skywalker coiled his legs and summoned the Force to his command. ✦ Anamorphosis by saltyavocado, obi-wan/padme & anakin & cast, 33.5k A distorted or monstrous projection or representation of an image on a plane or curved surface, which, when viewed from a certain point, or as reflected from a curved mirror or through a polyhedron, appears regular and in proportion; a deformation of an image. ✦ Knightrise by Deviant_Accumulation, obi-wan & yoda & satine & ahsoka & cast, 22.4k wip “Strong enough to fight the Sith Lord, you are not.“ And just like that the fight drained out of Obi-Wan, the barely scraped together agitation running out of him like water from a broken glass. He looked at Yoda, the other Master already hobbling towards one of the back exits, his presence burning with focus, obviously expecting Obi-Wan to follow. ✦ Ensuring The Future by Shouting_at_God_in_Latin, obi-wan & anakin & mace & cody & yoda & cast, 44.1k wip When both Yoda and Darth Sidious have a vision of the future, both send reinforcements to Cato Neimoidia. One fleet is sent to kill Obi-Wan Kenobi, the other is to save his life. The fate of the Light requires Obi-Wan to stay alive until years after the end of the Clone Wars, but can he even survive Cato Neimoidia? ✦ Rainfall on Geonosis by ealcynn, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cody & cast, 33.9k Obi-Wan Kenobi attempts to land his troops at Point Rain. Geonosis is not kind. ✦ Trust Fall by devilinthedetails, obi-wan & anakin & qui-gon, 1.4k Two generations of Masters and Padawans. Two generations of trust falls. ✦ Lay Me Down by TrickyTricky, rex & obi-wan & cast, 7.9k War is hell, and the terrible fate that lies in store for the clone troopers casts its long shadow over them even now. ✦ -when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, by glorious_clio, bail/breha, 1.1k Bail’s had enough, and goes home to Breha. They know just how to take care of each other. ✦ Something Borrowed, Something New by Raven_Knight, qui-gon & dooku/jocasta, 1.6k Qui-Gon Jinn had only been claimed as Knight Dooku’s Padawan for three weeks before he’d managed to get himself into trouble with his Master. ✦ Vestiges by Quark_Logic, obi-wan & anakin, ~1k While duelling in the Death, Obi-Wan tries to connect with Anakin through their old Force Bond, not really expecting it to work. OBI-WAN/ANAKIN RECS: ✦ not too particular, not too precise by AozoraNoShita, obi-wan/anakin & padme & ahsoka, modern au, 8.4k wip Obi-Wan and Anakin both run food blogs and they have Opinions about each other’s recipes. Then it turns out they live in the same apartment building and they have the same friends and when they finally meet? It’s like a cooking competition meets a rom-com. Kind of. ✦ Upfall by bell (belldreams), belldreams, usomitai (belldreams), obi-wan/anakin & obi-wan/satine & ahsoka & cast, NSFW, 71.1k wip Anakin is doing just about everything he can to hold himself together; it won’t last. ✦ Transactions and Negotiations by zarabithia, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, modern au, light d/s, 5.3k wip Obi-Wan Kenobi is Anakin Skywalker’s favorite client. ✦ This time we’ll fall together by liv_k, obi-wan/anakin & padme & yoda & cast, 27.6k wip In the aftermath of Order 66, Anakin Skywalker’s miraculous survival after his confrontation with the new Sith Apprentice Darth Vader ignites a sparkle of hope in the remaining Jedi, in the fledgling rebellion and, above all, in his former Master, who thought he had lost everything to darkness. But darkness is generous, and it is patient. ✦ Home by little_tales, obi-wan/anakin & shmi & mace & qui-gon & cast, NSFW, time travel, 39k wip Time travel fix-it story with a bit of a twist. After his death, Obi-Wan wakes up on Tatooine, in the body of his padawan self. But instead of trying to prevent Anakin from Falling, he decides to change the future by stopping Qui-Gon from ever meeting the little Ani. ✦ After the Pillars Come Down by Virgo827, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & cast, 19.7k Anakin, Obi-Wan, & Ahsoka investigate the death of a Senator, and an accusation against the Jedi Order. But as the shadow of their last offensive campaign looms over them, the Jedi find it harder and harder to come to terms with what the war has made them. ✦ In the Heat of the Moment by Gwendolyn (storiesofchaos), obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 5.5k In which Anakin and Obi-Wan are stranded on some lonely desert planet, and what first appears to be a dull, annoying mishap turns out to be full of pent-up desire and feelings that come to light. ✦ Mutual Acquaintances by