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skelebells · 4 years

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retail au fic

under the cut!

Disclaimer i have somehow managed to never work retail so im pulling all this out my ass if you actually know whats up and want to tell me how i fucked up and could fix it please do!

Gordon Freeman had hit something of a dead end in his life. It hadn’t started like that, though, he’d been on a great path since high school- he got accepted into and graduated from MIT with a degree in theoretical physics, been immediately promised a job at some mysterious, prestigious sounding-place called Black Mesa, moved to a nice apartment in a city in New Mexico to be closer to the job, had everything set up to succeed, and then- well, he wasn’t entirely sure what happened.

He had been half an hour in what was going to be his daily commute, leaning against a cool window as the fancy air conditioned bus wound its way into the desert. He might have fallen asleep if not for the anticipation of a new job- and, just as he started to relax, he picked up the smell of smoke. He looked up, suddenly concerned, but the bus driver seemed to not have noticed. Gordon put his face to the glass and tried to see any signs of impending disaster- was that the military?

Sure enough, a makeshift roadblock of several heavily armed tanks and sweating soldiers stopped the bus. One of them marched aboard and muttered something dangerous-sounding to the bus driver, who nodded. One of the other passengers- an important-looking man in a white coat with a briefcase, as all important scientists seemed to wear- was escorted (borderline dragged) off the bus, before it turned and started to head back up the road, the wheels spinning up sand as they pulled away.

Gordon snapped around and stared out the back window. Past the roadblock, obscured by dust and billowing clouds of smoke, was the source of that smell. That probably used to be Black Mesa, he figured, not quite processing what he was looking at. The military was shooting into the smoke clouds laced with dancing threads of electricity, and he could hear screams, both human and… not.

He stared at the clouds and the rubble of his future until it disappeared into the horizon, as the bus sped further and further away.

He got home and tried endlessly to call someone who might know what the hell happened, but he got no response. He couldn’t find any record of Black Mesa online, anywhere. He was jobless, apparently.

Every job application he submitted to other scientific institutions got turned down with no explanation, and every interviewer clammed up once he mentioned Black Mesa. Well- shit, then. With any sense of a bright and scientifically intriguing future fast disappearing, he applied to some soulless chain supermarket after taking his degree and his acceptance to Black Mesa off his resume, and got the job within the week.

Fantastic.

The next couple of months went by in a mindless blur of unremarkable to unpleasant customers and minimum wage, and Gordon was feeling a sort of dread setting in that the rest of his life was going to be like this. ‘Your college degree was for nothing and you are going to waste away selling gum to teenagers with better lives than you’ something told him, and it was hard not to listen.

It was in one of these late, quiet afternoon moods, mindlessly restocking within sight of the entrance, where he first saw one of Them. The sliding doors parted and a tall, skinny man in a bright yellow shirt walked in, golden retriever on leash and pushing an empty shopping cart.

Gordon looked up and opened his mouth to say something about no dogs being allowed in the store, and stopped. First off, it was a service dog, so that was fine, but said dog was huge. Sitting down, it looked like it would be about six feet tall, about the same height as Gordon.

‘Uh, what the fuck?’ he blurted, all regulations forgotten.

The tall man looked over at him and blinked. ‘Hi!’

‘...uh, hi! Why- why’s your dog so big, man??’

‘Oh- this is Sunkist! He’s- he’s the perfect dog,’ the man declared cheerfully. He and his dog walked up to the drink section just behind Gordon, and began loading several various sodas, both in packs and loose cans, into his trolley. The- the dog had a litre bottle of Mountain Dew held in its mouth. Okay. Sure.

‘Hi, Sunkist,’ Gordon said weakly, and decided not to press the issue. He wasn’t paid enough to try and figure out how or why this dog was so fucking giant. Instead, he stood and watched, entranced and with a growing sense of insanity for the e it took for the seven or so minutes it took both dog and man to drag roughly 50 litres worth of soda into the trolley and started to wheel it over towards the checkout.

‘Hold on,’ Gordon called out, suddenly very curious about this man with his lethal amount of soda and his terrifyingly huge dog. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Tommy Coolatta!’ the man said brightly, and squinted at the name tag on Gordon’s chest. ‘Uh… Gordon Freeman. N-nice to meet you!’

