According to Nostradamus, Silksong will come out on a day without a night once the chosen one has brought balance to the force by fighting an agent and winning while a bridge collapse kills 46 so the sleeper named for the mouse shape on the moon can awaken the ten plagues of Egypt and ingest the bodies of the four men who opened his tomb before the birthmarked child kills the queen who pulled the sword from a stone on March 15th once the forests walk and a man who was never born kills a guy so his soul can be used as a weapon in the war on heaven and the chosen undead collects the lordvessel.
new mechsplotation meta: angel pilots. You were custom bred to be the perfect pilot, designed hand and foot and teeth and tit to be the most efficient killing machine you can be, worshiping your handler, every bullet a prayer, every breath an exultation of the corporation that is your god. You are the paradisaical alastor lamb; an indispensable prize, beloved of the lord, given leave to reap her vengeance and wrath upon all who cross you. and yet, like all lambs, you cannot remain perfect forever, and when blood sullies your fine titanium coat, a new lamb, avenger of your flesh, perfect in ways you never could have managed, will be waiting, and it will reap what you could not, until it to proves itself,,, less than adequate.
As far back as you can remember, the dreams have made everything worse. The darkness the pain and the bone-deep, terrifying knowledge of the inevitable has infested your mind since you were a child. It has taken your sanity and everyone who has been unlucky enough to care for you.
And yet, nothing is worse than meeting Valarr and knowing that he isn't meant to survive you either. Nothing worse than the doomed knowledge that nothing lasts, not even love.
tags: dreamer girl, friends (??) to lovers, girl who thinks she’s doomed by the narrative, boy who loves her like that is his narrative.
[part ONE] [part TWO] [part THREE]
word count: 1.4k
You don’t quite remember the first time you meet Valarr Targaryen.
Mostly because you were actively trying to be somewhere else.
It’s a ditzy, slam-drunk, electrifying mess of a room with too-loud music and a cloying smell of alcohol in the air. The room is stuffed, air-conditioned, smelling of other people’s colognes and a gargantuan disco ball in the ceiling is sending neon lights all over the strange people’s bodies. They are dancing. Drinking. Kissing.
And you are there with your back to the wall, farthest from the drinks and the weeds, yet somehow pathetically aware of them. The base of the soundbox is thrumming against every solid surface of the room. With your back against the linoleum wall you can feel the music slicker against your skin, making your blood tremble. The people around you are shiny, fluorescent bright and pixelated. Not real enough for you to give a second thought to. You’ve only come here because you have nothing better to do.
You are invited here as sort of a last whim, you think. The text that Daeron sent was almost cryptic. An address and a time. It could be the place he’d want to die in or could be the place he’d make a headline by vomiting on someone important. And you knew you were lonely enough to get inside your car and drive through the heady traffic of King’s Landing in a Thursday midnight but in-your-senses enough to know that it’s a bad idea. Because Daeron is never up to anything sensible.
And try as you might, neither are you.
So you are standing on your own, gripping the glass of long iced tea as if your life depends on it. You want to leave the place, you want to dunk the tea in one go and get in your car and leave the penthouse, the city, yourself but your legs are almost bound. Lead-heavy. Not yours. You haven’t even seen the bastard. It could very well be someone else’s party and you may as well be uninvited and unknown, and strange to the hoards of people drinking and pressing against each other to feel something other than their bodies. Your head hurts looking at them.
Suddenly, the music stops, and in the split-second silence before the coming of the next song, you feel a switch go off in your head. Because suddenly, unfurling from the darkness, a terrible vision comes. It’s a snapshot of different colours—red and bright blue and a slick, helpless yellow and—bursting behind your eyes. You gasp—letting go of the glass—and clutch your head. The sounds around you intensify and in the blinding, senseless, irrational bitterness, all of your senses coagulate inside your chest. You try to breathe heavily and let the vision run its course, the image moulding and sharpening into the outline of a person. A man, arms twisted, laying on a gravel rash with his head slick with red. Dark hair with a silver streak splashed with blood.
You shake your head, refusing the sight. You are a leak in the walls, an ink spill, something rather than someone.
You are in pain.
And the pain is unbearable unbearable unthinkable. Your fingers spasm as your legs die out.
