#there is a redshirt dying in the corner | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sagamemes · 4 years

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critrole sentences starters --- shadow of the crystal palace. under the cut, you can find a total of 137 lines of dialogue from critical role’s call of cthulhu one-shot. as this contains both in and out of character sentences, there are options for modern and old timey or more eloquent muses alike. themes of the paranormal, heists, secret missions, light and darkness are sprinkled all around this sentence meme, but a good chunk is also usable by just about any muse. oh, and a lot of cat talk. as always, feel free to alter to fit your muse!

❝ good luck, may light and knowledge prevail. ❞

❝ consider your words heeded, sir. ❞

❝ hopefully, you can carry it. ❞

❝ i didn't have time to have it actually translated. if i recall, that's a review of the latest sailor moon musical. ❞

❝ she just wished me goodbye a minute ago in a text, i don't know what it means. ❞

❝ i want you in constant communication with us if you feel anything untoward, anything out of the ordinary at all. ❞

❝ we're not alone. ❞

❝ i imagine no one really wants to stay to hear the end of this speech. ❞

❝ could you try to enjoy this a little less? ❞

❝ are you? /are/ you getting it out of your system? or are you just getting started? ❞

❝ i'm more like a... tuning fork. ❞

❝ there are definite... bonuses to this little adventure. ❞

❝ what am i gonna do to you? ❞

❝ you're a good scientist who follows data. ❞

❝ most things that die in here, they never really leave. ❞

❝ perhaps we should try to get the thing that the rich guy wants? ❞

❝ i think we're doing more than just delivery. ❞

❝ i am a little worried about us getting discovered sneaking about here, though. ❞

❝ man was not meant to live within glass. ❞

❝ i'd say it's been fun but i'd be lying. ❞

❝ i suppose that's just a loss on the champagne then, isn't it? ❞

❝ poor [name]. i picked you especially for this. ❞

❝ we may be able to walks around unencumbered tonight. ❞

❝ my pants are exciting, just in the wrong way. ❞

❝ is there anything you /can/ do? fight? run? be prey? ❞

❝ you like to lead---after you. ❞

❝ it happens, you know. sometimes you shatter... artefacts. ❞

❝ i am so delighted that you are stuck here trying to find a lightswitch. ❞

❝ my kanji is at about second level. ❞

❝ bless your ignorance, child. ❞

❝ i do love a good poker. ❞

❝ have you ever tried to pull the sword, the excalibur sword, from the stone at disneyland? it's got just enough give to irritate a child for hours. i say---definitely not from /experience/. ❞

❝ i am here to make sure we're safe from threats on the other side. ❞

❝ it is for people such as ourselves to know. and then we protect the general public. ❞

❝ jesus, why am i following you people? ❞

❝ you can make the story a little less about him and a little more about you. ❞

❝ he's been very good to me. ❞

❝ i'm here to make sure this car stays on the rails, as it were. and to assist, of course. ❞

❝ i was concerned when i first met you. ❞

❝ is it pictures of all of our possessed bodies? ❞

❝ grant me my wish, make me big. ❞

❝ we're just gonna go to the cat room and we're just gonna hang out there for the whole time. ❞

❝ i believe it's better for the general public to believe your [writings/stories/tales] are fiction. ❞

❝ i'm beginning to think i'm the only one with any sense here. ❞

❝ i may be requesting your services again in the future. ❞

❝ it's just a little trinket from my country. ❞

❝ you need to know when to cut and run! look, i've got debt across europe but it's not worth dying over! ❞

❝ it's like a script you keep reciting from. ❞

❝ they wish to talk, in their own way. ❞

❝ care to place a wager? i'm feeling very confident. ❞

❝ nobody knows the value of a good redshirt anymore. ❞

❝ oh, fuck a duck, where are we going?! ❞

❝ i'm so confident, i will put 10% of my earnings from this job on the line. ❞

❝ i had my suspicions, you fraud. ❞

❝ what did you do to the light?! ❞

❝ mirrors are liars. they only show us what we expect to see. ❞

❝ i have some contingencies if things go wrong and will be waiting for your signal. ❞

❝ i mean, if you're looking at it from the right angle, you're just taking it back. ❞

❝ i fucking love cats, let's go. ❞

❝ did you learn /that/ at the [institute/school/etc]? ❞

❝ nothing to worry about, just go about your business! ❞

❝ [you're/he's] a shower away from pretty again. ❞

❝ they've never hurt me. ❞

❝ i've had a string of bad luck for a while. ❞

❝ we've been speaking to the other side for thousands of years. and our understanding evolves and changes with the passing of the years, but the core remains the same. ❞

❝ there's so much sexual tensioooon... ❞

❝ no one ever goes to a museum and reads the labels, it's really frustrating. ❞

❝ i would ask you to leave and never speak of this again. ❞

❝ oh, you fucking brilliant bastard. ❞

❝ you're not really a cat person, are you, [name]? ❞

❝ i know how that sounds, i know what i saw. ❞

❝ i got it the last time i went to russia. ❞

❝ mommy and daddy don't need to know about the necklace, though. ❞

❝ and i do hope we meet again sometime, [name], before the next time world needs saving. ❞

❝ wouldn't you agree that there are dark corners in this world, easier to find than the light? ❞

❝ well, /i/ don't like to toot my own horn, but if [name] will, i can't forbid him. ❞

❝ we're gonna take a moment to collect ourselves and have a stiff drink of something. ❞

❝ god, you look like a ghost, [name]. ❞

❝ i may be the one non-believer in the group. ❞

❝ it was certainly someone who looked like her. could've been anybody. ❞

❝ i was so looking forward to murdering the rest of you. ❞

❝ i didn't go to medical school, /period/. ph., not m.d. ❞

❝ just don't make too much trouble, alright? ❞

❝ you've been hand-picked for your skills. ❞

❝ i've actually read it as well. i think you sell yourself short. ❞

❝ your pants are more exciting than mine right now. ❞

❝ i feel like i should be haunting a house right now. ❞

❝ he was a problematic mess even by the standards of his time. ❞

❝ oh, you know, just little things you learn at finishing school. ❞

❝ you're not a useful doctor, are you? ❞

❝ honestly, i feel quite ignorant that i didn't put it together myself. ❞

❝ i'm an archivist, not an adventurer. ❞

❝ just repress! that! shit! ❞

❝ oh, no, i'm just so enamoured. we very rarely have the ability to socialise with such esteemed guests. ❞

❝ we might've fucking killed ourselves. ❞

❝ i think i'll have a nightlight for the rest of my life now. ❞

❝ i love a good potato clock though, i almost bought one. ❞

❝ my mum said i'm the most handsome boy is school. ❞

❝ [chuckling] that's a little mythology joke for you! ❞

❝ there's minimal security as long as you don't go into the upper floors. ❞

❝ what have they done to you? have they hurt you? ❞

❝ this is getting a bit rich for my taste. [insititute/workplace] does not pay /quite/ that well. ❞

❝ i believe you are more spot-on than perhaps you even realise. ❞

❝ we will come up with a good excuse for your back. there's shattered glass in there. ❞

❝ it's a bit... dizzying in here. does anyone else feel that? ❞

❝ you do not know what this has cost me. ❞

❝ he stole it. so i punched him in the face. ❞

❝ i'm a book doctor, not a blood doctor. ❞

❝ the idea of walking home in a mist without another living human being there nearly gave me a heart attack. ❞

❝ i'd like to thank you for your discretion. ❞

❝ it's a little less of the killing of the dragons and a little bit more of running for your bloody life. ❞

❝ some of us are just so sharp we could cut ourselves. ❞

❝ one more pitch to run for the fucking door. ❞

❝ he's a charlatan, isn't he? ❞

❝ the trouble with sacrificial magic is it requires sacrifice. ❞

❝ there's something about you they really don't like. ❞

❝ the only way we can protect ourselves is to know what we're protecting ourselves from. ❞

❝ it's a bit of a lark, isn't it? that's why i agreed. ❞

❝ i know about this. this is my design. and some /asshole/ put his name on it. ❞

❝ never owned a cat in my life. ❞

❝ i say this with as much honest and relative humility as i can: do i look like the sort of person that they would tell where the champagne is hiding? ❞

❝ he didn't go into medical school for you to call him /mister/ [name]. ❞

❝ you have an honest face. ❞

❝ it never hurts to be prepared, and i'm a big believer in being prepared. and i'm willing to spend on it. ❞

❝ look you were very worried about this chest; we opened it, it's fine! ❞

❝ we will never see each other again. ❞

❝ we're all just reaching for the same truth and describing it in different ways, i imagine. ❞

❝ the things i've seen you wouldn't want to wish on your worst nightmares. ❞

❝ take a lantern, you piece of shit. ❞

❝ he wrote some very, very nice reviews of the best gay brothels of japan when he would walk around. and a pamphlet on farting. ❞

❝ [suggestively] well, if you're looking for a /heat source/... ❞

❝ few things in this world are not somewhat haunted. this, i believe, is very. ❞

❝ do you know that they invented an electrical device in japan in 1776? ❞

❝ i would really run. ❞

❝ i'm sorry, did you say ' paid off the judges ' ? ❞

❝ it burns like acid. ❞

#rp meme #rp sentence starters #sentence starters #sentence meme #rp sentence meme #* sentences.#* meme.#i did not expect the eldrich horror content sentence meme to somehow possibly the least triggering in here but-

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silwenworld · 3 years

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Until The Last Petal Falls (Part 2 in the War Roses Series)

Summary: He could see the flowers floating before his eyes. A Bouquet. A single flower. Every time in different configuration but one thing was constant - the petals were falling away. Each time there were fewer and fewer petals attached to the stalk. And each time that happened, he could feel himself slipping further and further away.

Or: Captain Gold has a son to find and woman to come back to, and nothing short of dying will keep him from doing just that.

A continuation of the Rumbelle Showdown 2020 fic “The Dried Rose”

Category: M CHAPTER 8 [AO3] [First Chapter]

Gold had tried to live up to the promise he had given Belle. It wasn't an easy task, but he set his mind to fulfil it as best as possible. It was hard to wrap his mind around the fact that their talk on the balcony had happened only recently and not a lifetime ago. Gold had more or less accepted the way he looked now and that his life would never go back to the way it had been before. Of course, there were bad days that he grew to despise - the nightmares were still the worst, and he had found himself in a poorer mood for the following day every single time, almost ready to snap anybody's head off for getting too close to him. But he was getting used to it, even if he wished for it to just go away. The thing that was lightening his days, though, was the fact that Belle looked better these days too, and it made him happy that she could enjoy her free time with not only him but also her friends. And seeing Belle more lively made him want more too.

It was almost back to normal.

Almost.

The streets now were almost deserted. Many people rushed past him without so much as a glance, which suited him just fine. Some might have shot him some weird glances, but he tried to pay them no mind - he would have stared too if some bloke was simply standing there doing nothing. Gold looked at the pawnshop's door for the better part of ten minutes, glaring at the sign above. It took him long enough to get his head around the idea of coming here in the first place, but it seemed that getting into the shop was the bigger problem. He knew it wouldn't hurt to just look around, he didn't necessarily need to buy anything after all, but something was holding him back. An invisible force that had him rotten to the spot, something that had never been present in his life before he had been shot - self-consciousness mixed with ever-present uneasiness.

Mr A. Prentice Pawnbroker & Antics Dealer.

The sign mocked him as he scowled at it. Well, for a start, Gold had nothing to deal with - no money, no precious heirlooms as the last remotely valuable thing he had to give away to be able to come back to the country. His hand unwillingly raised to look for the locket at his neck that was no longer there. He swallowed hard as it dropped to his side, curling into a fist. He didn't even have the photograph of his only child, so what was the point in going in?

Gold glanced up at the sign again.

To hell with it.

He took a step forward.

A soft jingle of the bell started him, and he jumped, gripping his cane tighter while looking around. There was no one in sight; the noise of ticking clocks was the sole witness of his misstep, and so Gold straightened his jacket and walked further inside.

The number of things gathered in the room was overwhelming. From old paintings, some partly covered and some clearly visible, to bigger and smaller trinkets littering almost every free surface. Clocks, chests, music boxes, instruments, gramophones and many more, all dusty and clearly not touched for a very long time. Gold looked around the cluttered front room, and somehow he got an impression that not many people visited the shop.

Off to his right, he spotted a glass cabinet in which lay an open wooden casket. His eyes winded when noticing a display of various rings, one more decorated than the previous one. They were all beautiful but very clearly above anything he would be able to afford. He was so lost in his head that he didn't hear that he was no longer alone.

