10 or 17 for Rise for the injury dialogue prompts! :D
dialogue prompts
10. “I don’t care. I’m not leaving you.”
@calliopechild you requested this so long ago 😔 im so sorry
x
You’re not sure what to make of the new guy at first—he looks young, almost a full head shorter than you, definitely still wet behind the ears—but after a few hours you’ve turned the corner. He’s sharp and picks up things quickly and never has to be told the same thing twice. On top of that, he’s got an easy-going smile you don’t see much of in a place like this, and nothing seems to ruffle his feathers.
“That’s Susan, the menace of HR,” you say apologetically when Leon clears the final hurdle between himself and his newly minted trainee badge. “Thankfully you won’t see much of her until it’s time to argue for a raise.”
“It means a lot to me that you think I’ll be here that long,” Leon replies, tongue-in-cheek. He flicks the polished sleeve of his badge, hanging on a lanyard around his neck.
You think the photo they took for the personnel file wasn’t very good—the colors smear together, the edges a little out of focus. It’s person-shaped and vaguely smiling and that’s about all the details you can glean at a glance. You’ll have to remember to send an email about that.
“Hey, it’s like with any other cushy government job,” you tell him, leading the way down the hall. “Once you get your foot in the door, it’s all downhill from there.”
He’s probably heard the company spiel already, so you won’t waste any time reciting the new hire PowerPoint presentation. He’s quick on his feet, he’ll learn. His eyes are sharp, and he asks intelligent questions, and he never once hurries the tour along even though there is something about him that reads as distinctly restless. Eager.
You think you know exactly what he’s looking forward to. You’d put a month’s salary on it. Classified information doesn’t stay that way for long internally, and the rumor of three new aliens held on site is easier not to dismiss outright after the invasion of New York City last year.
The Krang specimen died, seemingly out of spite, three weeks ago. They learned less from it than they would have liked. These new subjects were a windfall no one was expecting. They squeezed another grant out of their parent corporation and brought in additional staff. Bishop is no person’s friend, but when he sees a need in the department he stamps it out in a matter of days.
“Okay,” you say, steering Leon toward the elevator, “time to see what you came here for.”
He blinks, and it’s the first time you’ve managed to surprise him all day. Then he smiles.
“Am I that obvious?”
The sublevel the live specimens are on requires security screening conducted by a pair of steely-eyed armed guards and one final ID scan at the door beyond them. There’s a bit of a hiccup with Leon’s badge not reading properly on the scanner, but you were there when it was printed, and you’ve worked at the EPF long enough that when you vouch for him, the guards let it slide.
He really wouldn’t have made it this far if he didn’t belong here, after all.
The overhead LED lights are stark and bright, leaving no corner in shadow. There is, of course, a lab—you nod hello to the other researchers, and they look amused to see you playing babysitter but greet the new guy amiably enough.
Leon doesn’t seem to hear them, eyes locked on the glass tank front and center. You hang back and watch him walk forward, smiling a little bit at his enthusiasm. You remember being young and enthusiastic, new to the job and unable to believe what you were seeing even when it was right in front of you.
This specimen is the one that unnerves you the most. The big one in the next room is scary in the traditional sense—like a child’s idea of a monster, with spikes and sharp teeth and a deep, rumbling growl—but it is not as scary as the Krang had been. You still jump when it slams against the glass, to the amusement of your colleagues, but you don’t feel haunted by it every second you’re in its presence. And the little one in the room past that just hides inside its shell, the only indication of life beyond the sensors in the room being the occasional rocking back and forth of its yellow-patterned carapace.
It’s this one, the one with deep purple markings on its limbs and unblinking eyes, that makes everyone in the room look over their shoulder, and triple-check the locking mechanisms on the tank, just in case.
You say as much, and it only manages to sound halfway like a joke.
Leon says, “Good thing there aren’t two of him, then.”
You’re used to a complete lack of motion from the creature behind the glass, the kind of dangerous stillness that makes your animal hindbrain feel hunted, but now it jerks its head around so fast you jump backwards. It’s staring at Leon—no it’s looking at him.
Everyone around you is talking in low, urgent voices. You haven’t had this kind of engagement from it since it got here two days ago, not counting the chunk it tore out of the former head researcher’s arm, when it told on itself that the sedatives they synthesized specifically to put it under for the purpose of collecting a few skin and blood samples did fuck-all.