Ghost_Owl, obi-wan/anakin & obi-wan/satine & anakin/padme & padme/satine & cast, 36.6k wip In which Satine’s distress call puts Obi Wan under Council scrutiny, Anakin offers to save her for him as a Totally Platonic Favor, Satine would like one good day, please, Padmé has everything under control, and Maul manages to cause an even bigger problem than before. ✦ Adrift and Entangled by WhiteMoose, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & padme & maul, some torture, 68k wip After the Hardeen operation, emotions are raw. But before anything can be fully sorted out, the boys are sent to Christophsis for their next mission. Things don’t go as planned, and they find themselves alone in an unknown system with no hyperspace capabilities and no effective means of communication. ✦ Distractions by SingManyFaces, obi-wan/anakin 1k Being distracted by Obi-Wan wasn’t anything new, but the circumstances always were. ✦ untitled by subskywalker, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, some d/s, 1k “Remember dear one,” Obi-Wan reminded him as he pet his curls with one hand while the other stroked his cheek gently. “If it gets to be too much or if your need a break just tap our signal, okay?” ✦ The Seduction of Anakin Skywalker by DontCallMeShirley, obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & obi-wan/anakin/padme & cast, 20.2k Anakin is falling to the dark side. Obi Wan and Padme concoct a scheme to bring him back. ✦ So Warm by amyfortuna, obi-wan/anakin, 1.2k Anakin needs body heat. Well, maybe he needs a little more than just body heat. ✦ untitled by subskywalker, obi-wan/anakin/padme, sith!obi-wan, sith!padme, 1k Anakin falls in increments and everything else happens in between. ✦ Dear Fellow Traveler by Glare, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, modern au, 17.4k When strangers Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker both miss their flight, they become unlikely partners in the quest to get home. ✦ Satisfying Victory by zarabithia, obi-wan/anakin/ahsoka, NSFW, 3.4k The Force gives and Ahsoka takes. (Or, Ahsoka goes back in time and is totally going to fix everything. But there’s another order of business to attend to first.) ✦ Cinnamon by birdcat, obi-wan/anakin, 2.4k “Was it the same dream, today?” It took Anakin a moment to process Obi-Wan’s question. “Yes.” ✦ The Lives We Live Before the Present Moment by lyhoradka, obi-wan/anakin, 1.2k The Jedi’s best-kept secret is that the Force lies. (Anakin finds Obi-Wan a flower.) ✦ Immortals by SingManyFaces, obi-wan/anakin/ahsoka, vampire au, ~1k They tried to picture their lives without Obi-Wan, but they couldn’t. ✦ Soldier, Poet, King by Glare, obi-wan/anakin & qui-gon & dooku & cast, NSFW, time travel, d/s undercurrents, 102.5k wip Second chances are very rarely given, but the Force smiles upon two of its favorite children and returns them to a time before their actions have met their consequences. ORIGINAL TRILOGY RECS: ✦ Yet Peace by theLoyalRoyalGuard, obi-wan & luke & cast, 3.7k Grieving and unable to part with his best friend’s son, Obi-Wan raises Luke. Turns out, he’s pretty good at it. ✦ Hidden Relics by Burning_Nightingale, aphra & ahsoka, 1k When Aphra goes searching for Sith relics on Malachor, she gets more than she bargained for. ✦ More Than Just a Treat by JessKo, obi-wan & luke & beru & owen, 1.3k Beru and Luke bake cookies for Old Ben. REBELS RECS: ✦ we don’t have to have everything at once by Burning_Nightingale, thrawn/eli & thrass, 12.3k Eli is reunited with Thrawn by chance on a mission for the Ascendancy; their changed circumstances give both the chance to voice things previously left unsaid. ✦ Lights In The Storm by Burning_Nightingale, thrawn/eli & faro, 13k An Admiral being asked to investigate reports of smuggling at a tiny listening post in the ass end of nowhere would in normal circumstances be insulting - but Admiral Ballenrost is asking as a ‘personal favour’, and one does not turn down that sort of request from a man of his standing, even if one is the Imperial Navy’s most unorthodox and sole non-human flag officer. ✦ A Second Honor and Privilage by katsu, thrawn/eli & cast, NSFW, 10k Eli and Thrawn smut held together with a thin veneer of plot. ✦ Dear by ambiguously, kanan/hera, fem!kanan, 4.8k Kanan’s life has been a mess ever since Order 66, but now she has a new business partner and a new job to do. What could go wrong? SEQUELS RECS: ✦ Coneflower Honey by ambiguously, leia & rey & ben & finn, 3.2k General Organa is seriously ill. The Supreme Leader of the First Order is the only person in the galaxy who knows what’s wrong with her. FULL DETAILS + RECS HERE!