"A fine eye you have," an old raspy voice made him stiffen, and he whipped his head to the side, coming face to face with a man dressed in a fine, black suit and redshirt. He was older than Gold, probably somewhere in his seventies. His white, groomed beard reached his chest, only emphasizing his age, but he surely knew how to move silently.

"I apologize for barging in - "

"Well, the sign on the door does say 'open', so I wouldn't call it bargaining in," the man cut in with a smile and exchanged his hand. "Alfred Prentice, I'm the owner of this cluttered establishment."

"Roy Gold," the captain accepted the handshake, a little surprised by the strength of the man's grip.

"Oh, I know who you are, but it's nice to finally meet the famous captain Gold," the barely contained flinch from Roy's side didn't go unnoticed. "The town talks," he added, letting go of Gold's hand with a slight twitch of his lips.

"Still?"

"Oh, a lot less than before, let me assure you. Now," Prentice clapped his hands and passed by Gold to sweep the dusty boxes away from the glass cabinet. "I see you have found the rings. I'm terribly sorry for the mess, by the way."

"You don't get many costumers, do you, Mr Prentice?" Gold asked as his eyes took in a mess around the shop.

"Not really." He didn't seem bothered by that. "Those who need my services usually find me anyway. So, Mr Gold which of them you think is the cheapest?" Roy was so taken aback by the fact he wasn't addressed by his former rank that it took him a second to notice that the rings were now fully displayed before him.

It was weird, he thought as he bent over the box - being seen as a civilian - A feeling he wasn't eternally opposed to, but instead of dwelling over it, he took a step forward to have a better view.

There were ten rings in total, each having some distinctive features - be they the stones, shape or engravings. Gold looked closely, fascinated. They were in perfect condition, even if not new. Polished and restored to their former glory, captivating and beautiful. It seemed that Prentice was putting a lot more effort into conservation than in tidiness of his shop, or maybe it was deliberate.

"That one," he gestured to the ring in the middle, and Prentice raised his eyebrow, a slight smirk slowly lifting the corner of his mouth.

"Oh? How so?"

"It's brass. The others are golden."

"Very good," the man was fully smiling now with a glint in his eyes, and Roy had a feeling he was being tested. For what he couldn't tell. "And which is the most valuable then?"

He held the older man's gaze for a second, trying to read him, but finding it hard to do, he looked down on the rings again, his eyes darting back and forth between the two on the far right. They were similar in appearance - both with a golden band, with decorative ornaments resembling petals. Delicate, definitely not conspicuous with blue sapphire as the sole stone drawing attention away from the engravings.

"May I?" Gold asked.

"Of course."

Their weight was almost identical. Almost.

"This one." Gold put both of them back and pointed to the one which had been the farthest to the right. Prentice grinned broadly.

"Impressive. I knew you had a good eye."

"I used to pickpocket rich people as a lad," he said offhandedly, shrugging his shoulders. Not many knew that, but it didn't matter. It wasn't as if he was still doing it. "This one is older than the other one, more used and heavier. That one is a good fake, I must admit."

"My own making, so thank you very much."

Prentice closed the lid, amusement clearly visible on his face with bearly hidden laughter in his voice. He didn't know why, but Gold found it hard to draw away his eyes from the sapphire ring even when it disappeared from his line of sight.

"What pushed you into the military then?" the other man asked, bringing Gold out of his thoughts. He looked up to Prentice, who was now leaning casually on the cabinet with hands in his pockets and smirked at the memory.

"I robbed the wrong person," he answered. "I wanted a golden watch, and it turned out I got a commission from a general instead. He said it was either this or calling the police. I'm still not sure if it was a good deal."

Prentice laughed, but there was nothing mocking in his voice - he seemed generally amused by the dry tone the captain had delivered the confession. Roy didn't know how, but somehow, he got a feeling that he passed the test. He was about to ask what the whole exchange was about when the older man tilted his head to the side as if thinking about something.

"Tell you what, Mr Gold," he rested his hands on the cabinet, leaning towards him. "You can have that ring you just picked."

"I don't - "

"As payment, you'll come work here for me," he added, not letting Gold finish his protests and only smiled at the captain's dumbfounded face.

"You - What?"

Prentice shrugged his shoulders.

"I hardly think that your military pension - nor your salary at Marco's for that matter - could make you afford even that brass one as of now, but I'm old, you see."

"I'm not sure I understand, sir," he answered, frowning.

"You don't have to answer right away, of course.," Prentice continued waving his protests aside with a move of his hand. "I understand you need to think about it, but I really believe you could be just the person I was looking for to help around here."

"You want me to work here? As who?" Was the man mad after all?

"But my assistant, of course," Prentice rounded the cabinet and winked. "You may find me a better employer than your previous ones, and it's a lot quieter in here than in the workshop. Think about it, Mr Gold."

With that, he just left Roy standing in the middle of the front shop, not waiting for his reply and disappearing to the back room through the drape in the doorway.

What the hell had just happened?

Ruby glanced at the envelope lying on the counter for the fifth time in the past five minutes. It came in today's post, and at first, she had been able to ignore it, but the longer it stayed where it now was, the harder ignoring it had become.

It was crumpled and stained at the corners, probably because of the neglectful messenger. Yet it wasn't the state of the envelope that had her concerned the most, but who had sent it and to whom.

She stared at it again, squinting her eyes as if the paper could jump and bite her when uneven steps that she now associated with captain Gold reached her ears. She glanced up, her heart beating faster with nervousness as she spotted him. He looked better lately as he put on more weight and walked with more confidence, but right now, his gaze was fixed more on the ground than anywhere else, and his brow furrowed in thought. He past by her without a glance, too lost in his own head.

"Captain?"

Gold turned around from where he stopped, only now realizing he wasn't alone. Even though his expression cleared, Ruby could see in his eyes that whatever had him occupied still lingered. It was intriguing how good she had become in reading him since he had returned.

"Yes, Miss Lucas?"

"There was a messenger for you, sir. He dropped in a letter."

The frown returned as he took the envelope from her, and a shadow passed over his face, darkening his expression. It looked to her like he debated with himself whenever to open it with her standing next to him or not, then tucking in into his coat pocket after making the decision.

"Thank you."

Gold turned on his heal, swiftly making his way to the stairs, not giving her much room to protest, so he was already on the third step when she had called after him with a question she was sure as hell not have asked a year ago.

"Sir? Um, You OK?"

He seemed confused at first, as if his mind was somewhere else eternally, looking at her with a dumbfounded expression. Ruby didn't know, but it took him a while to fully comprehend the meaning behind her words, but then his lips twitched.

"At the moment, yes." She wondered if she should press the point or not, but he was already at the top of the stairs. "Miss Lucas?" She glanced up, startled as he leant over the balustrade. "Thank you."

Only when he descended the stairs with a lost expression, sporting what looked like his old military jacket, the same one that Belle had carried around with her constantly when thinking him dead, she knew he wasn't as fine as he claimed to be.

Gold had thrown something over his shoulder about needed to think and clear his head and that if Belle asked, she would know where to find him.

Ruby just hoped he wouldn't do anything stupid.

That one time dragging his drunk self had been enough for her.

She would have run, at least before. Now, she walked. Maybe at a quicker than usual pace, but still - walked.

There were times when she was still afraid to have him out of her sight - petrified that all those months had been a dream, but she hardly thought that her mind could come up with how fragile he had seemed to become. But she had noticed the recent changes too - his eyes were no longer empty as they had been for those first couple of months, and he walked with more confidence in his steps, but she still worried. Maybe it was due to the vacant expression that sometimes lingered on his face or the fact that it still looked to her like he didn't get enough sleep - she didn't really know, but she tried to honour her promise to him and not over-worry herself. They managed to come to some sort of an equilibrium that none of them wanted to shatter.

As she got to the edge of town and near the woods, carefully avoiding puddles of freshly melted snow, she couldn't help but marvel at this new version of Roy. She had a feeling that he was somewhere in between now - no longer the person that had left, but also not the one who had returned. He was still looking for himself, and even though Belle sometimes missed the past, she knew it would not return, and she loved this new, slowly emerging version of Roy just as much. The man just had to be reminded of that fact more often than not.

The ground was muddy where the trail had started, and it was easy to spot his footprints going up and then disappearing beyond the bushes. It looked like he had lost his footing more than once but hadn't fallen over - a good sign, considering the uneven terrain. Belle followed the tracks, pushing away the branches in her way. It had been so long since anybody had come here that moving past the overgrown vegetation was a lot harder than before.

She spotted him sitting on the tree trunk that had probably fallen during the recent storm. Roy had his gaze focused on the river as his hands played with the golden handle of the cane. On closer inspection, he didn't look lost, at least not in the same way as he had that day when he had gotten himself drunk.

"It didn't change much," he said, not turning around. "Took me long enough to get here, though."

"Well, the snow had just started to melt. Even I had trouble."

Belle made her way towards him and sat down on the log, her shoulder touching his. She tried not to look at the bloody patch on his uniform jacket. No matter how much she had tried, she couldn't get rid of the blood.

Instead, she looked at the river, smiling as his fingers entwined with hers. It was their spot and the first time they had been here together since the day before his departure so long ago.

He was right - it didn't change much, only they did.

Belle waited patiently, knowing well by now that it would be better to let him start without being pushed. She felt him shift, letting go of her hand, and soon, a crumbled letter was pressed into her hand.

She scanned the paper, frowning a little as she made it to the point that had probably had him agitated.

"They made you a major?" She asked, turning towards him and saw him grimace, displeased.

"Aye. In gratitude for loyal service. It sounds almost like a joke," Roy's tone turned bitter, and she risked a glance in his direction. He was still looking ahead, his jaw set, and a crease on his forehead that he always got when either thinking too hard or displeased. It took him a moment to slowly breathe out and relax his shoulders. "Well, at least they finally confirmed it in writing that I'm out of the army even if I can't get myself out of it."

She frowned.

"What do you mean?"

He tapped the handle of the cane with his index finger in thought.

"Everyone calls me 'Captain', and I've never seen myself as anybody else... But then today that man in the pawnshop kept calling me 'Mister' -"

"What were you doing in the pawnshop?" She couldn't help but cut in with curiosity. Her question made his eyes widen briefly, which only made her more suspicious.

"I was offered a job, actually."

"In Mr Prentice's pawnshop?" He nodded, making her beam. "That's wonderful! Will you take it?"

"It seems...beneficial," he added, fidgeting with his cane - a new quirk of his that she noticed him doing more and more lately when thinking or nervous. "It's just - I've been a soldier almost my whole life... I can't - " He trailed off, running his hand threw his hair in frustration. "I won't be able to forget, will I?"

Roy searched her face for answers she couldn't give with helpful eyes. As much as she wished she could give them to him, she was unable to as it was something he would have to come to terms with on his own - even if it pained her so see him doing so.

"Do you still dream about that german boy?" she asked instead. "The one you told me you had to run through during your first fight?"

He swallowed hard and nodded.

"Do you feel the same when thinking about him as then or different?"

Gold didn't answer for a while, and when fidgeting became not enough to keep him distracted, he stood up and limped closer to the bank, resting the tip of the cane against the protruding root. He concentrated on the sound of the water, calming his mind. He looked down and tried not to focus on the eyes of the blond boy that had immediately appeared before his eyes. He risked a glance towards the apparition, noticing not for the first time that the boy's eyes were the image of his own gaze at the time - petrified and sick.

"I think... I think that whoever told us that the enemy was different from us had to be the biggest liar," he admitted slowly, pocking the root with a frown. "We were the same; I was just quicker with my bayonet."

He had been sick after killing that boy. They both had been deceived.

"Roy..." Belle licked her lips, and he looked over his shoulder at her. "I won't lie to you that you'll forget, but maybe with time, you'll be able to change your thinking as you did with that boy?"

"Hmm."

He turned away at poked at the root again. Belle sighed and hopped off the log, and with a couple of swift strides, she made her way next to him, then sat on the root instead, looking up at Gold. He avoided her gaze at first but then shook his head, sighing.

"I'm sorry," he said, looking at her apologetically as he took her hand in his. "You don't deserve any of this." She tilted her head to the side, raising her right eyebrow. "And I'm repeating myself, yet again," he added chastened.

Belle smiled softly, squeezing his hand. "When I thought you gone... I couldn't cope with it," she admitted, looking down. "Sometimes, panic still grips me at the mare reminder of how it felt because I don't want ever to feel that way again."