“Yeah,” Leon says. “That would be a disaster, huh?”
A second later, the creature is standing directly in front of the glass, and more than one person shouts in surprise and alarm behind you, but Leon doesn’t flinch. There’s three layers of inch-thick laminated glass between his face and the face of an alien still stained with old blood, ruddy red peeling off its snout and throat in flakes. For the first time since you met him, Leon isn’t smiling.
“Can it hear through the glass?” someone asks behind you, the researchers absorbing everything they can from this strange interaction playing out in front of them. “Has it been listening to us this whole time?”
It’s baring its teeth, more restless and agitated now, and doing something with its hands.
“Does anyone here know sign language?” Leon tilts his head to ask over his shoulder without breaking eye contact with the animal that put your direct supervisor in the ER.
The half dozen of you in the room all respond in the negative. You open your mouth to explain that everything that happens on this sublevel is recorded, and the footage will be reviewed and analyzed by a team who will be able to translate, but Leon has already lifted his hands and begun signing himself. Clearly fluent in the language, even though you don’t remember reading that in his file.
The exchange only lasts a few seconds and then Leon steps back. The creature is upset, shoving its face against the glass, scratching at it with nails already broken from scratching at it. Leon looks back at you ruefully, and says, “Nope, it’s all nonsense. Sorry, thought I was onto something there.”
You exhale a laugh, your head spinning. “Well, now we know,” one of your colleagues, Avery, says with good-humored disbelief. The whole team is buzzing around, eager to dissect the behavior they’ve just witnessed.
“The others are that way, right?” Leon says, nodding towards the door to the side. You barely eke out a yes before he’s off, swiping himself through and disappearing into the adjoining lab.
“Where did you find that kid?” Avery asks you, reluctantly impressed by the chaos Leon has left in his wake.
“Don’t ask me, I picked him up from HR,” you say, lifting your hands. “Apparently there was an issue with his transfer from another facility, and a bunch of missing paperwork—this Shelldon guy in IT spent lunch hour saving the day.”
“Well, thanks, Shelldon,” she replies, “we might actually come up with something to satisfy Bishop if this lucky streak holds.”
To say Bishop was dissatisfied is the understatement of a lifetime.
Months later, when internal affairs has finished its investigation and you’re off administrative leave, you’ll be allowed to see the footage. You’ll see the way the huge creature in the next room lowered itself to the floor on its knees so Leon didn’t have to crane his head back to look up at it, as if it saw something it recognized that managed to cut through the mindless animal fear. And the way the little creature in the third lab finally came out of its shell and scrambled to the glass wall so desperately it was more of a crawl than a run after just a few minutes of Leon speaking calmly in front of its tank. But it’s that first clip you watch over and over.
The dangerous creature in the first tank with its purple markings and the bite force of a saltwater crocodile emphatically signing Get out of here, stupid. Don’t do whatever you’re about to do. It’s too dangerous.
And Leon verifying that no one else in the room would understand before signing back, I don’t care. I’m not leaving you.
But for now, you don’t have context for everything that happens in the tight five-minute window that ruins your career. The sublevel is locked down, network disabled, every form of communication in and out jammed. The overhead LEDs go dark, emergency lights glowing on reserve power. More than one voice cries out in frustration as they lose their work.
There are armed guards stationed two doors away but every lab on this floor is soundproof—every lab is, from a technical standpoint, a glorified bomb shelter—so even if you had realized right away that this was a scream-for-help situation, it wouldn’t have done you any good to try.
Movement behind the glass catches your eye. The creature is baring its teeth at you, the facsimile of a smile. You’re reminded, abruptly, of an iconic scene in your sister’s favorite movie when a genetically engineered monster realized the electric fence keeping it enclosed was no longer an issue.
The door to the next room slides open and Leon strolls through. He’s holding something in his hand. It looks like it might be a broom handle. Did he stop at the custodial closet?
You’re half-expecting some level of concern from him about the blackout, but if anything he looks even more relaxed now than he has all day. It takes you realizing the tension he’s been carrying in his shoulders is gone to realize it was there at all. He signs something at the creature in the tank. He signs the same thing two, three, four times. By the fourth, the creature is blinking wetly at him.
