Unrelated Worm One Shots

[YseultNott]

"Some ideas," Roxanne said, "are better than others."

Rocky, with practiced ease, ignored him.

"This?" Roxanne continued, undeterred. "This is quite possibly the worst idea you ever had."

"Come on, man, don't be a puss… a coward!" Rocky said. He was, Roxanne noticed, still holding the fucking camera, fidgeting with the strap hanging it from his neck. Like a fucking noose.

"It's not cowardly to be careful," Roxanne said. "Or to have common sense. Or not to have a death wish. This is stupid, Rocky!"

"It's not stupid to want to pay rent, Roxy," Rocky answered.

"It is when you're trying to sell pictures of cape fights," Roxanne said, words slipping into a roar as worry overcame his patience.

For a while, Rocky was silent.

"You don't have to come with me," he said, quietly, and Roxanne felt a pang of guilt at his outburst.

"As though I'd let you do this alone," he said.

 

[YseultNott]

Cauldron spoop snip exchange of 2022, for the prompt "Hana lied about her not sleeping because of her powers. It's so that her dreams can't spill out into reality."

Click to shrink...

"This is your fault, you know?" Vista says. "You knew what would happen."



---



It starts with Velocity coming back from patrol, with Shawn preparing for his. With Shawn strapping on his breastplate as Velocity strips off his bodysuit. With Dauntless putting on his helmet as Robin zips up his jacket.

"There's coffee left in the break room," Dauntless says, and Robin gives him a smile as he walks toward the door.

"Thanks," he says. "I might grab a cup before heading home."

Robin steps into the hallway, and the world bursts into searing light.



---



Vista isn't looking at her. Not really.



---



The breath of the explosion throws him against the wall.

His armor absorbs the shock, his helmet hastens his reflexes and mind enough that he lands on his feet, scorched, but unharmed. There is blood on the hallway walls. Cinders. There are an arm and a leg and a body and charred flesh on Robin's bones.

There is bile in the back of his throat.

His communicator is broken.



---



Vista isn't looking at anything.



---



It takes longer than it should, for Shawn to find the others.

It takes too long, because the ground isn't safe. Because as he walks down the hallway, as he turns the corner, there is that same flash under his feet, that same surge of scorching flames, that same terrible deflagration, and he'd have died without his armor, he'd had been burned to cinders, blown up to pieces, he'd be an arm and a leg and a body, charred ribs bared by melted skin.

It's hard to fly under the ceiling, but he manages anyway.



---



"What do you mean?" Hana asks, and there is a trickle of red at the side of Vista's head, a hole, shards of white on her dark skin.



---



He finds Armsmaster in one of the meeting rooms.

He's not alone. There's his secretary there, the cleaning lady, a handful of PRT personnel. Triumph, too. Not Assault, but it was his day off.

Not Battery. Not Miss Militia.

There are scorch marks on Armsmaster's armor. No one talks about them.

"Phones are down," Armsmaster says. "Radio. All communications I could think of."

He hesitates, briefly.

"I can't fix it," he says.



---



"Do you still think my death was worth it?" Vista asks. Her voice is not hers.



---



No communications means no way of knowing where anyone else is without physically looking for people. Without walking, through the headquarters, on a ground that risks detonating at any step. No communications means no way of knowing who is alive and who is dead. Who is injured, in need of help.

The alarm doesn't work either. They can't call for help. If help does come, they won't know, won't be able to warn them.

"Miss Militia is unaccounted for," Armsmaster says, "as well as everyone in the lower levels. We need to find them."



---



She can hear her heart beating against her ears, loud, deafening, the dizziness that comes with exertion, with lack of air, with running and drowning and fighting and doing more than the body can take.



---



He's the only one in the building who can fly.

There's Aegis. Kid Win, with his hoverboard. Shadow Stalker, as a stretch, with the way she drifts in her falls. It doesn't matter. None of them are there. The Wards are safely at home, sleeping with their family, and he is glad for it.

(Unless they're not safe. Unless whatever is happening isn't restricted to PHQ.)

(How would he know?)

Recon. Find the survivors. Find the injured. Find the dead.

Find whoever is doing this.



---



There is gunpowder on her hands. There is gunpowder on Vista's hands, too.



---



The worst part of the whole thing is the stillness.

It's the quiet in the empty hallways. The silent flickering of dying neon lights. The doors that won't open, won't close, the lack of alarms over the hum of machinery.

The scorch marks on white-tiled floors. The black and red he won't look at.

He keeps going down. Down and down and down. That's where the offices are. The living spaces.

That's where Miss Militia might be.



---



There is the smell of gunpowder. Of hot steel. of burning. There is the glare of the sun on something glinting, something glass she knows means safety. Means danger. Means someone is going to die.



---



When he reaches the door of Miss Militia's door, there are bodies piled in the hallway, and the bodies are wrong. The bodies shouldn't be there.

The bodies are small, curled like broken dolls, and the faces are frozen in pain, in fear, in shock, Clockblocker and Vista and Aegis and children he doesn't recognize, eyes identically fixed.

The faces repeat. The faces are on the wrong bodies.

He can hear their voices in the walls, and some are in a language he doesn't recognize, but all are screams, or sobs, or pleas.



---



There is the heat of explosions.



---



The handle of Miss Militia's door is hot to the touch, burning, like the seatbelt of a car left under the summer sun, like the barrel of a just-fired gun. The handle turns, and the door doesn't open.

It isn't locked. It doesn't feel locked, doesn't move in the way it would were the issue a key. It feels like a stuck door. Like the heat has bent the frame, has swelled the metal, just enough to keep the door in place.

He rams his shoulder into the door, twisting himself awkwardly so that his feet won't touch the ground. Once. Twice.