"You won't. I'm not going anywhere."

She shook her head. His voice sounded firm and convincing, but she knew he couldn't be entirely sure about that. It was scary how much one could depend on another person.

"What I mean is, that feeling... it won't leave me, and I'll have to accept to live with it."

Gold smiled softly, love shining from his eyes. He bent down, closing the distance between them, chasing away the shadows of worry as he locked his lips with Belle's. Her eyes fluttered shut as she focused eternally on the warmth spreading through her body and the touch of his hand on her cheek. The sounds faded into the background, and even though the kiss was soft and undemanding, it spoke of reassurance and conviction.

Gold loved kissing Belle. From the first time it had happened to now, he knew he would never get enough of it. And now, when he no longer had to hide his affection from the world, he wanted more.

To bestow her with not only kisses but his whole life.

To never leave her side ever again.

He was hers. And she knew it. And that knowledge alone made him one of the happiest people on Earth.

Slowly he broke the kiss, but instead of drawing away, he rested his forehead against hers.

"I would be lost without you - you know that?" He murmured, rubbing his nose against hers, making her smile.

"I think it's mutual."

She could see the desire in his eyes, lurking beneath all the confusing feelings, but they both knew it was neither the time nor place for anything more than stolen kisses. And so he pecked her on the forehead and straightened up, looking around.

She watched him curiously when he limped to one of the trees, and with some difficulty, he put more of his weight on the left leg, balancing on it to remove the jacket, and then hung it on the branch.

"I can't see myself as a pawnbroker," he said, and Belle could help but chuckle.

"If it means having you in a tailored suit, then I can definitely see it."

"I can't afford a tailored suit," he wiggled his finger at her, but instead of hurt, there were playful sparkles in his eyes that she missed so much. She stood up from the root.

"But when you will, I'm sure you'll look mighty fine in it." Belle tone was husky as she approached him. Gold could only watch, his Adam's apple bubbling as he swallowed when her hands rested on his shoulders. She climbed on her toes, pressing against him, making him back against the tree as she kissed him. He could feel the bark scraping his back through his shirt, but he couldn't care less.

He wrapped his arm around her waist, bringing her closer. It was cold, but neither could feel it, not when so close to one another. She parted her lips for him, and he swept his tongue against her palate, making her shudder and scrap her fingernails against his scalp.

As he proceeded to kiss her behind her jaw, in his desire to hold Belle closer, he forgot himself. He let go of the cane, not even realizing that it had fallen to the ground before it was too late. Gold instantly wobbled, his leg folding on itself like a pocket knife. He would have fallen if not for his hand darting sideways and wrapping around the tree branch.

"Damn it," he hissed, trying to regain the balance, both frustrated and embarrassed not only by what had happened but also because he had to support himself on Belle's shoulder as well.

"It's OK," she handed him the cane, her eyes never leaving his. "Hey, look at me," she turned his face towards her and smiled. "It's actually a good thing."

He grimaced. "I don't see anything good in the fact that my leg is fucking useless."

"Well, making out against a tree trunk among the melted snow wasn't such a good idea."

There was laughter in her voice, but not at him - never at him, and he sighed. Belle might have been correct, but it didn't change the fact that at that moment, he would want nothing more than bash his own limb with that golden handle of the cane.

"When I make an honest woman out of you, I promise it won't happen again."

He felt like a lair just by saying those things, but Belle didn't look offended, more amused than anything.

"If I remember correctly," she stated, helping him find his footing and leading him away from the tree, "you made me a very dishonest woman right in this spot."

He chuckled, following her. Some of the clouds chased away.

"Minx."

"You bring the worst in me."

He grinned. Wrapping his arm around Belle's waist and pushing the pain in his ankle aside, he matched her tempo, walking in step with her.

The jacket stayed where he had left it - hanging on the branch.

The soldier was gone.

The last rays of the sun shone through the cracks in the pulled blinds, basking the room in a warm, red light. He flipped the sign to close at least an hour ago but still couldn't bring himself to leave the shop just yet. It wasn't as if anybody was waiting for him at home, and he didn't have anything better to do.

Lighting a gaslamp on the workbench, he sat on the stool and put the watchmaker's loup in his eye. The pocket watch he was currently working on was a magnificent object. The lid decorated with a crane taking flight among the swamp was so detailed that it was easy to spot single feathers in the animal's wings. A family heirloom, as his client had claimed, even if he himself suspected it stolen. Not working, but not for long.

One of his favourite activities was repairing watches—this, and restoring paintings. But his eyes weren't the same anymore, and he found out it took him longer to complete his tasks than before.

He took apart the mechanisms, lying the cogs next to each other in a neatly formed raw, not even an inch out of the line. He had always been thorough and a good judge in the value of things. This watch once restored and repaired, would be twice as valuable as it now was. Prentice knew this, and so did the owner, patiently waiting for the repair. He would then proceed to sell it, and Prentice would get one-third of the deal. Not bad, not terrible.

He just wished his hands wouldn't shake so much.

Prentice chuckled and shook his head. It was good that they hadn't done so in his youth. If they did, his skill would have been wasted, and he wouldn't be where he was now. He sighed as he glanced around the backroom before picking up the smallest screwdriver.

Once upon a time, there were three of them - three Musketeers as Martha used to call them. Wilfred Lucas had ended with the Diner and a motel, Prentice with the pawnshop and Leroy with a drinking problem. They did with their money what they thought was the best - once part of the Intelligence, then ordinary citizens. But now, one was dead, the second alive, and the third on an excellent way to join the first if the second wouldn't beat him to it - one never knew.

Storybrooke might have been a small town, but it surely did attract many individuals. No one knew what the three of them had been doing during the First War, only that they were part of the military. Of course, there were talks, just the same as with that whole mess with Captain Gold.

Prentice chuckled again as he replaced the broken cog with the new one. If Gold only knew about the past, he would be a lot less stiff about the whole affair. Being in love with a local was hardly a big deal, at least to Prentice. To be honest, he found it quite amusing. It almost reminded him how Wilfred and Martha used to be when young.

The bell above the front door jingled, and he smirked. The clever lad had noticed that the door wasn't locked despite the flipped sign.

"In the back!" he shouted, not tearing his gaze away from the watch in his hands. His back was to the doors, but it didn't stop him from knowing who had come to his shop. He always knew who his clients were. "You can come in, Mr Gold. I'm just finishing."

"How did you..?" He didn't need to look at the man to see the surprise on his face that was so evident in his voice.

"Maybe I'm a clairvoyant taught by a magician," he began, putting the watch down an turning around on the stool with a smirk, "Or maybe I saw you in the mirror that hangs above that closet."

Gold gaped at him, then glanced at the mirror and chuckled.

"Fair point," he admitted.

"What can I do for you, Mr Gold?" he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

The ex-soldier looked like he didn't want to stare too much at the various things in the room but couldn't help himself much. Prentice let him stare. He already knew what the other man wanted.

"About that job offer," Gold turned his gaze away from the antique Ming dynasty vase on the top shelf, "I have one condition."

"I'm all ears."

Gold looked like he searched for the right words, his hands clasping and unclasping in the handle of his cane. Wasn't it Wilfred's? Prentice tilted his head to see it more clearly. It definitely was; he had found it for the man himself. Alfred must have admitted that it suited the ex-soldier very much so. Blinking, he went down to the matters at hand.

"It came to my attention," Gold started, straightening up, "that years ago, a ring might have come into your possession, Mr Prentice."

Oh, that was too good. It was really hard not to openly grin.

"I see. I presume that by the seller, you mean Maurice Fench?"

Gold nodded, not surprised that Prentice already knew what he was talking about.

"You're in luck then, Mr Gold," Alfred jumped from the stool and went to the nearest drawer. It was good that he had already prepared himself for this conversation. Honestly, sometimes people were too predictable. He tossed the ring to Gold, impressed that the man had caught it with one hand. "It just happens that the ring I have promised you is one and the same as the one pawned to me by Mr French."

Gold stared at the ring, his mouth slightly agape. Then his eyes narrowed.

"Did you plan it?"

Prentice shrugged his shoulders with an innocent look.

"What can I say? I'm good at reading people. And you were right - it was the most valuable among those other rings. An old family heirloom," he added as he made his way towards Gold. "The times were hard for the Frenches after Colette's death, and I might have given a little bit more for it than required."

"So, how much is it worth now?"

"I would say, two months of your work here," he smiled. "And then you may decide if you want to stay here or not."

Gold offered the ring back, even if reluctantly, then exchanged his hand.

"I accept your terms, Mr Prentise."

"Splendid!" Prentice shook it vigorously then clapped Gold on the shoulder, making the other man jump slightly. "Consider yourself haired, Mr Gold."

Without another word, he rounded the younger man and grabbed his coat from the rack.

"The keys are in the smaller drawer right there. You can play around with the watch if you like, oh and do close up when you finish, would you? Have a nice day, Gold!"

Roy didn't manage to get a word in, and before he knew it, he was left alone in the shop. He could swear he could hear Prentice's laugh from the outside down the street.

He looked around, still not sure what exactly had happened. Slowly he approached the table with a dismantled pocketwatch and tilted his head.

Well, why not?

He sat down on the stool and began to study the cogs.

#rumbelle #rumbelle fanfiction #once upon a time #Rumplestiltskin #Belle #golden beauty #AU #my fic #fic: until the last petal falls

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justtheendoftheday · 5 years

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AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

“Mr. Weyland, what I told you in there wasn’t bullshit. If you rush this, people will get hurt. Maybe die.”

A strange energy reading leads a team of explorers to an ancient extraterrestrial pyramid located underneath a remote island in Antarctica. But things take a turn for the worse when they learn that the structure is actually the battleground for a race of extraterrestrial hunters and their deadly alien prey.

Fright: 1.5 / 5 Crossover Events

To the movie’s credit, when it tries to generate horror it actually does an alright job. That being said, it almost never tries. The majority of the time it sacrifices scares to go for a more Action-flick kinda vibe.

Gore: 3 / 5 Incidental Alien Autopsies

Okay, so there’s certainly some gore. But it’s not the usual sort.

I mean, sure, there’s some impaling, bits are chopped off, chests are burst, organs are seen, etc. But the gory stuff is almost always one crazy alien doing something gory to another crazy alien. Outside of getting stabbed, there’s an oddly minimal amount of anything being shown done to a human. Some messed up stuff is implied to have happened to them, yes, but you almost never see it.

Jump Scares: Light

There’s certainly some potential startles, but it’s more of an action flick than a horror one, so it never bothers attempting any serious jumps.

Review:

While it certainly delivers a lot of Alien and Predator action, it never fully grasps onto any of the deeper elements from the respective franchises. If all you want is some Who-would-win-in-a-fight-between style action, it certainly delivers. However, it doesn’t really offer anything much beyond that.

Thoughts:

There is something weirdly human about wondering who would win in various bizarre fantasy fights scenarios.

And what deeper expression of that is there then the weirdly long-running existence of Alien vs. Predators stories.

But the big question on everyone’s minds is whose decision was it to name it “AVP”?? I’m dying to know who was in charge of that decision.

Am I wrong here? I think we can all agree that “Alien vs. Predator” is a much better title. There’s just something about a “AVP” that that screams old people trying really hard to sound “cool.”

Anyhoo, before we get into it I should let you know a couple things:

I have only seen the theatrical PG-13 version of this one. I’ve heard word that there’s an extended unrated version, but I think it’s only available on fancy home media versions and thus I’ve never seen it.

Despite the fact that the filmmakers wanted AVP to be canonical for both franchises, both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant chose to completely disregard it. And I honestly can’t blame them, because this movie is so clearly meant to just be ridiculous action fun. So please don’t waste your time trying to figure out how this thing fits into the timeline.

Okay? So with that out of the way, here’s why AVP bugs me: it pays homage to all sorts of memorable visual elements of its respective franchises, but doesn’t even attempt to pay homage to any of their themes. So yeah, there’s predator heat vision and sneaking around all invisible. And sure, there’s chest bursting, facehugging, wee-little-mouth frenching, and all that good stuff.

But…that’s about it. If you look past those flashy actiony bits the film is rather thematically hollow.

The original franchises had very different styles, but like all horror movies they were both stories of survival. A big part of what makes stories of survival so intriguing is the excitement of seeing characters being pushed to their limits only to overcome them. We want to watch with rapt excitement as people are put against impossible odds only to keep going through sheer feats of wit, skill, and sheer determination.