The last thing you remember is seeing two different shades of eyes. A pale, oceanic blue. A blinding onyx. They hover atop you in great wonder. You reach out to touch the surprised face attached to it. You are not quite sure if he’s here, if you can ever reach him.
Then darkness.
—---
You wake up inside a bleak, white room. The ceiling is white, as you blink out the sleep from your eyes and sit up, your hand inadvertently massaging your head. It still aches, but you are present enough to take note of the open window, the writing desk, the coarse, blood-red block of a painting that looks like the shadow of a dragon. You blink despondently, still unclear about where you are. Your head aches as you lean back, your body fresh with sleep, still in last night’s jeans and sweater—dazed, but strangely feeling safe.
You are only able to move your leg when the door opens.
A man with a tray comes inside. You blink at him. He is wearing dark trousers and a lighter shirt. You stare at him shamelessly as he comes closer and sets the tray on the table beside the bed. And there is almost too much of him. Too many details. He is white and slender and has a curious, awkward slant in his shoulders as he walks. And then he just waits, standing. There’s a patch of silver-white in his short, brown hair. There’s a strange softness in him, the way his eyes flit over your face, soft, pink lips tilting in a bemused smile.
His eyes are two different colours. Ocean blue and dark onyx.
“You look familiar,” you say before you can think of anything else.
“Right.” He blushes. “I was the one who caught you when you fell.”
You shake your head. It isn’t that, you know. He looks familiar in the strange, unearthly way sometimes things come to you. Blurred out and hazy, dim and stark, a plethora of insensates somehow making sense only in your mind. But you shouldn’t have said that. It is the sort of thing that has gotten you into troubles—that still gets you into troubles. You do not remember last night at all, but you know you saw him in a dream of yours, one of those colourful, effervescent ones—those ones that reek of doom and distress. You don’t know the time or place, the past or future, what he was wearing or what he was doing, but you know you saw him.
“Then it might be one of the… uhm, news channels? No—” He shakes his head. “I sound like an ass.”
“It might be,” you say, mostly because you feel sorry for him. “CNN, most like.”
“Right,” he says curtly. The flush deepens. It covers his cheeks in a halo of pink.
“Where am I?”
“My room,” he says, then blinks too fast. “My guest room.”
The confusion isn’t even fully materialised before he explains again. “You collapsed in my living room. And no one… no one seemed to know you. So I… I let you sleep it off here.”
“Your living room?”
“You don’t know me,” he says, narrowing his eyes a little. And you are struck by it, a little, a little too much. How truly beautiful he is. Struck by the way the light hits his silver bit of hair, how it looks like the wings of a mid-flight dove. His eye, the lighter one, has gold flecks streaked around its edges. The lines on his cheeks deepen as his lips press together in some thought you can’t read yet. You cannot read him yet, but there’s a small, preternatural voice inside you insisting that you must. You must read him.
So you think, No, I know you. I know you well.
“I got a text,” you say carefully, “from Daeron.”
His eyelashes flutter, an almost blink. “Daeron? You know him?”
“Same psych ward.”
His eyes narrow again, as if he’s gauzing your answer. And you tilt your head, letting him consider this. You are half lying anyway.
“Valarr Targaryen,” he says finally, offering his hand. It’s a lovely hand, lovely like the rest of him. Polished and manicured and perfect.
“Valarr,” you say. “Daeron’s cousin.”
You take his hand and shake it, ignoring the pang of unexpected warmth unfurling at the middle of your palm. You try to not rub the skin after you drop your hand. It’s not a familiar feeling, but you think you can trace it back to the vision you had of this same boy a month ago. The colourful, odd one. One of those that ends in tragedy.
But it has been ages since you’ve felt this rested. And anyway, after more than two decades of surviving the damned visions, you have gotten somewhat good at managing them, compartmentalising them, ignoring them in the daytime or at the mercy of alcohol and drugs. And at this moment, even with the looming thought of something terrible, you cannot help but focus on his smile. Small and slight and undeniably genuine.
You smile back. It sends a shot of migraine through your head.
Tried something different with this. A scene came to me, and I just went off with it.
had a dream ImpulseSV came out as bi and for some reason this made Elon Musk really upset so he started tweeting about it angrily and hermittwt ratioed him so hard in response that he banned all mention of Minecraft from Twitter.
#project hail mary
#iron lung
#coquette
#photography