On the third try, the door gives in, and he stumbles inside the room.



---



It's not her heart that she hears. It's the rattling of guns.



---



Miss Militia is lying on her cot, curled up like a broken doll, a stray strand of hair fluttering to the rhythm of her breath.



---



"Hana?" Vista says, and her hand comes on her shoulder, and Hana can feel its weight and warmth through the fabric of her shirt, can see the lightning she holds in her hand. "Hana, you need to wake up."

 

[YseultNott]

For the Cauldron Spoop Snip Exchange of 2022, for the prompt "parasitic cape"

Click to shrink...

There is a stray cat who lives in Claire's street. A small one. A kitten.

"Don't feed it," Mom says. "It'll only encourage it to come begging for more. Don't touch it, either, we don't know where it's been. It might be diseased. You never know, with animals."

"No, we are not keeping it," Dad says. "We can't take in every stray we see, sweetie. There's always more of them out there. Besides, your mother doesn't like animals, and now really isn't the time."

It's a kitten. It's not like it's the Baxter's dog, who drools and barks and is big. Kittens are fluffy, and cute, and small. If Claire puts her palms next to each other, this one fits in the hollow of them, and it meows at passersby, like his tiny heart has been broken into even tinier pieces and he will die if no one stops to pet and take care of him.

Claire steals a can of tuna from the kitchen, and the kitten eats all of it, and then rubs his tiny head against her legs and hands.

She decides to call the cat Toby.



---



Toby eats like he's starving. It doesn't matter what Claire brings him, it doesn't matter how much, he eats it all, even the sandwich Mom made for lunch, even the entire bag of kibbles, even the ham she stole that was bigger than him.

Toby eats all he's given and then nibbles on weeds, on wet cardboard, on shoelaces and tin cans and garden fences, marking the metal with the pinpricks of needle teeth, and Claire worries, and Toby grows.

Toby grows, wrong.

Toby grows from the inside, belly bloated and fat, flesh spilling between the ribs and pressing under too-tight skin, and his legs feel as though strings were wrapped around the bones, and he's not so small anymore, not so fluffy, not cute at all, and it doesn't really matter, now, does it? She said she would take care of him. She can't stop just because he's stopped being cuddly.

"You're going to have a little brother, Claire" Mom says. "That means you have to take care of your brother. Be responsible. I know you can do it. You're a big girl."

"Your mother is going to be very tired, Claire," Dad says. "That means you have to be extra nice, and also help her with the cleaning and the laundry, so she doesn't have to be on her feet too much. It's a lot of work to make a baby!"

Claire thinks Tobias might be sick.



---



Claire's brother is called Timothy James. Tim-Tam. Timmy. He's small, and bald, and ugly, always wet and red from crying. Claire hates him, a little. Claire doesn't like it when he screams at night, when she has school in the morning and he keeps her awake, and in the morning the day stretches like the cheese on macaronis. Timmy cries every night anyway.

Claire hates him, a little, and Claire loves him anyway. That's what sisters do, isn't it?

Claire doesn't like school anymore.

"Claire, come on, it's not that hard to change a nappy," Mom says. "And don't make that face, you'll be happy to know this when you'll have your first kid."

"Claire, sweetheart, I love you, but you need to be nicer to your mother," Dad says. "She's very tired; you know."

The Baxter's dog has a puppy.

Claire finds Toby dead, skin like a torn paper over a box of cardboard ribs, with nothing at all left inside.



---



The Baxters' new puppy is soft, like Mom's silk scarf and Gran's velvet dress, like Toby was, at the beginning. Soft and cute and hungry and not quite growing as he should.

"I'm sure it's nothing," Mom says. "It'll fix itself in no time, you'll see."

"Maybe it's worms?" Dad says. "Maybe take it to the vet for a check up?"

Claire doesn't say anything. She doesn't like dogs. Too dirty. Too drooly. Too loud. Too much bark and weight and teeth. The puppy is still small, though, only a little bigger than Toby was. The same needle teeth, the same nibbling on cardboard and walls.

Claire misses Toby.

Mrs Baxter called the puppy Teddy, like the teddy bear Mom threw away when Claire grew too big for it, like something harmless and comforting, and Claire runs her hand over his head and thinks maybe she likes him, and wonders if she'll still do so later, when he's big and loud like his mother. She's not sure how all of this works, liking and loving pets. Liking and loving people.

She loves Mom, and Dad, and Timmy and she just needs to be a good girl, to be a good sister, and then everything is going to be okay. Good girls are happy, after all, and maybe if she's nice and helps with the cleaning and the laundry and the nappies it will come to her, in the middle of the night, like the answer to math problems after the test is over and done. Maybe she will stop being angry anymore when there's crying in the middle of the night. Maybe she won't miss Toby anymore.

Mrs Baxter insists she pets Teddy and she does, keeping her hand away from his teeth.

His flesh feels like strings under the fur.



---



Timmy is too small to be left alone at home and Claire, Mom says, isn't quite responsible enough yet to watch him on her own when the adults aren't there.

Mom and Dad aren't there, so Mrs Baxter is. She brought Teddy with her, but he's tired, sleeping in the guest room instead of asking to be petted or fed.

It's a good day, overall. They make a puzzle Mrs Baxter brought on the kitchen table, and she says they could tape the back of the pieces together and put it in a frame, hang the picture of matryoshka dolls on the walls of Claire's room. There are macaronis for dinner, with cheese, and Mrs Baxter gives her seconds, because she's a growing girl, and there is chocolate cake for dessert, as a treat. There are no dishes to wash, because Mrs Baxter insists on taking care of them herself, turning on the TV as she does so, leaving it on as she goes to check on Timmy and Teddy.