And yet AVP basically puts all the characters into a death trap from which escape is more or less impossible. Characters are put up against impossible odds and then...well, then they just die.

It isn’t a story of survival so much as it is a string of people/aliens dying in X-treme ways. Everyone kind of feels like a redshirt more than a flesh-out character, because their choices never really have any impact and they’re really only there as meat for the grinder.

Now to be fair here, lots of movies sacrifice story and fulfilling character arcs for the sake of hardcore action. But this one takes it to such an extreme that they don’t even bother letting you know what most of the characters’ names are. And yet a while into the movie someone will be all like “WHATSYOURFACE! NOOOOO!” and I’m sitting over here thinking “wait, that dude had a name?”

When it comes to a movie like this the real question is who is this movie for? The way I see it there are three types of people that would be intrigued by AVP:

People who want to see a movie that delves deeper into the lore of these respective franchises.

People who love bizarre B-horror movies.

People who just want to see xenomorphs have crazy fights with Predators.

If you’re in the first category and are looking for a movie that provides an interesting addition to your beloved Alien and Predator franchises? Well, you should probably lower your expectations.

But what if you already know the premise is inherently silly-good-fun and just want a crazy action fest, chalk full of predators (aka Yaujita/Hish-qu-Ten) and Aliens (aka xenomorphs) taking out humans and each other with signature style?

Well this movie certainly has lots of that!

Is it a quality example of that though? Well...that’s up for debate.

—————————————

content warnings: ummm...shockingly I don’t think there are any serious ones here.

after-credits scene?: None.

—————————————

Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson

Written by: Paul W.S. Anderson

Country of Origin: USA...

[also the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Germany, and Canada? I’m really not sure of what the story behind that is.]

Language: English

Setting: Bouvetøya Island, Antarctica

Sequel: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

If you liked this you might also like: Aliens (1986), Predator (1987), Tomb Raider (2018), Freddy vs. Jason (2003), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), Sadako vs. Kayako (2016)

—————————————

Context Corner:

Although it may seem odd, the connection between the Alien and Predator franchises actually goes back decades.

So the basic timeline goes like this:

Alien was the first one to hit the scene way back in 1979.

Then 7 years later (1986) its sequel Aliens was released.

A year after that (aka 1987) we got Predator.

The two franchises had nothing to do with one another, but they were both distributed by 20th Century Fox. Then later both franchises were licensed to the comic book publisher Dark Horse Comics.

The first time the world saw the two extraterrestrials cross paths was in a Randy Stradley and Chris Warner’s “Alien vs. Predator” chapter in Dark Horse Presents issue #36 in 1990.

Shortly thereafter the connection resurfaces as a pretty great easter egg in the 1990 film Predator 2, wherein you can see a xenomorph skull on the trophy wall in the Predator’s ship.

And ever since then it’s been a thing. Way before this movie ever came into being there were tons of Alien/s vs. Predator books, comics, video games (including a pinball video game), and even board games.

If you think Alien vs. Predator is still a slightly whacky concept, I feel compelled to mention that the crossover madness could have gone so much deeper! There are MULTIPLE examples of comics wherein the xenomorphs and predators encounter Batman...and Superman...and sometimes BOTH!

[I’m 100% serious. Look it up.]

—————————————

“I wish you’d reconsider coming with us, Lex. Come on, don’t make me pull out pictures of my kids again.”

“Your kids aren’t that cute.”

“What if we got pictures of other peoples’ kids?”

“Want my advice?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Stay on the boat.”

#AVP #Alien vs Predator #Paul W.S. Anderson #2004 #2000s

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renlyisright · 5 years

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Season 7 Episode 6 - Winter Wonderland

I like winter very much, but it’s nice that I can lock it out of the house for as long as I want to, and then I can go outside to like it when I want to do that.

I like the snow in its different forms, the clearness of air, how clean everything looks, the ways the sun sets, the brightness of days and the mysterious darkness of nights, the silence of forests… Having walking murderous dead there would spoil everything.

So when our fellowship walks on the lands beyond the Wall, they have some beautiful landscapes to see. It’s a nice atmosphere to talk to each other, to catch up and learn to know the new people. Jon and Tormund talk about kneeling. The Free Folk never kneel, and Mance as their leader certainly didn’t. And so they didn’t ally themselves with Stannis and were driven back from the Wall to be massacred by the dead, which was exactly what Mance fought against. In hindsight, as much as I’d like to blame Stannis and his pride, it was Mance’s pride that doomed them in the end. When faced with the exact same choice later, when Jon wanted their help in defeating the Boltons, Tormund joined him.

Jon offers the Mormont sword to Jorah. That Valyrian sword could be a matter of life and death up here, so Jon of course tries to give it to someone else. Jorah doesn’t take it. He is not here to be a Mormont.

Tormund likes to stack his odds against him, so he tells the Hound about the beauty “waiting for him” in Winterfell. Look, you are on a suicide mission, do you really want to talk about someone you want to see again? Tormund doesn’t care, he has lived this long by being tough to kill.

So have all of them. There’s Jon, who has ranged beyond the Wall five times now (I’m counting walking to Mance’s tent too), and been in mortal danger every time. He has been in a lot of fights, but he has always come back. Then there’s Beric Dondarrion, the knight who dueled in tournaments and has survived many battles, alive or dead, Thoros who fights with a drunk’s spirit, Jorah, survivor of Meereen’s arena, Gendry who hasn’t had anything to do but train and the Hound who is the Hound. They also have a couple of redshirts, because they are always useful. The greatest warriors of Westeros, all gathered here, at this time, for a purpose.

Beric doesn’t know what that purpose is, but the Lord of Light has guided them here. Or has he? He sent the Brotherhood vision “Hey, be near Eastwatch soon, big things will happen there”, but did he know what exactly that big thing will be? Jon got the idea very suddenly. And if he saw that the two people he has kept alive will go beyond the Wall, did he also see the end result of that trip? What is the Lord of Light’s endgame? I have thought that he is a “hard god making hard decisions”, and wants the humanity to survive, but doesn’t really care more than that (and that the survivors will worship him). He threw Stannis out after calling him the Chosen One for years. That still seems to be the likeliest explanation. The other is that he wants the humanity to end.

Now we get to the part of the plan called “How exactly do you plan to get just one dead with you, since they march in an army and the Walkers may well sense what all of them are doing?” Oh hey, there is one! It’s a bear. A dead bear. Which makes me think of how completely the ecosystem here has been wrecked. If the dead kill every animal they meet, have all the mammoths, sabertooth tigers, direwolves and so on gone extinct? These lands are wide, so maybe not necessarily, but big mammals must be in the brink of extinction. After all, humans were entirely capable of wiping out mammoths in our world without any help from the dead.

The dead bear is a terrifying opponent, and being dead doesn’t need any more sustainment than the rest of the army, so if I was in charge of this army I would take animals in it too. But now that I think about it, is there a reason the army is composed of only dead people and some horses? Is it that you can’t make wild animals to work formally for you, even when dead? Horses can be ridden because they were ridden when alive, and humans can do all sorts of things so they are easy to command? But while you can raise bears, the best you can do with them is set them free to kill everything they see.

After the bear, the fellowship sees a group of human dead, led by one of the Walkers. Killing the Walker makes the dead fall down, except one. They decide later that this must mean that killing the Walkers breaks the spells to the ones they raised. That simplifies things. How many Walkers are there? It can be any number between ten and a hundred. But the Night King has raised the most, killing others may remove pieces of the army but killing the king…

Oh, killing the main villain will remove the problem? That’s convenient. But it won’t solve the socioeconomics of Westeros so there’s still work to be done for Daenerys even if the apocalypse is averted.

Tyrion is worried about what can happen if and when Daenerys dies. Hopefully not before she has secured her rule, but even at that point the succession can get messy because she can’t have her own children. Daenerys doesn’t want to discuss that, the throne is top priority.

But… in case anything happens to her, Tyrion will be in big trouble. Let’s hope that the meeting next week will go well… haha, no way it will.

The fellowship ties up the wight, but either its shrieks alert the rest of the army or the Walker who raised it knew immediately what happened. The humans know so little about the rules. As far as plans go, this one wasn’t that well planned. The entire army of the dead follows them to the frozen lake and surrounds them.

Then it’s a waiting game. Thoros is the first one to lose, dying in his sleep during the night. He served the Lord of Light, he brought Beric and the Hound here, and now he’s dead? And doesn’t get any resurrections? Well how nice of the Lord.

The Night King arrives to see what they have here. Their entire army. Surrounding fewer than a ten humans. The million dragon question: Does the Night King know what he has here? It’s the King in the North. Does he know, does he care? He plays with his captives instead of sending his forces some way through the lake (later in the episode we see that fresh water is not deadly to them, so spending a few hundred wights maximum would have allowed them to overpower these humans) or throwing them with projectiles (even if the dead can’t throw anything far or use bows, the Night King himself has a strong throwing arm as we see later). They wait for an easier attack.

Meanwhile, at Winterfell it doesn’t take much to make Arya and Sansa suspicious of each other. They haven’t seen each other for years, and in each other’s eyes the other one has… maybe not changed but intensified. Arya comes back as a tough fighter who can go toe-to-toe with Brienne, and Sansa is a political player who has Littlefinger on her side.

Sansa says that Jon would have lost the battle without her, the Knights of the Vale are here because of her. Yes, that’s true, but Littlefinger talked them to it. Even if Arya can believe that Sansa is not stealing Jon’s throne, everybody knows that Littlefinger is always up for a promotion.

Sansa receives an invitation to the big meeting. Everyone seems to be invited. But Sansa doesn’t go, it smells like a trap all over and Jon has already left the North for months to the unrest of his bannermen. Her going too would make the bannermen wonder if the Starks actually want to die. So she sends Brienne.

Later she goes to check Arya’s room, and finds faces there. I don’t think that she knows what Walder Frey looked like, but someone’s face skin is never a nice find when going through someone’s bag. Arya enters to talk with her, extremely threateningly of course. Her point is that she is very dangerous, but at least for now she is loyal to Sansa, if Sansa is loyal to Jon. Yes, this certainly puts Sansa on the ease. And could someone please talk about that knife everyone swings around?

Daenerys gets the raven and rides out immediately, against Tyrion’s counsel. Nothing new in that last part. He points out that if she dies, everything is lost. That’s true. No her, no dragons, no armies who have sworn loyalty to her and her alone. Cersei will move her attention North, try everything to kill the rest of the Starks and then they all die when the dead come.

So in one corner we have Daenerys, and the other corner we have the Night King. The Queen and the King, and both are insta-win-buttons. Not very democratic.

The ice gets thick enough and the dead attack again. One of the attackers moves to free the captured dead. Why? It’s not like they are going to miss one wight. Have the Walkers figured out what they plan to do? Do they think that there are researchers of spells South of the Wall who may figure out something if they get a walking dead? How much do they know of the contemporary South?

But if they don’t like that humans captured a wight, then bringing it to the South is a good thing, right? Right?

That chinless skeleton got a lot of screentime for an undead mook. When it came back from under the lake I thought that it was going to get to kill someone or do something else memorable, but nope.

All hope seems lost, they are seconds from death, when… the death comes from the sky. Dragonfire and ruin. Three dragons in action start wrecking up the army of the dead. How do you like the song of fire?

I didn’t expect this so soon. There’s still eight episodes to go. Those three dragons could destroy the whole army in a matter of minutes. Daenerys could save the world without anyone believing she did that.

The Night King grabs a spear. Oh dear. Oooh dear. He throws it, and one-shots… Viserion? Their colors are hard to see. Anyway, a dragon is down. Okay, the dead are a threat again. Jon is left behind, Daenerys leaves before everything is lost.

This was not a good outcome. A dragon’s body amidst the army of the dead, I knew what would happen in the aftermath. Viserion’s body is raised as a flying dead. This is not good, not good at all. Can it spit fire? Can it spit ice? Anyway, now they have a flying giant creature. Do the Wall’s spells block flying dead? Can they now just melt it down? Aargh, I knew (not knew-knew but strongly predicted) that this would end badly, and I knew that the dead will get through during this season, but still.

Was losing Viserion worth it? Do they get Cersei and everybody else to listen soon enough so they can prepare for an invasion? Or will there be a big trap in King’s Landing and everything down there goes to further ruin?