#obi wan kenobi #anakin skywalker #padme amidala #ahsoka tano #obikin #luke skywalker #leia organa #thrawn #eli vanto #thranto #fic recs #star wars fic recs

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diveronarpg · 4 years

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Congratulations, JULIE! You’ve been accepted for the role of BRUTUS. Admin Rogue: There is always something about the way you write unvarnished truth that gets me, every single time. Boris is not a likable character by any means, but I still find myself curious about him when seen through your lens. You want to make ruin of him, or maybe for him to make ruin of us, and it’s so attractively despicable that I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a character this unapologetic, not just to some but to every single person in Verona. Let them try and eat him, let them spit him back out, let them realize he will not be swallowed no matter how much he deserves it. I can already see the way he’ll burn across the dash, a torch-song I want to touch, and I couldn’t be happier to welcome you back to us in this new and exciting form! Please review the CHECKLIST and send your account in within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Julie

Age | 20

Preferred Pronouns | She/her

Activity Level | Given that I’ll probably be stuck at home searching for a job for the next month, I figure my activity will be okay. The usual reply every other day or so situation, I hope!

Timezone | MST

Triggers | Already listed!

How did you find the rp? | Two years ago I went diving into the LSRPG tag because I was curious and now here we are. :)

Current/Past RP Accounts | Santino, Loretta, Lucien

IN CHARACTER

Character | Brutus / Boris Kovrov

What drew you to this character? | Brutus, I think, is one of the most human characters in Diverona by default, without development, in the sense that he is so selfish it makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. It’s the same with most people: we encourage each other to take time to themselves, to put themselves first, but can feel rebuffed or insulted when they actually do that. Boris has taken that to the ultimate extreme: everything he does is for himself and no one else. He didn’t ascend within the Montagues because he wanted to further his family’s social standings, he did it because he alone wanted to succeed.

He’s not apologetic about it, either, and that’s what makes him so interesting. At all times, Boris is fully aware he is perceived as underhanded and generally disliked among the mob, but he’s so good at what he does that it doesn’t matter. He returns to Verona with a searing brand of shame in the form of his personal betrayal, and anyone could see that if they just fucking looked close enough, but they don’t. That’s where his talent really lies, and that’s what makes him so weirdly endearing to me: he makes himself valuable, and even when he does the worst possible thing a person could do in a mob, it still doesn’t undercut his worth. He makes himself out to be a friend, lies and lies and lies, and because most people don’t want to make the effort or choose not to, it’s believable.

Some might call him cut-throat, or a coward, a backstabber, potentially even brutal: he’s not ashamed of sprinkling rat poison into the food of his competition if it means he’ll succeed. He’s an opportunist at best and a manipulator at worst, and if there’s anything to be said about Verona, it’s that the manipulators usually come out at the front of the pack. The last sentence or so in his bio are what really sealed the deal for me: “The historians fail to mention that the traitors are the ones who survive, who outlive empires and kingdoms, who lay their sovereigns to rest and spread their ashes like trail markers.” God help him, Boris will come out of Verona alive, no matter how much of it he feeds into and how much of himself he lets it consume.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