"...The suspicion of cape involvement in the recent rash of pet deaths and disparitions," the anchorman says. "Until more information is available, the PRT advise citizens to remain at home and keep pets separate from the rest of the household."

"We need to leave," Mrs Baxter says.

She's holding Timmy, but she's not looking at him. She's not looking at Claire, either. She's not really looking at anything, and Claire has never seen before the look on her face.

"The news say to stay home," Claire says.

"Claire, we need to go."

There is a strange note in Mrs Baxter's voice, and Claire doesn't protest any more as she opens the front door, as she hands her Timmy to look for her car keys.

She's not taking Teddy with them. Why isn't she taking Teddy?

Mrs Baxter's fingers are shaking as she tries to pull the keys from her pocket. Her shoes have left prints on the sidewalk, sticky and red.

When Claire goes to put Timmy in his car seat, she finds that he has bit through his pacifier, the rubber marked by needle-like teeth.

 

[YseultNott]

Written for the Cauldron Give-a-fic-athon of December 2022 for the prompt "A firefighter whose city has a fire-throwing villain."

Click to shrink...

Your first memory is a memory of warmth.

Mom tells you the full story when you're older and think to ask about the scar in the palm of your hand. She tells you about going camping, and cooking a hot meal, and looking away just long enough for toddler-you to put a hand on the hot stove. You don't remember it, the camping and the meal and your mother's screams. You don't even remember the pain.

Just cold fingers, and warmth, and reaching.



---



You're thirty-three when you gain a sister.

You haven't spoken to your father in years, not since you were twelve and the phone and the wires brought a stranger's voice and news of a disconnected number. You haven't seen him in even longer, shouts and screams behind the kitchen's door and an empty closet one morning, and your mother staring at her coffee as though it could give her answers. You didn't even know he was dead until social service came. Dead, like the bird you found on the sidewalk, like the faces on the news, like your sister's mother.

Your sister's mother is dead and your father is dead and she's not your mother's daughter and your mother doesn't want her. She's thirteen and there are no grandparents, no aunts and uncles and distant cousins. Just you. Only you.

You open the door to your home and promise to take care of her.

You are a firefighter.

People look at you sometimes, at your hands, at the scar in your palm, and they think it from a fire, and they tell you how brave you were, to go back after such a wound. Sometimes if they know you had it as a child they make up grand motives, a lost sibling or pet or home, a solemn oath to keep others from going through what you did.

You don't know how to tell them it never happened. You don't know how to tell them it just… felt right. Felt like someone you could be.

You are a firefighter, and the city burns every Sunday like clockwork, tick tock tick tock tick tick, like the belly of the crocodile, like a bomb waiting to go off.

I'll be okay, you say, you swear, empty words and empty promise, because you have no guarantee, because it's not in your power to make it so. There is a new villain in town and you are in the line of fire.

Solidago.

It's a pretty name.

You see a picture of her on the news, blurry glimpse caught on a phone camera, a slip of a girl in a yellow dress, ashes smeared over her hands and arms. You see a picture and you see the flames, high and bright and blue, like lightning, like wisps, like forget-me-nots.

You see what comes after them, too, charred flesh and vitrified bones and oil slick rainbows on fire-licked oven doors. You saw a documentary on fire-painting once, copper burnt blue and purple and pink. You'd thought it was pretty. You try not to think about it.

You tell Calla you'll be okay and it's a lie, and she smiles at you and believes it. I know you will, she says, and you smile back, and down under your ribs there's something that's a mix of glad and guilt.

You try not to think about that, too.

Calla turns fourteen. Calla pale and young, Calla the orphan, Calla your sister-child. You try to bake a cake and the oven turns it charcoal and you have ice cream instead, lemon and mint and blueberries, sweet and pretty and cold as the winter outside.

She paints yellow the walls of her room and for her curtains she asks for sunflowers, and you buy her hair pins shaped like buttercup and hope it makes up for all the evenings and all the Saturdays where you can't be home.

It doesn't, you know. It can't.

You both pretend it does anyway.

The fire keeps spreading, pretty and blue.

You glimpse a metal sculpture half-buried in cold ashes, a trinket to be put on a shelf, purple and blue from the flames, and you engrave the colors in your brain so you won't dwell on the knowledge the apartment wasn't empty. Oxidation, you know. A chemical reaction triggered by the heat. You find a guppy in the remains of an aquarium, tail fin frozen into crystal, more delicate than any artist could make. You find a sobbing girl with a marigold keychain in the elevator of a still burning building and you don't look at the glass where her hand should be. Lichtenberg calls you a hero. You don't feel like one.

You could have burned, Calla says and it's true. You could have burned. You could have died. You could have not gone inside, with the blue light and the heat and the glass-handed marigold girl. You didn't, you didn't, and you did.

I'll be okay, you repeat, as though the lie could make it true.

There is no fire on the next Sunday.

There is no fire on the next one either, or the next, or the next, and you catch yourself hoping that there will be no blue fire anymore, that it is over, that some of the ash-smeared bones were Solidago's, that she lit her own pyre and is gone, gone, gone forever. That you can go back to yellows and oranges and reds, to smoke and false alarms and things that make sense.

On the fifth Sunday after you save the marigold girl, a home burns blue, and your hope turns to glittering ashes.

On the fifth Monday after you save the marigold girl, you find a dress crumpled under Calla's bed, yellow, stained with black.

On the fifth Monday after you save the marigold girl, you stare at the sunflowers on the walls and you feel cold.

Solidago. Goldenrod. A girl in a yellow dress.

The worst part is how well it fits with the girl you took in. With Calla. With your sister.

With your sister, who is a child, who is your child, who doesn't have anyone else.

You find Calla in the living room with the dress still in your hands. She looks small like this, a hoodie pulled over her pleated skirt. She looks so, so very young.