Jon gets up, and faces an entire army alone. Again. But here’s the cavalry! Benjen is back! He is actually going to meet Jon again! “Here, take my horse, thanks, bye, oh, I’m dead”. Wow. In a series of quick reunions, he really wanted to get the quickest one. And so Benjen Stark is dead. He survived all these years, alone in the lands beyond the Wall, so that he could join the long line of people who have died so that Jon could live for a minute more.

He better be worth it.

He survives, once more, by a horse bringing him back. This time it’s Benjen’s horse, nice that it gets to finally return.

Jon is put on the ship and they are off. Daenerys is there to see him when he comes to. Okay, I am poor with shipping, but I still felt their conversation. And they seem like they could be a nice couple. They respect each other and know that they both want good for the world. Grading on a curve, that’s really good.

Maybe Jon’s luck will last through all the dumb things he still has time to try.

#game of thrones #renly is right #army of the dead

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auburnfamilynews · 6 years

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Can the Vols play defense this year?

War Eagle, everybody! It’s time now for the another Auburn game preview! On October 13th, Auburn will host the Tennessee Volunteers. It has been a decade since Auburn last hosted Tennessee in an offensively challenged 14–12 scrum in the dying days of the Tommy Tuberville era. Fortune hasn’t been kind to the Vols in days since. Tennessee has run through a number of head coaches and hasn’t won a title of any sort since 2007.

Tennessee is rebuilding once again this year under former Alabama defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt. Pruitt was frank about his new team’s performance this spring, grading the effort a “D.” He also lamented that some guys just “flat out quit.” The real challenge for Tennessee, as I see it, is rebuilding some toughness at the line of scrimmage. Last year’s Vol lines were awful on both sides of the ball. It led to a 4–8 finish on the year, 0–8 in the SEC.

This year, Tennessee opens in Charlotte with West Virginia, which should be a challenge. Tennessee then gets a couple of home tune-up games against East Tennessee State, and UTEP. The schedule gets brutal after that. The Vols host Florida, then travel to Georgia and Auburn. Auburn will have played Washington in Atlanta and hosted Alabama State, LSU, Arkansas and Southern Miss before traveling to Mississippi State.

On the offensive side of the ball, head coach Pruitt brings in veteran offensive guru Tyson Helton, who was the passing game coordinator at Southern Cal. last season. He will bring in a more balanced offensive style at Tennessee, which previously rarely ran any plays other than from the shotgun. We’ll wait and see on the results. Teams often transition from conventional to spread offenses with success. I really haven’t seen ANY team go from the spread to a pro-style attack and have much success in the first year.

The main weapon Tennessee returns on offense is junior receiver Marquez Calloway, who had five touchdown catches in 2017. Sophomore quarterback Jarrett Guarantano returns after a shaky freshman campaign, but he’ll face a challenge from transfer quarterback Kelley Chryst, who transferred from Stanford where he started most of the last couple of seasons. The main issue I see is that Chryst managed only a 54 percent completion rate in Stanford’s offense. Tennessee was poor up front last year on the O-line, and they lose their best rusher to graduation. They were still mixing and matching up front this spring.

Frankly, Coach Pruitt inherits a mess of a defense. It was just plain bad up front last year, giving up 5.4 yards per carry on the ground. The Vols only picked off 5 passes all year and got seriously pushed around by the likes of Kentucky and Vanderbilt. The pieces are in place to bolster line production this season, but there’s not enough there to make a run at a division title.

On special teams, Tennessee will have to find a punter, but part-time starting kicker Brent Cimaglia returns. Tennessee was pretty average on returns and coverage. Cimaglia hit 4 touchbacks on 10 kickoffs last season.

Unit matchups after the jump!

Auburn defensive line vs. Tennessee offensive line: Auburn brings a big, athletic defensive line back this season. Likely starters at tackle are senior Dontavius Russell and junior Derrick Brown. Junior strong-side end Marlon Davidson was a beast on A-Day. The buck side is a rotation between sophomores TD Moultry and Big Kat Bryant. Auburn can play monster sophomore Nick Coe at any position on the line with great results. Auburn has serious depth all across the line as well. Tennessee’s offensive line projects to be very young. Tackles should be sophomores Trey Smith and Devante Brooks. Sophomore guards will be Joey Cave and Ryan Johnson. Center is a huge concern as Tennessee was down to walk-ons in the spring game. Despite all of that, this unit just MASHED the D-line in UT’s spring game. Advantage: Auburn.

Auburn linebackers vs. Tennessee backs: The Tigers have a good cross-trained quartet of upper echelon SEC-caliber linebackers. Senior Deshaun Davis leads the bunch, seniors Darrell Williams and Montravious Atkinson are able to play all three positions, and we might see any combination of these players out on the field at a given time. Auburn has lots of depth behind the starters as well. Auburn’s linebackers play with leverage and are sure tacklers. Sophomore Ty Chandler looks to be Tennessee’s primary runner next season after picking up 326 rushing yards last season. The H-back/fullback picture is a mess. Advantage: Auburn.

Auburn corners vs. Tennessee receivers: Auburn has a fairly good combination of starting corners in juniors Javaris Davis and Jamel Dean. Junior Jeremiah Dinson could move over from safety, if needed. Sophomore converted wide receiver Noah Igbinoghene turned heads this spring and could be a co-starter on either side. John Broussard Jr. provides quality depth. Junior Marquez Calloway is the main threat on the Vol roster, and we know Auburn will double him. Sophomore Josh Palmer figures to start on the other side, having caught 9 balls last season. The rest of the crew caught exactly one ball from the bench last season. Advantage: Auburn.

Auburn safeties vs. Tennessee secondary receivers and quarterback: Auburn’s starting unit features Juniors Jeremiah Dinson and Daniel Thomas at safety. Thomas was an experienced backup last season, and Dinson played nickel back. Dinson can play every position in the secondary well but has missed considerable time with injuries over the past 3 seasons. Sophomore Jordyn Peters is listed as Auburn’s top nickel back as of now. Auburn is very young behind the starters. We don’t know who will win the starting Tennessee quarterback job. Sophomore Jarrett Guanantano looked decent this spring but will be pushed by transfer Stanford quarterback Kelley Chryst. Junior Brandon Johnson was a good receiver out of the slot last year and figures to be again this year. Junior tight end Eli Wolf caught 24 balls last season. Advantage: Even.

Punting: For now, sophomore Aiden Marshall is the starter, backed up by Ian Shannon. Both were inconsistent last year and didn’t do much to impress in Auburn’s A-Day game in bad weather. Australian import Arryn Siposs is expected to come in and win the starting punting job this fall. Last season, Shannon averaged 39.8 yards per punt, and Marshall averaged 39.4. Tennessee is auditioning punters, as well. Tennessee was decent in coverage, allowing 30 returns for a 7.3 yards per return average. Auburn was not good last season, giving up 11.4 yards per return. Auburn is still looking for a replacement return man. Marquez Calloway managed 8.4 yards per punt return last season for Tennessee on 13 returns. Advantage: Even.

Kickoffs: Auburn redshirt freshman Anders Carlson has no experience but given his displayed leg strength on A-Day, I think kicking a lot of touchbacks should be a given next season. Also, there is a new fair-catch rule in effect this season, that puts the ball at the 25. I think we will see a lot of fair catches on anything fielded inside the 5 this season. We are not sure who’ll be kicking off for the Vols this season. Auburn will return kickoffs with sophomore Noah Igbinoghene, who averaged 23.8 yards per return last season despite only fair-to-poor blocking. Sophomore Ty Chandler averaged 24.4 yards per return last season for Tennessee, including one taken to the house. Auburn was awful on kick coverage giving up 27.2 yards per return last season. Fortunately, Carlson can produce a lot of touchbacks. Tennessee gave up 23.0 yards per return, a less than average number. Advantage: Auburn.

Place kicking: Anders Carlson of Auburn has no experience, but he did hit 4 of 4 in bad weather in Auburn’s spring game. I watched him in warmups, too. His only miss in practice was from 53 yards, hitting the upright. Tennessee had a revolving door of kickers last season. Sophomore Brent Cimaglia returns to take over the job, having hit 8 of 13 field goals last season. Advantage: Even.

Auburn offensive line vs. Tennessee defensive line: It’s still not settled who’ll start for Auburn on the line, although the starters looked decent on A-Day. Auburn is set at the guard spots with veteran juniors Mike Horton and Marquel Harrell. Left tackle seems solid with junior Prince Tega Wanagho, who reputedly took the next step forward this spring after struggling last season in limited starts. Right tackle was a battle this spring between freshmen Austin Troxell and Calvin Ashley. Both had good moments, but Auburn turned around and signed graduate transfer Jack Driscoll from UMass. Driscoll played last season against SEC foes Tennessee and Mississippi State and allowed just 1 quarterback pressure. Center is another big question mark for Auburn. Junior Kaleb Kim and redshirt freshman NickBrahms were battling for the starting job, but both went out with injuries and may or may not be back for the season opener. Converted H-back/tight end/walk-on Tucker Brown started on A-Day and actually did a good job. By midseason, I’m confident that line coach J. B. Grimes will have a strong offensive line out there. Grimes did a really solid job with the Auburn line in his previous stint from 2013–2015. Grimes has been greatly missed the past couple of seasons! It’s a mash unit up front for Tennessee. Head Coach Jeremy Pruitt likes to run a 3-man front, but it may not be possible with the players Tennessee currently has on the line. I’d expect some combination of seniors Shy Tuttle, Kyle Phillips, Jonathan Kongbo, Alexis Taylor and junior Darrell Taylor to start. The bad news for the Vols are that these guys got seriously whipped by a makeshift starting offensive line in the Vol spring game. Advantage: Auburn.

Auburn backs vs. Tennessee linebackers: Auburn features senior H-back Chandler Cox, a 4-year starter, blowing open holes. The real question is who will carry the ball. Junior Kam Martin is blazing fast but has had durability issues in the past. Junior Malik Miller has size, power, and a few carries here and there but hasn’t been used much. Sophomore Devan Barrett has been moved to receiver. Auburn played freshmen JaTarvious Whitlow and Asa Martin a lot on A-Day. Both were suspect in pass blocking, and running sideways or backwards. Whitlow dropped several passes. The best A-Day runner for the second year in a row was junior walk-on C. J. Tolbert, who had 137 yards. Tolbert is on the small side and didn’t have an actual carry in 2017. We do know, after watching the Gus Malzahn offense for 8 years at Auburn, there will be a bell-cow running back identified, tearing SEC defenses up, as long as the offense is balanced. Again, well… it’s a big question in the linebacker corps. Can Tennessee find 4 SEC-worthy guys to put on the field? Current candidates include junior Daniel Bituli, who’s really good, and junior Quart’e Sapp, who’s not bad, either. Who the other pair will be is currently an open question. Advantage: Auburn.

Auburn receivers vs. Tennessee corners: At the end of spring, it looked like Auburn’s two starting outside guys were juniors Nate Craig-Myers and Darius Slayton. Both guys can fly, have good height, and great hands. Redshirt freshman Marquis McClain had the catch of the day on A-Day and is someone to watch out for on the outside as well. Likely starters for the Vols are junior Marquill Osborne and sophomore Shawn Shamburger. Advantage: Auburn.

Auburn secondary receivers and quarterback vs. Tennessee safeties: This is a strength-against-strength matchup with lots of experience on both sides. Auburn senior Ryan Davis shattered the team single-season receptions mark last year with 84 catches. Teams that gave Davis a cushion last season got eaten up 5 to 10 yards per quick pass. Teams that tried to press were often burned for touchdowns. Auburn depth at the slot took blows with both Will Hastings and Eli Stove having knee injuries and surgeries last spring. Both did a ton of damage last year. Auburn has moved running back Devan Barrett to the slot for depth. Barrett has good hands and is a good runner, but he’s not the breakaway threat the guys above him are. Auburn’s tight end is senior Jalen Harris. Teams can key on him as a blocker only. I think Auburn has targeted Harris maybe 3 times in his 3 years as a starter. Auburn quarterback Jarrett Stidham had a slow start and a propensity to take hits last season but heated up by about game 4 and lit up some SEC secondaries. He’s mobile in the pocket and can make every throw. UT has veterans at safety, and returns a lot of tackles. Junior Nigel Warrior and senior Micah Abernathy were the leading tacklers on the Volunteer squad last season. They will get help from junior nickel back Baylen Buchannan. Advantage: Auburn.

I’m not expecting this game to be much trouble for Auburn. Tennessee will be struggling, and Auburn will be hitting typical mid-season form with a very talented team. Having UT at home will only be a bigger help. Auburn has not lost at home against Tennessee since 1998, and even that struggling Auburn team took the eventual national champions to the wire in a 17–9 loss.