• Fly not; stand stiff: ambition’s debt is paid. I’d love to see some real-time consequences for Boris’ betrayal of the Montague family. Others have been ousted for less, but somehow he gets to remain? That doesn’t seem particularly fair, but Boris couldn’t give a shit about fair if he tried. He sold his information to a mob in Russia for the purpose of a safety net. Other emissaries also deal with Russia – it’d make sense that one of them might hear about the dark dealings and try to use it to their own advantage, were they so ambitious. Or maybe it will come from someone higher up, like Castora, who knows more than they’ve let on. Maybe this will lead to his demotion, his death, Damiano’s assassination, the ushering in of a new era – who knows? These things don’t play out without someone paying the price, and I want Brutus to pay in full.

• I kill’d not thee with half so good a will. In my head, Boris has been out of the picture for some time now, working on relations between the American families and the Montagues to keep business booming. I’d love to explore the Verona Boris left a little over a year ago (totally headcanon, by the way! I’m happy to adjust wherever necessary) and how it’s changed in comparison to what it is now. Roman Montague has failed as an heir, the Witches hung in a public trial, all illusions of neutrality or working towards peace have been shot right through the middle. Damiano is unraveling at the seams, and the question of who will lead the Montagues lacks an answer entirely. It’s complete and utter chaos: messy, bloody, exactly the kind of environment Boris thrives in. I want him to wreak as much havoc as possible in his own way, and if he can’t do that, then I’d like to see him secure his seat closest to the throne when the concept of a coup becomes inevitable.

• But hollow men, like horses hot at hand / Make gallant show and promise of their mettle. He hunts Tomas Sabello and Bernadette du Pont because they are the easiest openings into both sides of the mobs. Bernadette is croquettish and manipulative but still naive, in Boris’ eyes, to the difficult path which lies ahead. I could see him trying to sway her to the Montagues if she would only listen. Grace Daly had done it for less, after all. Sabello, on the other hand, is Boris’ favorite target: throat exposed, head leaned back, weeping tears of sorrow over his wife. Boris has experience with the follies of the heart and he can see that Celeste has never loved the man, and frankly, Boris doesn’t think there’s much to the man to love. He’s hollow on the inside, scraped out with a metal spoon. His arrival so late into the act poses some difficulties, but he’s hopeful he’ll be able to pick up where he left off.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Absolutely!

IN DEPTH

In-Character Para Sample:

Valentina Gallo dies a violent death. An inextricable, unforgiving death. An ugly death. When they take pull her body from her brother’s arms, and she is taken in to be seen by Damiano’s own eyes, witness the violence which has laid itself across the barren field of a corpse –

This is when Boris is called home.

Exit, Viola.

Enter, Brutus.

He bids Lorenzo and the rest of the Gambino family farewell that same night over the phone: Lorenzo calls him a bastard for not shaking his hand before saying goodbye, but Boris has other things on his mind: A plane. The brisk cold mornings that give way to blustery sunshine. Damiano greeting him as a member of the family instead of an extension of his long reach, like he had a year ago. He can remember the phone call well. He’d run it through, night after night, dissecting and picking apart intonation and tone and the speed with which Damiano had dismissed him, like a dog begging for scraps hastily shoved away from the dinner table. He lets the familiarity of the conversation wash over him as he settles in his plane seat the night of the twenty-seventh. He’ll be there by morning.

I’ll be there to greet you, Damiano had said. Boris had tried not to read into it too much.

New York was intended to be punishment and apology wrapped up into one. Damiano sent him off to deal with the budding crime syndicates and crush them under the imaginary Montague heel. He would spread seeds of dissent and terror: most fall silent when he enters a room for good reason, and it is in this way that he gets them to listen when he speaks. Most would not expect a man as imposing as Boris to speak so passionately; he’s always been a fan of turning ideas on their heads. By weaving tales of just what the Montague family has at its disposal, he alone would stamp out the passionate flames of greed and light his own small fire of fear.

In his younger years this would have intimidated Brutus. When he’d received the call a year ago, he’d only felt dread.

But he’d done well. It took him five months to chase down every single lead provided to him by men paid under the table, and after that, all there had been to do was clean up the mess and socialize. Shake hands with the shattered fragments of the once-powerful mob families, reach out to the contacts he’d had in Canada and New Orleans, as they were perhaps the most influential, the ones who could sway the boat with weaponry and other fun and exciting goods that still had his heart pounding when he looked at them.