"I just wanted to be warm," she says.

You think of ashes, of burns, of soot-streaked walls and faces, and then you think of glass and cold blue. You think of guppies and oil-slick rainbows and glass-handed marigold girls and ice cream and homes and buttercups hairpin. Of your father leaving and your mother closing her door.

"Are you going to turn me in?" she asks and you promised, didn't you? You opened your door and swore you would take care of her.

There's a hundred thousand firefighters in the world. A hundred thousand heroes. There's only one person for Calla.

"No," you say. "I won't."



---



Your first memory is a memory of warmth.

You fear that your last might be of the burn.

 

[YseultNott]

Written for the Cauldron snip exchange of February 2022, for Eva Grimm's Prompt "It's Valentine's day in Ellisburg, and love is in the air"

Click to shrink...

Once upon a time in Ellisburg, there was a little goblin named Ditzy.

Ditzy was a painter, responsible for maintaining the murals on Ellisburg's outer wall, so that the city would look as though it stretched on forever, and so that the goblins and their King wouldn't feel trapped and copped up. It was a very important job, and Ditzy was proud of having been chosen for it, even if it wouldn't be for much longer. Ditzy, after all, had recently reached the venerable age of four years and three months, which was quite advanced for a goblin: most didn't live past four years old, and few were those who had reached the age of five, and none had ever gotten to be six. Ditzy didn't think much of it, as it was merely how things were, but word was that it greatly distressed King Nilbog, for he cared dearly for all his subjects.

Ditzy wasn't afraid of dying. What was death, after all, but a rebirth, but to be remade anew in the hands of the King, or to be divided and shared between all who would eat, and thus to live on through them, forever and ever and always. No, death was nothing to be afraid of. Life had been good, and there were little regrets to be had. Just the one, really.

Paisley.

Paisley was the prettiest, most interesting goblin Ditzy had ever seen, with strong, broad shoulders and a flexible waist and rows of beautifully sharp teeth and oh! Those fingers! Longer than Ditzy was tall, ending in points that could easily pin any goblin or enemy to the ground or walls, every line of that body and hands made to fight and kill and be gazed upon in adoration.

"Do you need help?" Paisley asks, bringing Ditzy back to earth, and the wall, and the brush dripping paint on the ground.

"I need to touch up that tree but it's a bit too high for me," Ditzy says. "Do you think you could give me a lift? It shouldn't take long."

It's true that the tree needs to be touched up, and it's true that it is a bit too high for Ditzy to reach, but it is a bit of a lie nonetheless, as there is a stepladder hidden in the bushes just a few feet away. Ditzy doesn't feel bad about it though, not when Paisley is there and is so nice and so willing to help.

From up on Paisley's shoulders, Ditzy feels on top of the world.



---



Ogee, who collects bugs and birds and dead goblins for the kitchens, thinks Ditzy should talk to Paisley, which is ridiculous, because Ditzy talks to Paisley all the time to say hi and thank you and yes I need help please. It would be inappropriate to try more, when Paisley works directly to entertain King Nilbog and therefore is far too busy and important to spare time for old little Ditzy the wall-painter.

Ogee points out that maybe, possibly, Paisley so often coincidentally happening to be walking by where Ditzy is working, stopping to say hi and how are you and offering to help out, well, all those things might point toward the existence of some interest.

Ogee is pretty smart, in general. He might have a point.

Best to go out with no regrets, right?



---



Ditzy invites Paisley for a walk along the wall and Paisley, surprisingly, miraculously, wonderfully, accepts. It feels a little like the time Ditzy ate live butterflies, if those had survived being swallowed and had kept fluttering down the stomach and throat.

The walk is fine. The weather is nice, sunny, just the right side of cold to feel nice, and the murals on the wall are pretty where Ditzy fixed them up, are something to be proud of.

"Did you know," Paisley says, "It's Valentine's Day today?"

"What's Valentine's Day?" Ditzy asks.

Valentine's Day, Paisley says, is an old thing, a human thing, a thing from before, when Ellisburg wasn't Ellisburg and Nilbog wasn't King and there were no goblins at all. Valentine's Day, Paisley says, is something overheard from King Nilbog reminiscing, half-painted in rancor and nostalgia, colors vibrant and muted and bleeding together. Valentine's Day, Paisley, is a day for lovers and those in love to spend together.

The butterflies in Ditzy's stomach seem to have tripled in number.

"And do those in love do together," Ditzy asks, "on Valentine's Day?"

"I think most of the time they eat together, or give each other food," Paisley says, and there is a taste of disappointment in Ditzy's mouth now, butterflies dying and digested, because food is a rationed thing, a restricted thing, something to be parceled upon and not something any goblin can afford to share, and if that is what Valentine's Day is then Paisley only mentioned for the coincidence of the date, a quaint human things to be laughed at rather than an offer or reciprocation.

"Or," Paisley says, "they give each other flowers, and go on walks in interesting places."

There are flowers in Paisley's hand, fabric dyed red and rolled and sewn into pretty roses, there are flowers in Paisley's hand that will never wilt, there are flowers in Paisley's hand, offered.

"Will you do Valentine's Day with me?" Paisley asks, and…

"I'm going to die soon," Ditzy says. "We won't have long. A few months, maybe."

"I fight to the death every day for King Nilbog's entertainment," Paisley says. "We might have less. I don't care. I want you there, however long we both have left."

Ditzy isn't scared of death, or dying, or being gone, because as long as Ellisburg stands, no goblin is ever going to be truly, fully gone. Life has been good, anyway, and there are few regrets to be had. Just the one, really.

Maybe it could be none.

Maybe it doesn't matter.

