#they’d have to deal with his ghost guardians

[tanglepelt]

Dc x dp idea 66

Danny and Damian are twins.

Danny does not excel at majority of training. He does excel at stealth. One day he overhears a discussion regarding how there could only be one heir.

He knows he can’t defeat Damian. He also just doesn’t want to. They are by no means close, but it’s still his twin. So right there and then he plots.

Danny fakes his own death. Lighting a fire “accidentally” to “dispose” of his corpse. No risk of the pits bringing him back.

This leads to him in amity park. The Fentons were strange enough to take him in. A son story about how his family wants him dead. Jazz had always wanted a little brother.

Over time Danny realizes just how toxic the league was. Jazz helped a lot. He feels guilty about leaving Damian behind. And for having Damian “kill” him. Sneaking into the league is out of the question so he stews in guilt. Then the accident happens. 5 years later.

So he does go back. Damian isn’t there.

He ends up at a gala with Vlad or sam.

He sees Damian. Danny shoots his shot. Just popping up by him. Apologizing for using him to fake his own death and asking if he managed to realize how bad the league was.

All while dodging Damian’s attacks.

#danny phantom #danny fenton #dp x dc #dc x dp #dp dc crossover #dp x dc crossover #dp x dc prompt #demon twins #danny and damian are twins #jazz told Danny it was bad to let ppl believe they killed him #all the ghost attacks made Danny even better at dodging #he got thrown through one to many buildings #yes the one sided fight happens in the gala #honestly Danny is fine with the chaos #let the leauge find him #they’d have to deal with his ghost guardians #and the fentons #Bruce is unaware of the twin status #Damian feels guilty after the fact #or maybe during #if it’s sam who took him #she’s cheering on the side #sam and tucker know the full truth. jazz as well #Damian may have told the bats. depends on where he is I’m his journey #defintley not when he first was left with Bruce #it’s better if he didn’t #he’s just trying to attack what looks like a clone in the middle of a gala #if vlad is the one who forced Danny #well. vlad is going to try and save face. #the death battle happened at 9 one year before Damian got shipped to Bruce

[thebitterflamingo]

Lila dies but she doesn’t stay that way. She just so happens to be copying Klaus’ powers at the time of the incident. Too bad she doesn’t recover as fast as him though. Diego grieves. ☂️🔪

{set sometime during season 3 in Hotel Oblivion}

==========

It was exactly like loosing Patch.

It wasn’t at all like loosing Patch.

Patch was all work while Lila was all play. Both did what they thought was right, just in different ways. Both hated Diego almost as much as they loved him.

Both died because Diego was too weak to save them.

He sucks in a breath.

It wasn’t just Lila he was loosing either. Diego tries really hard not to think about the baby.

Lila lies in a puddle of blood on the hotel’s cursed floor and Diego tries really fucking hard not to think about the baby.

Then Lila gasps.

At first Diego thinks his mind is playing a cruel trick because what else is he supposed to think? However, that theory is quickly quashed when the others stir around him. They heard her too.

Lila chooses that moment to sit bolt upright, causing Viktor, the closest to her, to visibly jump.

Five, near Diego, also jumps (though his involves a few blue sparks he quickly quashes).

“Well that’s a fucking trip!” Lila exclaims, spitting a mouthfull of blood. Her teeth are red, but no more gore escapes her lips. There’d been so much of it when she first went down.

“God is a little shit. Mind catching me up?” Lila continues unperturbed.

Five recovers quickly. “I’d say it’s a pleasure to have you back with us, Lila, but that’d be a lie.” He says the words dryly, but there’s no real venom. He’s reciting from a recycled script. All of their brains are buffering at this point, though as usual, Five is quicker than the rest of them.

“She was copying Klaus’ powers, Diego,” he states, still staring at Lila. Maybe he directs it towards him because he thinks he‘s the slowest. It’s not at all because Diego has been staring blankly this entire time. Five certainly wouldn’t say anything out of concern.

“Diego?” Lila says, uncertain, like Diego is the one sitting in a puddle of his own blood and not her.

All the blood is hers.

It stains Diego’s shirt, his hands, his heart. It’ll never wash out. He can hear Lila’s response. It’s just bleach and hydrogen peroxide, Diego, and blood stains come right out!

He’s going to throw up.

Hands are on his arms then, still a bit too cold, and Lila’s face fills his vision.

“Hey, I’m right here,” she says gruffly. Uncomfortably. She was never one for comfort. (Or maybe that’s the blood still clogging her throat). Diego swallows.

“I’m right here,” she repeats. “See? Good as new.” She removes her hands from Diego’s arms to run them over her own. Her arms settle loosely across her stomach after, her shoulders hunched.

And that should make it all better, huh? To see her unharmed should discount her death. The collapse of Diego’s world only a temporary apocalypse, like the ones before. Like Klaus’s death. Like Klaus’s deaths.

Those had affected him too, though Klaus’s nonchalance and Stanley’s guilt had ushered him past it.

“What took you so long?” he finally croaks out.

They’d been in the damn lobby for thirty minutes, each in various states of disarray. Lila’s death had broken something in each of them, even if none were as attached as Diego.

Diego hadn’t been able to work up the courage to face the bloodstained body or the hotel guardian that had made her that way. Neither had his siblings, either out of respect or a similar fear. He knew the blood hadn’t scared Five, but something in Diego’s face had sent Five into the contemplative silence he’d maintained until Lila rejoined the world, a silent sentry by Diego’s side.

“Practice,” Five again answers for Lila as well as Klaus this time. And Diego does not have the time or energy to deal with the implications of that statement. His brother’s skeletons are a discussion for another day, when Diego doesn’t feel like a ghost himself.

Lila huffs. “It was still faster than Klaus’s first time.”

“How do you know?” Klaus whins, indignant.

Lila smirks. “God told me.”

Klaus pouts. “You’re right, she is a little shit.”

Lila laughs, and though she is no longer copying Klaus’s powers, the sound brings Diego back to the land of the living. He still isn’t alright. Maybe, probably none of them are, but they are alive. They’re together. It’ll do for now.

Diego suddenly pulls Lila into his arms, trying to ignore her slightly pained huff as he does so. “Welcome back,” Diego says into her hair, both of their tense bodies relaxing against each other.

“Good to be back,” she whispers into his chest. “Now get off of me you big softy!” She pushes him away but her eyes hold his as the once still room slowly stirs to life around them.

Somewhere, their father plots. Nearby, Five plans. And distantly, clanking steps tell Diego there’s a guardian to kill.

Just because Lila is back doesn’t mean Diego isn’t going to exact some well deserved justice.

#umbrella academy #umbrella academy fanfic #fanfic #season 3 #lila pitts #diego hargreeves #five hargreeves #hotel oblivion #klaus hargreeves #viktor hargreeves #whump #angst #Lila dies #but not really cause she copied Klaus’s powers #Diego is big sad #plot bunny #writing practice

[creativia10]

Hexside Starts and Locker Haunts

Hunter is looking forward to attending Hexside where he can see most of his friends. He didn't expect his new ghostly guardian to look out for him while there.

Warnings: reference to past child abuse

Let me know if I've missed anything

Word count: 3215

Notes: This is going to be the second one of a series about Hunter and Ghost Caleb. I really like this concept. I don't know how many works this series will have yet.

Hunter could hardly believe this was happening. He was going to go to Hexside and learn alongside other kids his age. Including his friends. Well, hopefully he would that was. Apparently, he had to take a placement exam, where enrollment wasn’t guaranteed. At least, not when he wasn’t a full witch like most of the students would be. He knew Luz had to deal with that, they’d talked about it.

He needed to know two spells on his own in order to not be placed at the lowest level in the school, the baby class. He only had one ability on his own, the teleportation and flash step from Flapjack. He couldn’t even use the glyphs that Luz had been able to. Ever since Belos possessed the titan and the battle ended, the glyphs hadn’t seemed to work. He didn’t really understand why. He had a feeling Luz would know more about that, as she seemed to.

He could do more with his artificial staff though, which he would have to start using again. Part of him didn’t want to, but it might be his only option if he wanted to go to this school. And he did.

He didn’t understand why this presentation was like a show for himself on the stage before the principal. He could appreciate the showmanship though. At least, he could have if he wasn’t so nervous.

Darius stood backstage giving him encouraging hand gestures. Darius has been there for Hunter now. More than just giving him somewhere to stay, which Hunter appreciated. It did seem like Darius was stepping into more of a guardian role for Hunter now. If the check-in after Hunter went on his own, the day Belos was defeated, said anything. Still, Hunter wasn’t quite used to a safe guardian who only had his best interests in mind. So, Hunter was having a hard time believing that was going to be the case. For now, he could just accept that Darius was safe and there for him. And really, that said a lot there.

Hunter had his artificial staff off to the side, easy to reach backstage, in case he did need to grab it. He wanted to try on his own first though.

Hunter took a deep breath and walked onto the stage.

“Hey, Principal Bump,” He said a bit awkwardly. Bump’s face was a bit hard to read, but he just nodded in response.

“Yes. G- uh, what is your actual name again?”

“Hunter,” He said.

Hunter’s eyes were drawn to a flash he caught from the back row of the seats. Odd, Hunter was sure it was just supposed to be the three of them in there for this exam.

Hunter’s attention was brought back to the conversation though.

“Yes, Hunter. Given your history in the emperor’s coven-“

Hunter couldn’t help but wince at that.

“-I’m well aware you have the magical abilities to be able to attend here.”

“…right.”

Of course, not everyone knew he was a powerless witch on his own. Only his friends knew that, and he didn’t exactly want everyone to know.

“So by all means, show me what you’d like. To give me an idea where to place you.”

Hunter took a deep breath and then flash-stepped to the side. He also teleported up into the air and then quickly back down, as his staff wasn’t in his grasp to catch him.

“Does that count as two?” Hunter asked.

Bump scratched his chin.

“Hmm, I’m not sure. Is there anything else?”

Hunter hesitated and then walked to the side to grab his staff.

“Well, if I may ask this not leave here, not really without my staff. As the glyphs don’t work anymore.”

Bump blinked.

“What, really? But many have seen you use powers. And you have,” He gestured to Hunter’s ears. Hunter reached to touch one on instinct.

“Uh, yeah. I’m a powerless witch, or I was. Belos gave me this artificial magic staff to be able to use magic abilities.”

Bump hmmed.

“I see.”

“But with it, I can do this!” Hunter held his staff up, making sure not to point it at anyone, and let the staff build up an energy blast at the end.

“I can also move earth with it.”

Bump nodded.

“Well, you have certainly shown you’re magically capable before, considering. Although, you may have some limitations with what tracks you can take though.”

Hunter sighed. “Yeah, I figured as much. I can live with that.”

“Very well. With this in mind, I welcome you to Hexside School of Magic and Demonics.”

Hunter smiled and bowed to him.

“Thank you sir.”

Bump raised his hand.

“That’s not necessary. I’ll let you look over the tracks before you start classes. Let me know if you’ll need any help testing out which ones you are able to do.”

Darius asked Hunter if he was okay while they on their way back home from the entrance exam.

Hunter shot him a confused look.

“Why do you ask? I got what I wanted. I can go to Hexside.”

Darius hmmed.

“I know, but some topics got brought up in there that I could tell you weren’t thrilled about.”

Hunter sighed and shrugged.

“I don’t know. I mean, it was bound to come up. Of course, I’m going to have to consider that I’m fundamentally different from other witches. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. At least I’m able to go to that school at all. Gosh, I need to be able to see my friends there.”

Darius nodded.

“Know that you can talk to me though, alright?”

Hunter hesitated. Trust was a hard thing. He was not used to opening up at all.

“I appreciate that,” Hunter said.

Darius pursed his lips, probably seeing how that was a non-answer. Hunter didn’t know if he was ready yet though. Maybe he could focus on one thing at a time. And at that point, it was figuring out his tracks at Hexside. He was used to working hard, so surely doing so for classes of his own choice would be better. Right?

*

Hunter was surprised that he came to the school his first day with so much trepidation. More than he had the first time he came onto the Hexside campus. Maybe because then he had a mission as the golden guard. And a lot of false confidence for some reason. But this time, he was just Hunter. Not even a full witch. Entering a building of normal witches and demons around his age. Which was something he was very much not used to. It was actually a bit overwhelming.

So he stood there for a moment just staring forward as students milled about the campus.

“Hey, Hunter. Are you alright?” Darius asked. He hadn’t left yet. Hunter took a deep breath. He didn’t know the answer to that. But he didn’t want to worry the other.

He did want this. He just didn’t feel fully prepared.

“Hunter!” Several voices shouted.

Hunter glanced over and his shoulders relaxed some as he saw his friends. Gus, Willow, and Amity made their way over.

Darius shot him a smile.

“I’ll see you later Hunter. Let me know if you need anything?”

Hunter nodded at Darius with a smile, before the other left.

Gus and Willow immediately hugged him.

“You’re finally here!” Gus exclaimed. He let out little illusion fireworks in celebration.

“Yeah, I know right?” Hunter said.

“It’ll be great to have you on the Emerald Entrails flyer derby team full time!” Willow cheered.

Hunter smiled at that.

“Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that.”

They chattered a bit more as they headed into the school. Being among familiar faces did wonders to help Hunter feel more at ease. It was a great reminder of why he wanted to go there in the first place, even if he was different.

A flash of light would be harder to see in the daytime outside. Hunter had a good sense of when someone was looking at him though. That had developed from moments with Belos. Sometimes he didn’t know when his uncle was understanding or in a bad mood, and he needed to be on guard.

But there are a lot of people at school there. He tried to reassure himself that it’s possible it was nothing. He was new after all, and some did know he was the golden guard. Maybe it had been a passing glance. There was a difference between one look and being watched though. Hunter could usually feel it, but that was likely no magic though. Just an instinctive intuition, or maybe even paranoia.

Still, he looked around, not seeing anyone.

“Hunter?” Willow asked. “Is everything alright?”

Hunter turned back to his friend group.

“Yeah, I think so,” He said.

She didn’t seem convinced, but let the conversation continue. Hunter couldn’t shake the feeling though.

-

Hunter went into Principal Bump’s office first, as he was told to. So he could choose his tracks and get to class.

He had been doing a lot of thinking about this. Yet still, he looked over the choices. He understood why Luz had a hard time choosing. Unlike her though, he probably couldn’t do all of them.

Potions was easy to tick off. It was the easiest for a low or nonmagical person to learn.

Beastkeeping. He liked palisman, so maybe he would like working with other magical creatures too. Construction seemed to be the closest to what he could use the earth-moving abilities for.

He pondered Healing, it was an ability he would like to know how to do.

“Can I add more later?” Hunter asked.

Bump thought for a moment and then nodded.

“Yes. With the new addition of multiple tracks learning, many students have been adding more tracks later.”

Hunter nodded. He held off on that one for then, since he wasn’t sure how he’d be able to do that. Illusion was also a no.

He supposed plants could be similar to earth, but he had moved the ground itself more, not so much growth.

He was almost good with his three tracks, but then he paused on the oracle one. He had read up a bit about that. He was less interested in knowing the future, as it was hard to think about that when you didn’t know how long you’d live. But the pamphlet had said those on the oracle track communed with spirits. He wanted to understand more about that world given recent events. He could at least learn more about the spirits. Besides, he was pretty sure that moment with the ghost of Caleb wasn’t going to be a one-time thing. Even if he wasn’t sure when he would see the other again.

So, he had decided on four tracks for then.

-

 Hunter was surprised he hadn’t seen his friends in classes yet. He supposed they did have different track focuses, and the ones he chose didn’t overlap, but still. There had to be some classes everyone took. He hoped they would have some in common.

Anyways, there was something in the schedule called a break? That was not something he expected. When he trained to become the golden guard, his learning was pretty intensive. He didn’t quite understand why there was a break, and so early. It had only been a few hours. Still, he wasn’t going to complain about the chance to see his friends some more if he had time. He was still figuring out the layout of the school.

As he walked through the halls, he walked past a group of students with a girl in the middle who looked familiar. Boscha he thought? She had been that pseudo-leader when the students hid out at Hexside during the Collector’s games. He hadn’t been able to catch everything that happened. He thought Amity had managed to convince her to go against Kikimora who had been taking over though.

So, that in itself could have meant she was an ally. But the Isles were no longer in emergency mode, at least not in the same way. He had heard his friends talk about this girl before. She was a bully. So it was probably best to steer clear of her. At least, that’s what he tried to do.

He was starting to wish he had asked even more about what to prepare for at this school. He caught her looking him up and down before she scoffed.

“Wow, someone’s a bit ambitious. Try hard much?”

Hunter rolled his eyes and kept going. Honestly, many students were taking multiple tracks now.

“Hey!” She exclaimed. “Don’t ignore me!”

Great. She was an attention hog as well. She then walked over to him and started following him.

“Who do you think you are? You’re not the golden guard anymore, nothing special about you now.”

Hunter paused and turned to her.

“How did you know about that?”

Boscha rolled her eyes and smirked.

“Oh, please. Word goes around fast here.”

He really hoped that didn’t extend to other parts about him.

“So you won’t be able to get away with stuff like before. This is Hexside, my school.”

“Oh please, you’re just a student here,” He said.

Boscha laughed. “Did you ever think about why I was the leader when everyone hid out at the school? People listen to me. And ignoring me isn’t gonna fly.”

“Why do you care if I give you attention? You don’t even know me. If you had as many fans as you imply, there would be no reason to make a scene at me walking past you.”

She glared at him and clenched her fists at that.

“Because you’re not just anyone. Most students here know their place by now, but you’re new. I can’t have you think you’re better than me. I’m most popular for a reason. The losers need to stay down. Especially half-witches.”

Hunter’s eyes widened at that last part and took a step back.

“What?” He asked.

She put her hands on her hips and smirked at him again.

“What, you think I didn’t notice your limited use of magic? And that you always have a staff with you now, even when it’s not a palisman.”

Hunter pulled his artificial staff slightly behind his back.

“Why were you even watching me for that?” He asked.

“I look out for the important things. Such as threats and the wastes of magic that need to be avoided.”

Just after she said that, a nearby locker door swung out and banged her in the face.

“Ow!” She cried out, stepping back and holding her face.

Hunter startled and looked on in surprised.

Boscha continued to hold her face, but glared out and looked around.

“Okay, who did that!?”

Some students fled at her yell. Hunter looked around, but he couldn’t tell. He hadn’t seen any spell-casting circles. His friends didn’t seem to be in the vicinity either.

Just then, he saw another flash at the end of the hallway. Okay, that couldn’t be a coincidence.

A faded figure formed the silhouette of a familiar man for a moment. The figure then drifted around the corner of the hallway.  Hunter sped walk in that direction right away.

“Hey!” He heard Boscha shout behind him, but Hunter ignored her. He went around the corner to a subsection of the hallway off to the side away from things.

The ghost of Caleb reformed to appear as he had when Hunter first saw him. Hunter stared for a moment.

“You found a way to follow me,” Hunter said.

Caleb nodded, “I can’t exactly say I understand why. Perhaps I was able to attach myself to you when my former reason for haunting died. Or it could be because that staff is from the castle.”

Hunter glanced to his staff at the mention then back to Caleb.

“You slammed that locker door into Boscha’s face.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“I said I would look after you. I wanted to protect you.”

Hunter huffed.

“I wasn’t in any real danger. She’s just a brat.”

Caleb hmmed.

“Perhaps. Doesn’t mean you have to deal with that.”

“I’ve been through worse,” Hunter said.

Caleb sighed. “I know. Trust me, I know. I don’t have to like any of it though.”

“So what, you’re just going to try to throw things at anyone who gives me a hard time? I don’t need that.”

“Do you know what you need?”

“Maybe not to be coddled!”

Calen floated back some.

“I don’t think one instance of retaliating against a bully counts as being coddled. She had no reason to be like that to you.”

“I mean, yeah. Of course she didn’t have a good reason. But I don’t need you to do that.”

“I know. I wanted to. She was annoying me.”

Hunter huffed. “Yeah, she was definitely annoying.”

“See?”

“How often are you going to do something like that?”

Caleb shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“Because, if that becomes commonplace, someone is going to figure out I have a ghost haunting me.”

“Well, it’s more watching over you than haunting. Are you expecting this type of thing to happen often?”

Hunter opened his mouth and then paused. He didn’t really know what to expect if he was being honest. Caleb seemed to sense that. He smiled.

“Well, then I’m definitely not going to stop.”

“Caleb!”

“My brother caused irreversible damage to this world for years. It’s the least I can do.”

“You are not responsible for his actions.”

“I know,” Caleb said. He looked sad now.

“But if I can do something good in spirit after my brother cut my life tragically short, then I want to be able to.”

It was hard to argue against that. Not like Hunter didn’t appreciate this ghostly ancestor wanting to look out for him. He just wasn’t sure if he deserved it. Especially over something like a mean girl. His life hadn’t even been in danger or anything.

“I suppose that’s fair…” Hunter started. He wasn’t really sure what to tell the other. Could a ghost be reasoned with? It’s not like it would do much harm. Hopefully. This was still new to Hunter, so he wasn’t sure what to expect.

Before he could say anything else,

“Hunter!”

Hunter turned to see his friends running towards him. Hunter turned back to Caleb, or where he had been. Caleb had disappeared again. Hunter sighed.

He still had questions about this whole thing. Like, why did the ghost keep disappearing on him like that?

The school bell rang signaling that the break was over. Other students around started to head to their next classes.

His friends were talking over each other. They mentioned how they heard something happened with Boscha. Concerned that he ran away after. He walked with them to start heading to his next class as well. He tried to answer their questions, without mentioning Caleb. He was honestly still in a bit of a daze over what had happened. He was really dealing with a ghost now even with everything else going on? Well, at least Caleb was a nice ghost, but still. He didn’t know anything about this stuff. He supposed he was going to find out.

#Ghost Caleb and Hunter #the owl house #toh #toh spoilers #toh hunter #toh fanfic #caleb wittebane #darius toh #principal bump

[eliotqueliot]

After the Scarlatti Web

For the May 29 prompt: Bed Sharing, for @duckprintspress May Trope Mayhem

Fandom: The Magicians (TV)

Relationship: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh

Tags: Sharing a Bed, queliot, Insomnia, References to Depression, Fear, Falling In Love, Best Friends, Fluff, Literal Sleeping Together

Summary: Quentin’s afraid to sleep. Eliot wants to help.