Prediction: Auburn cruises over an outmanned UT team, 47–7.

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penaltybox14 · 3 years

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Finally got some spare brain cells and wrote for myself, not school or patient care reports. Kicking around an idea I had with @dying-redshirt-noises, an Adam-12 AU where Pete is actually a runaway juvenile delinquent who ended up changing his name, fuzzying up his past and becoming an LAPD officer.

...

Pete has this dream sometimes. He is twelve years old, before he got taller, when his voice was just beginning to break and hovered in that soft, sweet spot like water sweeping over the suggestion of a stone. The dream is far from Los Angeles, and he sits on a rock by a creek that lingers on its curves like a freight train far in the distance.

He is in jeans and a t-shirt and chuck taylors but they aren't chuck taylors, they've got no marks on them but a size, and the t-shirt has a laundry print he tried to cover with the whitewash off a fence a mile ago. He doesn't belong here, in the dream, but he's got nowhere else to go. The wind is slow and high, the sun beats down, and the grasshoppers fiddle in the weeds.

The dream is far from Los Angeles; it is far from anywhere at all.

The man's voice and the chuckle of a belt heavy with keys comes from the brush, and it throbs in his ears and in his bones: It's time you got back, isn't it?

The creek is too wide and too swift. When he turns back at the voice, squinting the figure to shadow, the voice says: Let's go, son. Let's not be any trouble.

There is nowhere left to run.

When he wakes up, in his bachelor pad on the second floor, his skin is damp and electric. The central air shunts the same dry, stale breeze around, here and there a whiff of cigarettes or casserole gone before you can think to identify it. So he opens the window and leans, and watches the still, unblinking surface of the complex's pool. Three years ago a beautiful woman - a girl, really, whose scars were still white and not yet stretched and faded and forgotten - drowned in the pool and no one knew who she was and no one knows now. Some recalled the tender face and tight, pursed mouth, or the long dark hair worn straight with a beaded headband, or maybe the red checked shirt with the blousing sleeves or the dark dungarees. She was barefoot, which seemed right if you thought about it.

Pete doesn't think there's anybody but him and the landlord left who remembers the whole business. This is not a place for staying - people live here a while, get on their feet, and move on to split-levels and brand-new subdivisions clustered around glittering, gritting freeway interchanges. Places where people eat and sleep and dream and wake up and go to work and round the clock and come home and eat and sleep and dream and wake up and do it all again. They are safe there in their catalog homes, and no beautiful barefoot girls drown, nameless and white-eyed, in paste-jewel swimming pools.

Jim lives in a place like that. Him and Jean, the doe-eyed pair of them, and their baby, who will be a toddler soon, with his own yard to play in, grass as neatly hemmed as any major league outfield. Jim will teach him to play catch; he won't be very good at teaching, from the start, because he's still a boy, still a varsity star whose body did everything he every imagined it to do, without coming up short, without halting or asking. But that's alright. Jim will teach him to play catch and he won't be frustrated and he won't be angry, he'll just say, Jimmy, eye on the ball, okay?

Jim will invite him over and he'll watch from the shade and rib Jim, just a little, but not Jimmy, except just a little when he's bigger and he can laugh about it. He's hoping the kid won't turn out to be a pitcher, he's really hoping, because then he might have to step in and teach the kid how to sling a curveball that'll unbutton a jersey, or fire a fastball that'll make the Army sit up and take notice. Jim will ask him where he learned it, and he'll have to shrug and think up something, and he'll make up a story about accidentally breaking Mrs Patterson's kitchen window with a bad pop-up from the playground sandlot, which was too small for big boys to play on anyhow, and that'll make Jim laugh with all his teeth and ruffle Jimmy's hair. That'll be a good story. It won't be the one where he was popping rocks off his Louiseville Slugger; it sure won't be the one where he pegged a Coca-Cola bottle at a passing freight train. He didn't know the train was going so fast; he didn't know how the bottle, heavy and sweating in his hand and the high summer, was going to spin, come off the box car at the angle it did.

He was sorry. He was. But that's not the story he's going to tell Jim, and sure not the one he's going to tell little Jimmy.

The girls never run like the boys do.

Pete's never figured that one out - the girls, at least the ones who know trouble, they go to ground when they're cornered, their eyes down, or, more rarely, hot with challenge. The girls in patched jeans and old army coats, who smoke cigarettes like men, between stained fingertips, eyes like lionesses. Girls who know the power of their vices, they bide their time.

But the boys run: they all do, bolting long-limbed through the clawing dark, breathing hard in time with the street-lamps, their hearts pounding. They get away, some of them, if not most of them - hard to catch the lot when they spring out like sparks from their squat-houses, their teenage tent-city tenements. They book it, on sneakers worn to the soles of their feet, into the urban forest. They will catch a bus in the morning downtown, to Hollywood and Vine, somewhere people with money pass by. They will hitchhike to the hillsides, or the beach, somewhere to bide their day in the shade.

Sometimes they never make it past the night. Early one morning, just when they were breathing easy, just when the sun was scrambling over the mountains and shaking the valley awake, they got the call for a DB. A man in a suit and tie and glasses perched on the hood of his car shaking his head, while his daughter sat in the back seat with the door open. She had a book open on her lap and kept pushing up her glasses, which slid down her nose in the dusty morning. The man shook his head and said: Lydia, she gets car sick, I pulled over so she could be sick in the brush (and the verge stank like vomit; and something else, richer), and then I saw -

A bare foot, as dusty as the sun, and an awkward young leg in jeans, and a brown t-shirt with yellow stripes on the arms, and long curly hair, his head to one side, on his arm, as if he were sleeping. His eyes half-open, waiting. The flies were gathering on his lips and he had no hands, and there was still twine around his neck. Ants marching across his lashes. Perhaps older than he looked; perhaps not. He still had one shoe, with no laces.

Boys run; the slip into the shadows. They throw back their heads and laugh, they are defiant, they are stupid, they are too young.

They stayed late that morning, waiting for the coroner. They stayed late, filling out paperwork.

Pete said: "Go home."

Jim had a look that said he didn't know how. His dumbstruck eyes had blurred the line between work and home, between the pavement and the rocky earth, between the boy (who would wait for a month among the other nameless dead) and himself (whose varsity track ribbons had yet to fade). Pete said: go home, and kiss your wife, and go to bed.

"I can't stop thinking about him."

"You will."

"Malloy, that's awful harsh."

"Didn't say you'd stop caring. Just you'd stop thinking about this one kid, when the next one comes along, and the next. It's too big a basket, carrying around all that. You gotta set it down, partner, you gotta set it down and think about the ones that made it."

"How?"

Pete shrugged. "I drink too much coffee, and I eat my steak rare. You do what you gotta do."

#adam-12 #brain doodles #listen I haven't had a brain cell to myself in over a month

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penaltybox14 · 4 years

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@dying-redshirt-noises @its-skadi And Now, The Sex. (ok, sort of.)

He had been young, too, once. And fast.

Well. Maybe not that. Never tore up the track, never was a speed demon. He was the thinker, and on the backside of that, the fists when the chips came down. Busted his knuckles on a few faces, back before there was hair there to soften the scars. When he was young.

(or younger. he isn't old, after all.)

The kid, Jim, sits ramrod-straight on his couch, doe eyes on a military bearing, his face like he's expecting something, like he's waiting. They had dinner, Mexican takeout from a little stand a block from his apartment - tacos, fresh from the fryer, crisp lettuce, sour cream and dots of hot sauce that lay in wait like atomic bombs, cokes and corn chips. Pete's lips are still burning from the salsa.

(must be the salsa)

Jim's coke is sweating like a junkie in withdrawals and the bottle is making a ring on the coffeetable, and he thinks Jim probably has coasters at home, he seems like a coaster person, him and his wife, nice girl his wife is. Jean's a pretty girl, and smarter, he thinks, than she'd let anyone know - he likes her, there's iron in her eyes, and he thinks there's a fierceness there that must hang over Jim's exhausting calm like smoke on water.

He wouldn't dare hurt her. He respects her too much for that.

(funny thing: the guys, they wouldn't peg him for respecting a woman that way, not just that he's not handsy but he likes a gal who looks him in the eye and says, Pete, it was fun, but it's time to go our own ways. likes a gal he can talk to.)

Jim wouldn't hurt her. It wouldn't occur to him. Too good, too decent, too clean. You can smell the leather and wool of the letterman's jacket, feel the weight of the books in his hands. He's still young, and he'd never hurt her, and Pete makes fun of him for being domesticated but he respects that, he has to.

They had dinner, in his spare apartment with the blackout curtains in the bedroom and the mismatched plates in the kitchen. The refrigerator and the cupboards full of sensibly non-perishable things.

And Jim sits up like a rabbit in the brush, all but twitching at the ears and nose, like he's waiting for something, like the answer is there and he's only waiting for the question.

Pete is not good at conversation. He is good at listening. He likes to take it all in, before he makes a decision. In the classroom, years ago, he was a quiet boy, the boy in the corner taking his time, some days talking with his fists. He imagines Jim, bright and eager, the kid in the front of the classroom, interrupting, apologizing, asking questions. Pete holds the coke bottle loosely in his hands, studies the curvature of it, the cool weight, the psychedelic seasick world through the bottom. He wishes Jim would ask whatever question it is.

Long-fingered hands clasp, unclasp.

"Well?"

Pete startles: his apartment doesn't hear voices. It swallows them up.

Clears his throat: "Well, what?"

"Well, aren't we gonna - you know."

Pete thinks he knows the answer floating between them but he feigns an air. "What, 'you know', partner?"

Jim is red as a Christmas light bulb. He glows. Pete chuckles. Even flustered, even balking on his own tongue, the brilliant, stupid kid is beautiful - and he doesn't often say that for men, though men have their own kind of beauty - with his big blue eyes and his sharp jaw and lashes that most women would have to buy in a bottle at the drugstore. Jim is beautiful and makes him laugh, sometimes, even with exasperation.

After Tommy Parker, he hadn't given much thought to laughing, or to beautiful things, and the guys in the lockerroom would crack some joke, or he'd see a gal or a man on the street - someone he'd have given the soft eyes to, the little smile, before Tommy - and it would feel like part of him just wasn't there.

First thing Jim made him feel was angry, but that was familiar, that lived in his fists and in his scars.

But god, the kid was smart, the kid made him smile.

"Well, after what you said - back at Central Receiving, you know, after the Eisley case - "

Said, that was funny. Pete hadn't said more than a hand of words, just slammed the boy up against the wall of a stairwell at the hospital, all but bit his throat in eager panic, the swell of arousal smacking right into the downslope of terror, his fingers in Jim's hair and breathing in antiseptic, his cheek against the soft thick bandage on Jim's cheek. Boy, he'd said, heavy as a rockslide, his voice trapped in a cave, boy, don't ever fucking do that again.

(Jim had not done anything wrong, per se - not wrong, by the books, just dumb bad luck he was the one walking in first and they'd miscounted the perps - and Pete had had to sit by for an hour not knowing, and what he meant was don't scare me like that again, but all the fear was in his lips and teeth and hands, like some volatile medicine in a glass he intended Jim to swallow down.)

Jim is starting to sweat. Like he's made a mistake, the way he bites his bottom lip when Pete's about to give him a lecture.

"Oh, you mean, are we gonna have sex?"

The kid's a shade of pink Pete has not ever seen outside of a biology textbook. But he nods, practically vibrating.

Pete sighs, leans back on his couch (there is one couch: what does he need two for?), into its plush and sturdy arm, spreading wide his arms and smiling, gently. "C'mere then."

Jim sort of tumbles toward him, legs and arms, as awkward as a teenager in a backseat, as clumsy as a fledgling struggling to take to the sky. It takes a moment - a patient moment, a thinking moment - for his arms, his chest, his cheek - to find a rest, a place where the two of them entwine. Pete strokes the soft hair at the back of Jim's neck, and lays a kiss on his jaw. He was not much of a talker, and he was never fast. Jim's breathing slows, and his hand goes to Pete's arm while his mouth tickles his throat like he's asking, asking permission now.

Pete inhales, sharply, stumbling over the memories: Tommy Parker, sheet over his face. Jim, cheek bruised up like a ripe plum, rope-burned at the wrists, raw at the heart. The bandage and the hospital smell that stays with you.

"Pete?"

"Yeah."

"Sure this is alright?"

"You didn't think to ask that til after you're all but in my lap?"