“Hey, man, I wanted to say thanks for the tour,” he says light-heartedly. It’s a kind sentiment, if a little out of place. “It’s really hard getting around someplace you’ve never been before. Visualizing a destination when you don’t have the first clue what it looks like—that’s just asking to get lost or get caught. But hell, put on a badge and act like you’re supposed to be here, and someone will come along and take you right where you want to be!”
You’re not sure what the hell he’s saying. There’s something glinting on the floor of the other room. You tilt your head to look past him through the open door, and see what looks like a foot. You move to the side a little more, and now you can see one of your coworkers sprawled face-down in a blanket of broken glass, twinkling as it reflects the emergency lights and smeared with hints of red. The light is just right at this angle; you can make out a matching spatter of red on Leon’s cheek.
You’re slow to understand what you’re seeing. Leon stands between all of you and the tank, where the creature is pressed as close to him as it can get on the other side of the wall.
He laughs, and it isn’t a kind sound.
“All it took was my little nephew cooking up some fake new hire paperwork. And, you know, making sure the real new guy never showed up for his first day.”
Avery is quicker on the uptake, and runs toward the exit. She doesn’t make it. Leon steps over her prone form, still smiling, smiling, smiling. He doesn’t have any weapons, beyond the blunt stick in his hand that he isn’t using, but he doesn’t seem to need them. He hits hard enough that one blow to the temple or the solar plexus folds even the researchers that tower over him.
He leaves you for last. You don’t know why. Your mind is blank with panic. There should be alarms blaring, but instead there’s just overwhelming silence. It’s you and this kid who shouldn’t even be here. Who faked his way in. Who fooled you and everyone else.
“God, I bet you’re just dying to know,” he says with a moue of false sympathy. “What the heck, you did help me out today.”
Leon reaches into the collar of his shirt, pulls a necklace with a large charm out from underneath it, and slips the whole thing off his head. As it comes off, your vision blurs and you have to blink to readjust your eyes. Once you have, the likable young man who spent the day shadowing you is gone. In its place is a creature exactly like the ones caged in this sublevel, holding a gleaming sword in its hand.
Between the blood on its striped face, and the wicked grin it’s using as a thin excuse to bare its teeth, it could be the purple creature’s twin. This is not a good development for you.
“Oh fuck,” you whisper, too afraid to do anything but stand absolutely still.
“I hope you have a really fun time explaining this to your boss,” it says, boyish and charming.
It slices its sword through the empty air, making you flinch and backpedal, tripping over the body of one of your coworkers and hitting the ground. There’s a shine of blue, painfully bright in the dim glow of the emergency lights, and when you push yourself upright and blink through the afterimages, you’re alone.
You do not have a fun time explaining this to your boss. You’ve never seen Bishop as apoplectically angry as when he was informed that not only did every single specimen escape, but they were rescued right out from under your entire team. And you were the one who delivered the rescue to them. Forget your job, you’re lucky to have left that debrief with your life.
Months later, when you’re allowed to watch the footage from that day, you study it with a fixation that borders upon obsession. You try to peel back the false layers of the Leon that he let you see, you try to find the moment—any moment—that gave him away. You’re consumed by it.
“You were outwitted by a child,” Bishop had snarled. The condemnation makes you nauseous, but not for the reason you might have thought it would.
You had noticed how young Leon had seemed. He was good at assimilating into the role he’d chosen, he adopted patterns of speech and body language that made sense in the environment he’d snuck into, but when he had finally shed that fake skin he sounded more like your teenage nephew than you were willing to admit for a long time.
And that makes you think of the smallest creature, rocking back and forth in its shell, too frightened of you and your team to come out for any reason. The biggest creature, stirred into an aggressive frenzy when it realized it had been separated from the others, slamming repeatedly, tirelessly, against the walls of its cage as if it would never stop until it found them again. And the creature that scared you the most—the one that bit as soon as there was someone within biting distance, the one hyper-aware of every sight and smell and sound in that stark, bright room, twitching restlessly like even the near-inaudible whirr of the food dispenser was nails on a chalkboard—the way its face transformed into something human the second it was treated like one, the way it clustered close to the glass and urged its only hope of rescue to save himself instead.