This story takes place following the end of 1x04, “The World in the Walls,” right after Quentin wakes up from being trapped in his own mind by Julia in the Scarlatti Web.

Warnings for canon-typical language. The first 1k is up on tumblr, but the whole story is on AO3; link at the end.

--------------

Eliot handed Quentin a brandy. Q glanced at him as their fingers brushed, but didn’t pull away. Instead he looked at Eliot as though he was some sort of lifeline.

Eliot reseated himself on the back of the couch beside Quentin and reached out to pet his hair again, but this time it was more than a quick pat. “How are you, Q? Really?”

“A little freaked out?”

“Understandable. If I get my hands on that hedge bitch—”

 Quentin shivered. He pulled Eliot’s hand off his head—but then he just held onto Eliot’s wrist for a minute. “God, no. Just let her be. I hate what she did—”

“You almost died, Quentin,” Eliot spat out. “There was a very good chance you were never going to wake up.”

“But I don’t blame her for being mad. I should have told the dean she had magic, like she wanted.”

“That doesn’t excuse—”

A smile ghosted over Quentin’s lips. “No, but maybe they would have mind-wiped her again? Before she could do anything stupid?”

It surprised a laugh out of Eliot. “God, I hope it takes next time.”

“Same.” Quentin drank his brandy. Eliot crossed around and sat next to him.

“What was it like in the mind-prison? How did you get out?” God, I was so worried, Quentin. His heart still hadn’t calmed the fuck down. The flood of relief was making him giddy, possibly stupid, because—he wanted to tell Quentin what he’d realized. How his heart dropped the moment they’d found Q unresponsive in the back of that closet. The moment he realized just how much he loved Quentin.

“It was my worst nightmare. I got committed.” Quentin tipped the tumbler, downing the rest in one go, and God, he didn’t recommend that, but Eliot reached for the glass instinctively. But Quentin shook his head to a refill. “You know, Eliot, you were there? Probably the one bright spot in the whole damned place.”

“Really?” Eliot’s aplomb was no match for this sudden surge of happiness. Inescapable: I love Quentin. Oh God, I’m head over heels. So that’s what it means… Fuck, he was in trouble.

Quentin sighed and flopped back against the cushions. “The funny thing is… I slept for what, ten hours? Thirteen? But I’ve never been so tired in my life. I feel like I’ve been running for, like, a month. Only…sleeping right now? I can’t even. Would I ever wake up? Is it bad that I’m so tired I almost don’t care?”

Eliot took Q’s hand and stood decisively. “Come with me, Quentin.”

“El, I have to go to class.”

“They can excuse you for one day. After this? They can excuse you for a month. You almost died, Quentin. And their famous methods of dealing with former students and warding against hedge magic didn’t work.”

But halfway up the stairs, Quentin sighed heavily and just stopped walking. “I’m not sure I ever want to sleep again, to be honest.”

“I can watch over you, Q. If you’re worried about it.” Always. I’ll always be there for you, Q. “It’s no trouble.” Oh, I can think of so many ways to help you sleep… Sternly, he told his brain to settle down.

“My guardian angel?” Despite the cheeky smile, Quentin looked so tired, so serious. “Thank you, El. But—I’ll let you know? Right now I need to get my books and just—make it to class. So I don’t get mind-wiped too.”

“Don’t worry, Q. I’m not going to let that happen.” Eliot helped Q gather his books, tucked his tag back in his shirt collar, smoothed Q’s hair, and had just enough time to grab him a water bottle before Q rushed out the door.

Eliot had class himself, and plans with Margo, but he tried to keep an eye out for Q. Quentin didn’t come back till late after dinner—apparently having a serious meeting with Dean Fogg, among other things. Eliot put a plate together for him—heard all about it while Quentin ate, even though there was a previously scheduled party to attend to. When Quentin pushed back his chair and announced he was going to crash, Eliot followed him upstairs to make sure he had strong enough wards to keep out the noise of the party, before wishing him a peaceful sleep.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to stay? I don’t mind. I have plenty of homework. I can sit up and read,” Eliot found himself babbling. “Make sure nothing happens. Keep up the sound wards.”

Quentin just smiled tiredly and waved at the bed. “It’s okay. I’m so wiped I could sleep through anything at this point. But I appreciate it.”

Then he closed the door.

Eliot just stood there for a moment. The way his heart surged out of his chest, still on the other side of that door, with Quentin…felt like an out-of-body experience.

The next morning, Eliot got up early to make Quentin breakfast before class. Quentin dragged himself downstairs just in time, clearly struggling.

Q talked to him, but he seemed subdued, his chatter coming more slowly than usual. While he moved about the kitchen, Eliot snuck worried glances at Q. Each time, he found Q sitting there, slumped in the chair, his usually eloquent hands flat on the table like fallen birds.

When he set the plate of scrambled eggs on toast in front of his favorite nerd, Eliot murmured, “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t sleep all night, El. I mean, I tried, okay? But I guess I’m kind of afraid to? Every time I close my eyes, they pop back open after a few minutes. What if I never wake up? I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to sleep again,” he repeated his fears more forcefully—this time backed by experience. He looked up at Eliot miserably.

Eliot soothed a hand between his shoulders. “You probably got enough sleep for a while, Q.” “And now I’m going to fall asleep in class and flunk out and be mindwiped,” Q fretted.

#may trope mayhem #duck prints press #eliot waugh #quentin coldwater #queliot #quentin x eliot #the magicians #queliot fanfic

[call-me-honkie]

Measure of a Hero

Also on AO3. Season of the Haunted spoilers!

The Guardian struggles to maintain the tempo at which their heroic lifestyle demands, and Ghost notices.

Left. Right. Left. Right. This was the Guardian’s mantra.

Their feet shuffled lazily, dangerously, propelled only by the momentum of walking itself. Their sandy eyes were trained forward. Their face, which had dripped sweat all day, felt cracked and dry now. Drought-like. Deserted, like the dunes of Mars.

The day was packed with overgrown fungus, Scorn, Nightmares, and Calus. The Guardian had gone on longer, more grueling patrols than that, so the exhaustion was frustratingly illogical. They could deal with Scorn; bullets and Light never failed them. Nightmares may have bothered the Guardian a mere couple years prior, when their heart was nothing but rage and grief, but now they could choke down their cutting words. And Calus… His booming voice resounded in their mind like an acoustic chamber, about protein slurry and baths, war beasts and Ghaul, opulence and admiration.

The Guardian shivered violently and didn’t bother to suppress it. If they tried, it would disrupt their rhythm.

Left. Right.

Only that rhythm kept them upright.

Left. Right.

“Guardian?” A white shell flashed in front of them.

And if anything were to disrupt it, they would fall.

Left. Right.

“Guardian!”

Stars burst before they realized they’d pitched forward and hit concrete.

“Guardian, what in the Light—are you—” Their Ghost stumbled over his words, as if shuffling through a script for the correct response.

A small noise came out of the back of the Guardian’s throat—they didn’t bother to suppress that either—while they pushed themselves off the ground with robotic clumsiness. Wet slid down their mouth and dribbled off their chin.

Ghost’s hesitation wasn’t pity, but it resembled it. “Are you… alright?”

They were fine, the Guardian insisted, trying to wipe away the wetness on their mouth and chin but smearing it instead. They didn’t know why their breathing became more ragged with each second. They were fine, they were fine, they were fine.

Ghost paused, unblinking, weighing each repetition. “I don’t think you’re fine,” he said finally.

The Guardian and Ghost stared at each other. They wanted to straighten their back and offer some cool-headed platitudes, but that stoic, legendary hero was far out of their reach now. They didn’t know why. They just didn’t know.

 “And I don’t think you’ve been fine for a long time,” Ghost added slowly.

Something inside cracked open as hard and fast as their face on the concrete. Ghost was already nuzzled in the crook of their shoulder when their breathing hitched, and when the body-shaking sobbing started.

They gaped and choked on their crying for a different reason with every passing second. They had done so much. Their Light should have been snuffed out long ago. They avenged Eris and all of those who fell in the Great Disaster by killing Crota, when they barely knew what a Hive was. And Oryx, who had Taken worlds—they didn’t falter in killing him because they hadn’t understood the enormity of his crown. Did the Vanguard keep the gravity of Oryx’s power from them on purpose? The Guardian was the first of a new generation of Iron Lords, responsible for bearing the weight and setting precedents, when they did not have even a decade of experience. Yet for all their strength, they could not kill Ghaul, twice; the City only “won” thanks to the Traveler. Rasputin, Osiris, Cayde-6, the Barons, Uldren Sov, Eramis… Savathun.

A strangled, garbled noise came from their throat. Next, they would undoubtedly be the spear thrown haphazardly at the Witness’ heart at the very tempo they had walked to. And the Witness would break them before they came close.

“I’m here,” Ghost whispered. “I’m still here.”

The Guardian remembered the neural symbiosis between them and wondered if his words were a comfort, a response to thoughts shot down the symbiotic line, or both.

The Guardian continued to cry while Ghost remained fiercely nestled in their shoulder in the narrow hall. Minutes later, the Guardian got out an apology. They shouldn’t have flooded the symbiosis with a deluge of… this.

“You never have to apologize for this,” Ghost said, floating sternly in front of them, but quickly softening his tone, “I want you to tell me things. The neural symbiosis makes it easier to understand each other, but it doesn’t replace explicit communication.”

They apologized again for their frigidity.

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” Ghost sighed. “You’re quiet, but I know your communication styles. It just gets hard when you hide your feelings. And I know you’ve been hiding your feelings.”

The Guardian put their head in their hands wearily. They really tried to be strong. They tried to be the exemplar the City needed, the soldier the Vanguard wanted, and the Guardian that Ghost deserved. To fall into the clashing rhythms of all their roles.

Ghost sighed again. “Oh, Guardian…” He nuzzled their shoulder again. If he were human, he would be hugging them.

The Guardian realized the vulnerability of their confession and the back of their neck got hot. As if to deflect the discomfort, they smeared the wetness on their face more. They didn’t know why this was happening now.

“To be honest,” Ghost murmured, “I’m glad. Well, I’m not glad you’re not feeling well. But I’m glad we had this talk, and… well, if you went on like this forever with no emotional aftershock, I think I’d worry the Darkness was taking away your humanity.” Ghost tried to sound bright, but the Guardian knew he was only half-joking.

The Guardian only nodded, biting back another apology. They felt empty, but a light, freeing sort of empty. The crying left their throat raw, but they managed a gravelly, Thank you. You know, for being my Ghost.

“I love you,” Ghost said.

They loved him, too.

“And you’re going to love me even more when I tell you that I put in a double order of ramen for you before we even left the hangar.” He spun his shell proudly. “Your favorite, too. You’re welcome.” He floated closer and whispered, “But, uh, completely unrelated to the ramen I ordered without your knowledge… Do you have ten Glimmer?”

The Guardian managed a voiceless chuckle, standing sluggishly. Yes, they indeed had ten Glimmer he could “borrow” for his unrelated-to-ramen reason.

“Then let’s get you cleaned up so we can eat it hot,” Ghost chirped. “Well, you know what I mean by ‘we.’” He sighed. “I wish I had a mouth.” They swore Ghost beamed at his own joke and they chuckled again, forgetting all about their left-right mantra.

#destiny 2 #season of the haunted #fanfiction #Ghost and Guardian #Ghost and YW #Ghost Destiny #Young Wolf #Guardian Destiny #hurt/comfort #is it possible for angst to be self indulgent? #cause if it is #then this is definitely self indulgent lmfao #im a sap okay

[kuzann]

Guardian Moons AU: Team Flare Overview

Gonna add more to my silly Perfectworldshipping AU cause folks in the Discord were excited about it. So here’s more info on Team Flare in this AU! First post about the AU is here with general information on it. This post is kind of a work in progress since I’m sure I’ll think of stuff after posting and have to add it lol.

---

Main Mission & Recruitment

Lysandre founded Team Flare so he could have backup in the form of like-minded individuals for his alien-hunting endeavors. Are they gonna do anything bad to the aliens if they find them? Nope, they just want to know about them. They have a whole database of confirmed aliens, disproved aliens, and common hoaxes to watch out for, most of it accessible to the public so they can be aware too. If said aliens turn out to be a threat to Earth then they’d work to stop them, but otherwise they’re just out for knowledge and sniffing out hoaxes. The hoax debunking is important to helping normal folks feel safe when they sleep at night, so it’s also pretty important to Team Flare too.

Though it starts as being strictly about discovering aliens and uncovering associated hoaxes, Team Flare eventually branches out to pretty much all things paranormal. It’s partly because aliens/paranormal stuff just naturally overlaps, and also because some of grunts were able to win Lysandre over by talking to him about their paranormal special interests and he got excited. Team Flare divisions have special names when they deal with a specific topic and special uniforms: for example Spectral Flare is for ghost stuff, and they look pretty goth and have black and purple uniforms.

Anyone can join Team Flare as long as they’re a good team player and treat others with respect, thinking aliens and the paranormal are cool is just a bonus. It’s high-diversity as a result of this, with members from all manner of social strata and categories mingling together and vibing over their shared interest in the paranormal--or just having fun watching coworkers be passionate about said topic while enjoying the good pay and working conditions.

The Ultimate Weapon

Upon discovering the Ultimate Weapon’s existence, Lysandre decides that it must be destroyed in order to keep it from falling into the wrong hands and makes this Team Flare’s main mission. They keep this mission under wraps so the public won’t panic about such a horrible thing existing and so they can hopefully get rid of it before any shady organizations get any ideas about what to do with it. The plan is to get it to the surface and destroy it there, since detonating it underground could cause unanticipated collateral damage if there are undetected fault lines nearby that could cause earthquakes, so Team Flare is stockpiling energy sources on top of their typical work a bit like in canon but without the harming Pokemon part.

The protags get hints that something’s up as they help Team Flare with various other and related projects and are eventually told about the plan because they’ve earned enough trust with Lysandre and the team and they’re chosen students of Sycamore’s. Luckily they arrive just in time to help out when things go sideways during the finale too.

Unfortunately and unbeknownst to Lysandre until the very end, his discovering the weapon at all is in part a ploy by AZ to get someone else to do the hard work of raising it so he can move in at the last minute and seize it before it gets destroyed. Which he does. As Team Flare prepares to bring up the Ultimate Weapon and destroy it, AZ and his followers assault their base and are able to take control of it after AZ incapacitates most of Team Flare’s members. 

Science Division

The lead science squad of Team Flare have varying degrees of enthusiasm for the organization’s mission, depending on who you ask. Xerosic is here strictly for the good pay and the science and as long as he has those he’s happy. Aliana, Bryony, Celosia, and Mable, meanwhile, are big paranormal fans and they enjoy making gadgets to help Team Flare and going on missions.

Main Base

The main base is under the Lysandre Cafe, with the cafe itself being open to the public. There are regulars outside of Team Flare members(and Sycamore) who go there just to listen to the interesting gossip. Hex maniacs and psychics really like hanging out there, and they’re even a potential source of information on potential incidents that Team Flare pays attention to; anyone who is able to pass on accurate information gets free food and drink in return.

#Perfectworldshipping #Team Flare #Pokemon #Lysandre

[demiclar]

Class Warfare

Class Warfare - Ao3

Osiris comes to the defense of his new Ghost.

(This fic exists in an AU I was playing around with over the summer where Fynch bonds with Osiris as his new Ghost after the events of The Witch Queen. Hope you enjoy it!)

Destcember Day 2 - Class Warfare

------

Fynch was immediately taken with the Eliksni of the Last City. Osiris noticed it instantly. After Osiris woke and was healed thanks to the combined efforts of his new Ghost and the Kell of the House of Light, he was quick to notice how drawn Fynch was to the House. They visited the Eliksni quarter often. Osiris was still healing both in mind and body—though Fynch did make the latter a great deal easier—and he found it eased some of the stressors that plagued his mind to be among the House of Light, to help them as they had helped him.

Saint was similarly drawn to the Eliksni quarter, as were Crow and Glint. Osiris could understand why. Even with the difficulty surrounding his first impression to the House of Light, they’d become a steadfast support for Saint in the difficult months that had followed, dealing with Savathûn’s deception and Osiris’ comatose state, Mithrax and the others had been there for Saint in a way few others could. It was only natural that he would remain close to them even after Osiris woke, but what surprised Osiris was the attachment the other members of his little flock had to the quarter.

Geppetto’s feelings were closely related to Saint’s, and to Osiris’ own. The House of Light had taken care of her and her Guardian during a dark time, the Eliksni also had a way of seeing Ghosts as their own beings, not so tightly coupled with their Guardian partners as some of the people of the city seemed to believe. Crow’s attachment was similarly understandable. The Eliksni had been both protectors and abusers to Crow in his lifetime. Spider had been his captor on the Shore, and that certainly introduced a layer of tension into their time in the Eliksni quarter, but many of his men had worked to shield Crow from his brutality in the same way he had tried to protect them. Of the group of them, he had the best hold on the language, and could often be seen speaking among them in both English and Eliksni.

Glint and Fynch offered a new perspective, however. Even bonded with Osiris, Fynch still found the Tower and the Guardians within to be unreceptive to him. Whenever they ventured in, Fynch would conceal himself within Osiris’ light, the feeling of being unwelcome creeping down their bond from Fynch’s side. Osiris did his best to reassure the Ghost, but as long as the Ghost still bore his chitin shell and green eye, the Guardians would not forget who he’d once pledged himself to.

At first, the Eliksni of the House of Light had given him similar looks. It had taken the explanation of who Fynch was—Osiris’ Ghost, but more specifically one of the key players in the defeat of Savathûn—for their suspicion to be replaced by trust. Once it was, Fynch had relaxed into their company. The feelings of discomfort, of being unwelcome or different had gradually lessened, until Osiris could no longer feel them through the bond that linked them together. Glint, he realized, had a similar experience. Among other Guardians and Ghosts, there were still those that felt Crow should not have been revived, that Uldren Sov did not deserve the Traveler’s blessing, and that Glint had betrayed the Tower and the City by bestowing it upon Crow. The Eliksni quarter offered them both an escape from the creeping class warfare that deemed them both as different, or evil, agents of Darkness and ill will to the Traveler.

Unfortunately, it was never completely safe.

Osiris was on his knees, his hands in the cool earth, his knees cushioned on a foam panel as he tended the garden beside a number of Eliskni and human workers. Crow was at his side, picking weeds from the dirt around the growing plants. He was immersed in his work, relaxed in the domesticity of his task when he felt a pinprick of Light from the other side of the quarter. He lifted his head on instinct, only for an overwhelming sense of fear to pour down the bond between himself and his Ghost.

It was so intense it was nauseating, and Osiris drove his fingers into the damp Earth as he shuddered at the sensation, stimuli pouring into his being. Fynch suddenly reached for him with utter desperation Osiris had never felt before, sending his every perception down the bond as he tried to bring them close together.

“Please!” Osiris heard his Ghost saying. “You don’t understand! I’m not one of them, I helped the Guardian fight her, I–”

He saw the flash of an armored Guardian looming above him, felt the clench of a fist around his body—around Fynch’s body. Distantly, Osiris felt Crow’s hand on his shoulder, but his focus had moved into his Light.

Osiris reached for his Ghost, fought to pull him back from the being inducing such fear in him, to draw him into his Light and protect him the way he needed to, but something held Fynch in place. Paracausal power wrapped around Fynch’s shell and rallied, but Osiris would not lose another Ghost, certainly not like this.

His own Light roared in response, and Osiris was on his feet in an instant, crossing the Eliksni quarter at a sprint.

“I helped save Osiris! The Guardian, the Young Wolf, they trust me, please—”

Osiris could find his Ghost without his senses. He needed no sight to guide him, he didn’t need the sound of his cries, the nauseating fear was enough, the power of the Light that linked them together. Osiris ran.

He spotted the Guardian in front of him, sunlight reflecting blindingly off of his armor, a Titan held Fynch aloft in his fist, paracausal power dripping from his fingers and holding Osiris’ Ghost in a vise grip.

“Let him go!” Osiris felt his own Light surge in him, it rallied in defense of his Ghost, to fight tooth and nail if need be, but at the sight of him, the Titan balked.

The instant the grip of the Titan’s power lessened around Fynch, the Ghost broke free of his fingers, hurtling towards Osiris. He paused before the Titan, his Light raging through his veins, Crow just a step behind. Osiris cupped Fynch in a palm for a moment, looking him over to confirm what he was feeling with his Light—that the Ghost was scared, but unharmed—before he guided him behind him. He could feel through their bond when Crow’s fingers brushed over Fynch, protectively pulling the Ghost close.

Osiris didn’t remember what he said to the Titan. By the time the words of anger and reprimand were out of his mouth, Saint and Mithrax were at his side and they were beginning to draw a crowd of onlookers. The Titan left the Eliksni quarter without delay, and Osiris coaxed his raging Light to calm. When he finally turned round, he found Fynch cradled in Crow’s hand, pressed to his collarbone, wrapped in the warmth of the Hunter’s Light. Saint’s hand settled on Osiris’ shoulder. Crow met his gaze with worried eyes.

“Fynch.”

His Ghost turned to face him, his shell drawn close around him.

“I–I’m sorry.” He stammered, “I didn’t mean to–”

Osiris reached out a hand. His movements telegraphed through their bond, he drew his Ghost close, cradling him in his hands with warmth rather than aggression.

“You have nothing to apologize for.” He lifted Fynch to press his forehead to his Ghost’s frame, even when the prongs of his shell were hard and sharp against his skin. “That Guardian should not have touched you.”

“But I look like–”

“It doesn’t matter.” Osiris cut in. He pulled back enough to look Fynch in the eye. “You’ve more than earned your place here. You deserve to live in peace.”

“But I–”

“Fynch.” It was Crow who interrupted him this time, setting a hand on Osiris’s shoulder and stepping close until he, Osiris, and Saint formed a protective little circle around the Ghost. He cupped his hand around Osiris’, holding Fynch in an open grip. “It doesn’t matter what you look like.”

Fynch’s shell seemed to droop around him, and he gave them a small nod. He pressed himself into Osiris and Crow’s hands.

“Thank you.” He murmured. “I’m sorry.”