"Sorry."

Pete shakes his head. He likes the feel of Jim's body breathing against him. Men have a certain kind of beauty, by themselves. And Jim is beautiful.

"Don't be sorry," he says. "Don't be. Just c'mere, alright? C'mon."

Pete's been the thinker all his life, the thinker and the fists on the backside of it, the boy who broke his knuckles on more than a few faces, but only when he had to. Only when he really meant it.

Been on a lot of dates, too. Had sex with a fair share of guys and gals. Made love to a few, even.

But only, he thinks, bringing his partner closer, only when he really meant it.

#jim reed #pete malloy #adam-12 #pete is a professional flirt #it's plot exposition it has to go somewhere

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penaltybox14 · 4 years

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@dying-redshirt-noises @its-skadi You could basically title this “feelings are hard” and be done with it.

Every time Jim Reed comes slinking, soft-shouldered, out of the locker room at the end of the night, Mac wants to stop him. Wants to talk to him.

Listen, he wants to say. Listen, it's not you.

Mac wishes he could sit him down without the uniform and the stripes and the years between them and tell him about Pete.

Sometimes, he does hold Reed up. Sometimes he says - how're things going? And Reed nods earnestly and says things are fine, really, Sarge, things are going ok.

Reed's not a bad liar but Mac's seen a lot of eyes in his years and they always give 'em away, even the young men who believe they can't be hurt. Reed's not stupid, not really - just new, just some yearling who hasn't settled into his stride yet, who wears his badge like a buck wears a new pair of antlers. He's a good kid. A fool kid, but a good kid.

Mac thinks that Pete can see that, too - which is really part of the problem, isn't it?

Mac'd love to have a beer with the kid, and tell him about Pete. How he laughs and how he drinks. How he kids but he's honest to the core. How he loves, and how he's loyal to a fault. Mac could tell him stories so raw and rowdy they'd take the blue off the sky. He could tell Reed how Pete was.

But that's just the problem, isn't it.

When the Captain and the Lieutenant had asked him what he thought of assigning Pete a rookie, he was all for it. He would've set up a full briefing, with color photographs and pull-down charts and diagrams on the chalkboard, about how they couldn't find anyone in the division better, Pete would for sure drag any rookie through the briar but he'd drag him out too, he'd be by his side all the way. Pete would tease the kid and teach him. Mac could've told them all about him, but he typed it out in measured sentences, to only say that yes, he would recommend Pete for the job.

Pete had talked to him about it. Pete, being Pete, wasn't too sure. Pete had always had a patient streak, and he liked to get the facts before he made a move.

Mac had said, what do you mean? You remember being the rookie, you just be the guy you needed to bring you along.

And Pete had said, what I needed was to get a clock upside the head.

But he was grinning when he said it, the smile he had that rose into his eyes when he meant mischief.

Mac had said, and that's why I've got the stripes and you don't, pal.

By the end of the watch, Tommy was bearing Pete's taunts about his hair with reasonable humor. Tommy was a stolid kid who still had acne under his ears, a boy with a bad case of bravery but a kind face, and kind hands. He came out to inspection his first day with his badge on upside-down, and Mac had liked him immediately.

"He's like you," Pete had told him.

Mac had frowned at him - "I don't know how I feel about that."

Pete, grinning, the laugh at the corner of his mouth, said "Me neither, Mac."

Two shifts in and Mac was pretty sure the two of them were plotting to woo every eligible woman in the division, four shifts and there was a fake scorpion in Walters' locker, but Mac couldn't be too mad, because Pete was teaching the kid to be a good cop. Pete's tongue was a knife some watch-nights, but it was carving a good man out of the raw-boned boy.

It was a good couple of weeks. So good, that Mac still yearns for the laugh ringing in the locker room, the way a treble note hangs in the rafters of a church, the way a boy's hand remembers the first shy touch of a girl. They were riding high, Pete and Tommy, faltering sometimes, but falling to each other's shoulders. The Lieutenant had said, Mac, you were right about him, for sure. And the Captain had even thanked him for the recommendation - but please, he'd said, creases milding his eyes, keep them out of my office.

Mac thought he could do that, he said to Pete, the Captain tells me if you give him any more grey hairs he's going to start charging you for the dye job.

"Just me? What about Tommy?"

"You're the senior man, Pete. You've got responsibilities now."

"You mean I've got custody."

"That's another way to put it."

"I'll have him in home and in bed by one o'clock."

"Make sure he brushes his teeth."

"You got it, Papa Bear."

Pete was smiling when he left him, and smiling when he swung Tommy out to the parking lot by the shoulder. Mac had followed them. It was a cool night, and a dense fog had lumbered into the basin, and in the drizzle their breath hovered in front of their faces as they got in the car, talking about something. Probably women, or perhaps where to go for seven. Maybe where to stash another fake scorpion. Mac had a cigarette, watching them pull away.

The smile on Pete's face, and the way the drizzle had collected like stars on Tommy's jacket collar, are fixed in his mind as sure as a snapshot.

The next time he saw Pete there had been some expression frozen to his face, something Mac had never seen before, and something that scared him back to being twenty with a rifle in his hands. The look on his face was like an trapped animal, and his teeth, bared and chattering, shone in the damp black night.

Tommy was dead on the ground out in front a of a very ordinary looking house, a yellow Craftsman with a picket fence, a slate walkway, a neatly trimmed lawn and a wreath of plastic flowers on the door, which was open.

Tommy's eyes were open, too, halfway, and his mouth, and Mac thought maybe the light from the porch was casting a long shadow from Tommy's sprawled shoulder but it wasn't, it was blood, and the blood was still wet.

Blood and grass was in Pete's hair, on his jacket, on his knuckles. There was a man mostly in the patrol car and he'd been cuffed and was spitting onto the curb.

Walters had Pete by the arm, both of them tense, Pete a storm and Walters a rowboat tossed on waves. Walters' face was splashed with porch-light and pale with hollow fear.

There was so much to take in, so much to sort out. On the back end of it, after the detectives had spit Pete back out and he sat in the locker room half in uniform, Mac had wanted to go to him, like a sergeant would, like a friend would. But Pete was sitting there in his ruined shirt - the blood had dried in muddy blotches, and Mac thought he could smell it, like meat in the market, or maybe it was just the lockers, just the smell of men's bodies crammed in, joking and sweating and laughing and living.

Pete just sitting there dumbstruck on the bench, his eyes far-off, looking young and strangely small, as if he'd shrunk a size or two. Sat there like a kid who'd lost a fight too big to win, waiting on authority to come down on him.

Looking an awful lot like Reed did some nights after watch, an expression pinched with lonesome thoughts, trying to get it right, trying to catch a break, trying so hard he trips over his own feet, his face, his words, his hands.

Mac isn't sure which of them he wants to grab and throttle more. Jim, who runs headlong - every damn time - into Pete's wicked tongue or worse his silence, or Pete, too damn stubborn to remember who pulled the trigger. He wants to shake some sense into the both of them, either of them, whoever runs afoul of him first. It's a rotten, surly kind of anger, something that makes his chest feel like caving in.

It takes a warehouse bust to finally snap his temper like tinder on a hillside. Nothing serious, but the kid takes a right-hook to the jaw and a carton of computer parts to the gut. Reed is writing the report with an bag of ice to his face, when his nose starts bleeding again.

"Aw, Christ, Reed, wouldya get that fixed? Look, you're - jesus, you've fucked up your book."

"Sorry, sir," Reed mumbles, fumbling over grabbing a kleenex or shoving the ice-bag into his face. "Sorry," comes out all muffled.

"Don't be fucking sorry, kid, don't do it!"

In the time he's been Sergeant, Mac has pulled rank less than a hand of times on Pete. Not because they're friends - but because his friend has never made it necessary.

"Malloy." He barks, his voice dropping an octave, calling up his service days, and the few officers still around make themselves scarce.

Because they're friends, though, Mac drags him to the locker room and not his office, where the window makes it too easy for the rubberneckers to lurk.

"What in the hell is this about?"

That stubborn kid from the Academy with the smoke-blue eyes is staring back at him with boxer's shoulders cocked. "What?"

"You! Reed! You've raked that kid over the coals almost every watch I've seen you two - everything he does right, you give him two things he did wrong."

"You wanted me to teach him."

"Teach him! Pete, you're grinding him down to a nub, lay off, will you?"

"Lay off, what'll that get him? A fist in his teeth, like tonight? I let him get complacent, he's liable to get a bullet in his head."

"I'm not asking you to give him free rein, I'm asking you to be reasonable. A bloody nose isn't his fault."

"It's his fault for getting it, isn't it?"

"Is it? Who's his FTO, Pete? Who's his partner? Who's supposed to be looking out for him?"

That's the wrong thing to say, and Mac knows it. Pete's face seals it, that stunned look from eight weeks ago, the hands with the blood on them that wasn't his, and the ruined shirt crumpled on the floor outside the showers.

He's known him long enough to dodge the hit, and he hasn't been so long off the streets that his body's forgotten how to fight.

If anybody's thinking about coming to the lockers about now, they'd damn well better think twice.

If anybody sees them, he's going to have to save face, he's going to have to be the sergeant, and he can't do it, can't twist the knife he's already jammed in.

So he pins Pete, like he'd wrestle a perp, and Pete curses him, curses his family, curses Jim, curses God and the world, curses Tommy Parker, and finally, finally, he curses himself.

"Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ, what'd I do, Mac, what'd I do? I've thought about it a hundred, a thousand times, what'd I do? Why didn't I think of it, why didn't I remind him, stay to the side? Why'd I send him first? He wasn't ready, Mac, he wasn't."

"If you'd gone, it might be him taking a swing at me right now."

Pete laughs a jolting laugh, like boxcars clanging in the yards. "Tom couldn't hit the broadside of a barn."

"No. Wasn't much of a fighter."

Pete breathes in deep, breathes out hard. But his eyes are softer.

"Pete," he says, letting him up and letting him stand, man-to-man, against the wall. "It wasn't your fault."

"That's what everyone says."

"It isn't Reed's fault, either."

Pete looks away. At the lockers. At the scuffed floor. At the ceiling, where one panel is askew, because Brinkman and Parker were relieving their high school glory days with an apple from the breakroom.

"Pete. It's not his fault."

"Yeah." Pete sighs. "Yeah. I know."

"Well, could you act like it, then?"

"What do you want me to do, hold his hand?"

"Apologize, for one. Two, treat him like a person. And three, get him a new ice pack and a box of kleenex."

Pete's smile is shaky, but it's the most genuine Mac's seen on him in two months. "You gonna write me up for assaulting an officer?"

"No, but if you ever try anything like it again, I'm staking you out on the beach and dumping french fries on you. Those Manhattan Beach gulls get hold of you, there won't be anything left to write up."

Pete shrugs. "Fair." Pete brushes his uniform off. Tucks the hem of his shirt back into his pants. "Mac."

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."

#adam-12 #sass is a love language #sergeant macdonald #pete malloy #jim reed #butterfly meme: is this homoeroticism?

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penaltybox14 · 4 years

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For @dying-redshirt-noises cupped-face prompt.

When Bob was a kid, a real kid, just a little kid with a brush haircut and milk-tooth molars, his mom would open up the windows on summer nights just to let their apartment breathe, and he could hear the sirens down below. He could lie in bed and try to guess each one as it went by: police, or fire, or ambulance. Wasn't any paramedics, in those days, and the man behind the ambulance wheel might just as soon be the undertaker, and himself he might not know which til he got on scene.

When Bob was a kid, when he was Bobby, when he was Frank's kid brother, when he was Ed and Louise's son, two boys from his block went swimming in the Des Plaines river, under the hot, fat, shimmering August sun, but only one boy came back out again. Bob (Bobby) walked into a funeral parlor in his Sunday best, starch and a clip-on necktie and hair his mother fussed to flatten, and saw a dead boy lying still and ordinary, as if lulled by the soft weeping of grown-ups and the grinding wheeze of an industrial fan in the corner. Bobby walked up to the dead boy trying to work out what that meant: dead. There was something pale about the boy that he had only vaguely known, something missing, something too sweet and fine-spun about his stillness.

A woman, who might have been the boy's mother (it was a room of bodies: of shuddering bodies in black suits and sunday dresses, veils and whispers, grown-up bodies swaying and heaving like the cars of a freight train), bent and stroked the hair, the cheek, the hands. A woman looked down at him with shining eyes. Bob (Bobby, his cock's comb hair straying from its pommade bonds) touched the hand of the boy who wasn't, anymore, because his skin was cold, cold like a door in the morning, before the sun come out and woke up the streets and the buses and the world. Colder than the gentle face of the moon, colder than the comforting stars.