He’d thought about calling Evgeny once, and only once: when Damiano had chewed him out over the phone for something that was not his fault and hadn’t been in his wheelhouse to begin with. Boris knew, that night, what Evgeny would say. Patience, Kovrov. We’ll be here when you’re ready.

When you’re ready. Whatever that meant. For all Evgeny knew, Boris would never be ready. He’d die with Verona just out of reach.

He startles awake as the plane hits turbulence coming into Verona, heading towards the landing strip. It’s a bumpy landing, but he’s never done well in planes to begin with. He thinks, often, of his father, who had marked to Boris that all would be well just before returning to Russia. The flight wouldn’t make it, of course. Damiano had ensured it: Sasha Kovrov had been dead weight long enough. All he could’ve hoped for, Boris thought, was that his son would prove worthy of something.

And he had. He’d crawled on his hands and knees across glass and gravel, waded through blood and sweat, and tears – never his own, if he could help it – to see the Montague family through to the other side. Could he really have been blamed for wanting to ensure he had some sort of future laid out for him, even if it wasn’t in the name of the two old bloodlines of Verona? In return, he’d gotten: a usurpation of a position that should have been his, a pound’s worth of rat poison that he couldn’t use, distrust among his peers and disgust from the one man who should have seen his dedication, and a promise he couldn’t act upon until he was ready.

враки.

He exits the plane, meets Damiano on the tarmac, and just as quickly they are swept away by Damiano’s driver. There is no discussion of previous business, tasks he has completed. Craven is mentioned offhandedly, but Boris had to admit some time in September that whatever illicit ties Everett Craven had to the Capulets when it came to his dealings in America, the man kept them wound up tight. He’d been impressed. Instead, they set their eyes on the future: Damiano speaks to him of the failures and successes, trials and tribulations, and Boris takes note of the way his brow knits together when he speaks.

It is like Damiano cannot bear to look at him, but is forcing himself to anyway. Surely his betrayal had not burned so badly. It wouldn’t have left a mark.

Valentina Gallo died for less. She didn’t give nearly as much away. She’d given what she had to give. Boris had given Evgeny everything, and then offered the grounds of the coffee to Damiano in return.

Boris is lucky to be alive, seated across from a man he might have once considered a better father than his own, who looks at him with poorly-veiled discuss and tells him what to do. Boris had sold his soul – this might just be the devil’s recompense.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, watching the city pass them by, nodding where appropriate and watching the sun rise over the river as they drive alongside it. If he gets his way, Damiano Montague will be sooner dethroned, and Brutus will have his rightful place as second-in-command to some poorer, less competent man. If he is anything, it’s stubborn. They drive by the Castelvecchio, and he’s saddened to see it is still a work in progress, not at all the shining beacon it had once been of unity or pride within a place being torn in two, right down the middle. He feels a pang of something hit him in his chest. Homesickness? He’s home, but—

Boris’ flat is small, modest, tucked away in an alley. Close enough to the library that he can be there within minutes just by walking, if necessary. All the pedestrians on the street avert their eyes when they see Damiano’s car pull up outside. He grabs the one bag he’d taken with him on the plane: he’s hopeful the rest will arrive within the week, but that’s an if at best. Before he slips out, Damiano clears his throat.

He stops, and finds a single piece of paper pressed into his hand. He can only assume what it is, won’t open it – it’s deliberately folded closed. It could be anything: a name, a number, a place, a threat, a promise.

“When you’re ready,” Damiano murmurs, like some sort of sick joke, which is to say that it will be when he asks, because Boris ceded any hope at control over his own life the minute he sold all he possessed to the Russian mob, heart and mind and soul, only to crawl back to Verona just after. Some might’ve called him a fool, but he’d only seen the future, then. If only others could see the eclipsing horizon always in his sight.

It’s here that Boris is left: a small alley, out of sight of the rest of the world, the morning sun shining on his face. The future in his hand. He opens it before he has the chance to breathe in again, the vitriol in his heart already beginning to sear out through his ribcage.