Maybe there could be time spent together, memories to be made and hands to be held, while Ditzy is still Ditzy and Paisley is still Paisley.

Maybe that's what Ditzy wants.

"Okay," Ditzy says. "Yes. Please."

They finish their walk hand in hand, along the walls of Ellisburg.

Ditzy wouldn't trade this moment for all of a thousand years.

 

[YseultNott]

Cauldron Spoop Snip Exchange 2023, prompt: Gimel's Stonehenge is only half-built

Click to shrink...

The Sun is bright on the horizon, a thing of art and beauty, God's fingers and angels' wings and stained glass at a church window, and the light colors the sky, and this morning is a gold morning.

You get up, and you set to work.

There is much to do — breakfast to make, chickens to feed, houses to build, logistics to figure out. The stuttering engine of the car to fix. You only have one working vehicle for all of you here, and the nearest settlement is two days walk away. If it breaks, you'll be on your own. There aren't many people in Wiltshire, nowadays. Not all that many people at all.

(You don't know the numbers, exactly. The ratio, the this-is-how-many-died and this-is-how-many-didn't, and it feels wrong to even consider it. Blasphemous, even, to reduce it all to cold arithmetics, the end of the world and the crowd of refugees and the red of blood on a broken window. You don't want to know. You don't)

You like the quiet.



---



Gimel's Stonehenge is only half-built.

You never saw the Stonehenge of Bet, never went to that England, never even left Nevada before the closest thing you ever saw to a God judged your kind and found it wanting. You meant to. Your ten years anniversary, with Jennifer — it was her dream. You loved her. Everything seemed so simple. Everything made so much sense.

The Stonehenge on Bet isn't whole either, stones felled by wind and rain and the inexorable march of time, and you wonder if the missing stones would feel as the ones here do, as fangs pulled from a maw or gaps between a prison's bars, just wide enough to slip through. It is a silly feeling. There is no one here, nothing, just you. Just Simon, and Katrine, and Torsten, and old Monique. Just a couple dozen people or so.

Five thousand years ago, if you remember right. Five thousand years ago, Stonehenge was built. Five thousand years ago, there were people here, and then there weren't.

You wonder what the end of the world looked like for them.



---



"Anne is leaving," Torsten says over dinner one night, and it takes you some time to place the name, to make it fit with the face of a woman with blue eyes and bitten-off nails. Long enough to chew, and swallow, and then again, and again, and again.

"Katrine got news from that settlement in Spain," Torsten continues. "The one that started before. They're going to send one of their capes in a few days, to check on us, maybe give us a hand with some things. She'll ask to go with him when he leaves."

There is a hint of disdain in his voice when he says the word cape, a note of anger, and you think of light staining your hands, bleeding white-gold from your fingers, and you think of a car turned red-hot where metal meets glass, and you think of gods and puppets and a choir of false angels.

"Did she say why?" you ask.

"She said the place feels wrong," Torsten says.



---



You do not sleep well at night. You lie down in your sleeping bag, arms crossed under your head, and you look up at nothingness and listen to the rain hitting the fabric of your tent. You loved that sound, before, its soft notes against the windows, a mug of hot chocolate in your hand and the light of the living room lamps tinting Jennifer's hair with a warm halo of gold. There is no warmth to this rain, no sweetness, no music. Just cold aching like a missing limb, like the empty space where there used to be a world.

How strange it is, that after everything, the Sun keeps on rising.

Sleep, when it comes, feels like drowning. Like sinking in a deep dark sea, lungs filling with slick black tar, down and down and down and knowing all the while there is something at the bottom. Waiting.

You wake up and you think of oil spills.

You wake up, and the sky is gold, and you get up and set to work.



---



Anne isn't wrong. Neither is the Spanish cape who comes and takes her away, with his unease and comments. Neither was Matthew, whom you met at the portal who came here with you and then changed his mind and left to build his new life somewhere else. That's the thing, isn't it?

There is something wrong with this place.

No one talks about it. Everybody knows, Simon who doesn't talk and old Monique with her weak lungs and Katrine whose hands never stop shaking. Torsten who pretends he doesn't. Everybody knows, and everybody acts as though nothing was wrong, because what does it matter? Nothing is right on Gimel. Nothing is the same. Nothing is home in the ways that matters. It was a strange thing to learn, that you can grieve for a place just as much as you grieve for people.

You are all refugees now.



---



There's something wrong with this place. With the unfinished Stonehenge. With the dark oil you find sometimes, seeping out from between rocks. With the ground under your feet.

There's something wrong with you.

You used to like the Sun, and the color gold, and the way sometimes the shape of the clouds would outline beams of light, like an upside-down crown, or God's fingers reaching for the earth. Like something ephemeral and grandiose and sacred, and maybe you do like the rain, even if it makes you feel lonely. The sunrise and the light just remind you of Scion.

"I used to dream of meeting him, as a kid," Katrine says over dinner. "Who didn't? He was the greatest hero of them all, and one day he'd come to my town and I'd help him with something. He'd be so impressed he'd take me to be his sidekick and I'd be special so he'd talk to me and we'd save kittens from trees all around the world together. Even when I grew up, I kept wanting it, a bit. I used to volunteer at an animal shelter you know? And in a way, he's why. I started because I wanted to be like him, in any way I could."

"When I was a kid," Torsten says, "whenever I was scared, I used to, just. You know. Imagine he'd come for me. Help me. Save me, and no one and nothing in the world could stop him. I'd look at the window and dream up that he'd break through it, golden and handsome and strong, and that everything would be okay."

When you were a kid, you don't say, there was a fire in your house, and you still remember it so very vividly, the golden flickering of the flames and the taste of the tar-like smoke, And the vivid, rabid terror of a child too young to understand death and yet who knows they will die. When you were a kid, you don't say, you curled up in a corner of your bedroom to wait for the end, and you couldn't stop crying. When you were a kid, you don't say, he saved your life.