Mostly, you think of that last thing Leon had signed, the words he repeated again and again until the message finally seemed to get through.
It was almost funny, because Casey’s expression was so similar to the one Leo made when he was lying; not for his Faceman schtick when he was playing up his charms, but the kind where he was trying to hide something he was sensitive about.
This probably is super random bc I don't think I've ever sent you an ask before, but I just wanted to say that it's really nice to see you back on tunglr.hellsite again. I know you got unfairly dogpiled w/ reactionary bullshit bc of your mp100 fic, & I'm sorry that it got so bad that you had to leave. But I'm glad you're back; I enjoy your run-and-watch posts & your humor, and you always bless my dash w/ good bnha content. Hope tumblr & fandom is kinder to you now & henceforth.
fjdfhjhjdfdfdfd this is a really sweet ask...
And yeah just... GOSH... of all the curveballs 2017 threw at me, the whole “angst fic, where bad things happen to good characters, is a problematic and cancellable offense” was NOT one i was expecting or prepared for until it was too late. and - surprising though this may seem - someone who’s neck-deep in writing fic about characters healing from the lowest point in their lives might not be in a great frame-of-mind themselves - i kinda just wasnt equipped to deal with social media discourse. ...so yeah, i tapped out for a while, for my own sake.
i am happy to be back though! tumblr seems... kinder? maybe? (is it because everyone went to twitter?) and even if it’s quieter and less popular these days, i prefer that to the bastion of discourse it was in 2017.
so for now im intending to stick around and make the most of this blue hellsite (affectionate)
I never thought I'd find out on tumblr of all places that Ulysses S. Grant was a Horse Girl(TM), but that recent post you reblogged has taught me that, lmao. Ragging on him aside, it is very sweet that he cares so much about animals and is ready to throw hands with anyone who mistreats a horse (as well he should).
lmaoo Grant was a BIG OL HORSE GIRL, I laugh about it all the time. But it’s very sweet!! A lot of the time, he was more comfortable being around horses then being around people and I’m like wow same dude!
and yes it’s super sweet, he would throw DOWN if he saw someone mistreating a horse...that was a big nono...and he didn’t get mad often so when you saw that happen, you know you’re fucked
I saw your earlier post on how spirits/quirks manifest and change in the CC 'verse, and now I'm super curious re: Todoroki. Did his spirit have both fire and ice previously, or was one a shift? And since they generally scope out kids before settling on one, did his spirit know the awful shit Endeavor was up to? Did that influence its decision? Did the other Todo kids' spirits purposely try to keep their power as ice or fire to protect their kids/spite Enji? So many implications!
So Spirits Are Kindof Assholes (I mean, spirits are overall mostly assholes) and so caring about their human is hit or miss.
For the Todoroki side of the family, they are a group/clan of Onibi which are not, generally speaking, ‘good spirits’, who have stuck with that family tree for the last two centuries. Fire is the natural expression of their power and they have been pleased with how that family has honed their power and continually improved it.
Rei’s side of the family are in fact Yuki-Onna, and likewise have a bit of a clan who tend to choose from within the family.
These are both spirits 100% in things for power gain, not really entertainment or anything, but then you get Endeavor, and seriously, What The Hell is Wrong With This Human? He has some very strong spirits in his kids and he continually bitches and moans that they aren’t enough??
Endeavor’s spirit talks to Rei’s spirit and is like. Let’s make one together, give it to his new kid, and give it enough power to overpower HIM, It’ll piss him off and also make him fight more, power gain is a win for all of us.
Todoroki’s spirit, therefore, is an entirely new creature.
And was created to spite his father and make other spirits stronger.
He will not be particularly happy to learn this fact.
Happy birthday! I hope you're having a good one, and I'm issuing a friendly order to treat yourself to something tasty (and maybe a little unhealthy) if at all possible.
thank you, I am trying to have a good one, though I did just put up an instagram story that’s gonna infuriate some family members and frankly I’ve been infuriated for the past week so it’s their turn
yes hello friend, if you're offering, may i put in a venmo titty request for one (1) cup size? thank you very much. signed, a card-carrying member of the itty bitty titty committee
I will venmo you one (1) cup size, which still keeps me at bigger-than-99%-of-brick-and-mortar-stores-carry-in-stock but blessed be your new larger tiddies