Extras: N/A

#accepted: brutus #accepted

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meanwhile-on-spn · 3 years

Text

Meanwhile...

S1 Ep4: Phantom Traveler

Previously on Supernatural: Led Zeppelin Rules!

---

“Great.” A young woman grumbled as her music went out. Pulling her iphone out she saw the black screen with a massive empty battery sign in the center, “Dead” she grumbled. Bending in her seat, Anathema Device tried to dig in her carry on, hoping to find her charges. Luckily she found it easily, unfortunately she couldn’t actually find a charging port. Of course this little country hopper plane wouldn't have one, hopefully she could charge her phone before getting on her international flight to the U.K.

Huffing, she flopped back unsure what to do, she could read from Agnes again. She wouldn't be bothered if she did, the person beside her was fast asleep. As she bent over again, she heard the distinct hug of biker boots pound on the slightly hollow cabin floor. Looking up she saw an intense looking guy approach, he looked kind of nauseous. Hopefully he wouldn't stink up the bathroom directly behind her seat, the flight had only just started and she did not want to send the rest of it inhaling vomit.

“Hi.” The man said, talking with the stewardess back there.

“Can I help you with something?” The young woman asked. Whatever the man said, something about an uneasy flyer, as if the pallor on his face didn't give that away, the stewardess responded with the forced politeness all women knew. OH great this guy was trying to one her. Anathema rolled her eyes, even on a flight. Some mine just never knew when to keep to themselves.

Bending forward, Anathema craned her neck trying to see what was happening. The Stewardess was busy trying to prepare her drink cart and the man was just standing there. He had his hands in his pocket throwing these smiles that Anathema was sure many women found charming.

Even though she couldn't make out exactly what was being said, Anathema could tell that the Stewardess would rather this guy leave her alone to do her work. This guy couldn't take the hint though and just kept pestering him with questions.

The conversation seemed to come to an end but the guy just wouldn't leave. Then he mumbled something but she could barely make out what it was. The Stewardess didn't seem to understand either. “I’m Sorry. Did you say something?”

“Cristo? Nothing. Never mind.” Suddenly the man came through the curtain divider, slamming herself back into her seat, Anathema closed just as the strange man left down the aisle again.

“Cristo?” What the... why was this weirdo mumbling Latin? Sitting back, Anathema closed just as the strange man left down the aisle again.

Just as Anathema was finally getting comfortable again she noted the same man was up again. This time he was just slowly walking down the aisle like he was looking for something. In his hand was a massive ipod that he was stupidly sweeping side to side. Good lord, this man must have a few screws loose... or. A tiny terrified voice in her head whispered horrible thoughts. What if he was a threat. What is he planning? What if something was happening to the plane.

That couldn't be though, Agnes would have told her... wouldn't she. Anathema mentally scrolled through every prophecy she could remember. Bits and pieces of thousands of short cantos wheezed by in her mind.

“Excuse me,” Anathema looked up to see the stewardess giving her a polite smile. “ Would you like something to drink?” Even as she asked her eyes kept flitting back to the bizarre man stalking the aisle.

“Oh, no I am okay,” She thanked the woman who stopped her as she meant to walk away, “Actually though, I couldn't help but overhear that man” She pointed to the weirdo at the front end of the plane “talking with you. Are you okay?”

The Stewardess gave a slight put upon sigh but smile anyways. “Yes I am alright. It happens all the time unfortunately.”

“Guy hit on you all the time?”

“Yeah, they get it in their heads that the mile high club is a thing and every hostess wants to sleep with them. You know because all a woman wants to do is have sex while working.” She rolled her eyes and spoke with utter contempt. She had that universal look on her face that said ‘men’. Anathema smiled in companionship, yeah she knew a little of what the poor stewardess was though. She learned quickly in her early 20s, every time she mentioned being a witch the first question out of dates mouths would be “So you like to dance naked right?”

Finally, he was back at his seat, maybe the idiot would sit down. Instead of sitting though, he stood and talked with an even taller man. Several people were shooting the men uncomfortable looks, but they seemed fully oblivious of that fact. They talk for a moment, before the tall one swivels and starts to march down the aisle towards them.