Wasn't any paramedics, back then, and Bob wonders sometimes if there had been, would there still be two boys and not one, would there be two boys grown to young men. Two boys gone to work, two boys gone to Vietnam, two boys come home and starting families. Two boys went swimming and one came back, and one had a painted cheek that felt like the bottom of a river.

Summer in Chicago was a season of sirens: police and fire and ambulance, and in the later afternoons when the storms rolled in you'd hear the tornado warnings go off, howling like something trapped and wounded, like something raging to get out.

It doesn't storm like that, in Los Angeles. Back home you'd go days of heat, days of swelter, the mercury all but busting out of the thermometer on the drugstore window. Drink Coca-Cola, said the fading metal, with the similing lady on it, and boy you did, boy you drank it half-solid with ice. The heat would rise from the day to the night, from the pavement to the bricks to the El, all the way to the sky until at last God deemed it right to break, and the lightning split the world to pieces and the thunder might've cracked the foundations of the earth and rain came spilling out of the sky like Noah was building an ark on the shores of Lake Michigan. But the heat, here, is brittle and fierce, and holds you in its teeth.

When the rain comes, if it comes at all, it sneaks up on you, and all of a sudden the power's out and the cracked-concrete culvert they call a river here is a raging torrent, rolling fury down to the port, to the ocean, rolling fury like it wants to tear everything down, like a bad trip, like a schizophrenic throwing himself against the walls of a cramped house in a neighborhood of cramped houses and cramped alleys and bad, boiling summer madness.

They're in the throes of the heat, they're at the mercy of the mercury, and Bob's gone through two uniform shirts and Craig's gone through four, and Bob's thinking about asking dispatch to post them up at a landromat for a couple of hours cause he's running out of shirts before he's gonna run out of sweat to soak them in. They drink water like horses and no one at Station wants to cook, and Cap says the hell with it, popsicles for dinner, and Leroy says Cap they're gonna melt before we get to eat them and Cap says the hell with it, just throw them in a bowl and call it soup. Craig says, from the couch where he has wilted, ever so slightly, gaz-popsicle, and chuckles. Gaz-popsicle, like gazpacho, get it?

Parker says Brice made a joke, Cap, I'm gonna shove my whole head in the freezer and don't take me out til January.

Bob laughs, and laughs, and Craig smiles, and the tones go off for a structure fire, as if the whole of the basin isn't hot enough already, just gotta add a few more degrees.

Fire's like death, he thinks, while Craig drives. It ain't scary, or not. It's just there, like sky or sand, like birth or sleep. You're meant to be at least little scared of it, like all the things that'll kill you out in the wide world, but it's no sense to lose sleep over it. No sense but to be prepared, as Craig is always reminding him, in his sweetly bothersome way, you're a fireman, Bob, how can you forget to change your smoke-alarm batteries?

The structure fire's a house, or it was a house, but it isn't going to be one soon - it's a Craftsman, Bob thinks, and in his mind he sees the layout, in his mind he sees the timbers and the frame, he sees the insulation packed in the walls. He sees hollow-core doors and shag carpeting. He sees these things as he hitches up his SCBA. He sees Craig doing the same, and pats him on the shoulder and Craig pats him back and no one questions it, even if they see it they haven't questioned it for months now.

The sun is a murky eye in the west and the heat of the sky and the cement pushes them toward the house as the house breathes out smoke. There is no heat like fire: it's like being inside a body, like being inside a fever. Twenty minutes in and out: it's all you can stand. Twenty minutes, that's a whole mile walking, twenty minutes, that's nothing, that's an intermission at the drive-in, that's popcorn, that's a thousand years in black smoke.

Twenty minutes. Craig triple-checks his SCBA every morning every shift, and Bob does the same because why not, because he's close to Craig that way, he does it because Craig does it and once upon a time he just did it to make peace with his partner but he does it now because that peace is like water, that peace is like smoke-detector batteries and bullhead catfish on a barbecue grill.

When Bob comes out of the fire stumbling, slapping hands like a relay to send the next crew in - and 51 is there, and 8s, and 10s, a small army - he falls to his knees on the grass and breathes its sweet summer-cracked smell. Someone is wrangling the ambulance attendants to bring out paper cups and water and coolers full of ice and he'd shove his head right in but he thinks: what would Craig thing, me shoving my sweaty, sooty face in everyone else's water?

What would Craig think?

He looks around and squints and doesn't see his partner. He shoves a man from 10s. You seen my partner, he says? You see Brice? The grimed face is blank. He walks among the kneeling rows: you seen my partner? You seen Craig? Roy DeSoto is crouched on the sidewalk, his ginger hair streaked in grime. You seen Brice, Roy?

Roy has always had that softly concerned face, an expression that seems at first too gentle for a fireman. He shakes his head. No, he says. No, he's not with you?

Now his heart is thumping. Now his heart is jumping. Now his muscles hurt, and the gauge on his SCBA is in the red, and twenty minutes is much too long. There's an army of firemen in the same beige and blackened coats, the same black helmets, breathing the same thick air.

Cap, he says, Cap, you seen -

There's a hand on his shoulder and a glimpse in his eye, and Craig is missing his glasses somewhere, what a stupid thing to think at first, Craig stares nearsighted at him and pats his arm again. Bob, he says. I've been looking for you.

His heart beats in his chest so loud his ribs feel like the rafters of a church. Oh god, he thinks, oh god. Craig's live and living and confused face. His myopic gaze he swipes with one gloved hand.

"Aw, jeez, kid, don't do that - "

You forget yourself sometimes. Act like a probie, act like a person.

So he bites his glove off instead, and swipes the grime from under Craig's eye, and smudges it further. He wants to say: jesus, kid, don't scare me like that.

But Craig puts a hand flat against his chest, so instead he lets his hand, of flesh and blood and fever, linger longer than it ought.

#bob bellingham #craig brice #brice/bellingham #emergency!#steering the ship into ritalin bay #this actually includes the prompt as requested

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penaltybox14 · 4 years

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Working on an Adam-12 AU to hassle @dying-redshirt-noises with - Pete is an ex-delinquent/runaway who changed his identity to get his shit together and become a cop. No one knows. (yet.)

One cool, coal-dark and damp night, under the fog-haloed streetlights, they pick up a hitchhiker by Union Station. The boy looks not much more than 15 - a face all hard edges and lines, but his jaw is smooth, unstubbled. None of the names he gives them are any good, but he's got no identification, and no coat, and nights in Los Angeles are like the wide dark sea, plied by intercity buses and low-slung cars with deep backseats. That kind of sea that'll open up and swallow you and close over as the dawn breaks, smooth as glass.

The boy bites his lip and fiddles with the bracelet on his wrist, one of those knotted-rope kinds you see in tourist shops by the pier, and he smells rank and adolescent in the back of the car. When Pete looks in the rear view mirror, as the shadows pass between the lights, it is easy to mistake his partner for the boy, the boy for his partner.

"Didn't have to hook me up," the boy had said, getting into the car. The cuffs had glinted on his wrists. "Didn't have to hook me up, you know." Softer. His hair is long, like boys these days. Pete can't place the accent, something broad and midwestern. What the boy says is just a statement: it bodes no disagreement. He is not a fighter. A survivor, likely, but no fighter.

Pete does not like the way those dark eyes pierce him. Jim does that, sometimes - a look like he knows something, a look like he is on the precipice of some mystery. Pete would like to keep his mysteries to himself, not farm them out to probationers and runaway boys. Pete would like those eyes not to catch him so hard, like banging your elbow on a corner, that swift and delirious rush.

The boy is too old for MacLaren, and too young to be held at the station, not without a name, not without some admittance to some family, somewhere. So it's Central Juvenile Hall, a hand of buildings hunkered down on Eastlake between the railroad and the freeway. The pale high walls face the avenue as blank and expressionless as the boys they pick up and turn back, on the regular, one or two a week. Boys that break out like a hobby, just something to do. When they ask them: son, why'd you run? The boys just shrug and look out the window, and they turn away with the blank-faced masters at their elbows, down the long, bleak, gleaming hallway.

MacLaren is perhaps not much better. He frames it to Jim as a decent place, a refuge, kind hands and warm beds, but it won't be long before Jim will hear the wailing of some child late at night, and Pete's picked up kids there, before, too, caught on the shoulder by their matrons. Broad-shouldered women with tight waves and unsmiling faces who just can't take this one anymore, officer.

Jim still believes in decency, and Pete wants to stretch that lie a little longer. Jim has only seen the doting workers fuss over abandoned babies and grimy, snotty toddlers crawling with lice and desperate for a warm embrace. Jim hasn't heard the howling. Jim hasn't come to break up a fight in a cottage and been hit with the feral stench of urine and clorox in a dormitory crowded with kids, so many kids, too damn many kids.

After they leave the boy in custody, signing over his sloping shoulders and his soft eyes, the silence swells around them like it does - Pete counts the streetlights waiting for his partner's question to break the tension and the dark.

"How's it happen?"

Pete thinks how grateful he is that Jim is still so green and raw as to believe he has all the answers. It's easier to skew him, then. Easier to nudge him this way or that.

He wonders if Mac or the Lieutenant thought that about him.

They might have been grateful for his obedience and acquiescence, but maybe, Pete thinks ruefully, only because it was (at one time, and he'll deny it up down and sideways) a rare thing.

"Whaddya mean?"

Give the boy a question for his question. Let him saw it out, what he's seen.

"A boy like that. How's he end up hitchhiking alone in the middle of the night?"

Pete keeps his eyes on the road. He knows that Jim is peering at him with those lost-puppy eyes, his throat taut, his expression keen. At least after dark, in the pure and purring darkness of the patrol car, Pete still has all the answers.

"Lot of reasons," Pete says. He is careful to keep the aloof shrug in his voice. He knows things, and he doles them out when he should so choose. "Kids run away from a lot of things, they get mixed up with the wrong crowd, they get in over their heads. Sometimes it's just one bad fight with their folks, sometimes it's a long time coming."

Sometimes, it's a lot of little things all piled together, like a game of jackstraws, and you can't tease one thing from the others without the whole of it coming down. Sometimes, it's just a river you can't seem to reach across. Sometimes, it's just a stupid kid whose mouth writes checks his ass can't cash.

"Oh." Jim says. Pete can just about hear his brain clicking and clacking, the clockwork winding up. The boy's smart, sure. If it seems for a moment he's accepted this answer, Pete's known him long enough now to know he's going to be pelted with another hand of questions in another minute or two.

"You know how it works." This is a preemptive strike - it throws a momentary wrench into the gears. "The kid'll get processed through, he'll be assigned a caseworker, he'll have a hearing. They'll place him, probably up at Preston."

"You think they'll try and find his folks?"

"They'll try. Can't say they'll have much luck. LA's a big county, California's a big state, and then you've got the whole rest of the country to think about."

"You suppose he's not from around here?"

"Does it matter?"

Silence again. That came out harder than he meant.

But it doesn't matter, does it? One boy, one bed, just the same as another. Detroit, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Reno, Seattle, Portland. He's heard from probation officers and attorneys and social workers, he's been to conferences, it's all about the same. Same halls, same walls, same kids. He's heard there's a fellow over in Massachusetts trying to change some things, really upending the place, but he doesn't know anything will come of it. Central is much the same as it was six or seven years ago, Preston hasn't given an inch in decades, MacLaren has kids spilling out the windows, and the state hospitals are places he wouldn't leave his worst enemy's dead dog.

One boy, one bed, just the same as another, up and down the freeway, east to New York, north to Washington, south to Texas.

He can't shake the way the boy's eyes pierced him, just struck him open and spilled into him, stuck the hair up on the back of his neck. He can't shake it and he doesn't like it and it makes him snap at his partner, who has done nothing and knows nothing and Pete is going to keep it that way if it kills him.

(He has never had a partner who looks at him like Jim does. Mac looked at him two ways: exasperation, or the exasperation of the bigger brother. Tommy -

Tommy wasn't around long enough.)

When Tommy died he wanted to run. Like the boy, maybe.

(Again. He wanted to run again. Like he had been running since he was ten years old. Like he had been running since his pop came back from overseas and his mother held her head in her hands and wept softly when she thought her children couldn't hear.)

#adam-12 #jim reed #pete malloy #men with feelings #1968 was a hell of a year

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