‘Yeah, that’s- that’s me. Nice to meet you too, Tommy,’ Gordon said, feeling himself retreat into customer service mode from the bizarreness of it all. His name was fucking Coolatta?? He was done. He started back on restocking his shelves and glanced periodically over to Tommy and Sunkist at the checkout. Ah, Darnold was at that till. Gordon had never spoken to the man much but apparently he liked soda, judging by the enthusiastic conversation the two seemed to be having. Ten entire minutes later, the soda was scanned and paid for and bagged, and the two left and walked off down the street. Sunkist seemed to be carrying two of the plastic bags in her mouth.

‘What the fuck,’ muttered Gordon, once they were out of sight. He’d had unusual weird or creepy customers before, of course he had, but this was a new level. Fuck this job. He had no idea what to make of the encounter.

The next few days went by without much of an event. Tommy slipped into the background of his memory and Gordon fell back into his normal, boring, working routine.

Until, like a purposeful slap in the face from the universe, the store was robbed. Or at least he was pretty sure that was what happened.

He had taken to playing solitaire in the empty hours of the store (which were most hours, in this gloomy late autumn). It was a normal and productive game for someone his age. He was doing puzzles to challenge his brain, fuck you. Maybe twelve games in a row was a getting a little sad, but-

His cards spontaneously combusted.

He yelled and reared back from the counter but before he could even process what the fuck just happened the window- the large display window next to the accessible, already opening sliding doors- was shattered by some large thrown projectile.

Oh god, that was a guy, what the fuck- there was a- an old man in a lab coat? Sprawled out on the floor in the broken glass of the window and- cackling, and a second, shorter guy with- with a sleeveless lab coat, what the fuck-

and that is all folks

mad i lost interest before i could write in benrey’s entrance but thats alright

if any of yall want to take this and continue it or whatever please do!

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deanandcastrash · 6 years

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guys, the weirdest thing happened today

so i was taking the practice ACT and in the reading part, there was this passage. and as i began to read it, only into the first few sentences, this feeling washed over me like i had wrote this before, and i continued to read and i seriously thought that it was my writing.

so i skipped to this part where i knew a character name would be, but the name was different. i glanced at the copyright and it said 1957.

so i read the whole thing and was shook.

it was a bit different from my own, but it wasssss sooooo simmiiillaar.

look, ill show you cause thats how shook i am.

the passage was adapted from the essay “Just This Side of Byzantium” by Ray Bradbury

here are the first few sentences of it:

“I began to learn the nature of surprises, thankfully, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.“

Now, here are the few sentences of mine (which is part of a fanfic i posted on tumblr 5 months ago. heres a link to the post )

“Being a writer, forcing ideas into the world came naturally, and it was a bad habit that Castiel had to learn how to break. When he was younger-a young writer-Castiel used to think something so far out there was great, and he would force it into words, onto a page that it didn’t fit. Those ideas would turn into these rabid monsters, clawing at the page, chewing up each letter of each word between their sharp teeth. He knew he had to learn to let it come naturally, but he didn’t know exactly what that consisted of. He didn’t know how to do that.”

we both used personification, giving a thing-an idea-living characteristics. we both had young writer characters. (im bolding the parts that are similar.)

heres the rest of bradburys (this is passage a, there was also a passage b that i will get to later)

“ It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.

I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.

First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.

Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to try words for all that.

I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.

So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.

Along the way I came upon and collided, through word-association, with old and true friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say good-bye to him properly.

Along the way, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved.

Thus I fell into surprise. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.”

mine:

“One morning, after many countless nights sitting behind a blinking cruiser, Castiel got up out of bed, turned on his computer, and wrote the first thing that came to his mind and everything that came to his mind until he had a string of words lines long in front of that blinking cruiser. He wrote mostly of his life, things that meant a lot to him. It was the most fun to write about. It surprised him so much-that he had written so much-that he knew that this is what he must do. This was the only natural thing he knew to write.

So every morning for quite a few years, Castiel would get up and sit behind the computer. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for just a few minuets, and he would write about everything that came to his mind (or mostly everything).