Osiris leaned forward to press a kiss to his shell. The Hive chitin was rough against his skin, but the Ghost had never had an ounce of malintent towards him. He wreathed their bond in affection and care and felt Fynch sink into his touch, gratitude coupled with exhaustion shuddering out of Fynch’s side of the bond.

Osiris held him close. “No apologies.”

#destiny 2 #destiny game #destiny fanfiction #destcember2022 #destcember #destiny osiris #destiny crow #destiny fynch #destiny season of plunder #demiwrites

[fromprison2002]

Short story

Stuart Dybek: Hot Ice

    Saints

    The saint, a virgin, was uncorrupted. She had been frozen in a block of ice many years ago.

    Her father had found her half-naked body floating facedown among water lilies, her blond hair fanning at the marshy edge of the overgrown duck pond people still referred to as the Douglas Park Lagoon.

    That’s how Eddie Kapusta had heard it.

    Douglas Park was a black park now, the lagoon curdled in milky green scum as if it had soured, and Kapusta didn’t doubt that were he to go there they’d find his body floating in the lily pads too. But sometimes in winter, riding by on the California Avenue bus, the park flocked white, deserted, and the lagoon frozen over, Eddie could almost picture what it had been back then: swans gliding around the small, wooded island at the center, and rowboats plying into sunlight from the gaping stone tunnels of the haunted-looking boathouse.

    The girl had gone rowing with a couple of guys — some said they were sailors, neighborhood kids going off to the war — nobody ever said who exactly or why she went with them, as if it didn’t matter. They rowed her around to the blind side of the little island. Nobody knew what happened there either. It was necessary for each person to imagine it for himself.

    They were only joking at first was how Kapusta imagined it, laughing at her broken English, telling her to be friendly or swim home. One of them stroked her hair, gently undid her bun, and as her hair fell cascading over her shoulders surprising them all, the other reached too suddenly for the buttons on her blouse; she tore away so hard the boat rocked violently, her slip and bra split, breasts sprung loose, she dove.

    Even the suddenness was slow motion the way Kapusta imagined it. But once they were in the water the rest went through his mind in a flash — the boat capsizing, the sailors thrashing for the little island, and the girl struggling alone in that sepia water too warm from summer, just barely deep enough for bullheads, with a mud bottom kids said was quicksand exploding into darkness with each kick. He didn’t want to wonder what she remembered as she held her last breath underwater. His mind raced over that to her father wading out into cattails, scooping her half-naked and still limp from the resisting water lilies, and running with her in his arms across the park crying in Polish or Slovak or Bohemian, whatever they were, and then riding with her on the streetcar he wouldn’t let stop until it reached the icehouse he owned, where crazy with grief he sealed her in ice.

    “I believe it up to the part about the streetcar,” Manny Santora said that summer when they told each other such stories, talking often about things Manny called weirdness while pitching quarters in front of Buddy’s Bar. “I don’t believe he hijacked no streetcar, man.”

    “What you think, man, he called a cab?” Pancho, Manny’s older brother, asked, winking at Eddie as if he’d scored.

    Every time they talked like this Manny and Pancho argued. Pancho believed in everything — ghosts, astrology, legends. His nickname was Padrecito, which went back to his days as an altar boy when he would dress up as a priest and hold mass in the backyard with hosts punched with bottle caps from stale tortillas and real wine he’d collected from bottles the winos had left on door stoops. Eddie’s nickname was Eduardo, though the only person who called him that was Manny, who had made it up. Manny wasn’t the kind of guy to have a nickname — he was Manny or Santora.

    Pancho believed if you played certain rock songs backward you’d hear secret messages from the devil. He believed in devils and angels. He still believed he had a guardian angel. It was something like being lucky, like making the sign of the cross before you stepped into the batter’s box. “It’s why I don’t get caught even when I’m caught,” he’d say when the cops would catch him dealing and not take him in. Pancho believed in saints. For a while he had even belonged to a gang called the Saints. They’d tried to recruit Manny too, who, though younger, was tougher than Pancho, but Manny had no use for gangs. “I already belong to the Loners,” he said.

    Pancho believed in the girl in ice. In sixth grade, Sister Joachim, the ancient nun in charge of the altar boys, had told him the girl should be canonized and that she’d secretly written to the pope informing him that already there had been miracles and cures. “All the martyrs didn’t die in Rome,” she’d told Pancho. “They’re still suffering today in China and Russia and Korea and even here in your own neighborhood.” Like all nuns she loved Pancho. Dressed in his surplice and cassock he looked as if he should be beatified himself, a young St. Sebastian or Juan de la Cruz, the only altar boy in the history of the parish to spend his money on different-colored gym shoes so they would match the priest’s vestments — red for martyrs, white for feast days, black for requiems. The nuns knew he punished himself during Lent, offering up his pain for the poor souls in purgatory.

    Their love for Pancho had made things impossible for Manny in the Catholic school. He seemed Pancho’s opposite in almost every way and dropped out after they’d held him back in sixth grade. He switched to public school, but mostly he hung out on the streets.

    “I believe she worked miracles right in this neighborhood, man,” Pancho said.

    “Bullshit, man. Like what miracles?” Manny wanted to know.

    “Okay, man, you know Big Antek,” Pancho said.

    “Big Antek the wino?”

    They all knew Big Antek. He bought them beer. He’d been a butcher in every meat market in the neighborhood, but drunkenly kept hacking off pieces of his hands, and finally quit completely to become a full-time alky.

    Big Antek had told Pancho about working on Kedzie Avenue when it was still mostly people from the old country and he had found a job at a Czech meat market with sawdust on the floor and skinned rabbits in the window. He wasn’t there a week when he got so drunk he passed out in the freezer and when he woke the door was locked and everyone was gone. It was Saturday and he knew they wouldn’t open again until Monday and by then he’d be stiff as a two-by-four. He was already shivering so badly he couldn’t stand still or he’d fall over. He figured he’d be dead already except that his blood was half alcohol. Parts of him were going numb and he started staggering around, bumping past hanging sides of meat, singing, praying out loud, trying to let the fear out before it became panic. He knew it was hopeless, but he was looking anyway for some place to smash out, some plug to pull, something to stop the cold. At the back of the freezer, behind racks of meat, he found a cooler. It was an old one, the kind that used to stand packed with blocks of ice and bottles of beer in taverns during the war. And seeing it, Big Antek suddenly remembered a moment from his first summer back from the Pacific, discharged from the hospital in Manila and back in Buddy’s lounge on Twenty-fourth Street, kitty-corner from a victory garden where a plaque erroneously listed his name among the parish war dead. It was an ordinary moment, nothing dramatic like his life flashing before his eyes, but the memory filled him with such clarity that the freezer became dreamlike beside it. The ball game was on the radio over at Buddy’s, DiMaggio in center again, while Bing Crosby crooned from the jukebox, which was playing at the same time. Antek was reaching into Buddy’s cooler, up to his elbow in ice water feeling for a beer, while looking out through the open tavern door that framed Twenty-fourth Street as if it were a movie full of girls blurred in brightness, slightly overexposed blondes, a movie he could step into any time he chose now that he was home; but right at this moment he was taking his time, stretching it out until it encompassed his entire life, the cold bottles bobbing away from his fingertips, clunking against the ice, until finally he grabbed one, hauled it up dripping, wondering what he’d grabbed — a Monarch or Yusay Pilsner or Fox Head 400—then popped the cork in the opener on the side of the cooler, the foam rising as he tilted his head back and let it pour down his throat, privately celebrating being alive. That moment was what drinking had once been about. It was a good thing to be remembering now when he was dying with nothing else to do about it. He had the funny idea of climbing inside the cooler and going to sleep to continue the memory like a dream. The cooler was thick with frost, so white it seemed to glow. Its lid had been replaced with a slab of dry ice that smoked even within the cold of the freezer, reminding Antek that as kids they’d always called it hot ice. He nudged it aside. Beneath it was a block of ice as clear as if the icemen had just delivered it. There was something frozen inside. He glanced away but knew already, immediately, it was a body. He couldn’t move away. He looked again. The longer he stared, the calmer he felt. It was a girl. He could make out her hair, not just blonde but radiating gold like a candle flame behind a window in winter. Her breasts were bare. The ice seemed even clearer. She was beautiful and dreamy looking, not dreamy like sleeping, but the dreamy look DPs sometimes get when they first come to the city. As long as he stayed beside her he didn’t shiver. He could feel the blood return; he was warm as if the smoldering dry ice really was hot. He spent the weekend huddled against her, and early Monday morning when the Czech opened the freezer he said to Antek, “Get out…you’re fired.” That’s all either one of them said.

    “You know what I think,” Pancho said. “They moved her body from the icehouse to the butcher shop because the cops checked, man.”

    “You know what I think,” Manny said, “I think you’re doing so much shit that even the winos can bullshit you.”

    They looked hard at one another, Manny especially looking bad because of a beard he was trying to grow that was mostly stubble except for a black knot of hair frizzing from the cleft under his lower lip — a little lip beard like a jazz musician’s — and Pancho covered in crosses, a wooden one dangling from a leather thong over his open shirt, and small gold cross on a fine gold chain tight about his throat, and a tiny platinum cross in his right earlobe, and a faded India-ink cross tattooed on his wrist where one would feel for a pulse.

    “He got a cross-shaped dick,” Manny said.

    “Only when I got a hard-on, man,” Pancho said, grinning, and they busted up.

    “Hey, Eddie, man,” Pancho said, “what you think of all this, man?”

    Kapusta just shrugged as he always did. Not that he didn’t have any ideas exactly, or that he didn’t care. That shrug was what Kapusta believed.

    “Yeah. Well, man,” Pancho said, “I believe there’s saints, and miracles happening everywhere only everybody’s afraid to admit it. I mean like Ralph’s little brother, the blue baby who died when he was eight. He knew he was dying all his life, man, and never complained. He was a saint. Or Big Antek who everybody says is a wino, man. But he treats everybody as human beings. Who you think’s more of a saint — him or the president, man? And Mrs. Corillo who everybody thought was crazy because she was praying loud all the time. Remember? She kneeled all day praying for Puerto Rico during that earthquake — the one Roberto Clemente crashed on the way to, going to help. Remember that, man? Mrs. Corillo prayed all day and they thought she was still praying at night and she was kneeling there dead. She was a saint, man, and so’s Roberto Clemente. There should be like a church, St. Roberto Clemente. With a statue of him in his batting stance by the altar. Kids could pray to him at night. That would mean something to them.”

    “The earthquake wasn’t in Puerto Rico, man,” Manny told him, “and I don’t believe no streetcar’d stop for somebody carrying a dead person.”

    Amnesia

    It was hard to believe there ever were streetcars. The city back then, the city of their fathers, which was as far back as a family memory extended, even the city of their childhoods, seemed as remote to Eddie and Manny as the capital of some foreign country.

    The past collapsed about them — decayed, bulldozed, obliterated. They walked past block-length gutted factories, past walls of peeling, multicolored doors hammered up around flooded excavation pits, hung out in half-boarded storefronts of groceries that had shut down when they were kids, dusty cans still stacked on the shelves. Broken glass collected everywhere, mounding like sand in the little, sunken front yards and gutters. Even the church’s stained-glass windows were patched with plywood.

    They could vaguely remember something different before the cranes and wrecking balls gradually moved in, not order exactly, but rhythms: five-o’clock whistles, air-raid sirens on Tuesdays, Thursdays when the stockyards blew over like a brown wind of boiling hooves and bone, at least that’s what people said, screwing up their faces: “Phew! They’re making glue today!”

    Streetcar tracks were long paved over; black webs of trolley wires vanished. So did the victory gardens that had become weed beds taking the corroded plaques with the names of neighborhood dead with them.

    Things were gone they couldn’t remember but missed; and things were gone they weren’t sure ever were there — the pickle factory by the railroad tracks where a DP with a net worked scooping rats out of the open vats, troughs for ragmen’s horses, ragmen and their wooden wagons, knife sharpeners pushing screeching whetstones up alleys hollering “Scissors! Knives!” hermits living in cardboard shacks behind billboards.

    At times, walking past the gaps, they felt as if they were no longer quite there themselves, half-lost despite familiar street signs, shadows of themselves superimposed on the present, except there was no present — everything either rubbled past or promised future — and they were walking as if floating, getting nowhere as if they’d smoked too much grass.

    That’s how it felt those windy nights that fall when Manny and Eddie circled the county jail. They’d float down California past the courthouse, Bridwell Correctional, the auto pound, Communicable Disease Hospital, and then follow the long, curving concrete wall of the prison back toward Twenty-sixth Street, sharing a joint, passing it with cupped hands, ready to flip it if a cop should cruise by, but one place you could count on not to see cops was outside the prison.

    Nobody was there; just the wall, railroad tracks, the river, and the factories that lined it — boundaries that remained intact while neighborhoods came and went.

    Eddie had never noticed any trees, but swirls of leaves scuffed past their shoes. It was Kapusta’s favorite weather, wild, blowing nights that made him feel free, flagpoles knocking in the wind, his clothes flapping like flags. He felt both tight and loose, and totally alive even walking down a street that always made him sad. It was the street that followed the curve of the prison wall, and it didn’t have a name. It was hardly a street at all, more a shadow of the wall, potholed, puddled, half-paved, rutted with rusted railroad tracks.

    “Trains used to go down this street.” Manny said.

    “I seen tanks going down this street.”

    “Tank cars?”

    “No, army tanks,” Kapusta said.

    “Battleships too, Eduardo?” Manny asked seriously. Then the wind ripped a laugh from his mouth that was loud enough to carry over the prison wall.

    Kapusta laughed loud too. But he could remember tanks, camouflaged with netting, rumbling on flatcars, their cannons outlined by the red lanterns of the dinging crossing gates that were down all along Twenty-sixth Street. It was one of the first things he remembered. He must have been very small. The train seemed endless. He could see the guards in the turrets on the prison wall watching it, the only time he’d ever seen them facing the street. “Still sending them to Korea or someplace,” his father had said, and for years after Eddie believed you could get to Korea by train. For years after, he would wake in the middle of the night when it was quiet enough to hear the trains passing blocks away, and lie in bed listening, wondering if the tanks were rumbling past the prison, if not to Korea then to some other war that tanks went to at night; and he would think of the prisoners in their cells locked up for their violence with knives and clubs and cleavers and pistols, and wonder if they were lying awake, listening too as the netted cannons rolled by their barred windows. Even as a child Eddie knew the names of men inside there: Milo Hermanski, who had stabbed some guy in the eye in a fight at Andy’s Tap; Billy Gomez, who set the housing project on fire every time his sister Gina got gang-banged; Ziggy’s uncle, the war hero, who one day blew off the side of Ziggy’s mother’s face while she stood ironing her slip during an argument over a will; and other names of people he didn’t know but had heard about — Benny Bedwell, with his “Elvis” sideburns, who may have killed the Grimes sister; Mafia hit men; bank robbers; junkies; perverts; murderers on death row — he could sense them lying awake listening, could feel the tension of their sleeplessness, and Pancho lay among them now as Eddie and Manny walked outside the wall.

    They stopped again as they’d been stopping and yelled together: “Pancho, Panchooooooo,” dragging out the last vowel the way they had as kids standing on the sidewalk calling up at one another’s windows, as if knocking at the door were not allowed.

    “Pancho, we’re out here, brother, me and Eddie,” Manny shouted. “Hang tough, man, we ain’t forgetting you.”

    Nobody answered. They kept walking, stopping to shout at intervals the way they had been doing almost every night.

    “If only we knew what building he was in,” Eddie said.

    They could see the upper stories of the brick buildings rising over the wall, their grated windows low lit, never dark, floodlights on the roof glaring down.

    “Looks like a factory, man,” Eddie said. “Looks like the same guy who planned the Harvester foundry on Western did the jail.”

    “You rather be in the army or in there?” Manny asked.

    “No way they’re getting me in there,” Eddie said.

    That was when Eddie knew Pancho was crazy, when the judge had given Pancho a choice at the end of his trial.

    “You’re a nice-looking kid,” the judge had said, “too nice for prison. What do you want to do with your life?”

    “Pose for holy cards,” Pancho said, “St. Joseph is my specialty.” Pancho was standing there wearing the tie they had brought him wound around his head like an Indian headband. He was wearing a black satin jacket with the signs of the zodiac on the back.

    “I’m going to give you a chance to straighten out, to gain some self-respect. The court’s attitude would be very sympathetic to any signs of self-direction and patriotism, joining the army, for instance.”

    “I’m a captain,” Pancho told him.

    “The army or jail, which is it?”

    “I’m a captain, man, soy capitán, capitán,” Pancho insisted, humming “La Bamba” under his breath.

    “You’re a misfit.”

    Manny was able to visit Pancho every three weeks. Each time it got worse. Sometimes Pancho seemed hardly to recognize him, looking away, refusing to meet Manny’s eyes the whole visit. Sometimes he’d cry. For a while at first he wanted to know how things were in the neighborhood. Then he stopped asking, and when Manny tried to tell him the news Pancho would get jumpy, irritable, and lapse into total silence. “I don’t wanna talk about out there, man,” he told Manny. “I don’t wanna remember that world until I’m ready to step into it again. You remember too much in here you go crazy, man. I wanna forget everything, like I never existed.”

    “His fingernails are gone, man,” Manny told Eddie. “He’s gnawing on himself like a rat, and when I ask him what’s going down all he’ll say is ‘I’m locked in hell, my angel’s gone, I’ve lost my luck’—bullshit like that, you know? Last time I seen him he says, ‘I’m gonna kill myself, man, if they don’t stop hitting on me.’”

    “I can’t fucking believe it. I can’t fucking believe he’s in there,” Eddie said. “He should be in a monastery somewhere; he should’ve been a priest. He had a vocation.”

    “He had a vocation to be an altar boy, man,” Manny said, spitting it out as if he was disgusted by what he was saying, talking down about his own brother. “It was that nuns-and-priests crap that messed up his head. He was happy being an altar boy, man, if they’d’ve let him be an altar boy all his life he’d still be happy.”

    By the time they were halfway down the nameless street it was drizzling a fine, misty spray, and Manny was yelling in Spanish, “Estamos contigo, hermano! San Roberto Clemente te ayudará!”

    They broke into “La Bamba,” Eddie singing in Spanish too, not sure exactly what he was singing, but it sounded good: “Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán, capitán, ay, ay Bamba! ay, ay, Bamba!” He had lived beside Spanish in the neighborhood all his life, and every so often a word got through, like juilota, which was what Manny called pigeons when they used to hunt them with slingshots under the railroad bridges. It seemed a perfect word to Eddie, one in which he could hear both their cooing and the whistling rush of their wings. He didn’t remember any words like that in Polish, which his grandma had spoken to him when he was little, and which, Eddie had been told, he could once speak too.

    By midnight they were at the end of their circuit, emerging from the unlighted, nameless street, stepping over tracks that continued to curve past blinded switches. Under the streetlights on Twenty-sixth the prison wall appeared rust stained, oozing at the cracks. The wire spooled at the top of the wall looked rusty in the wet light, as did the tracks as if the rain were rusting everything overnight.

    They stopped on the corner of Twenty-sixth where the old icehouse stood across the nameless street from the prison. One could still buy ice from a vending machine in front. Without realizing it, Eddie guarded his breathing as if still able to detect the faintest stab of ammonia, although it had been a dozen years since the louvered fans on the icehouse roof had clacked through clouds of vapor.

    “Padrecitooooo!” they both hollered.

    Their voices bounced back off the wall.

    They stood on the corner by the icehouse as if waiting around for someone. From there they could stare down Twenty-sixth — five dark blocks, then an explosion of neon at Kedzie Avenue: taco places, bars, a street plugged in, winking festive as a pinball machine, traffic from it coming toward them in the rain.

    The streetlights surged and flickered.

    “You see that?” Eddie asked. “They used to say when the streetlights flickered it meant they just fried somebody in the electric chair.”

    “So much bullshit,” Manny said. “Compadre, no te rajes!” he yelled at the wall.

    “Whatcha tell him?”

    “It sounds different in English,” Manny said. “‘Godfather, do not give up.’ It’s words from an old song.”

    Kapusta stepped out into the middle of Twenty-sixth and stood in the misting drizzle squinting at Kedzie through cupped hands, as if he held binoculars. He could make out the traffic light way down there changing to green. He could almost hear the music from the bars that would serve them without asking for IDs so long as Manny was there. “You thirsty by any chance, man?” he asked.

    “You buyin’ by any chance, man?” Manny said, grinning.

    “Buenas noches, Pancho,” they hollered. “Catch you tomorrow, man.”

    “Good night, guys,” a falsetto voice echoed back from over the wall.

    “That ain’t Pancho,” Manny said.

    “Sounds like the singer on old Platters’ records,” Eddie said. “Ask him if he knows Pancho, man.”

    “Hey, you know a guy named Pancho Santora?” Manny called.

    “Oh, Pancho?” the voice inquired.

    “Yeah, Pancho.”

    “Oh, Cisco!” the voice shouted. They could hear him cackling. “Hey, baby, I don’t know no Pancho. Is that rain I smell?”

    “It’s raining,” Eddie hollered.

    “Hey, baby, tell me something. What’s it like out there tonight?”

    Manny and Eddie looked at each other. “Beautiful!” they yelled together.

    Grief

    There was never a requiem, but by Lent everyone knew that one way or another Pancho was gone. No wreaths, but plenty of rumors: Pancho had hung himself in his cell; his throat had been slashed in the showers; he’d killed another inmate and was under heavy sedation in a psycho ward at Kankakee. And there was talk he’d made a deal and was in the army, shipped off to a war he had sworn he’d never fight; that he had turned snitch and had been secretly relocated with a new identity; or that he had become a trustee and had simply walked away while mowing the grass in front of the courthouse, escaped maybe to Mexico, or maybe just across town to the North Side around Diversey where, if one made the rounds of the leather bars, they might see someone with Pancho’s altar-boy eyes staring out from the makeup of a girl.

    Some saw him late at night like a ghost haunting the neighborhood, collar up, in the back of the church lighting a vigil candle; or veiled in a black mantilla, speeding past, face floating by on a greasy El window.

    Rumors were becoming legends, but there was never a wake, never an obituary, and no one knew how to mourn a person who had just disappeared.