"I did meet him," you say. "Twice."

You don't say that on the day the world ended, he set your neighborhood aflame, dropped rays of sun on houses and cars until only you were left alive. You don't say that you saw it, the red-white-hot of the car and the cracks on the window and the screaming of Jennifer, her face pressed against the glass.

You don't say that you stood there, in the middle of the street, and when you look at him he met your gaze.

You don't say that when he left, the light was coming from your hands.



---



You put the last tile on the roof of the first building of the settlement.

It doesn't mean it's over. It's just the one building. The inside isn't even done yet. There's still much to do. There's still so, so much to do. An entire world to rebuild, and if you let yourself think about the scope of it all you can feel is vertigo, standing at the top of a cliff and looking at the sea, edged with silver and gold where the Sun touches the waves, and no land in sight as far as the eye can see. Standing at the top of a cliff knowing you have to jump, walking the tightrope with no net or harness.

What happens, if you fail? What does it mean, for everyone left behind?

What does it mean, if no one is left behind?

It took you three days, when everything ended, to get to the portal that led to Gimel. Two days wait with the panicked crowds to get through. A day to get a tent, and a piece of ground, and enough time to ask yourself what you were going to do now. Another day before you dug from your bag for a water bottle, the bag you took when you left your home, and at the bottom of it you found two plane tickets for Southampton. You remember buying them. You remember the plans, and the smile on Jennifer's face.

There are no planes on Gimel, no airport, no Southampton. The bag is long gone. You couldn't get the blood and soot out of the fabric.

You keep the tickets in your tent, and you never look at them.

You sit at the edge of the roof and you look at the world under.

You put the last tile on the roof of the first building of the settlement and it is not an ending. It is not an ending. It is not an ending.

You put the last tile on the roof of the first building of the settlement.



---



You wake up in the morning and the Sun is a golden jewel set upon the horizon, a thing of art and beauty, of churches and poems. You wake up in the morning and old Monique is dead.

She looks so very small, lying in her tent, her lips blue and her mouth full of oil and tar. She looks so very frail.

She doesn't look peaceful.

"She had weak lungs," Torsten says.

You say nothing.

You bury old Monique under the tumulus and three people leave for the closest settlement, and no one talks about it.

There is a house standing in the settlement now, and the world already ended once, and no one wants to start over again.



---



It didn't have to end like this.

The dark seeps up between stones and grass and it seeps in like sleep and exhaustion and it spreads like the rainbows of spilled gasoline, bitter and beautiful and terrible, and you feel it in your lungs, like grief, like drowning, like smoke. The thing under the hill, the great black lake, the not-god, the absence of sun, and it didn't have to end like this.

The world didn't have to end.

It would be different if it had been some natural disaster, some meteor or supervolcano or terrible earthquake. If it had been some mindless force of doom, as inexorable as the crumbling of mountains. It wasn't. It was Scion.

He didn't have to do it. He spent years being a hero, didn't he? Saving kittens in trees and children in burning houses. It wasn't mindless, or inexorable. He didn't have to do it.

The world didn't have to end.

There's Stonehenge, up the hill, Stonehenge half built and half fallen, and it reminds you of great stones hands, fingers cut off to break their grip. Stonehenge can't hold anything down. Stonehenge can't keep the dark under.

One false god above, one below.

The people who once lived there left. The people who once lived there died. It didn't have to end like this.

There's a house standing down the hill, and there's a house being built, and there are no planes for your tickets and nowhere to go back to and you're not going to do it again. You're not going to lose the world again.

Old Monique is dead but you are not, and all the wrongness in the world isn't going to make you go.

After all, gasoline burns.

You'd forgotten what it feels like to be angry.

 

[YseultNott]

Cauldron Spoop Snip Exchange 2023, prompt:

Click to shrink...

There is a deep web of cracks in the screen of Susan's phone.

It's funny, how quickly these things happen, how easily. One instant of distraction, one momentaneous loosening of a grasp, and it slips between fingers to hit the ground. One brief second, and when you next need it, it's there but it's broken. Unusable. Useless.

The phone is in the glove compartment anyway. Force of habit.

The sun is still high in the sky. According to the map, it's at least a three hour drive to the nearest gas station.

Susan drives on.



---



When Susan was fourteen years old, her mother took her and Debra and the car to see her parents in South Carolina. The memory of it is strange, a clear crystal thing, sharp and jagged and as distant as a dream or a story told by someone else. It reminds Susan of burnt caramel, the orange-brown shade of the light in the habitacle and a bitter aftertaste and the way the edges of it cut as she tries to pick it up.

In the memory, Susan is sitting in the back of the car.

Her head hurts, a painful throb behind her eye where she took the punch earlier that day. She tried to press a water bottle against it to soothe the pain, but they've been driving for hours, and the bottle isn't cold anymore, and now lays discarded on the backseat. It's night. Outside, the sky is dark, the world a pool of ink torn by intermittent lights. She lays her head against the window, and the vibrations of the car make the headache worse, but she's tired. She's so tired. She wants to sleep.

In the front seat, her mother chokes.

Now, with the knowledge and hindsight of adulthood, Susan knows she didn't, not really. It was hyperventilating, a panic attack maybe, or something similar. But in the memory, in the head of Susan, fourteen, scared to go home, she doesn't know what is happening, and it sounds like her mother is choking, like her mother is drowning on dry land. Like she's going to die. Like she's going to lose control of the car, and they're all going to die.

They don't. Debra, sweet Debra, twelve years old Debra sitting in the death seat, talks their mother down until she manages to stop the car on the side of the road. Until she lays her forehead against the steering wheels, hands shaking, and cries.