Once he got better at writing; once he felt more confident, he would stare at a word on the page and weigh it down with his arms, his arms that carried his life- his memories.

He picked the words that could support the weight. He picked the words that could handle the pressure.

Soon though, Castiel began losing the details of his childhood. He couldn’t remember his beloved cats name he had through middle school.

So, one morning, sitting behind his computer screen, behind that blinking cruiser, Castiel took a trip to his grandparents house back in Kansas.

He walked up to the front lawn. He felt the grass in his fingers. He walked inside, and he didn’t look at the neighbors house next door.

Each morning, Castiel explored each room. He looked desperately for some old toys he might have left behind, or some forgotten memories.

Each morning, Castiel took a trip to the place he used to call home.

It had been months, and Castiel had only found a few things that he hadn’t expected; only small surprises had occurred recently. Nothing big enough to satisfy his writer needs.

It had been several months more before Castiel gave in. He wasn’t going to find any bigger surprise than the thing he was sure he was hiding.

One morning, when Castiel woke up, his black hair littered with gray, his eyes once a bright blue and full with life, now dull and dark, he sat behind his computer for the first time in years. He stared at the blinking cruiser before him.

Castiel had stopped writing. He had stopped trying to remember specific details because there was this one huge detail that was always getting in the way. But this morning, for some reason, was different.

Castiel closed his eyes, and he typed.

Cas took a trip to his grandparents house, but once he got there, he knocked on the neighbors door.”

UM WOW. WOW. okay this is was more exciting for me than it is for you because i wrote this but still. i know so many people have written so many things that some ought to be similar, but still. this is cra

passage b is the memory that he makes up from ‘visiting’. its written like its actually happened. here it is (by bradbury)

“The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than anyone since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of. And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the creeks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.

Douglas walked through it thinking it would go on this way forever. The sound of a good friend whistling like an oriole, pegging the softball, as you horsedanced, key-jingled the dusty paths; things were at hand and would remain.

It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again.

John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him.

“John, say that again.”

“You heard me the first time, Doug.”

“Did you say you were—going away?”

John took a yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it.

“Tonight!” said Douglas. “My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don’t pick up and leave!”

“It’s my father,” said John. “He’s got a job in Milwaukee. We weren’t sure until today . . . ” They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent John’s ever getting up and running off.”

splendid. mine is written with two parts as well, but its wayy longer. so ill just add the first few sentences.

“Dean Winchester was just about the worst behaved seventeen year olds to live in Lawrence Kansas, and Lawerence was a big city. He walked big and acted bigger. He did the normal rebellious teenage number, you know, stealing things from the gas station and keying peoples cars. Getting and giving illegal tattoos. Most people saw him for just that, a teenage guy who smokes, skips school, and gives no shits, but when Castiel met him back when he was only a twelve year old shy-guy, he saw him for who he really was.

Dean loved his brother more than he loved himself, and he would do anything for him, and even though Castiel was three-and-a-half months older than Dean, he looked up to him because of it.

Castiel knew who he really was, and even as they began to drift apart and Dean started wearing too much flannel and listening to so much rock and put on this persona that was oh-so familiar to his dad, Castiel still remembered who he was.

Castiel was still his best friend, even though he wrote as many words as Dean listened to in his music, and owned as many scratchy green and purple sweaters as Dean had green and purple flannel.Castiel was actually wearing his greenest sweater when he knocked on Deans door after school one day, and he grinned when he saw him.

“Hey, Cas. Been a while.”

“Well, if you went to school it wouldn’t seem so long.”

“Yeah, well, that school thing really isn’t my thing.”

“Too bad.”Dean nodded and grinned at his sweater again.

“Let’s go somewhere, yeah?”

“Sure.” Castiel shrugged and watched as Dean yelled inside to tell his brother he would ‘be out with Cas for a while’.

Cas followed Dean to his car and he started it up and drove out of the driveway. Things were a lot different from what they were when they were twelve.”

but yeah. a destiel fic so similar to short writing by the guy who wrote fahrenheit 451. im shook.

tell me what you think of this. is this some cool phenomenon that has a name?

#dean and cas trash #ray bradbury #just this side of byzantium #writer similarities #mine #my post #destiel #destiel fanfic #writers

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