    For a while Manny disappeared too. He wasn’t talking, and Kapusta didn’t ask. They had quit walking around the prison wall months before, around Christmas when Pancho refused to let anyone, even Manny, visit. But their night walks had been tapering off before that.

    Eddie remembered the very last time they had walked beside the wall together. It was in December, and he was frozen from standing around a burning garbage can on Kedzie, selling Christmas trees. About ten, when the lot closed, Manny came by and they stopped to thaw out at the Carta Blanca. A guy named José kept buying them whiskeys, and they staggered out after midnight into a blizzard.

    “Look at this white bullshit,” Manny said.

    Walking down Twenty-sixth they stopped to fling snowballs over the wall. Then they decided to stand there singing Christmas carols. Snow was drifting against the wall, erasing the street that had hardly been there. Eddie could tell Manny was starting to go silent. Manny would get the first few words into a carol, singing at the top of his voice, then stop as if choked by the song. His eyes stayed angry when he laughed. Everything was bullshit to him, and finally Eddie couldn’t talk to him anymore. Stomping away from the prison through fresh snow, Eddie had said, “If this keeps up, man, I’ll need boots.”

    “It don’t have to keep up, man,” Manny snapped. “Nobody’s making you come, man. It ain’t your brother.”

    “All I said is I’ll need boots, man,” Eddie said.

    “You said it hopeless, man; things are always fucking hopeless to you.”

    “Hey, you’re the big realist, man,” Eddie told him.

    “I never said I was no realist,” Manny mumbled.

    Kapusta hadn’t had a lot of time since then. He had dropped out of school again and was loading trucks at night for UPS. One more semester didn’t matter, he figured, and he needed some new clothes, cowboy boots, a green leather jacket. The weather had turned drizzly and mild — a late Easter but an early spring. Eddie had heard Manny was hanging around by himself, still finding bullshit everywhere, only worse. Now he muttered as he walked like some crazy, bitter old man, or one of those black guys reciting the gospel to buildings, telling off posters and billboards, neon signs, stoplights, passing traffic — bullshit, all of it bullshit.

    It was Tuesday in Holy Week, the statues inside the church shrouded in violet, when Eddie slipped on his green leather jacket and walked over to Manny’s before going to work. He rang the doorbell, then stepped outside in the rain and stood on the sidewalk under Manny’s windows, watching cars pass.

    After a while Manny came down the stairs and slammed out the door.

    “How you doin’, man?” Eddie said as if they’d just run into each other by accident.

    Manny stared at him. “How far’d you have to chase him for that jacket, man?” he said.

    “I knew you’d dig it.” Eddie smiled.

    They went out for a few beers later that night, after midnight, when Eddie was through working, but instead of going to a bar they ended up just walking. Manny had rolled a couple bombers and they walked down the boulevard along California watching the headlights flash by like a procession of candles. Manny still wasn’t saying much, but they were passing the reefer like having a conversation. At Thirty-first, by the Communicable Disease Hospital, Eddie figured they would follow the curve of the boulevard toward the bridge on Western, but Manny turned as if out of habit toward the prison.

    They were back walking along the wall. There was still old ice from winter at the base of it.

    “The only street in Chicago where it’s still winter,” Eddie mumbled.

    “Remember yelling?” Manny said, almost in a whisper.

    “Sure,” Eddie nodded.

    “Called, joked, prayed, sang Christmas songs, remember that night, how cold we were, man?”

    “Yeah.”

    “What a bunch of stupid bullshit, huh?”

    Eddie was afraid Manny was going to start the bullshit stuff again. Manny had stopped and stood looking at the wall.

    Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled, “Hey! You dumb fuckers in there! We’re back! Can you hear me? Hey, wake up, niggers, hey, spics, hey, honkies, you buncha fuckin’ monkeys in cages, hey! We’re out here free!”

    “Hey, Manny, come on, man,” Eddie said.

    Manny uncupped his hands, shook his head, and smiled. They took a few steps, then Manny whirled back again. “We’re out here free, man! We’re smokin’ reefer, drinking cold beer while you’re in there, you assholes! We’re on our way to fuck your wives, man, your girlfriends are giving us blow jobs while you jack-offs flog it. Hey, man, I’m pumping your old lady out here right now. She likes it in the ass like you!”

    “What are you doing, man?” Eddie was pleading. “Take it easy.”

    Manny was screaming his lungs out, almost incoherent, shouting every filthy thing he could think of, and voices, the voices they’d never heard before, had begun shouting back from the other side of the wall.

    “Shadup! Shadup! Shadup out there, you crazy fuck!” came the voices.

    “She’s out here licking my balls while you’re punking each other through the bars of your cage!”

    “Shadup!” they were yelling, and then a voice howling over the others: “I’ll kill you, motherfucker! When I get out you’re dead!”

    “Come on out,” Manny was yelling. “Come and get me, you pieces of shit, you sleazeballs, you scumbag cocksuckers, you creeps are missing it all, your lives are wasted garbage!”

    Now there were too many voices to distinguish, whole tiers, whole buildings yelling and cursing and threatening, shadup, shadup, shadup, almost a chant, and then the searchlight from the guardhouse slowly turned and swept the street.

    “We gotta get outa here,” Eddie said, pulling Manny away. He dragged him to the wall, right up against it where the light couldn’t follow, and they started to run, stumbling along the banked strip of filthy ice, dodging stunted trees that grew out at odd angles, running toward Twenty-sixth until Eddie heard the sirens.

    “This way, man,” he panted, yanking Manny back across the nameless street, jumping puddles and tracks, cutting down a narrow corridor between abandoned truck docks seconds before a squad car, blue dome light revolving, sped past.

    They jogged behind the truck docks, not stopping until they came up behind the icehouse. Manny’s panting sounded almost like laughing, the way people laugh after they’ve hurt themselves.

    “I hate those motherfuckers,” Manny gasped, “all of them, the fucking cops and guards and fucking wall and the bastards behind it. All of them. That must be what makes me a realist, huh, Eddie? I fucking hate them all.”

    Sometimes a thing wasn’t a sin — if there was such a thing as sin — Eddie thought, until it’s done a second time. There were accidents, mistakes that could be forgiven once; it was repeating them that made them terribly wrong. That was how Eddie felt about going back the next night.

    Manny said he was going whether Eddie came or not, so Eddie went, afraid to leave Manny on his own, even though he’d already had trouble trying to get some sleep before going to work. Eddie could still hear the voices yelling from behind the wall and dreamed they were all being electrocuted, electrocuted slowly, by degrees of their crimes, screaming with each surge of current and flicker of streetlights as if in a hell where electricity had replaced fire.

    Standing on the dark street Wednesday night, outside the wall again, felt like an extension of his nightmare: Manny raging almost out of control, shouting curses and insults, baiting them over the wall the way a child tortures penned watchdogs, until he had what seemed like the entire west side of the prison howling back, the guards sweeping the street with searchlights, sirens wailing toward them from both Thirty-first and Twenty-sixth.

    This time they raced down the tracks that curved toward the river, picking their way in the dark along the junkyard bank, flipping rusted cables of moored barges, running through the fire truck graveyard, following the tracks across the blackened trestles where they’d once shot pigeons and from which they could gaze across the industrial prairie that stretched behind factories all the way to the skyline of downtown. The skyscrapers glowed like luminescent peaks in the misty spring night. Manny and Eddie stopped in the middle of the trestle and leaned over the railing catching their breath.

    “Downtown ain’t as far away as I used to think when I was a kid.” Manny panted.

    “These tracks’ll take you right there,” Eddie said quietly, “to railroad yards under the street, right by the lake.”

    “How you know, man?”

    “A bunch of us used to hitch rides on the boxcars in seventh grade.” Eddie was talking very quietly, looking away.

    “I usually take the bus, you know?” Manny tried joking.

    “I ain’t goin’ back there with you tomorrow,” Eddie said. “I ain’t goin’ back with you ever.”

    Manny kept staring off toward the lights downtown as if he hadn’t heard. “Okay,” he finally said, more to himself, as if surrendering. “Okay, how about tomorrow we do something else, man?”

    Nostalgia

    The next night, Thursday, Eddie overslept and called in sick for work. He tried to get back to sleep but kept falling into half-dreams in which he could hear the voices shouting behind the prison wall. Finally he got up and opened a window. It was dark out. A day had passed almost unnoticed, and now the night felt as if it were a part of the night before, and the night before a part of the night before that, all connected by his restless dreams, fragments of the same continuous night.

    Eddie had said that at some point: “It’s like one long night,” and later Manny had said the same thing as if it had suddenly occurred to him.

    They were strung out almost from the start, drifting stoned under the El tracks before Eddie even realized they weren’t still sitting on the stairs in front of Manny’s house. That was where Eddie had found him, watching traffic, taking sips out of a bottle of Gallo into which Manny had dropped several hits of speed.

    Cars gunned by with their windows rolled down and radios playing loud. It sounded like a summer night.

    “Ain’t you hot wearin’ that jacket, man?” Manny asked him.

    “Now that you mention it,” Eddie said. He was sweating.

    Eddie took his leather jacket off and they knotted a handkerchief around one of the cuffs, then slipped the Gallo bottle down the sleeve. They walked along under the El tracks passing a joint. A train, only two cars long, rattled overhead.

    “So what we doing, Eduardo?” Manny kept repeating.

    “Walking,” Eddie said.

    “I feel like doing something, you know?”

    “We are doing something,” Eddie insisted.

    Eddie led them over to the Coconut Club on Twenty-second. They couldn’t get in, but Eddie wanted to look at the window with its neon-green palm tree and winking blue coconuts.

    “That’s maybe my favorite window,” he said.

    “You drag me all the way here to see your favorite window, man?!” Manny said.

    “It’s those blue coconuts,” Eddie tried explaining. His mouth was dry, but he couldn’t stop talking. He started telling Manny how he had collected windows from the time he was a little kid, even though talking about it made it sound as if windows were more important to him than they actually were. Half the time he was only vaguely aware of collecting them. He would see a window from a bus, like the Greek butcher shop on Halsted with its pyramid of lamb skulls, and make a mental photograph of it. He had special windows all over the city. It was how he held the city together in his mind.

    “I’d see all these windows from the El,” Eddie said, “when I’d visit my busha, my grandma. Like I remember we’d pass this one building where the curtains were all slips hanging by their straps — black ones, white ones, red ones. At night you could see the light bulbs shining through the lace tops. My busha said Gypsies lived there.” Eddie was walking down the middle of the street, jacket flung over his shoulder, staring up at the windows as if looking for the Gypsies as he talked.

    “Someday they’re gonna get you as a peeper, man.” Manny laughed. “And when they do, don’t try explaining to them about this thing of yours for windows, Eduardo.”

    They were walking down Spaulding back toward Twenty-sixth. The streetlights beamed brighter and brighter, and Manny put his sunglasses on. A breeze was blowing that felt warmer than the air, and they took their shirts off. They saw rats darting along the curb into the sewer on the other side of the street and put their shirts back on.

    “The rats get crazy where they start wrecking these old buildings,” Manny said.

    The cranes and wrecking balls and urban-renewal signs were back with the early spring. They walked around a barricaded site. Water trickled along the gutters from an open hydrant, washing brick dust and debris toward the sewers.

    “Can you smell that, man?” Manny asked him, suddenly excited. “I can smell the lake through the hydrant.”

    “Smells like rust to me,” Eddie said.

    “I can smell fish! Smelt — the smelt are in! I can smell them right through the hydrant!”

    “Smelt?” Eddie said.

    “You ain’t ever had smelt?” Manny asked. “Little silver fish!”

    They caught the Twenty-sixth Street bus — the Polish Zephyr, people called it — going east toward the lake. The back of the bus was empty. They sat in the swaying, long backseat, taking hits out of the bottle in Eddie’s sleeve.

    “It’s usually too early for them yet, but they’re out there, Eduardo,” Manny kept reassuring him, as if they were actually going fishing.

    Eddie nodded. He didn’t know anything about smelt. The only fish he ate was canned tuna, but it felt good to be riding somewhere with the windows open and Manny acting more like his old self — sure of himself, laughing easily. Eddie still felt like talking, but his molars were grinding on speed.

    The bus jolted down the dark block past Kedzie and was flying when it passed the narrow street between the ice house and the prison, but Eddie and Manny caught a glimpse out the back window of the railroad tracks that curved down the nameless street. The tracks were lined with fuming red flares that threw a red reflection off the concrete walls. Eddie was sure the flares had been set there for them.

    Eddie closed his eyes and sank into the rocking of the bus. Even with his eyes closed he could see the reddish glare of the walls. The glare was ineradicable, at the back of his sockets. The wall had looked the same way it had looked in his dreams. They rode in silence.

    “It’s like one long night,” Eddie said somewhere along the way.

    His jaws were really grinding and his legs had forgotten gravity by the time they got to the lakefront. They didn’t know the time, but it must have been around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and the smelt fishers were still out. The lights of their kerosene lanterns reflected along the breakwater over the glossy black lake. Eddie and Manny could hear the water lapping under the pier and the fishermen talking in low voices in different languages.

    “My uncle Carlos would talk to the fish,” Manny said. “No shit. He’d talk to them in Spanish. He didn’t have no choice. Whole time here he couldn’t speak English. Said it made his brain stuck. We used to come fishing here all the time — smelt, perch, everything. I’d come instead of going to school. If they weren’t hitting, he’d start talking to them, singing them songs.”

    “Like what?” Eddie said.

    “He’d make them up. They were funny, man. It don’t come across in English: ‘Little silver ones fill up my shoes. My heart is lonesome for the fish of the sea.’ It was like very formal how he’d say it. He’d always call this the sea. I’d tell him it’s a lake, but he couldn’t be talked out of it. He was very stubborn — too stubborn to learn English. I ain’t been fishing since he went back to Mexico.”

    They walked to the end of the pier, then back past the fishermen. A lot of them were old men gently tugging lines between their fingers, lifting nets as if flying underwater kites, plucking the wriggling silver fish from the netting, the yellow light of their lamps glinting off the bright scales.

    “I told you they were out here,” Manny said.

    They sat on a concrete ledge, staring at the dark water, which rocked hypnotically below the soles of their dangling feet.

    “Feel like diving in?” Manny asked.

    Eddie had just raised the bottle to his lips and paused as if actually considering Manny’s question, then shook his head no and took a swallow.

    “One time right before my uncle went back to Mexico we came fishing at night for perch,” Manny said. “It was a real hot night, you know? And all these old guys fishing off the pier. No one getting a bite, man, and I started thinking how cool and peaceful it would be to just dive in the water with the fish, and then, like I just did it without even deciding to, clothes and all. Sometimes, man, I still remember that feeling underwater — like I could just keep swimming out, didn’t need air, never had to come up. When I couldn’t hold my breath no more and came up I could hear my uncle calling my name, and then all the old guys on the pier start calling my name to come back. What I really felt like doing was to keep swimming out until I couldn’t hear them, until I couldn’t even see their lanterns, man. I wanted to be way the fuck out alone in the middle of the lake when the sun came up. But then I thought about my uncle standing on the pier calling me, so I turned around.”

    They killed the bottle sitting on a concrete ledge and dropped it into the lake. Then they rode the El back. It was getting lighter without a dawn. The El windows were streaked with rain, the Douglas Avenue station smelled wet. It was a dark morning. They should have ended it then. Instead they sat at Manny’s kitchen table drinking instant coffee with canned milk. Eddie kept getting lost in the designs the milk would make, swirls and thunderclouds in his mug of coffee. He was numb and shaky. His jaw ached.

    “I’m really crashin’,” he told Manny.

    “Here,” Manny said. “Bring us down easier, man.”

    “I don’t like doing downers, man,” Eddie said.

    “’Ludes,” Manny said, “from Pancho’s stash.”

    They sat across the table from each other for a long time — talking, telling their memories and secrets — only Eddie was too numb to remember exactly what they said. Their voices — his own as well as Manny’s — seemed outside, removed from the center of his mind.

    At one point Manny looked out at the dark morning and said, “It still seems like last night.”

    “That’s right,” Eddie agreed. He wanted to say more but couldn’t express it. He didn’t try. Eddie didn’t believe it was what they said that was important. Manny could be talking Spanish; I could be talking Polish, Eddie thought. It didn’t matter. What meant something was sitting at the table together, wrecked together, still awake watching the rainy light spatter the window, walking out again, to the Prague bakery for bismarcks, past people under dripping umbrellas on their way to church.

    “Looks like Sunday,” Manny said.

    “Today’s Friday,” Eddie said. “It’s Good Friday.”

    “I seen ladies with ashes on their heads waiting for the bus a couple days ago,” Manny told him.

    They stood in the doorway of the Prague, out of the rain, eating their bismarcks. Just down from the church, the bakery was a place people crowded into after mass. Its windows displayed colored eggs and little frosted Easter lambs.

    “One time on Ash Wednesday I was eating a bismarck and Pancho made a cross on my forehead with the powdered sugar like it was ashes. When I went to church the priest wouldn’t give me real ashes,” Manny said with a grin.

    It was one of the few times Eddie had heard Manny mention Pancho. Now that they were outside, Eddie’s head felt clearer than it had in the kitchen.

    “I used to try and keep my ashes on until Good Friday,” he told Manny, “but they’d make me wash.”

    The church bells were ringing, echoes bouncing off the sidewalks as if deflected by the ceiling of clouds. The neighborhood felt narrower, compressed from above.

    “I wonder if it still looks the same in there,” Manny said as they passed the church.

    They stepped in and stood in the vestibule. The saints of their childhood stood shrouded in purple. The altar was bare, stripped for Good Friday. Old ladies, ignoring the new liturgy, chanted a litany in Polish.

    “Same as ever,” Eddie whispered as they backed out.

    The rain had almost let up. They could hear its accumulated weight in the wing-flaps of pigeons.

    “Good Friday was Pancho’s favorite holiday, man,” Manny said. “Everybody else always picked Christmas or Thanksgiving or Fourth of July. He hadda be different, man. I remember he used to drag me along visiting churches. You ever do that?”

    “Hell, yeah,” Eddie said. “Every Good Friday we’d go on our bikes. You hadda visit seven of them.”

    Without agreeing to it they walked from St. Roman’s to St. Michael’s, a little wooden Franciscan church in an Italian neighborhood; and from there to St. Casimir’s, a towering, mournful church with twin copper-green towers. Then, as if following an invisible trail, they walked north up Twenty-second toward St. Anne’s, St. Puis’s, St. Adalbert’s. At first they merely entered and left immediately, as if touching base, but their familiarity with small rituals quickly returned: dipping their fingers in the holy water font by the door, making the automatic sign of the cross as they passed the life-size crucified Christs that hung in the vestibules where old women and school kids clustered to kiss the spikes in the bronze or bloody plaster feet. By St. Anne’s, Manny removed his sunglasses, out of respect, the way one removes a hat. Eddie put them on. His eyes felt hard-boiled. The surge of energy he had felt at the bakery had burned out fast. While Manny genuflected to the altar, Eddie slumped in the back pew pretending to pray, drowsing off behind the dark glasses. It never occurred to Eddie to simply go home. His head ached, he could feel his heart racing, and would suddenly jolt awake wondering where Manny was. Manny would be off — jumpy, frazzled, still popping speed on the sly — exploring the church as if searching for something, standing among lines of parishioners waiting to kiss relics the priest wiped repeatedly clean with a rag of silk. Then Manny would be shaking Eddie awake. “How you holding up, man?”

    “I’m cool,” he’d say, and they would be back on the streets heading for another parish under the overcast sky. Clouds, a shade between slate and lilac, smoked over the spires and roofs; lights flashed on in the bars and taquerías. On Eighteenth Street a great blue neon fish leapt in the storefront window of a tiny ostenaria. Eddie tried to note the exact location to add to his window collection. They headed along a wall of viaducts to St. Procopius, where, Manny said, both he and Pancho had been baptized. The viaduct walls had been painted by schoolchildren into a mural that seemed to go for miles.

    “I don’t think we’re gonna make seven churches, man,” Eddie said. He was walking without lifting his feet, his hair plastered by a sweatlike drizzle. It was around 3:00 p.m. It had been 3:00 p.m. — Christ’s dark hour on the cross — inside the churches all day, but now it was turning 3:00 p.m. outside too. They could hear the ancient-sounding hymn “Tantum Ergo,” carrying from down the block.

    Eddie sunk into the last pew, kneeling in the red glow of vigil lights that brought back the red flicker of the flares they had seen from the window of the bus as it sped by the prison. Manny had already faded into the procession making the stations of the cross — a shuffling crowd circling the church, kneeling before each station while altar boys censed incense and the priest recited Christ’s agony. Old women answered with prayers like moans.

    Old women were walking on their knees up the marble aisle to kiss the relics. A few were crying, and Eddie remembered how back in grade school he had heard old women cry sometimes after confession, crying as if their hearts would break, and even as a child he had wondered how such old women could possibly have committed sins terrible enough to demand such bitter weeping. Most everything from that world had changed or disappeared, but the old women had endured — Polish, Bohemian, Spanish, he knew it didn’t matter; they were the same, dressed in black coats and babushkas the way holy statues wore violet, in constant mourning. A common pain of loss seemed to burn at the core of their lives, though Eddie had never understood exactly what it was they mourned. Nor how day after day they had sustained the intensity of their grief. He would have given up long ago. In a way he had given up, and the ache left behind couldn’t be called grief. He had no name for it. He had felt it before Pancho or anyone was lost, almost from the start of memory. If it was grief; it was grief for the living. The hymns, with their ancient, keening melodies and mysterious words, had brought the feeling back, but when he tried to discover the source, to give the feeling a name, it eluded him as always, leaving in its place nostalgia and triggered nerves.

    Oh God, he prayed, I’m really crashing.

    He was too shaky to kneel, so he stretched out on the pew, lying on his back, eyes shut behind sunglasses, until the church began to whirl. To control it he tried concentrating on the stained-glass window overhead. None of the windows that had ever been special for him were from a church. This one was an angel, its colors like jewels and coals. Afternoon seemed to be dying behind it, becoming part of the night, part of the private history that he and Manny continued between them like a pact. He could see night shining through the colors of the angel, dividing into bands as if the angel were a prism for darkness; the neon and wet streetlights illuminated its wingspread.

    Legends

    It started with ice.

    That’s how Big Antek sometimes began the story.