They don't die. They aren't hurt, not anymore than they were when they left. That story has a happy ending.

Susan doesn't like driving.

She can drive, she is driving, but she doesn't like it. She's never done it for so long, for more than a half-hour drive. Nancy's the driver between them, Nancy's the one who always sits behind the wheel.

Nancy isn't there now.

Two hours. Two hours left, and it'll be over.

Surely, she can hold on for two more hours.



---



There is blood on the steering wheel.

It doesn't quite look real against the black plastic. Just dark. Just wet. Just tacky and sleek under her fingers. There is blood on the steering wheel and there is blood on Susan's hand.

She stops the car on the side of the road.

It's strange. She can hear her heart, can feel it pounding against her skull, and everything is too bright, soo quick, spinning round and round and round around her, and there is blood on her hands.

Susan throws up.

Susan can't breathe.

She feels like she's dying.

She's not. She's not. She's not. She knows what this is. She's not choking, she's not dying, she's not lacking air. She needs to breathe out.

She's not sure how long it takes her to calm down. To stand up. To look at her hands.

The blood is hers. There are cuts on her fingers. She must have hurt herself with her broken screen. The blood is hers. The blood is only hers.

There is blood on the car hood.



---



It all starts when Nancy stops the car.

There is a RV on the side of the road, a white thing like there are thousands, and a little girl kneeling in front of it, and a man standing beside her, looking at the road.

"Everything all right?" Nancy asks.

The girl straightens a bit, turns away from the RV and half-toward you, her hair golden in the sunlight. The man smiles. He looks familiar.

Susan thinks nothing of it.

Maybe he just has one of these faces, after all. What else could it be?

Later, Susan will remember this and feel like a fool. Like the worst of imbeciles. Like she got up to close the leaking tap and found the rust was blood instead. Later. Too late.

Now, she just wants the trip to be over.

"Flat tire," the man says. "I don't suppose you have a jack I could borrow?"

His tone is perfectly polite, but there is something underneath, some kind of amusement, as though he were laughing at a joke only he understood, and Susan is being silly, being stressed from the car trip and looking for reasons to be wary. She always overthinks, everyone always tells her so.

"As a matter of fact," Nancy says, "I do. Want a hand?"

Susan doesn't quite pay attention after that. Nancy steps out of the car to help as Susan scrolls through her phone, chatting with the man as she does, good-day-for-a-drive-isn't-it and not-too-much-traffic-on-the-roads-that's-nice and bit-low-on-gas-but-it-should-be-fine and all kinds of idle nothing. The girl interjects, sometimes, calls the man Uncle Jack, and that was the joke, Jack needing a jack, and Susan really did overthink it. Everything is fine. There is a small bloodstain at the bottom of the girl's dress, and her hair is in ringlets. The man looks like Johnny Depp.

The realization hits Susan just before the knife hits Nancy.

She gets out of the car. She doesn't think before she does, doesn't even consider the danger, the insanity of it, she just gets out of the car, phone slipping from her hand, and she rushes toward Nancy, toward the man and the girl and the monsters, and Nancy isn't dead. Nancy isn't dead when Susan gets out of the car.

There is a spider with a brain and a spray of something colorful, and then there is nothing at all.



---



Susan wakes up in the driver's seat.

The girl is leaning over her, grinning.

"Don't worry," she says. "You won't run out of gas ever again."

She waves through the window as the RV drives away.



---



The broken phone is in the glove compartment.



---



The night is falling when Susan reaches the gas station.

There is a car at one of the pumps, a neon sign stark against the dusk, a family sitting at a picnic table. They look at her car as she parks, and Susan can see the moment they realize the red and brown isn't rust but blood, can see the way the mother pulls the children behind her as the father takes a step forward.

"No!" Susan screams. "Don't come closer! Stay away!"

She was unconscious. She was unconscious and Bonesaw was there and she doesn't know what happened. She doesn't know what she did. She doesn't know why she left her alive.

She doesn't know what might have been left inside.

She needs to give the alert, and she might have brought the enemy herself.

"Call the PRT!" Susan says. "Tell them I saw the Nine!"

The father stares, wide-eyed. The mother is the one who makes the call.

All there is left to do is wait.



---



"You're clean," the man says as he comes into the quarantine room. "As far as we can tell, Bonesaw didn't leave any surprises inside you. Didn't do anything at all. You're going to be fine."

It doesn't make any sense.

She can't be fine. That was Bonesaw, and that was Jack Slash, and that was Nancy, and she can't possibly be fine. Why would she be fine? Why would they have spared her? It doesn't make any sense.

"We'll keep an eye on you, of course," the man says. "Just in case. But it does seem that you were lucky."

Lucky.

The worst part of the PRT coming wasn't the blaring sirens, the harsh lights, the faceless masks. It wasn't looking at the family through the glass station windows, wondering if she had condemned them. It wasn't sitting in her car, waiting, not knowing whether she would live or die.

It was telling them she hadn't been alone in the car.

It was telling them Nancy was under the hood.

 

[YseultNott]

For the Cauldron GAFAT, for the prompt "Any rarepair romance fic"

Click to shrink...

It's raining outside.

The walls of Carlos's living room are yellow.

It's a study in contrast, streaks of dull watercolor and muddy grays and pools of pale lights and crisp bright rooms and solid walls and the buttery smell coming from the kitchen. Stepping from a painting into a children's book, out of the cold and into golden warmth.

The bed in Carlos's room creaks when Dean sits on its covers. The bedspread is stripped, black and orange and white, bold and bright colors against the pastel blue of the walls and the dull rainbow of an array of old, faded posters. Movies posters, to go with the movie collection sitting proudly on what was likely intended as a bookshelf, once upon a time. There is, inexplicably, an electric kettle on the windowsill, deprived of the base that would make it usable. A post-it clings to the handle. Someone drew a smiley on it.