“Oh great,” The hostess huffs, “The cavalry is here.”

“Please let me know if I can help.” Anathema gives her hand a squeeze then let's go to allow the woman to slip back behind the curtain.

“She is not gonna believe this.” The taller man said as he passed Anathema’s seat. Immediately followed by the original pervert who whispered back, “12 minutes, Dude.” A sentence that made anathema’s hair stand on end. Hovering her hand over her seat belt, she prepared to stand up and interrupt the trio, lie about needing the bathroom or something just to get them to leave the stewardess alone.

“What can I do for you?” the woman askes, sounding far more tired than she did while talking with Anathema.

“This is gonna sound... don’t have.... The truth is out there speech..” What the hell kind of pickup line was that?

“We know... Flight 2485.” The only man interjects. 2485 why did that sound familiar? Anathema strained to hear everything they trip said but the men were talking quietly. She could only parse out a handful of words, broken phrases like “Mechanical failure”, “happening again”, “Not gonna hurt you”, “Chuck”, “Amanda”, “eyes” and “copilot.” Just as Anathema was about to get up and come to the Stewardess' help, the other woman came through the curtain.

She tried to stop the stewardess but the woman was frantically heading towards the cockpit. Whatever these men said to her, they had thoroughly scared the woman. She was knocking on the cockpit door. Maybe reporting the two men to the pilots. Good, Anathema hopped they would be told to sit down and shut up.

With a satisfied smile Anathema watches as the co-pilot and stewardess march to the back of the plane. She was looking forward to hearing the chewing out these two jerks were about to get.

Just as the copilot enters the back cabin she heard the last thing she expected. With a loud thud and stubble it sounded like someone had just been punched in the face. The sounds of fighting just kept happening, growling louder and unnoticed by all the other passengers who were plugged into their devices.

Holy hell, were they guys attacking the pilot. There had to be something in the book about this? Throwing open her book, she started to smell burning and sulfur, making her nearly frantic as she desperately searched. 2485. 2485. That was important, she knows she has ready 2485 before. Just as the stewardess came out to stand in front of the curtain, Anathema remembered the exact page she needed. Quickly, Anathema flipped through the book, trying to find the appropriate prophecy. Three on page 695 Agnese's tight tight clean cursive was the passage.

When survivor of 2485metal flies with hundreds ascend the skye Brothers two, of witchfinder new, will split wonne made two and raise thee up once again.

Then suddenly, the plane just dropped from the sky.

Riding a rollercoaster is the most common metaphor one makes when talking about the pitting feeling in your stomach. That isn't quite right though. When one falls from the sky it doesn’t feel so much like your on a rollercoaster. It in fact feels like that moment when you miss-calculate how many steps you need to go and your foot suddenly falls down an unforeseen distance. That suddenly sick tight stressor runs up your spine, making your muscles tight and your breath gasping in an aborted scream that you don't fully have time to give. It is like that but has a thousand steps, respective and constant.

Everyone in the cabin was suddenly alert and screaming. The lights flickered and the cabin began rattles. Anathema clutched Agnes’s book to her chest and held in her screams as her eyes teared up in terror.

Instantly the curtains flew open and one of the men stumbled down the aisle. He hit the ground almost instantly but kept crawling, he was hell bent to keep going. Alarms blared, the air masks dropped and screaming kept going. Anathema's ears popped as the air pressure changed quickly as they fell closer and closer to earth.

Lightning hit the plane, coursing around the cabin, rolling along the walls and ceiling. The plane seemed to catch air and start flying once more. Where it was the stress or air pressure of shear relief at surviving, Anathema blacked out until they landed. Anathema’s stomach settled and she nearly cried with relief. Thankfully within the hour, they had landed. She couldn't get off that plane faster.

Unfortunately for her, she still had an international flight to make. She had an Apocalypse to avert.

Did this have to be a good omen X SPN cross over? No. Do I regret anything? absolutely not! Also I thought the last episode was dark. This one drops two plane out of the sky. In 2005 like that was most American’s biggest nightmare in those days.

On screen Body Count: 142

#supernatural #supernatural fanfiction #good omens #fanfiction #spn fanfiction #anathema device #sam and dean #sam winchester #dean winchester

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