    At dusk a gang of little Mexican kids appeared with a few lumps of dry ice covered in a shoe box, as if they had caught a bird. Hot ice, they called it, though the way they said it sounded to Antek like hot eyes. Kids always have a way of finding stuff like that. One boy touched his tongue to a piece and screamed “Aye!” when it stuck. They watched the ice boil and fume in a rain puddle along the curb, and finally they filled a bottle part way with water, inserted the fragments of ice they had left, capped the bottle, and set it in the mouth of an alley waiting for an explosion. When it popped they scattered.

    Manny Santora and Eddie Kapusta came walking up the alley, wanting Antek to buy them a bottle of rum at Buddy’s. Rum instead of beer. They were celebrating, Kapusta said, but he didn’t say what. Maybe one of them had found a job or had just been fired, or graduated, or joined the army instead of waiting around to get drafted. It could be anything. They were always celebrating. Behind their sunglasses Antek could see they were high as usual, even before Manny offered him a drag off a reefer the size of a cigar.

    Probably nobody was hired or fired or had joined anything; probably it was just so hot they had a good excuse to act crazy. They each had a bottle of Coke they were fizzing up, squirting. Eddie had limes stuffed in his pockets and was pretending they were his balls. Manny had a plastic bag of the little ice cubes they sell at gas stations. It was half-melted, and they were scooping handfuls of cubes over each other’s heads, stuffing them down their jeans and yowling, rubbing ice on their chests and under their arms as if taking a cold shower. They looked like wild men — shirts hanging from their back pockets, handkerchiefs knotted around their heads, wearing sunglasses, their bodies slick with melted ice water and sweat; two guys in the prime of life going nowhere, both lean, Kapusta almost as tan as Santora, Santora with that frizzy beard under his lip, and Kapusta trying to juggle limes.

    They were drinking rum using a method Antek had never seen before, and he had seen his share of drinking — not just in the neighborhood — all over the world when he was in the navy, and not the Bohemian navy either like somebody would always say when he would start telling navy stories.

    They claimed they were drinking cuba libres, only they didn’t have glasses, so they were mixing the drinks in their mouths, starting with some little cubes, then pouring in rum, Coke, a squeeze of lime, and swallowing. Swallowing if one or the other didn’t suddenly bust up over some private joke, spraying the whole mouthful out, and both of them choking and coughing and laughing.

    “Hey, Antek, lemme build you a drink,” Manny kept saying, but Antek shook his head no thanks, and he wasn’t known for passing up too many.

    This was all going on in front of Buddy’s, everyone catching a blast of music and air-conditioning whenever the door opened. It was hot. The moths sizzled as soon as they hit Buddy’s buzzing orange sign. A steady beat of moths dropped like cinders on the blinking orange sidewalk where the kids were pitching pennies. Manny passed around what was left in the plastic bag of ice, and the kids stood sucking and crunching the cubes between their teeth.

    It reminded Antek of summers when the ice trucks still delivered to Buddy’s — flatbeds covered with canvas, the icemen, mainly DPs, wearing leather aprons. Their Popeye forearms, even in August, looked ruddy with cold. They would slide the huge, clear blocks off the tailgate so the whump reverberated through the hollow under the sidewalks, and deep in the ice the clarity shattered. Then with their ice hooks they’d lug the blocks across the sidewalk, trailing a slick, and boot them skidding down the chute into Buddy’s beery-smelling cellar. And after the truck pulled away, kids would pick the splinters from the curb and suck them as if they were ice-flavored Popsicles.

    Nobody seemed too interested when Antek tried to tell them about the ice trucks, or anything else about how the world had been, for that matter. Antek had been sick and had only recently returned from the VA hospital. Of all his wounds, sickness was the worst. He could examine his hacked butcher’s hands almost as kids from the neighborhood did, inspecting the stubs where his fingers had been as if they belonged to someone else, but there were places deep within himself that he couldn’t examine, yet where he could feel that something of himself far more essential than fingers was missing. He returned from the VA feeling old and as if the neighborhood had changed in the weeks he had been gone. People had changed. He couldn’t be sure, but they treated him differently, colder, as if he were becoming a stranger in the place he had grown up in, now, just when he most needed to belong.

    “Hey, Antek,” Manny said, “you know what you can tell me? That girl that saved your life in the meat freezer, did she have good tits?”

    “I tell you about a miracle and you ask me about tits?” Antek said. “I don’t talk about that anymore because now somebody always asks me did she have good tits. Go see.”

    Kids had been trying for years to sneak into the icehouse to see her. It was what the neighborhood had instead of a haunted house. Each generation had grown up with the story of how her father had ridden with her half-naked body on the streetcar. Even the nuns had heard Antek’s story about finding the girl still frozen in the meat freezer. The butcher shop in Kedzie had closed long ago, and the legend was that after the cops had stopped checking, her body had been moved at night back into the icehouse. But the icehouse wasn’t easy to break into. It had stood padlocked and heavily boarded for years.

    “They’re gonna wreck it,” Eddie said. “I went by on the bus and they got the crane out in front.”

    “Uh-oh, last chance, Antek,” Manny said. “If you’re sure she’s in there, maybe we oughta go save her.”

    “She’s in there,” Antek said. He noticed the little kids had stopped pitching pennies and were listening.

    “Well, you owe her something after what she done for you — don’t he, Eduardo?”

    The kids who were listening chuckled, then started to go back to their pennies.

    “You wanna go, I’ll go!” Antek said loudly.

    “All right, let’s go.”

    Antek got up unsteadily. He stared at Eddie and Manny. “You guys couldn’t loan me enough for a taste of wine just until I get my disability check?”

    The little kids tagged after them to the end of the block, then turned back bored. Manny and Eddie kept going, picking the pace up a step or two ahead of Antek, exchanging looks and grinning. But Antek knew that no matter how much they joked or what excuses they gave, they were going, like him, for one last look. They were just old enough to have seen the icehouse before it shut down. It was a special building, the kind a child couldn’t help but notice and remember — there, on the corner across the street from the prison, a factory that made ice, humming with fans, its louvered roof dripping and clacking, lost in acrid clouds of its own escaping vapor.

    The automatic ice machine in front had already been carted away. The doors were still padlocked, but the way the crane was parked it was possible for Manny and Eddie to climb the boom onto the roof.

    Antek waited below. He gazed up at the new Plexiglas guard turrets on the prison wall. From his angle all he could see was the bluish fluorescence of their lighting. He watched Manny and Eddie jump from the boom to the roof, high enough to stare across at the turrets like snipers, to draw a level bead on the backs of the guards, high enough to gaze over the wall at the dim, barred windows of the buildings that resembled foundries more than ever in the sweltering heat.

    Below, Antek stood swallowing wine, expecting more from the night than a condemned building. He didn’t know exactly what else he expected. Perhaps only a scent, like the stab of remembered ammonia he might have detected if he were still young enough to climb the boom. Perhaps the secret isolation he imagined Manny and Eddie feeling now, alone on the roof, as if lost in clouds of vapor. At street level, passing traffic drowned out the tick of a single cricket keeping time on the roof — a cricket so loud and insistent that Manny didn’t stop to worry about the noise when he kicked in the louvers. And Antek, though he had once awakened in a freezer, couldn’t imagine the shock of cold that Manny and Eddie felt as they dropped out of the summer night to the floor below.

    Earlier, on their way down Twenty-sixth, Manny had stopped to pick up an unused flare from along the tracks, and Antek pictured them inside now, Manny, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, holding the flare away from him like a Roman candle, its red glare sputtering off the beams and walls.

    There wasn’t much to see — empty corners, insulated pipes. Their breaths steamed. They tugged on their shirts. Instinctively, they traced the cold down a metal staircase. Cold was rising from the ground floor through the soles of their gym shoes.

    The ground floor was stacked to the ceiling with junked ice machines. A wind as from an enormous air conditioner was blowing down a narrow aisle between the machines. At the end of the aisle a concrete ramp slanted down to the basement.

    That was where Antek suspected they would end up, the basement, a cavernous space extending under the nameless street, slowly collapsing as if the thick, melting pillars of ice along its walls had served as its foundation. The floor was spongy with waterlogged sawdust. An echoing rain plipped from the ceiling. The air smelled thawed, and ached clammy in the lungs.

    “It’s fuckin’ freezing,” Eddie whispered.

    Manny swung the flare in a slow arc, its reflections glancing as if they stood among cracked mirrors. Blocks of ice, framed in defrosted freezer coils, glowed back faintly, like aquarium windows, from niches along the walls. They were melting unevenly and leaned at precarious angles. Several had already tottered to the sawdust, where they lay like quarry stones from a wrecked cathedral. Manny and Eddie picked their way among them, pausing to wipe the slick of water from their surfaces and peer into the ice, but deep networks of cracks refracted the light. They could see only frozen shadows and had to guess at the forms: fish, birds, shanks of meat, a dog, a cat, a chair, what appeared to be a bicycle.

    But Antek knew they would recognize her when they found her. There would be no mistaking the light. In the smoky, phosphorous glare her hair would reflect gold like a candle behind a frosted pane. He was waiting for them to bring her out. He had finished the wine and flung the pint bottle onto the street so that it shattered. The streets were empty. He was waiting patiently, and though he had nowhere else to be it was still a long wait. He would wait as long as it might take, but even so he wondered if there was time enough left to him for another miracle in his life. He could hear the cricket now, composing time instead of music, working its way headfirst from the roof down the brick wall. Listening to it, Antek became acutely aware of the silence of the prison across the street. He thought of all the men on the other side of the wall and wondered how many were still awake, listening to the cricket, waiting patiently as they sweated in the heavy night.

    Manny and Eddie, shivering, their hands burning numb from grappling with ice, unbarred the rear door that opened onto the loading platform behind the icehouse. They pushed out an old handcar and rolled it onto the tracks that came right up to the dock. They had already slid the block of ice onto the handcar and draped it with a canvas tarp. Even gently inching it on they had heard the ice cracking. The block of ice had felt too light for its size, fragile, ready to break apart.

    “It feels like we’re kidnapping somebody,” Eddie whispered.

    “Just think of it as ice.”

    “I can’t.”

    “We can’t just leave her here, Eduardo.”

    “What’ll we do with her?”

    “We’ll think of something.”

    “What about Antek?”

    “Forget him.”

    They pushed off. Rust slowed them at first, but as the tracks inclined toward the river they gained momentum. It was like learning to row. By the trestle they hit their rhythm. Speed became wind — hair blowing, shirts flapping open, the tarp billowing up off the ice. The skyline gleamed ahead, and though Manny couldn’t see the lake, he could feel it stretching beyond the skyscrapers; he could recall the sudden lightness of freedom he’d felt once when he had speared out underwater and glided effortlessly away, one moment expanding into another, while the flow of water cleansed him of memory, and not even the sound of his own breath disrupted the silence. The smelt would have disappeared to wherever they disappeared to, but the fishermen would still be sitting at the edge of the breakwater, their backs to the city, dreaming up fish. And if the fishermen still remembered his name, they might call it again repeatedly in a chorus of voices echoing out over the dark surface of the water, but this time, Manny knew, there would be no turning back. He knew now where they were taking her, where she would finally be released. They were rushing through waist-deep weeds, crossing the vast tracts of prairie behind the factories, clattering over bridges and viaducts. Below, streetlights shimmered watery in the old industrial neighborhoods. Shiny with sweat, the girl already melting free between them, they forced themselves faster, rowing like a couple of sailors.

Lost

    I remember, though I might have dreamed it, a radio show I listened to when we lived on Eighteenth Street above the taxidermist. It was a program in which kids phoned the station and reported something they’d lost — a code ring, a cap gun, a ball, a doll — always their favorite. And worse than lost toys, pets, not just dogs and cats, but hamsters, parakeets, dime store turtles with painted shells.

    I’d tune to the program by accident, then forget about it, and each time I rediscovered it, it made me feel as if I were reliving the time before. The lost pets would always make me think of the old Hungarian downstairs who, people said, skinned stray cats, and of my secret pets, the foxes in his murky shop window, their glass eyes glittering fiercely from a dusty jungle of ferns, and their lips retracted in a constant snarl.

    Magically, by the end of the program, everything would be found. I still don’t know how they accomplished this, and recall wondering if it would work to phone in and report something I’d always wanted as missing. For it seemed to me then that something one always wanted, but never had, was his all the same, and wasn’t it lost?

Pet Milk

    Today I’ve been drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow. It’s not that I enjoy the taste especially, but I like the way Pet milk swirls in the coffee. Actually, my favorite thing about Pet milk is what the can opener does to the top of the can. The can is unmistakable — compact, seamless looking, its very shape suggesting that it could condense milk without any trouble. The can opener bites in neatly, and the thick liquid spills from the triangular gouge with a different look and viscosity than milk. Pet milk isn’t real milk. The color’s off, to start with. There’s almost something of the past about it, like old ivory. My grandmother always drank it in her coffee. When friends dropped over and sat around the kitchen table, my grandma would ask, “Do you take cream and sugar?” Pet milk was the cream.

    There was a yellow plastic radio on her kitchen table, usually tuned to the polka station, though sometimes she’d miss it by half a notch and get the Greek station instead, or the Spanish, or the Ukrainian. In Chicago, where we lived, all the incompatible states of Europe were pressed together down at the staticky right end of the dial. She didn’t seem to notice, as long as she wasn’t hearing English. The radio, turned low, played constantly. Its top was warped and turning amber on the side where the tubes were. I remember the sound of it on winter afternoons after school, as I sat by her table watching the Pet milk swirl and cloud in the steaming coffee, and noticing, outside her window, the sky doing the same thing above the railroad yard across the street.

    And I remember, much later, seeing the same swirling sky in tiny liqueur glasses containing a drink called a King Alphonse: the crème de cacao rising like smoke in repeated explosions, blooming in kaleidoscopic clouds through the layer of heavy cream. This was in the Pilsen, a little Czech restaurant where my girlfriend, Kate, and I would go sometimes in the evening. It was the first year out of college for both of us, and we had astonished ourselves by finding real jobs — no more waitressing or pumping gas, the way we’d done in school. I was investigating credit references at a bank, and she was doing something slightly above the rank of typist for Hornblower & Weeks, the investment firm. My bank showed training films that emphasized the importance of suitable dress, good grooming, and personal neatness, even for employees like me, who worked at the switchboard in the basement. Her firm issued directives on appropriate attire — skirts, for instance, should cover the knees. She had lovely knees.

    Kate and I would sometimes meet after work at the Pilsen, dressed in our proper business clothes and still feeling both a little self-conscious and glamorous, as if we were impostors wearing disguises. The place had small, round oak tables, and we’d sit in a corner under a painting called “The Street Musicians of Prague” and trade future plans as if they were escape routes. She talked of going to grad school in Europe; I wanted to apply to the Peace Corps. Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.

    The waiters in the Pilsen wore short black jackets over long white aprons. They were old men from the old country. We went there often enough to have our own special waiter, Rudi, a name he pronounced with a rolled R. Rudi boned our trout and seasoned our salads, and at the end of the meal he’d bring the bottle of crème de cacao from the bar, along with two little glasses and a small pitcher of heavy cream, and make us each a King Alphonse right at our table. We’d watch as he’d fill the glasses halfway up with the syrupy brown liqueur, then carefully attempt to float a layer of cream on top. If he failed to float the cream, we’d get that one free.

    “Who was King Alphonse anyway, Rudi?” I sometimes asked, trying to break his concentration, and if that didn’t work I nudged the table with my foot so the glass would jiggle imperceptibly just as he was floating the cream. We’d usually get one on the house. Rudi knew what I was doing. In fact, serving the King Alphonses had been his idea, and he had also suggested the trick of jarring the table. I think it pleased him, though he seemed concerned about the way I’d stare into the liqueur glass, watching the patterns.

    “It’s not a microscope,” he’d say. “Drink.”

    He liked us, and we tipped extra. It felt good to be there and to be able to pay for a meal.

    Kate and I met at the Pilsen for supper on my twenty-second birthday. It was May, and unseasonably hot. I’d opened my tie. Even before looking at the dinner menu, we ordered a bottle of Mumm’s and a dozen oysters apiece. Rudi made a sly remark when he brought the oysters on platters of ice. They were freshly opened and smelled of the sea. I’d heard people joke about oysters being aphrodisiac but never considered it anything but a myth — the kind of idea they still had in the old country.

    We squeezed on lemon, added dabs of horseradish, slid the oysters into our mouths, and then rinsed the shells with champagne and drank the salty, cold juice. There was a beefy-looking couple eating schnitzel at the next table, and they stared at us with the repugnance that public oyster-eaters in the Midwest often encounter. We laughed and grandly sipped it all down. I was already half tipsy from drinking too fast, and starting to feel filled with a euphoric, aching energy. Kate raised a brimming oyster shell to me in a toast: “To the Peace Corps!”

    “To Europe!” I replied, and we clunked shells.

    She touched her wineglass to mine and whispered, “Happy birthday,” and then suddenly leaned across the table and kissed me.

    When she sat down again, she was flushed. I caught the reflection of her face in the glass-covered “The Street Musicians of Prague” above our table. I always loved seeing her in mirrors and windows. The reflections of her beauty startled me. I had told her that once, and she seemed to fend off the compliment, saying, “That’s because you’ve learned what to look for,” as if it were a secret I’d stumbled upon. But, this time, seeing her reflection hovering ghostlike upon an imaginary Prague was like seeing a future from which she had vanished. I knew I’d never meet anyone more beautiful to me.

    We killed the champagne and sat twining fingers across the table. I was sweating. I could feel the warmth of her through her skirt under the table and I touched her leg. We still hadn’t ordered dinner. I left money on the table and we steered each other out a little unsteadily.

    “Rudi will understand,” I said.

    The street was blindingly bright. A reddish sun angled just above the rims of the tallest buildings. I took my suit coat off and flipped it over my shoulder. We stopped in the doorway of a shoe store to kiss.

    “Let’s go somewhere,” she said.

    My roommate would already be home at my place, which was closer. Kate lived up north, in Evanston. It seemed a long way away.

    We cut down a side street, past a fire station, to a small park, but its gate was locked. I pressed close to her against the tall iron fence. We could smell the lilacs from a bush just inside the fence, and when I jumped for an overhanging branch my shirt sleeve hooked on a fence spike and tore, and petals rained down on us as the sprig sprang from my hand.

    We walked to the subway. The evening rush was winding down; we must have caught the last express heading toward Evanston. Once the train climbed from the tunnel to the elevated tracks, it wouldn’t stop until the end of the line, on Howard. There weren’t any seats together, so we stood swaying at the front of the car, beside the empty conductor’s compartment. We wedged inside, and I clicked the door shut.

    The train rocked and jounced, clattering north. We were kissing, trying to catch the rhythm of the ride with our bodies. The sun bronzed the windows on our side of the train. I lifted her skirt over her knees, hiked it higher so the sun shone off her thighs, and bunched it around her waist. She wouldn’t stop kissing. She was moving her hips to pin us to each jolt of the train.

    We were speeding past scorched brick walls, gray windows, back porches outlined in sun, roofs, and treetops — the landscape of the El I’d memorized from subway windows over a lifetime of rides: the podiatrist’s foot sign past Fullerton; the bright pennants of Wrigley Field, at Addison; ancient hotels with TRANSIENTS WELCOME signs on their flaking back walls; peeling and graffiti-smudged billboards; the old cemetery just before Wilson Avenue. Even without looking, I knew almost exactly where we were. Within the compartment, the sound of our quick breathing was louder than the clatter of tracks. I was trying to slow down, to make it all last, and when she covered my mouth with her hand I turned my face to the window and looked out.

    The train was braking a little from express speed, as it did each time it passed a local station. I could see blurred faces on the long wooden platform watching us pass — businessmen glancing up from folded newspapers, women clutching purses and shopping bags. I could see the expression on each face, momentarily arrested, as we flashed by. A high school kid in shirt sleeves, maybe sixteen, with books tucked under one arm and a cigarette in his mouth, caught sight of us, and in the instant before he disappeared he grinned and started to wave. Then he was gone, and I turned from the window, back to Kate, forgetting everything — the passing stations, the glowing late sky, even the sense of missing her — but that arrested wave stayed with me. It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.

.

[midori-laboratories]

Ashes In The Fall - Chapter 19: Paradise City IV

Book 2 of the Calendula Chronicles

Resident evil, Wesker X OC

Story Summary: Marigold Ashford escaped the mansion, only to face new incarceration with a familiar jailor. She may yet have to make a deal with the devil, if she can unearth what this Faustian bargain would cost her.

There is always something left to lose.

Chapter summary: Marigold takes an opportunity to place a secure call.

Seventeen years, and Poppy Turner (née Higgins) was still walking the perimeter of the estate. The Lady had left her the property in trust when she had left in the event of her…disappearance. The document had been co-signed by Alexander Ashford back in 1976, and no lawyer Spencer hired seemed particularly enthused about breaching a trust that was backed up by surprisingly alert, armed farmers.

Umbrella had managed to slip onto the property once or twice. They’d sent people to quietly enquire in the village about the nature of the estate. None came away with any satisfactory answers, and several learned entirely too much about the bloodlines of their neighbour’s sheep.

They found things that they seemed to be expecting. The ranges, bordering on public parkland, were left fallow, and allowed to be ‘discovered’. Just enough to confirm their expectations. After a year or so, Umbrella had seemed to lose interest.

Those who had lived on the estate were built cottages along the main road. Luther took it upon himself to train up a few livestock guardian puppies from a nearby flock, and regularly take them around the moors. Teaching them the lay of the land. The growing animals quickly found that there was refuge in the old priory, though it was never home. They’d rousted more than a few schoolchildren looking for ghosts in that wild and lonely moor.

Years ago, Marigold had planted roses in the priory at Poppy’s gentle prodding to get out of the house. She’d done so clumsily, a twenty-year-old heiress wilting under the weight of her own grief, cutting up her hands in the process. The Lady had not thought twice about it at the time; her cuts closed quickly, and the dirt washed away. The blood that had found their way into the roots though…

The roses had developed a strange life of their own. They seemed to lean toward those who had come under Lady Ashford’s influence, but lash out when under threat. The thorns they bore were sharper and longer than those Luther had kept up at the house, despite their sharing the same source. And if an intruder came…

Well. There was a reason it was better to keep outsiders clear of the place than to deal with a body. Marigold had long taken an old-world view of her condition, and the damned garden seemed determined to follow suit.