At the request of Carlos's parents, the door stays open. Just a little, just a crack.

Boys will be boys Carlos's father joked, full of blue, shimmering mirth, Carlos a pale embarrassed green.

It's the first time Dean is here.

"Done!" Carlos says, and he plops himself on the bed beside Dean, shoes carelessly kicked across the room. "We're all set up. Ready?"

His shirt, Dean notices, is a little too big for him. Not much, just enough for the collar to slip a little lower than it should on his shoulder. Just enough for a hint of his binder strap to peek through.

"Yeah," Dean says, mouth dry. He's, all at once, starkly aware of how close Carlos is, of the warmth coming off from his skin and the smell of his shampoo. Coconut. It feels enormous, somehow, to know that about someone. Almost too much. "Yeah, I'm ready."

"This is going to be fun," Carlos says, and he presses a touch on his laptop.

The movie starts.


—


"So blue is happiness?" Carlos asks, and there is a touch of pink around him, something pale and soft and just bright enough for a touch of eagerness.

"Mostly," Dean answers. "It depends on the shade? Happiness is something like sky blue, but something brighter will be anticipation, or if you go paler it can be more… Contentment? But if you have a very dark blue it'll be lethargy, like when you're too tired to really feel what you're feeling. It's hard to explain."

It's hard to explain because it's not really colors, and it's not really seeing, and it's more that there's someone, and that person is feeling something, and that feeling is dark red, or violet, or azure, in the same way that chocolate tastes like purple and meat like turquoise: true as a stone falling down, and arbitrary, and not real at all.

It's hard to explain, because there is no way to convey all the shades and variations, like there is no way to make someone understand the exact shades of a sunset they didn't see, like there is no way to name every feeling that he sees. Because even when there are words Dean doesn't always know them.

"So bright colors are good," Carlos says. "That makes sense."

"Not really?" Dean says. "Take yellow. Pale and warm and golden yellows are love, or fondness, or affection, things like that, but highlighter yellow is brighter, and it's disappointment."

"Love is yellow?" Carlos asks, and Dean thinks about the sun reflecting into puddles, and ripped denims, and a warm, warm smile, behind the Arcadia bleachers.

"Yeah," he answers. "Love is yellow."


—


The ceiling of Dean's bedroom is white.

He wonders, somewhat, how much of his life has been spent like this, lying in this bed, looking at this ceiling. Stewing after a fight or a scolding, stomach tied in writhing knots, or spread out in boredom on a hot summer day, or lying in the dark waiting for sleep to come. Waiting. Always waiting.

There's a book in Dean's bag. A school reading. He should get it out, go through it. Highlight important passages and quotes, take notes on themes and structure.

He should. He just… Doesn't want to.

He really, really doesn't want to.

There is a fly buzzing in the corner of the room, where the walls and the ceiling meet. It buzzes, and buzzes, and buzzes, and the sound of it is inescapable, an annoyance he can't block out, adding yet another stone to a wall of exhaustion.

He should, at least, take his shoes off the covers. He would, maybe, if that didn't require moving.

The fly keeps on buzzing, and now his phone is buzzing, too, a two-tone pulse in his pocket, like a heartbeat. A text, or some kind of notification.

He really, really should move.

It feels like a superhuman effort, to roll on his side. To sit on the side of the bed, untie his shoes, pull them off. To fish his phone out of his pocket.

It's Carlos.

Dean falls back on his bed with a smile.


—


The sun shines high and bright and yellow above the Boardwalk.

It is a hot, hot summer day, right at the edge of being unbearable, the sky so clear and blue it hurts to look away from the ground. There's Tyler from school, Samantha, Megan. Carlos, walking close enough to Dean's side their fingers brush every few steps.

They aren't holding hands.

"Ice cream?" Megan offers, and the warmth is heavy and ice cream is cold and colorful and tempting, and sticky as it melts down the side of the cones, and Dean wonders, if he leaned forward and kissed Carlos, would it taste of sweet lemon?

"Is yours good?" Carlos asks.

They're not holding hands, and they don't kiss, but they both know what it means when Dean smiles and inclines his cone for his boyfriend to have a taste.


—


Carlos's mom made them a bowl of microwave popcorn.

They started the movie with it sitting between the two of them, taking turns digging inside, fingers sticky and sugar-sweet. It's drifted, now, squarely on Carlos's lap, and Dean's stomach turning with the slight nausea that comes with overindulgence.

They started the movie with five inches between each other, and now their legs are touching and Carlos's hand is on his knee, and Dean feels like a live wire.

On the screen of Carlos's laptop, a frat boy is cut in two.

His insides don't look real.

It startles Dean, sometimes, to remember that he knows what real insides look like. Real guts, real bones, real sinews and flesh, red and wet and glistening. Carlos turned inside out and laughing it off in the aftermath.

Dean saw Carlos's heart, once, a glimpse of a pulsating muscle through a hole in his chest. Carlos had reached inside himself to put his fingers against it, wrist bloody between his breasts, and then he'd laughed, and he'd asked Dean if he wanted to touch it too.

It would almost have been romantic, in a way, if Dean had done it. If he'd literally held Carlos's heart in his hand. Mostly, thought, it would have been fucked up.

There was no fear-green on Carlos. Dean sees no colors on the frat boys on-screen.

They first kissed under the bleachers on a Monday morning, in between two fits of rain, and Dean had wanted to catch that moment in amber, forever and ever and ever so it would never end.

He had never kissed a boy before.

"Same time next week?" Carlos asks, warm blue and soft yellow, and Dean looks forward to it.