Sometimes Poppy walked the paths alone, her rifle open and loaded over her crooked arm. Sometimes Luther accompanied her. As the years passed, their children began to accompany them, never quite understanding the weight of the secret, but tickled that their family had a Secret Garden of their own to protect.

In the early 1990s, Umbrella’s interest had briefly flared once again. It seemed that Umbrella was treating the estate as an intelligence training exercise. The dogs, second-generation guardians, alerted them to the incursion, and Luther had taken a few potshots at a man creeping through the woods. That was the closest to real peril they had even got. Poppy had immediately got on the line to the youngest Lord Ashford, who had been finishing his studies in London back then. Afterward, no one else from the company had tried to break in.

Had they understood that the machinery of the Umbrella Corporation had grown to such an extent that they considered the matter of the Ashford estate a useless relic, they might have relaxed. As it stood, Poppy began to check in with Rockfort every few months - not to Lord Ashford directly, but with Harman, the old butler. Harman, who had attended the family back when it had been whole, and had departed with Alexander all those years ago.

Harman, who watched the garden grow from offshoots started in the priory, brought during Lady Ashford’s final visit. Harman had other priorities, of course. But his loyalty was sealed to the family as much as hers was. He watched as she watched, and waited.

They lived their lives. Their children began to grow up. They waited.

Then…the roses began to wake up.

It had been a subtle thing, starting late that summer. They had seemed….restless, almost. The dogs had whined nervously and refused to enter the priory, even though they had established their own safe corner, and it had always been a safe place to devour any rabbits they caught. Poppy’s blood ran cold at the sight.

She had called old Harman at Rockfort the next morning, off-schedule. Harman had been cagey, but he confirmed the same. Marigold had understood what she was doing more when she had planted the offshoot at the house, and it had bloomed under mindful care in a private garden.

Harman had seemed extremely nervous. Shaken. After more than a decade of watching Lord Ashford sink under the weight of the family legacy, something was happening.

That’s when she knew.

Lady Ashford, Marigold, somehow, was back. Escaped from whatever prison they had concocted over in America. As the weeks dragged in with no official word, Poppy’s daughter began to find news articles on the Internet about the strange murders that had been occurring in Raccoon City since the spring on the internet, and the disaster at Spencer Mansion.

Their concern only deepened. Something had gone terribly wrong, and Marigold had not -or could not - safely reach out on her own.

All they could do was wait.

----------

6:12 a.m.

Down, down down. Into the maelstrom, Marigold sank.

She’d been right. This was no place for serenity. The force that was rapidly consuming William Birkin was made of territorial rage. He, it, would have swatted her away with a vast sea of violence, costing her precious time to recenter and try again when his guard was up.

Oh, she was so very, very glad she was up here, and Birkin was securely locked behind steel and stone down there while she attempted this. There was no way she’d survive a direct encounter.

The experiences in the forest were nothing in comparison. Running into Marcus had been a confusing, fragmented, oily mess of a mind, one that she had just barely managed to ward off in her shocked state.

Wesker had initially maintained his distance, although that had been partially out of caution. Now, she could hardly trust that norm would be maintained, what with his increasing boldness. The scent of the T-virus had been getting stronger on him as well, now that she thought of it. Whether that was her influence, her increasing sensitivity, or simply the virus itself embedding itself deeper was both a question and a consequence she’d have to examine later.

Annette’s words, payment for a chance to maintain a dead zone within the NEST, rang out in her memory. You may wish you’d never woken up before long. I can’t imagine a more dangerous person alive holding your leash. The words had been bitter, but the sentiment was sincere.

This was like Sonnetroppe…were Sonnetroppe built on a foundation of steroids and cocaine. That high, piercing sensation heightened unbearably until she slammed into the gibbering remnants of William’s mind. All of the roiling, pent-up emotions of the last twenty years of his career were feeding into the virus. All he cared about was hunting down those who had wronged him…except that now included any human that he came across.

And what he was doing to them…nausea rose in Marigold. She swallowed hard, and slammed into him again.

Annette had better be ready for this, Marigold thought to herself. At the monster, she focused her will into a cold spike. That’s right, you little pissant. The real threat is in your head, not out there. Too bad for you that they didn’t let you play with the specimen, isn’t it?  What was left of William roared in pain, and Marigold snarled back at him, focusing that current of stay the hell down anew.

----------

In the office, Ada had lingered at the doorway when the still form of Marigold snarled quietly in her chair, and began to issue a quiet stream of somewhat archaic yet utterly filthy threats. Or Welsh. Possibly both. Her head had fallen forward. In the amber light of the streetlamps outside, Ada could spy the top of a blackening bruise peeking out the back of the woman’s collar. Was that a….

Ada blinked, then turned on her heel, muttering “nope,” under her breath, over and over again. She still had more than enough time on the clock to retrieve the plans from the library. Whatever bioweapon fuckery was happening in there was something that didn’t need her input for a good…eighteen minutes more.

If Ada got out of the city alive, she’d have to corner the other woman for a good, long talk.

----------

Marigold’s mind continued to strike down against the mutating creature like an open fist, slamming down with all of the pain and rage she had been siphoning off over the last several weeks as she had gone into survival mode. All of the uncertainty, all of the sense of being made prey to entitled bastards with too much time on their hands. Annette’s words to her, not half an hour earlier, rang out in her memory.

The strength behind the G-Virus was obscene. It was taking all of her focus and energy just to contain it, even as it began to quiet and cower under blows it could not source. The mind bucked and lashed wildly at her like a bull, threatening to break her grip over and over again. But it was newborn. Inexperienced.

Marigold, on the other hand, had been teaching herself to temper her strength for decades. Now that she was going to the wall, it felt like she had been wearing lead weights all her life, and they had just been lifted.

The minutes passed. The alarm on Marigold’s wrist beeped, just once. Her lip curled, just a little, and she went in for the kill.

Below, the remnants of William Birkin cowered against the wall, temporarily visited by an emotion that should have been obliterated by now: pure, reptilian fear. Some little predator (PLACIDIA), striking at him from within his own mind. They had refused to let her return to her own territory, and now she was striking at him from what he had claimed in absolute sovereignty as his. Little floating creature, sleeping creature, now made of nightmares and hate and ambushing PAIN.

Without a solid enemy to fight, William’s will began to falter, and it crept into a nearby lab where he had already implanted several nearby scientists. Their bodies lay strewn about him, ignored as he searched desperately for shelter.

That entity, the nightmare, reared back once more and drove a spike of PAIN through William’s skull. You like tests, don’t you William? The voice cooed at him. Let’s run one.

‘William’ screamed, then passed out.

----------

Devon, England (six hours ahead)

Poppy stumbled in the middle of the path during her midday walk, eyes going wide with shock. Luther, bless him, caught her arm. If it weren’t for the walking stick in her other hand, they both would have tumbled on the well-concealed moorland path.

Poppy

She knew that voice, would always know it. Poppy made a noise between a gasp and a cry. Luther stilled, like he had heard a faraway voice on the wind.

The voice sounded distraught. Strained. Lady Marigold was a woman of iron will by necessity. The last time she had been so clearly distraught was…

The time she had come home from Romania. When something terrible - she’d never told any of them the details - had been set in her path by Lord Spencer, and the Lady’s heart had been closed to that family friend forever.

Poppy, I got out, but they followed me he followed me

The Lady had indeed been freed from her imprisonment and was genuinely in distress. There was a strange sharp energy **backing **the words. It reminded her of a radio, like someone breaking into a modern heavy metal piece with a news report, but using the shrill music to buoy its own signal.

I think he’s coming for them Poppy they’re alive I don’t understand but

Luther met Poppy’s eye, and she shook her head. She wanted to deny the words. The anguish in them narrowed the subjects to only two people. If this were true…she wanted to deny it.

But Marigold had been missing for almost two decades, and this felt like a stolen moment, this little, horrified message. Marigold was always prone to dramatics, absolutely, but she never lied outright. Even when she withheld information - and that was a regular occurrence- she’d been honest with her that she was doing it. Poppy had no idea that Marigold could even send this far - she could barely manage to do it across the property before.

“She doesn’t have her medication,” She said, numb, reaching for the first thing that made sense, as if any of this could ever in this damned Shakespearean diorama. If Luther produced a skull from his pocket right now and started addressing it as the missing Lady, she’d very well lose her mind -

Teig O’Kane

And just like that, her mind cleared, the moment ended. The pair remained frozen for a long moment before Poppy levered herself back up to full height. They stared at eachother.

“Teig O’Kane?” Poppy echoed in a baffled voice. “Where have I heard that?”

Luther groaned. “It’s an old Irish fairy tale. A boy’s forced by the good folk to carry a corpse on his back until he can find a churchyard to bury it under. The old family loved their riddles.” He tucked Poppy’s hand under his elbow. “Come on,” he grumbled. “I’ve got to get a shovel from the cottage shed, and maybe a few of the lads.” He started walking again, towing Poppy gently along. “Whatever she’s pointed you at is buried under the flagstones of the damned priory, and somebody’s got to calm the bloody flowers for long enough to get the stones up.”

----------

Marigold snapped back to her surroundings, just in time to catch a book being lobbed at her face in one hand.

Ada stood in the doorway, looking bemused…and not a little wary. “Twenty minutes,” She reminded.

Marigold grinned, partly out of adrenaline-fuelled relief and partly in triumph. “Twenty minutes.” The look on her face must have been manic, as the balance of Ada’s expression shifted hard towards wary.

“Do I even want to know?” Ada asked.

Marigold actually snorted - something her instructors had worked hard to groom out of her in her youth - but her face relaxed as her heartbeat began to finally slow. “You have to report something, don’t you?” She tried to push herself to her feet, then wobbled as her legs refused to hold her. “I think I need a minute. That…cost.”

“What did?” Ada’s curiosity was getting the better of her.

Beating the absolute shit out of William Birkin, she thought, keeping the thought small and tight, aimed at Ada alone. Was this what it felt like to be drunk? It had been so long, but it might have been.

Aloud, she said, “There’s an outbreak below. The whole area around the station is radiating with it. If I get into the details right now, we’ll lose too much time. I needed to see if I could contain…the worst one.” A term finally came to her. “I think I’m a little punch-drunk.” She covered the giggle chasing those words with a hand.

Ada continued to stare. Finally, she spoke. “An outbreak. Beneath us.”

Marigold rapidly lost her sense of mirth. “Yes. There’s been one building in the city anyhow, but this is gasoline on a campfire.”

Ada glanced back, then down. “Fucking Birkins.”

“If it makes you feel better, I think I just kicked the absolute shite out of what’s left of him,” Marigold offered. “I owed him that much. I…pay my debts.” She held Ada’s eye on that last part, then tried to stand again, managing to keep her feet this time. “I’d appreciate not being named a vindictive bitch in your report, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate. That’s hardly even news.”

Ada stared at her, then allowed a slow smile. “If I get out of here alive, I think we should be friends.”

Marigold, now weary and riding the last of her adrenaline, smiled back.

#ashes in the fall #calendula chronicles #marigold ashford #albert wesker x oc #resident evil fanfiction

[robininthelabyrinth]

Wei Wuxian{s obsessions get redirected to healing at a young age. He is still a chaos gremlin.

ao3

Untamed

“Do you know what they say about you,” Wen Qing said.

She did not make it a question, but Wei Wuxian beamed at her anyway, pretending he hadn’t heard.

“Do they say things about me, Wen-jiejie?” he asked. “Lil old me? But I’m just a humble healer –”

“They say you’re a demonic cultivator.”

“…they say I’m a what.”

“Mm,” Wen Qing said. “You see, apparently someone overheard some conversation that involved your plans to resurrect the dead.”

“Resurrect the – I was exaggerating! I’m a doctor! Everyone always makes that sort of claim about the really good doctors, saying that they’re so talented that they can raise the dead! No one takes it seriously.”

“Well, apparently they do, when it’s you,” Wen Qing said. “Find a way to deal with it, will you?”

“Well, fuck,” Wei Wuxian said. “How am I supposed to do that?”

-

“Hi there,” Wei Wuxian said, beaming. “You’re Mistress Wen, right?”

“…right,” Wen Qing said, squinting at the kid in front of her. He looked like he was of age with her little brother – he was wearing Jiang sect colors, but he definitely wasn’t Jiang Cheng, who she’d seen before. “And you are…?”

“Jiang Sect’s Wei Wuxian! I’m new!”

Ah, Sect Leader Jiang’s ward. Wen Qing had heard about him – his mother was the famous Cangse Sanren, his father a former Jiang sect servant, and they’d gone off and died before Wen Qing had a chance to ask them all the questions she had about the immortal mountain and what exactly it meant to be immortal. From a biological perspective, of course.

“A pleasure to meet you, young master,” she said politely, wondering what he wanted from her. Their ages were just a bit too distant for an actual acquaintance – for the best, really, or else her uncle and guardian, Wen Ruohan, might get ideas about marriage alliances. “What can I help you with?”

“You wrote an essay on improving common surgical procedures! I want to ask you questions about it!”

“You read that?” Wen Qing asked, surprised. She’d come to the discussion conference on the strength of that essay, which had been widely praised by doctors in the Wen sect, and she’d braced herself for having to fight for someone to talk to about it here – she knew she was young, and female, and a Wen, and none of those were things that made conversing with her peers in the medical world any easier.

She certainly hadn’t expected some snot-nosed brat to approach herabout it.

“Sure did!” Wei Wuxian chirped. “I told Uncle Jiang that it was amazing! I wanna learn to be a doctor, too!”

Uncle Jiang, Wei Qing thought. Amazing.

She could work with that.

-

“So I have some questions about some of your questions these past few years,” Wei Wuxian said, sitting next to Wen Qing in the back mountain of the Cloud Recesses. “And now that I have you in person, I’m not so easy to ignore. You know that, right?”

Wen Qing rolled her eyes at him.

“No, but seriously! What sort of problem are you trying to cure? The symptoms you mention in your letters are diverse as anything: headaches, qi deviations, excess yin energy…”

“It’s a long story,” Wen Qing said. “Also, secret. Like I’ve already told you.”

“I can’t help diagnose anything without full information,” he pointed out, irritatingly correct. “Much less help you come up with a course of treatment. Can’t you rely on my discretion as a doctor?”

“If I could, do you think I still wouldn’t have told you?” she snapped. “I’m not an idiot, and you’re brilliant. But I have orders not to spill anything about this, and I can’t disobey them.”

“All right,” Wei Wuxian said agreeably. Too agreeably. “Does this have anything to do with the ghost puppets the Lan sect ran into recently?”

Well, fuck.

“Better question,” he said, and Wen Qing braced herself. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Yin metal’?”

“Well, fuck,” she blurted out, and his smirk said everything it needed to.

-

“I can fix shijie,” Wei Wuxian said. “I’m a doctor.”

Jiang Cheng didn’t respond. He hadn’t been responding at all – typical trauma response, really. Wei Wuxian had taken his pulse a couple of times, not liking what he’d found; he knew Jiang Cheng was awake in there, but who even knew what he was capable of doing right now. Nothing sensible, that was for sure.

Wei Wuxian didn’t dare let him out of his sight.

He didn’t dare let either of them out of his sight – but Jiang Yanli had never been strong, her health always poor, and all this running in the rain without rest was wearing her down. Her fever was sign enough of that. If Wei Wuxian wasn’t as able a hand at acupuncture as he was, he would’ve needed to go to the market to buy medicine, and maybe he would’ve run into the Wen sect, ruining everything. They were being hunted, their tracks being closely trailed, their every move predicted in advance…

“I have an idea,” Wei Wuxian said suddenly, it coming to him in a burst of inspiration. “They’re expecting us to go to Meishan Yu or somewhere like that, right? To one of our allies? Let’s do the exact opposite of that!”

Jiang Cheng blinked at him, the entire process taking at least two minutes.

“Sometimes the most dangerous place is the safest,” Wei Wuxian added helpfully.

“…are you talking about Wen Qing?” Jiang Cheng asked. “Are you serious?”

Wei Wuxian was too busy celebrating the fact that Jiang Cheng was talking again to bother with his incredulity. It wouldn’t last – Wei Wuxian had talked him into plenty of stupider things before, and things involving Wen Qing had always been a particularly easy sell, given that Jiang Cheng had always had the most obvious crush on her.

“Less complaining,” he said. “More packing up. We’re going!”

-

“Obviously you’re not going anywhere,” Wei Wuxian said. “Jiang Cheng! You can’t just turn them away! Don’t you remember, Wen Qing and Wen Ning sheltered us when we escaped from the Wen sect!”

“I know that,” Jiang Cheng said, blushing bright red. “Even when you got your stupid self captured by the Wen sect, Wen Ning got us your location – do you think I don’t know that?”

“Not just that, he talked them into throwing me into the Burial Mounds instead of executing me directly,” Wei Wuxian said. “Right after I snapped the meridians in Wen Zhuliu’s arm – hard to be the Core Melting Hand without those, am I right? I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d just impaled me on a pole right then and there!”

“I know, I know! You’ve said it often enough! But we can’ttake them into the Jiang sect – do you know what that would do to morale? We’re fighting a war here.”

“It’s fine,” Wen Qing said. “I understand entirely. We’ll make our way on our own…”

“Don’t be stupid,” Wei Wuxian told her. “Jiang Cheng, let’s take them as prisoners of war.”

“What?!”

“I’m serious! We can put them to work. You can’t tell me that morale wouldn’t improve having a doctor of Wen Qing’s caliber on side!”

“Having experienced what the two of you call a bedside manner, I’m not so sure about that…”

“It’s unnecessary,” Wen Qing said. “We don’t need help. I just need to find Wen Ning; I can do the rest myself.”

Wei Wuxian turned and glared at Jiang Cheng.

“…prisoners of war it is,” he said, yielding. “And I’ll have people search for him, okay?”

-

“Tell me you didn’t actually revive Wen Ning from the dead, Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng shouted.

“I didn’t!” Wei Wuxian exclaimed. “I swear!”

“Then why does everyone think that you did?!”

“It’s a mistake! An innocent mistake! I swear!”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I’m going to smash your skulls together,” Wen Qing said sweetly. “And you’re both going to deserve it.”

“Mostly him!”

“Hey!”

“No, he’s right,” Wen Qing said to Wei Wuxian. “Mostly you, Yiling Patriarch.”

Wei Wuxian put his head in his hands and groaned.

#mdzs #wei wuxian #wen qing #jiang cheng #my fic #my fics

[damonalbarn]

Hey I was wondering if you knew the article that Justine spoke about suzi in?!

It was in The Guardian in 2000. Here you go:

Sweet revenge

In the mid 90s, Justine Frischmann and Damon Albarn were the First Couple of Britpop. Then he used a Blur album to rake over their break-up, while she languished in obscurity amid rumours of heroin addiction. Now she's back with a new album, and it's her turn to exorcise her demons.

Caroline Sullivan

Friday March 24, 2000

As Alison Moyet once said, it's hard to write a decent song when you're happy. Rock bands thrive on romantic turmoil in their private lives, without which they would be reduced to padding out lyrics with football scores and the weather.

Thus it was for Blur's Damon Albarn in mid-1998 when he sat down to write what would become the 13 album. His eight-year relationship with Justine Frischmann of the chart-topping Elastica, whom he once described as **"the only person who's ever been completely necessary to me" **had just ended, at her instigation. Pained and humiliated, he decided to exact revenge by exposing their most intimate details to public scrutiny.

The outcome? Embarrassment for Frischmann, a number one album for Blur and a bit of a result for Albarn.

Break-up albums are by definition both embittered and yearning - in the case of Marvin Gaye's vindictive Here, My Dear, they're just plain nasty - but 13 got more up-close and personal than could be considered gentlemanly. Albarn portrayed his former partner as neurotic, even slipping apparent drug references into the single Tender: "Tender is the ghost, the ghost I love the most/Hiding from the sun, waiting for the night to come". Frischmann was the ghost, supposedly, who was on the verge of being consumed by what one music paper euphemistically called "the darkness at the heart of Elastica".

Frischmann's response can be found on a song called The Way I Like It, which appears on Elastica's first album in five years, The Menace (out next month): "Well, I'm living all right and I'm doing okay/Had a lover who was made of sand, and the wind blew him away".

This is unlikely to be her last word on the subject. As she ambivalently begins her first round of interviews since 1996, she's finding that everyone has the same three questions. Why did Elastica nearly sabotage a promising career by taking so long to follow up their million-selling debut? Had Frischmann taken leave of her senses when she walked out on Mr Britpop? And what about the drug rumours?

"One journalist said to me, 'Dahling, I heard you were on heroin - Mahvelous!' " she says with some amusement. "Drugs are around, but I'm not that interested and never have been, although there have been elements of party animal in my band. The rumours are a lot to do with rock'n'roll mythology, where people want to believe you're having a more exciting time than you are."

The only drugs on her person today, as she perches on the edge of an armchair in her publicist's north London living room, are Marlboro Lights. Her other indulgences are two cups of herbal tea and a Cadbury's Flake cupcake, which she nibbles with well-bred pleasure. Her dark eyes are clear, and her long, tanned body is a testament to the virtues of a daily swim in a pool near her Notting Hill home. Only Elastica know whether they really succumbed to heroin and hedonism after their self-titled debut made them more famous than they'd ever expected to be, but if they did, Frischmann, 30, seems little the worse for it.

Given the current predominance of damnable boy bands, the Britpop mid-90s are beginning to seem like a halcyon period for English music. It was a time when the underground went overground, and a self-described "little punk band" like Elastica could sell 80,000 albums in a week.

More than a few loser guitar groups saw Britpop as a licence to print money, but Elastica, led with cool elan by the androgynous Frischmann, were one of its gems. The Blur connection was a marketing godsend (Frischmann and Albarn met on the London indie circuit, she as guitarist in an early line-up of Suede and girlfriend of frontman Brett Anderson, he as a cherubic baggy hopeful), yet the spiky-haired Elastica LP embodied that euphoric time like nothing else.

Frischmann, guitarist Donna Matthews, drummer Justin Welch and bassist Annie Holland were unprepared for the album soaring to number one in its first week. When they signed their record deal, Frischmann, whose great-grandfather was a conductor of the Tsar's orchestra at the Summer Palace in Byelorussia, was five years into an architecture degree at London University. A liberal north London Jewish upbringing - her engineer father built the Oxford Street landmark Centrepoint - had instilled expectations of success, but the reality of being photographed in the supermarket and having her rubbish stolen was a shock. Fiercely independent, she also resented her unsought role as half of Britpop's First Couple.

There was more. Two of Frischmann's musical heroes, The Stranglers and Wire, decided that two Elastica songs were suspiciously similar to two of their own tracks, and won royalties. Meanwhile, there were malicious rumours that Albarn had done much of the work on the record. He hadn't, but he did find Justine's success in America, where she was substantially out-selling Blur, hard to endure.

"It was very hard for him to deal with and he's very confrontational," she says, with the flattering openness of someone who prefers interviews to be more like conversations. She admits she often says too much, but in an era of image control and spin, her honesty makes her a one-off. Not that she's likely to land herself in it too badly - she possesses the intellectual ammunition to look after herself, which must have been instrumental in attracting two of rock's more articulate stars, Albarn and Anderson.

She's been accused of being a professional rock girlfriend, though it was probably they who were lucky to get her. She spent the cab ride over reading the Sylvia Plath letters in Monday's Guardian, and muses on the irony of the poet's subjugating herself to Ted Hughes when she was the more gifted. (Her new boyfriend, by the way, is an unknown photographer, "though that'll probably change, because men seem to get famous when I go out with them".)

"I reacted the way a lot of women do, by being passive," she continues. "He put a lot of pressure on me to give up Elastica. He said, 'You don't want to be in a band, you want to settle down and have kids.' " In so many words? "In so many words. He kept putting on pressure till I started to believe him." She adds bemusedly: "I've met his new girlfriend, and one of the first things she said was that he wanted her to give up travelling with her work to stay home with the baby [Missy, born last autumn]. I'm surprised he's got away with being thought of as a nice person for so long."

After 18 months, during which they did seven American and three Japanese tours, Elastica came off the road to record company demands for an immediate second album. Annie Holland's response was to quit the group, while Donna Matthews became renowned for hard partying on the nocturnal west London scene. They lethargically recorded some demos, but their heart wasn't in it. By 1997, when a second album should have been ready to go, Frischmann and Matthews were barely speaking, and there was nothing useable down on tape.

Holland's replacement, Sheila Chipperfield (of the circus Chipperfields), was deemed not good enough and left by mutual consent. By 1998, their continued lack of productivity was being likened to the Stone Roses' lengthy and ultimately self-destructive holiday between their first and second LPs.

"I didn't think Elastica were going to continue at that point, and we did kinda split up," she says, absently stroking her publicist's cat. Frischmann is a cat person; she's owned a tabby called Benjamin since she was 10. "Unconditional love," she coos. The pet's place in her life is so assured that prospective boyfriends are subjected to his feline scrutiny before she'll go out with them.

On top of everything else, in early 1998 her relationship with Albarn was in trouble. Frischmann retains enough of the indie ethic to detest the phenomenon of celebrity couples, and was dismayed when they became one. "I really hated the tabloid interest, and I went out of my way not to be photographed with him. Only about three pictures of us together exist, I think. In many ways, I think the media interest broke us up, because it made me feel the relationship was quite ugly, and I had to get away from it. There were other factors, too, obviously, because we were together for eight years, and I finally felt it was better the devil you didn't know, really."

Albarn's ego seems to have been severely undermined by having a girlfriend who was nearly as successful as he was, and something of a sex symbol to boot. Despite adopting a resolutely boyish T-shirt-and-jeans uniform, she's thoroughly feminine, a mix that got her voted fifth most fanciable woman in a lesbian magazine.

"I'm completely heterosexual, so I didn't know how to take that. It scares the shit out of me, the idea of being with a girl. I'm glad I've narrowed it down to half the people in the world."

She seems to view Albarn with indulgent exasperation these days, simultaneously praising his intelligence ("The Gallaghers just couldn't compete") and ticking off his flaws. "Damon adores being in the press, and sees all press as good press. He orchestrated that rivalry thing with Oasis. He really wanted kids, and I didn't feel our relationship was stable enough. He was a naughty boy, and he wasn't the right person to have kids with. I had this cathartic moment..."

At which point they split up. Albarn wrote 13 and then met Suzi Winstanley, an artist. "She was pregnant within three months," Justine observes wickedly.

Of the acclaimed 13, she's tactful, describing several songs as "really lovely". She studies her cigarette for a while before adding, "but I'm cynical about selling a record on the back of our relationship". But you're doing the same now. "It's true, but at the time I had no right of reply."

Elastica finally pulled themselves together last year, just as the music industry was about to write them off (their American label had already "very kindly let us go", as she puts it). Holland rejoined, Matthews went to Wales to sort out her life and the band banged out an EP and played the Reading Festival. Things came together quickly after that. They spent the last £10,000 of the recording budget on re-recording a dozen tracks, finishing the album, after years of procrastinating, in six weeks. They've called it The Menace "because that's what it was like to make".

It's dark and resolutely uncommercial - all wrong for 2000's pop-oriented climate. It's unlikely to match the success of the first one, which is fine with them. Call it (though Justine doesn't) their White Album. Its 70s punk aesthetic brings to mind angry girls such as the Slits and the Au Pairs, although the defining mood isn't anger so much as catharsis. None of the songs is specifically about Albarn, she claims. "The dark feeling is due to the sense of isolation, tasting success and getting frightened by it. I was questioning whether I wanted to be in a band any more, and there was no one I could ask for advice. Getting success and everything you ever dreamed about is hard to handle, and makes you question everything."

She's better prepared for success, if it comes again, this time. Already the privacy-preserving barriers are in place. The next interview of the day is with Time Out magazine, which wants a list of her favourite restaurants. "I'm not telling them where I eat," she says reflexively. "I'm gonna lie."

#questions #damon albarn #justine frischmann #blur #elastica

[k-l-bryan]

After Epilogue

*Crow x Young Wolf (wrote them vague, so readers can visualize their own Guardians), set shortly after the end of the Epilogue mission.  I hope you enjoy it.*

“I thought . . .”

Ghost, who had been floating lazily over his Guardian’s shoulder as they kept an eye on the Eliksni camp from a hidden vantage point at Ikora’s request, turned to look at them.  He knew how hard it was for his Guardian to express themselves, so he waited in patient silence for them to continue.

“I thought the Vex invasion was when I was going to die.”

Oh!  Oh . . . Ghost’s shell quivered slightly as he thought back to their discovery in the Corridor’s of Time and Saint’s accompanying eulogy.  The thought of loosing his Guardian gave him an unpleasant feeling.  He supposed it would be comparable to what people called heartbreak.  He only hoped that when that terrible day came; no matter how close or far away it was, that he would go out with them; like Sundance did with Cayde.

The shudder wasn’t missed by the Guardian, who gave him a small, sad smile and reached up to cup him in their hands.  They guided him down gently out of the air and placed a kiss atop one of his fins before nestling him into their collar.

“I’m glad you didn’t” Ghost replied quietly, expanding and contracting his shell a few times, like a cat stretching before making itself comfortable.  “And I hope that day is a long, long way off.”

The Guardian didn’t reply to that, and as Ghost turned his core to look up at them, he could tell by their expression that they felt the opposite was true.  As they sat and continued their silent vigil, Ghost found himself wishing Crow was there.  Almost everyone who knew his Guardian knew them as the legendary Young Wolf; Hero of the Red War.  They didn’t see the tired person behind all the titles and accolades, the person who seemed to always have the weight of the world on their shoulders.  Crow did though.  Crow saw them as his friend who he got drunk with and made fun of their awful cooking skills.

“What are you thinking about?” Wolf asked after a long period of silence, broken by the occasional howl of wind or smattering of distant chatter.

“Just, how I wish you had someone here to talk to . . . like another Guardian,” Ghost said tactfully, his optics glowing a little.

“Another Guardian meaning Crow?” Wolf replied, more as a statement than a question.  “I’ve told you Ghost, he’s already dealing with a lot.  I can’t pile about my gra-”

“I know you like him,” Ghost interjected and Wolf shifted, obviously embarrassed.  “You should talk to him, not just about your feelings, but about seeing your grave too.  Going through this alone . . . I’ve seen the toll it’s been taking on you.”

Wolf was about to reply when the sounding of someone clearing their throat startled them and they turned quickly to see Crow standing there with a bag of what smelled like takeout, the Hunter looking equally if not more embarrassed than Wolf felt.

“Sooo . . . sounds like we missed quite the commotion,” Glint said as he materialised over Crow’s shoulder in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness before adding.  “We headed back as soon as we got word of the attack.”

“Sorry we weren’t back in time,” Crow said, sounding more than a little disappointed in himself as he sat down beside Wolf and started unpacking the plastic bag; arranging white containers of food between them.  “How bad were the casualties?”

“. . . Not as bad as they could have been, but any loss of life is too much,” Wolf replied with a sigh as they picked up a container and opened it to investigate the contents.  “And with Osiris missing, it seems we can’t catch a break.”

Wolf and Crow talked for a while about the attack while very obviously avoiding the earlier overheard conversation, and how they might help Saint in his search for Osiris, before there was a lul in conversation and the two fell into a comfortable silence.  Ghost and Glint shared a knowing look before turning to their Guardians.

“We’re going to head down to the camp, see if there’s any way for us to help” Ghost stated before Glint added.  “Even if it’s just entertaining the hatchlings.  They’ve gotten very good at chasing us.”

With no further discussion, the two Ghosts flew off, leaving Wolf and Crow to their own devices.

“So . . .” Crow started awkwardly.  “About what Ghost said before, about you liking me . . .”

“I would’ve told you eventually,” Wolf replied quietly, focusing on the partially eaten noodles in their container.  “I’m not good with expressing myself, and after loosing Cayde I . . . guess I just pushed down any sort of romantic feelings to avoid feeling that sort of hurt again.”

“I, feel the same way about you,” Crow admitted after a moment.  “At first, I thought what I felt was because you were one of the first people to be kind to me after I’d encountered so much hate; my first true friend.  Then I met more people and they were kind to me too, but I didn’t feel the same towards them as I did you.”

Wolf was momentarily stunned, more surprised by the Hunter’s admission than they had been by any of the craziness they’d encountered over the last seven years, before they tentatively reached out and took Crow’s hand in theirs, lacing their fingers together with a small smile.  Crow squeezed their hand and returned a smile of his own, but Wolf could tell he wanted to ask about what else he’d overheard . . . so they told him everything; starting with the Sundial and ending with the messages from Quaria or Savathun in the Vex collective.

“Thankyou for telling me,” Crow said after taking some time to process everything.  “Do you, think what you saw can be changed?”

“I want to say yes, but I feel like my death defending the City is going to be one of those things that Osiris called a fixed point; something that always happens no matter what you do to try and change it,” Wolf replied.  “And if that’s the case, I’m not going to waste time worrying about it,  I’m going to focus my time and energy into making sure we’re ready for the Witch Queen.”

#destiny #destiny 2 #destiny 2 fanfiction #guardian #The Guardian #crow #destiny crow #crow destiny #guardian crow #ghost #destiny ghost #ghost destiny #destiny 2 ghost #young wolf #The Young Wolf #epilogue #season of the splicer #saint 14 #destiny saint 14 #saint xiv #osiris #osiris destiny #destiny osiris #Witch Queen #savathûn #quaria #eliksni

[southslates]

you are lost without the waiting

for the @grishaversebigbang mini bang 2021!

lovely art was done for this piece by amethyst @amethystmoonart [here!] and door @doorhandle16 [here] ! these two were absolutely amazing to work with <3

Summary:

Inej made a deal with the devil. She had faith in him, for whatever reason. His eyes were black as dirt. They were cold. They were home.

In which Inej is Persephone, Kaz is Hades, and she chooses to stay.

ao3 link!

“Tell me you loved to destroy.

Tell me you need me. Please. You are the bones

of my spine. You are the ground beneath my feet.

You are made of deeper stuff than the earth

can give. Admit it: you are lost without the waiting.

― clementine von radics, letter from hades to persephone

Can you even imagine yourself in paradise?

Even the daughter of gods must know loneliness,

must sometimes want nothing more than to be

trapped in a hell of forevers. Thank me, you queen.

I’ve given you forever.”

/

Inej had been a wind spirit.

Technically, she still was. She didn’t feel like one anymore. She used to dance across rooftops and skies—her parents said she was a  gravity-defier. That there was no place in the world—no land, nor ocean—that could bind her feet—or her—to anything.

They were wrong. She had been taken when flying through the skies, swept away into a deep sleep until she woke up in a bed at the Menagerie. There she met Tante Heleen, purveyor of lost spirits. Heleen had told Inej that she saved the girl from a fiery fate, and that now she owed her an indenture. An indenture Inej paid by tending the lands the goddess reigned over and touching the men who let Heleen carry out her whims.

Inej had been a wind spirit, but she did not think she was one anymore. She could not break free. If she left the grassy fields of Heleen’s island world she would be caught and subjugated to an even darker fate. 

She stayed. She tended to the fields. She danced in front of gods with long teeth. She belonged to the Menagerie, the girls with lost spirits. She distanced the innocent who breezed through the flower fields from the one who balanced on rope. She felt like two people. She wanted to leave but had nowhere to go.

One day, airing out a field of daisies, she stopped. She could see a flash of color between the deathly white blooms, and held her breath as she reached out to thumb bright orange petals. It was a geranium. It had been her mother’s favorite flower.

In a moment of weakness and pain and longing, she reached for the stem and tugged it out of the earth. And then the ground opened, and Inej fell.

/

Inej felt as though she fell for days. She thought she would shatter into a thousand pieces when she finally hit the bottom of this well. She thought she would fall forever.

When she reached the bottom of the hole, it was an ocean. She found herself submerged in water and darkness, and pulled herself up until she felt dry air. The darkness stayed omnipresent. She couldn’t see anything. “Hello?” she called into a void.

For a minute, nothing happened. She could almost believe that she was nonexistent. And then something, a bullet, whizzed past her. She barely dodged it.

A light flicked on, and she saw a man in a bright orange waistcoat holding a . . . small cannon in her direction. She assumed it had dislodged the bullet that had almost torn her immortal life. The light disturbed Inej for a moment, but she found her balance quickly. She anticipated another attack, but the man just frowned in her direction. “Who are you?”

“Where am I?” Inej countered.

The man took in her silk dress and the painted spots on her face, and he seemed to come to his own conclusion. “Not anywhere you should be, goddess. Your kind are not welcome here.”

“Where is here?”

The man sighed. “My name is Jesper,” he said, then gestured to his side. “Welcome to the land of greed. I suppose I’ll have to take you to the boss.”

/

Jesper took Inej to a large black palace in the middle of . . . absolutely nothing. It wasn’t particularly enchanting, unlike the gilded arches of the Menagerie. The building seemed to speak to her, to warn her away from its obsidian glare. She wanted to turn back when Jesper gestured for her to enter, but she had nowhere else to go. Even if she could find her way to the surface, she would land in Hell that was simply more discreet.

And she was certain that she was in Hell. The land of greed, Jesper had said. The land of greed, of rocks and riches and death. What lay under the fanciful pretenses of the land Tante Heleen and men such as Pekka Rollins claimed to rule.

Inej didn’t know who ruled this land, but she was certain she was about to find out. She took one last look around the landscape, blank and dead and black, before stepping into the palace. The stone of the entrance cracked under her feet.

Jesper led her around dilapidated columns and stairs and walls, human architecture, until they reached a large room at the top of the palace. Even up here, Inej was distinctly aware of the stillness of the air. She felt as though a part of her was missing. She felt like a wind spirit again. When she looked down, she could almost see through herself. She required air to stay formed. This place was sucking out her lifeblood, and she could not find it in herself to care.

“Kaz!” he yelled. Inej startled at the sudden noise, but stayed deft on her feet as they approached a tall, lank, pale figure, sitting at a throne that almost seemed like a desk. There was a hat on the man’s head and a cane next to him. Inej frowned at it. She had met many gods and spirits, and none needed aids such as that. “We’ve got a four-hundred-sixty-three.”

The man looked up, and his searing brown eyes met hers. He didn’t break that contact as he stood up from his seat and gripped his cane. “I don’t know what your asinine numbers mean, Jesper. Speak proper. We have a guest.”

Jesper almost blushed at Inej’s side. She found herself entranced by this man she knew nothing about. “She fell from above.”

“Indeed,” Kaz said. He was unnaturally still. “So? Take her back up.”

“No!” Inej shouted. Jesper’s gaze fixed on her too, and he seemed a bit scared.

“No?” Kaz questioned. “Why would a wind spirit not want to go back to the lands above?”

“I’m indentured to Tante Heleen,” she murmured. “Please, I can help you.”

“Can you?” Kaz asked. She couldn’t let her eyes off him, either. His voice was a salty rasp, dead but safe. They stood in that silence for a moment, looking at each other, until Jesper cleared his throat.

“Kaz?”

“Put her in a guest bedroom,” he said easily. “Always fine to piss on darling Heleen.”

/

His name was Kaz Brekker, and he was greed’s guardian. Truly, he was the guardian of Hell, but few called him that. “Death does not bow to me,” he told her at breakfast the next day, a table length apart. He wore leather gloves and kept his cane close to him. It was topped by a crow’s head. Late at night, Inej had heard them flying around the palace. They were the only form of life she’d seen so far, though no wind followed. She was the faintest bit translucent. “Death bows to no man. But greed? It is my servant and my lever.”

Inej was a bit overwhelmed by it all. She was frightened of this new world, one of death and decay. She knew she did not belong. But she knew it was better than what awaited her above.

“How do you intend to help me, Inej Ghafa?”

“How do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to know all things,” Kaz said. “There is unrest in my fields, those of the deceased. You will learn why.”

“Why—”

“Yesterday,” he said, “you came with Jesper, bells on your ankles, bracelets on your wrists. I could hear my enforcer from a mile away, but not you.” He leaned close to her, several bodies apart. “Spy for me, won’t you?”

Inej made a deal with the devil. She had faith in him, for whatever reason. His eyes were black as dirt. They were cold. They were home.

Inej saw Jesper occasionally. He ensured that she had basic necessities, and he toured her around the land of greed. She saw rubies growing on trees, diamonds blooming from the ground. She met shades, those who had died centuries ago and entered the land crying for the saints she knew were above. The more days and weeks she spent here, the more see-through she became. She was almost afraid she would become one of them.

She made herself silent and danced through them. And when she knew what they spoke, she went back to the palace. She went to the river. She went to valleys and canyons, and she learned of the guardian of this Hell. She found peace in the darkness, in the stillness.

Kaz Brekker was a true  demjin, she was told. She was told he started wars himself, when he grew tired. She heard he controlled all the riches and corruptness above her.

She believed it, too. She ate twice a day with him, and then he did whatever demons did as she wandered the terrain of his domain. They spoke only occasionally. He tended to stare into her soul, and those looks always said more than words. Inej was a wraith, a ghost, but Kaz made her feel solid and seen.

One day Kaz Brekker asked her if she would like him to take her to the shadow fold. “You’re curious,” he told her, as though he could see inside her and also right through her. She wondered if he could. “It’s intriguing.”

So they’d gone on a walk through something dark and damp, sapphire-studded weeds carpeting the ground under their feet. The air was moist and still. The fold was somehow darker than the rest of this world, and it frightened Inej. As they stood at its precipice, she grabbed Kaz Brekker’s gloved hand.

She had seen him shy away from Jesper’s touch, seen him stay feet away from her. But when she held his hand that day, he didn’t let go. The next day he was not at breakfast, but there was a bouquet of flowers in front of her, studded with orange opal. Inej had never mentioned to Kaz her favorite flower.

/

The walks became a daily occurrence, and she slowly started to wring fragments of humanity from this immortal. Kaz Brekker enjoyed drinking wine and his work, the guardian of the souls of the worst kind of men. He was sure of himself as a monster. He asked her twice as many questions as she asked him.

If she wrung humanity from a demon, he wrung personality from a shadow. He brought her up into what she once was—until she remembered the wind spirit again. Inej talked of flowers and her friend Nina and how she loved dancing across rooftops. She talked of her parents and her siblings and the freedom of the air. Kaz seemed to drink her in, with his menacing, freeing gaze. He knew her. He saw her.

Once, she asked him why he wore gloves, why he avoided the river at the entrance of his realm, and why he used a cane. He only explained the latter, only said there was strength in being broken.

They didn’t touch. Inej grew used to the feeling of leather around her palm. Kaz seemed aloof, but he grasped her translucent hand through his clothing as though he never wanted to let her go. And yet she never felt stuck, or alone, until—

Until one day she woke up to Jesper forcing her back into her rooms. He seemed frenzied, and Inej went back to bed only to crawl out through her window when she heard loud sounds in Kaz’s throne room. She sat at his window and heard a voice which seared her invisible soul. Pekka Rollins, indeed.

“You must return her. She is indentured—”

“And you would think that something I would consider? I am your safes and vaults personified. It’s meaningless.”

“The girl belongs to—”

“The girl belongs to no one,” Inej heard Kaz hiss. “Go tell your Tante Heleen that Inej Ghafa belongs to nobody.”

Inej slipped a little at that admission, right into Rollins’ eyesight. He looked at her slight, ghost-like body with his eyebrows afloat—as though he’d won something. “Come, little lynx,” he cooed at her. “You don’t have to stay in this land anymore, with this demon.”

“She doesn’t want to come with you,” said Kaz. Rollins laughed.

“Found a new master already, have you?”

“I belong to no one,” Inej repeated what Kaz had said.

“Little girl,” Rollins said. “You would stay here? In a land of no sky, of death and decay and greed? You are a free spirit. Come to the world above.” His eyes traced her figure. “You are nothing here.” 

She knew he was referring to her barely corporeal form. His words still stung deeply.

“I am freer here than I could ever be,” Inej said. And yet she knew the hard skies of Kaz’s world were dulling her sensibilities. She didn’t want to leave; but she would have to soon, if she didn’t want to fade into the fold itself.

Pekka appeared as though he had more to say, but Kaz stood up in protest to his unsaid words, ghosts in the air, leaning on his cane, something truly—truly  demonic in his eyes. “If you do not leave now, Pekka Rollins,” he said, “it is your mortal son who will suffer. Kaelish, isn’t he?”

The man left. His words stayed in the air. Inej was in a nightgown and Kaz was dressed like a monster, but she felt as though she had the power in the room. His gaze did not fall away from her. “He was right,” she said. She was fading. 

“I know,” he said. He stared at her enough to know that she did not have much time left before she became invisible. “You would never be able to pay off your indenture.”

Inej knew this. She knew that he could give her all the riches of his realm, and she would never pay off her indenture. “I have no choice.”

He walked across the room and pressed a gloved hand to her cheek. “Greed is my servant,” he said. “And my lever.”

The walls started shaking, and Inej fell away from Kaz. She could feel leather on her face. 

Then she saw darkness, and nothing more.

/

Inej woke up in a field of flowers. They were jeweled, and they were orange. They smelled like dirt and decay. She wanted to spend the rest of her life in that field. She lifted her hand and saw herself, all of herself.

When she stepped forward, she was back home. She heard the news soon afterward, that the entire Menagerie had fallen into Hell. That the guardian of greed had taken the woman who loved it above. That the girls forced to be animals were free.

Inej was home, and yet she was not home; how did she explain to her people of the air that she yearned for a place with croaking birds, cloaked in darkness? She did not—Kaz Brekker made it his business to know all things. It was six months later that she found a fresh geranium in a field of flowers outside of her cottage.

She fell again. This time she didn’t fall into water, but the open embrace of a demon without armor. She thought she would fall forever. She thought she could find peace.

#dee writes #gvbb21 #gvbbminibang21 #gang 2 #kanej #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #shadow and bone #six of crows #crooked kingdom #grishaverse #kanej fic #amethystmoonart #doorhandle16

[harveyb-wabbit92]

Invader Zim: Elite Guardians AU Pt. 2

The following is a non-profit fan-based story, Invader ZiM  is owned by Jhonen Vasquez and Nickelodeon please support the official release, I gain no profit nor do I own anything other than OCs and whatever spouts from my imagination!

------------------------------

A another month passed Zim started looking less like wrinkled worm and more like an Irken, Red and Purple were running low on money, Repairing the cruiser was getting more difficult, whenever they fixed something, another thing would break or scavengers would sneak in and take whatever wasn't bolted down, that's when the Elites came to the conclusion that maybe they should look for work. So they started bounty hunting for the local constabulary.

What choice did they have? if they were ever gonna get off this rock and find Cradle 2-117. Bounty hunting was the way to go, The Cruiser was a lost beyond repair, but there were a lot of ships for sale in Meeko; the problem was finding who was willing to sell a ship to them, The citizens were still cold towards them, Again. Neither Red and Purple could understand why? They soon got answer in the most unconventional way, they'd come back from a job, Some nut job thought it was good splice a giant spider with a squid and than super sizing it!

Red was shooting the thing with his Plasma gun while Purple striking it with his photon axe, meanwhile Zim was happily skipping around the battlefield, narrowly missing being crushed or shot at, Red noticed the smeet hopping around. "Zim! get out of the way!" Red dodges a tentacle swinging for him. "You're gonna get hurt!" He barked the smeet just stared at him blankly before smiling "Rwed!" he cheered waving at him, Red facepalmed. "Hi!" he waved back before going back to fighting, Zim went back to his little skipping game dodging death at every corner, only stopping when he saw a large beetle crawling around on the sand, the smeet crouched down just as Purple was thrown off the Squider and sent crashing into the wall behind Zim.

The purple eyed elite sat up with a groan; rubbing his head looked at Zim and did a double take when he saw the smeet eating a beetle, Purple jumped to his feet rushed over to the smeet trying to pry his mouth open. "Naw, no, no. Spit it out, spit out! c'mon!" he lightly slapped Zim's back and the smeet spat up bug guts Purple grimaced. "Disgusting!" he huffed giving the smeet some ration wafers and went back to helping Red fight, Zim calmly sat out of the way to eat and watch his 'Brothers' fight the monster, by the end of the battle Red and Purple were covered in ink and teal colored guts, and their wallets were a good chunk heavier, when they woke up this morning...

Later when they got back to the cruiser both Red felt something was off, there was scent in the air he didn't recognize at first he thought it was the Squider guts, but as they got closer to their wreck... it became more apparent that someone or something was in there, Purple noticed it too he and Red exchanged a look; the red clad elite set Zim down and shush him, the smeet copied him and nodded, Purple dispatched his PAK legs and went in from above while Red followed and hid in the doorway of the engine room, his first thought was it was just another scavenger looking for scrap, but by now everyone nearby knew this ship was occupied and stayed clear of it, Red peeked into the engine room and saw a hooded figure fidgeting around with the power core. 

Red's eyes narrowed as he tried to get a better look and saw this person reading off what looked like an engineering manual, he saw Purple getting into position, they could hear this person mumbling to themselves. "Okay... now shut down switch Y and detach port Q?...wait no, um..." the guards looked at each other and nodded, Purple jumped from the ceiling; landing in front of the intruder catching them completely off guard. "What the fu-" they saw the purple eyed Irken reach for a his stunned baton and panicked. "Shite!" they yelped and went to run only to get pistol whipped from behind by Red knocking them out. 

Red and Purple were perplexed when they tied them up removed the intruders hood and made sure they didn't have weapons, they've never seen an alien like them before...  they had this weird long stringy stuff on their head that was soft to the touch, but stood out out most of all was how tall they were... Both Irkens just barely came up to the intruder's chin. "Whoa! They're almost the same height as Tallest Miyuki!" Purple said stunned while Red shook his head. "No... Miyuki is definitely taller..." he insisted but then again they haven't seen Tallest Miyuki in months! So they couldn't exactly make a comparison.

While the two were prattled about Miyuki and the intruder's heights, neither noticed Zim wander in the smeet looked between the bickering Elites before noticing the stranger sitting against the wall. His pink eyes lit up as he curiously approached the unconscious alien, He saw the long fuzzy stuff on their head and immediately grabbed it and started tugging which roused the trespasser awake.

Red and Purple tenses at the unknown voice cut into their conversation they looked and saw Zim swinging off the alien's... mane? "Ow..ow! quit it! They try to jerked their head away from Zim's grasp. "Oww, Seriously kid stop it!" They growled Red snapped out of his stupor and quickly picked up Zim. "Don't talk to him like that!" He spat glaring at the intruder, who glared back their e/c eyes looked odd too, but Red was more focused on whether or not they were a threat or not.

"Who are you? What are you?" he huffed along with Purple butting in. "And why do you want our power core?" the alien winced a the purple one's shrill voice. " if I tell you will you untie me?" they asked hopeful, the Irkens were silent, and the intruder took their silence as a hard "maybe."

"My name is Y/n, I’m a human female, My ship crashed few clicks north from here, the power core was always little spotty, and it finally gave up the ghost. So I went out looking for a replacement, looked around Meeko and other crash sites, before finding a power signal that lead me to... I thought it was it was a derelict ship!"

"Does this ship derelict look to you?!"

"Well... yeah? I mean look around, your ship is in pieces! it'll obviously never fly again, I'm surprised your core was even intact!"

"How did you even get in? we have security measures!"

Y/n looked bemused before something clicked in her head, she cocked her head towards the front of the ship. "Oh! the giant hole in your hull, with the lasers and forcefield? yeah, I think your motion sensors and hard light generator is offline, I walked right through it" Purple looked like he was going to cry seeing as he was the one who rigged that forcefield up. " that and your front door was wi... was.." Your voice suddenly trailed off, Red and Purple watched your demeanor change as something caught your eye, it took a moment for Red to notice you were staring at the Irken symbol on their armor.

"Shite... You slaver scum!" both Irkens jumped back startled by your sudden outburst. "What are you planning to do with that kid?! huh? did you kidnap him too?" You growled Red and Purple looked at each other stunned. "What are you talking about?" Red asked you just glared him in disgust. "Don't play fucking coy with me! I’ve seen your damn ship going around ransacking outposts around the system and kidnapping people!" Red and Purple were at loss here, 2-117 was overtaken by Slavers? well, at least now they knew why almost everyone on Greedo was so hostile towards them!

There was a tense stare down between the trio, You watched as the two "slavers" got into a huddle, you heard the numbers "2-117..." being mumbled then Red one was saying something the Purple one disagreed with. "No, oh no no no! We're not taking in another stray!" the purple hissed vehemently. "She's the our ticket off this rock, we're doing it!" They turned to look at you.

"What?" you hissed as the Red clad alien silently handed the kid over to his Purple counterpart who glared at him, you tensed up as he walked up to you. "Calm down and just listen alright?" Red guy explained they’re not slavers, but Elite guards from Irk sent to investigate and retrieve a missing Nursery ship called Cradle 2-117 that had been skyjacked a few months ago, the only lead they have is Zim, who Red found malnourished and wandering around in a trash dump.... Now you.

You of course were bit skeptical about this whole situation, what with being tied up and all! but, then Purple told you to take a good look at Zim, the kid was same species as them: Irken. "How many other Irkens have you seen wandering the Tarn system?" You realized never, you have never seen an Irken in Tarn before, so maybe they were telling the truth? then Purple got you attention again "Where was the last place you saw that ship?" You paused thing back to were you saw the Irken ship, it wasn’t hard to forget considering how unique it looked. 

"I think it was headed to Planet Nyree? that’s a two week journey from here." Both Irken elites looked each other hopeful, finally a real lead! "However I'd suggest getting a new ship, I don’t think this one will taking off anytime soon." They hear the ship groan as a panel falls out of the ceiling, landing a little too close to you then you'd like, Red looks at Purple whose shoulders slumped, knowing what was coming, You were confused as Red reach around behind you and untied you. "Okay! New plan, we need a ship and you need a power core, let’s make a deal..." and that's how you gained three new crew members aboard the Cardinal.

#invader zim #invader zim x reader #the almighty tallest #the tallest x reader #smeet zim #tallest red #tallest purple #tallest miyuki #tallest red x reader #tallest purple x reader #irken elite #elite guardians au

[the-golden-ghost]

40 for Lupin

40. "I rock between dark and dark/my soul nearly my own/my dead selves singing"

~

He could see them lurking in the shadows, the ghosts, his ghosts, every one of them a fiend of his own creation, every one of them wearing his face. They laughed without joy and sang without spirit, machines more than people, dead more than alive.

He could not outrun them. There was nowhere to run to. Only the hazy circles, only the city lights and the never-ending streets. He could run til he wore down, burnt up, crashed and vanished and there would be nothing left of him. He’d just die and join the chorus, this motley gang of grinning wretches, these pied pipers who wanted to sing him down to hell to pay the price of his years upon years of wicked intent.

If he caught the smell of smoke and whiskey he could follow it briefly and wake up from the spinning graveyard in his mind, wake up in Jigen’s arms, shaking and burning, his head throbbing, tears on his face. He could briefly be soothed by the soft and gentle touch of a hired killer and then his body would force him back down into unconsciousness where he would again be whirling, tumbling though the images in his head and waiting for the crash.

After two days of this he was seeing the ghosts out of the corners of his eyes even when he was awake. After four days he was so desperate that he was begging Jigen to kill him and get it over with. He didn’t care anymore. He’d been called crazy before but this was true insanity, the most painful kind he could imagine.

It was only him and Jigen in the hideout but he heard the voices still. They sang. Jigen had put the radio on so he would have something to focus on, but this was no melody that played on any earthbound airwave. This was his mind finally cracking and spilling out because he’d split it so many times over the years that it couldn’t help but shatter.

Jigen’s answer to all the screaming ghosts surrounding him was to remain steady and insist he could not see them. To cool Lupin with a damp cloth to his forehead, give him a blanket when he shivered and hold him tight enough that he couldn’t break his own bones with his thrashing. “When the fever breaks, you’ll sleep.” Jigen’s voice was a rock in a hurricane. Lupin clung to it. “You’re delirious, that’s all. Give it a day more. You’ll be okay.”

Lupin, in his frenzy, squeezed Jigen’s arms til he raised bruises and clawed at his face when he was again denied the peace that would come with death. Why had he hired a killer who wouldn’t kill!? He screamed that - maybe in his mind, maybe in his throat. Both felt raw as anything.

~

On the fifth day Jigen slept beside him. Lupin could see the shadows that now clouded his blurry mind reflected on Jigen’s face. It was quiet, and nighttime, and there was no singing nor screaming now, but they would come back. It was just the shadows.

He took a cigarette from the bedside table, lit a match. Smoking quieted his frayed nerves just a bit. He still felt dull and achy and he knew without the slightest doubt that the ghosts would be back to yell in his head. He knew his soul was on the chopping block and he was thrown about and helpless.

And Jigen would do nothing.

He lit another match, watched it burn, let it nip his fingers as it ran down. The little bite of pain was oddly soothing. It was a focal point, at least. The light, the heat. Keep away the shadows and the screams.

He lit another. His fingers trembled, wanting to drop -

Drop the match onto the sheets that covered him and let himself go up in smoke and flame. He was so wrung out now that he was sure he’d blaze up and be burnt to a cinder in moments. Instantaneous. Bright and wild and gone in a blink. The world seemed to shrink and waver before his eyes. There was nothing but the light. Nothing but the fire.

He could end it. His guardian slept; he had the reins, and the means.

One deep breath and he’d do it. He’d show the ghosts who they were dealing with. They thought they could keep him, hold him, spin him in circles until there was nothing left? Not so; Lupin was going to forge his own ending, and he would do it beautifully.

He’d forgotten his shaking hands. He could not hold the match true. It dropped like a warning flare and missed its mark - falling instead onto Lupin’s partner who slept beside him.

The screaming that followed was deafening, and all too real.

~

Time had ceased.

Lupin’s head rang with the knowledge that he was alone now, alone, and falling. The smell of smoke was no longer a guide but a hell, taunting him in his loneliness. Did he really think he could escape? Did he think the universe was done playing games?

He could still hear the laughter, the singing, the screams. But beyond that there was the scent of burning flesh and the sting of smoke in his lungs, and the floor he was lying on was cold and hard.

He cried out and received no answer. He reached out for his partner and found empty space and shadows - endless empty space. He gave in then and just let the whirling take him. If this was hell he’d jump in, join the chorus if that’s what fate demanded. Weakly, he began to sing in harmony with the voices around him.

Eventually that all faded and he slipped into the deep depths of unconsciousness.

It was only then that the fever broke, and silence reigned, and Lupin’s mind began to shift back into place.

~

Lupin did not know what day it was. He had slept. He awoke to merciful quiet - his head clear, his body exhausted and drained. There was no sound but the wind outside, the birdsong. No screaming, no laughter, no wild taunts. He lay down and slept again.

He woke again in the sunshine. The window was cracked open, allowing light and air. He’d been rested on a mattress in the corner, away from the burnt one. And as he got his bearings, he could see now that he hadn’t ever been abandoned. He had a glass of water, a bowl of soup by his side, still warm. Extra blankets within easy reach. His glasses, his favorite books, a few painkillers in a little cup. He’d been cared for.

He got up on trembling legs, weak as water, but feeling like a person again. Not just any person, either. He knew who he was. He had a face, and a name, and it was his and his alone. He caught sight of that face in the mirror. It looked back at him with a slight smile. Yes, he was real, and alive.

Once he was dressed, he was complete. He never felt quite himself without his jackets, anyway.

He left the room vowing never to come back to this apartment. He’d take Jigen and they’d go someplace warm and inviting and they’d rest. But this place... no, this place was cursed. Lupin slammed the door on it.

Jigen was on the couch. He smelled like burnt skin and cheap scotch and Lupin could tell he’d been keeping himself just this side of blacking out for the past few days - wobbling, but just steady enough to be able to take care of a sick friend.

He was bandaged and blistered. That would heal - burn marks on his legs and chest and stomach but they’d heal. Lupin, by some miracle, didn’t have a mark on him anywhere. How could that be? They’d been right beside each other.

Jigen woke up then, sensing Lupin’s presence. He looked him over through glazed eyes. “You’re better,” he muttered. “That’s good.”

“Jigen...” Lupin said, but he didn’t know what else to say. There weren’t words or promises that he could make that would amount to anything. Instead he just lay down beside Jigen, careful not to brush up against the bandages.

“You’re okay now, though, right? You’re not gonna -”

“No,” Lupin said. “I’ll be fine.” He was already making plans. The first was to get out of here. Take Jigen somewhere good - anywhere he wanted to go. Call Goemon and Fujiko back and from there... who knew? But Lupin was alive and kicking, and whatever came of it would be an adventure to remember.

But no adventures yet. Right now he was going to make sure Jigen had time to rest and heal. He’d take care of his partner; he owed him that at least.

Jigen had fallen asleep against Lupin’s shoulder, and Lupin held him gently. Fatigue was pulling on him, too. He’d fought hard the past few days, and he was still drained, but getting stronger.

He drifted off, a sweet and peaceful sleep this time. Tomorrow would be another day, and after that, the world was waiting.

#Lupin III #sorry for the wait anon! I know this was requested a long time ago #I hope it serves its purpose! #anyway: finally a fic that doubles as a fire safety PSA #Don't Play With Matches Kids #ESPECIALLY when the voices of the damned are echoing in your head #also I think I'm gonna start archiving some of these. like save them and polish them and put them on ao3 #I planned to do it with some of my TKLUTS fics but didn't #but now's as good a time as any to start #tumblr is a SUCKY place to save writing and I've lost fics because of it #also I feel like I should tag this but I don't really know WHAT to tag it as so...? #unreality tw

[sage-nebula]

Listen. All I'm saying is—

Cardcaptor Shizuka AU.

Everything in YGO canon remains the same except Shizuka, age 13, finds the book of Clow Cards in her grandma's old library and manages to open it. Cards scatter everywhere in a huge gust of wind, and a golden lion currently taking the form of a little plush toy awakens.

Only Shizuka can't really see him very well, because this is before she has her surgery. (And before her surgery is even on the table, really.)

Like, okay, she can kind of see him. She can see that there is a blurry mass of yellow floating in her face, and since her hearing is fine, she knows that thick Osakan accent is coming from the blurry yellow mass. But that's about it.

"If ya can't see, what were you doin' in a library?" the yellow mass, who has introduced himself as Keroberos, demands.

"Some of Grandma's books are in braille. I was looking for one of those," Shizuka says, although that's not really true. Something was calling to her in the library, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. Something wanted her to open that book.

"Well, I never thought the Cardcaptor would be blind," Keroberos—and really Shizuka thinks she might call him Kero-san for short—says. "But where there's a will, there's a way. Congratulations, kid—you're the new Cardcaptor!"

Of course, Shizuka has no idea what that means, but she soon finds out.

See, at first Shizuka protests because she doesn't have magical powers. Kero-san ("It's Keroberos!") is mistaken. When he points out that she couldn't have opened the book without magic, she reminds him that she's legally blind and will eventually lose her sight completely.

"Don't worry, I'll direct you. Just consider me your seeing-eye Clow guardian," Kero-san says.

And direct her he does, because when the Clow Cards start causing trouble around Hanafuda City—well, someone has to deal with them, and Shizuka is the only magical girl around. It's far from easy, but with Kero-san acting as her eyes and her staff in hand, Shizuka manages to capture The Windy, The Watery, The Mirror, The Jump, The Fly, The Shadow, and The Shield before her brother calls.

Because that's the thing with this AU: it overlaps with Battle City.

Thankfully, there are no Card crises while Shizuka has her surgery or during her recovery. The biggest challenges are the lengths of time that Kero-san has to pretend to be a plush toy, something that gets exponentially worse for him when Honda and Otogi pick Shizuka up from the hospital and take her to meet with the rest of the group.

The idea here is . . . Kero would absolutely recognize the Millennium magic as magic, and as powerful and tbh evil magic at that, much different than what Shizuka can do and more than she can tackle at the moment with her limited cards. There are times when I think Shizuka would still be tempted to try to do something, anything, but ultimately she would keep her magic secret and vow to get the rest of the Cards and learn more magic so the next time something like this happens, she CAN help.

That said, people who can sense her magic even if they can't quite pinpoint it are: Atem, Yuugi, Bakura, Ring Spirit, Malik, Isis

People who are suspicious af about Kero are: Jounouchi

People who think Jounouchi is being stupid by being suspicious of a plush toy are: Honda, Otogi, Anzu

People who secretly think Kero is cute and wish they had a plush toy of their own are: Mokuba

Anyway, when Battle City is over, the reason Shizuka doesn't join the rest for the Millennium World arc is because she had to return to Cardcapting (and also middle school). She does get the rest of the Cards and becomes their master. I don't know where Yue fits into this, but I imagine he must be someone also in Hanafuda.

A couple other things:

— I don't know how possible this is because I've never used one, but I like to imagine Shizuka would use a braille writer to put her name on the cards in kantenji (a.k.a. braille kanji), especially since her first handful of cards were before her surgery. Like I don't know if you could stick cards into a braille writer, but also this is a story about magic cards so let's go with it.

— I do think Shizuka does eventually tell at least Jounouchi about her magic. Or like I think she'd show him, perhaps with a card like The Glow. He mighr freak a bit at first because he hates occult stuff, but this isn't any more occult than Atem, a literal actual ghost, was so he'd be fine after a second, especially since The Glow is really pretty. Plus his baby sis is a superhero!! How cool is that??

— Kero and Jounouchi have a lot of personality traits in common, so tbh I think they'd get along even if they occasionally butt heads. More importantly though, Kero would remind Shizuka of her brother which means he would be a good guardian for her.

Anyway, I just think Shizuka deserved more than whar canon gave her, that she's every bit as brave and strong as her big brother (even if in a quieter way) and that she deserved more time to shine, so. Cardcaptor Shizuka was definitely happening behind the scenes and no one can convince me otherwise.

#yugioh #kawai shizuka #cardcaptor shizuka #fic fix #kind of not really #Shizuka calls him Kero-san bc she's less familiar / outgoing than Sakura #(at least at first . . . she might warm up to a Kero-chan) #and she doesn't tell Jou abt her magic during Battle City bc well #there was a lot going on #Jou died for a brief time there & that was after two (2) attempts on his life #there just wasn't time for ''I'm a magical girl & my plush toy is my familiar'' #so that had to come later #but anyway