I saw you reblog that thing talking about how people revisit old fic with weapons of time and I just wanted you to know that that is my absolute favorite piece of 2nd person point of view media. I loved it so much and it's one of a handful of fics saved to my kindle. I also started playing legend of Zelda because I wanted to understand the context of the fandom you moved on to immediately after Red versus Blue cuz I liked your writing so much so much and I wanted to keep reading it.
That's the sweetest thing I've been messaged in a while. <3 Thank you. Look, Weapon of the Times is one I still want to sit down and finish, but it would require me fully just being retired to focus on it honestly. My brain works in a very specific way for writing but maybe one day... I just REALLY wanted to get into the AI-centric section in part 4.
I'll tell you what tho, I still really like this opening:
Weapon of the Times - I - Chapter 1 - starkraving - Halo [Archive of Our Own]
This is how you come back to the war.
Step one: Wake up dead. Wake up dead with a number laser-stamped into the meat of your tongue. That number is 24. Survive for 13.423 seconds. Your brain lights up, the insides of your skull unfolding into the bone-bowl of your cranium. Awareness is a needle -- a hypodermic shunt penetrating into the lizard core of your brain and delivering three CCs of a highly-volatile bio-synaptic serum that, unbeknownst to you, has liquefied seven skulls of gray matter prior to yours. The chemical cocktail hits the curdled sludge of cerebrospinal fluid -- fires a series of electrical pulses into the deadened folds of your brain and for 13.423 seconds the synaptic paths of your last memory fire up and you open your eyes and --
Step two: Immediately and violently go into cardiac arrest. Your heart -- heavy, artificially warmed and softened for weeks prior -- jackknifes in your chest and seizes. Scream. Scream for the whole 13.423 seconds that you’re alive. Scream like an animal being gutted alive -- the flayed roadwork of your veins pulsing with artificial and bio-cloned blood, semi-toxic with antigens and tissue hydration fluids, poison to any living thing. There’s an oxygen mask strapped over your nose and mouth, force feeding purified air through a long tube fed down your gullet and up your nose into the back of your throat. Gag around the obstruction as your heart stops completely.
Step three: Die again.
***
Step four: Wake up. Survive for 24.5 seconds this time. Fail to understand what’s happening to you or why your entire existence is made of up of black and white -- the black’s on the inside of your head and the white’s in every nerve, every fiber, every molecule of your body which has been set on fire. Your guts are loops of rubber tubing, siphoning battery acid through your lower intestines. Your bones are cracking in their housings of muscle roped too tight to the carbide ceramic grafted into your skeleton. You are aware of the bones in your skull, of your teeth rooted in your head -- you are aware of them because they hurt.
Your eyes burn with tears and with medical gel -- you’re floating in a soup of it. You don’t know why. You don’t understand anything. You understand that your body is a slab of blood and bone and you’re trapped inside of it. Become frightened by these noises that echo through the thick liquid soup around your head. Take 5.4 of your 24.5 seconds to realize those noises are coming from you. Take comfort in the sound of your own voice, impossibly deep, vibrating through the ossified structures of your bones and remember how to moan.
Step five: Feel, don’t see, the needles that punch through the skin and muscle at the base of your cervical and thoracic vertebra. Promptly piss yourself while the feeling goes out of your lower body, twitch and spasm as the needles start to twist inside your spine, spinning and they are not needles, they’re drills. It’s good you’re paralyzed because otherwise you’d snap your spine the other way and break off the drill bits in your vertebra.
They grind through the bones, until every fiber of your being is pulsing, glowing, throbbing with agony. The wirework of your nerves burning inside the envelope of your skin. You try to scream again, the muscles of your esophagus closing around the tubes in your throat, swallowing and gagging, your whole body flexing as the pain spreads through you, inhabits you, possesses every cell in your body and you’re screaming. Screaming to distract yourself. Screaming to make it stop. Screaming until your wordless thoughts spin out and --
“Remember.”
Her voice is calm, familiar. It settles onto your skin and lies there until it sinks inside you as surely as the needles push through the muscles of your upper body, your ribs, your thighs, your calves, your neck. You can’t move as the technicians slide each needle one by one or dozens by dozens into the meat of your body, long burning lines of heat sitting inside you, the plungers not yet pushed. It hurts, but you don’t make a sound other than to breathe a little faster. You’re scared. You are scared. You don’t want to do this, you’re not ready for what comes next.
“When you wake up. You will be given the best in medical attention to recover from the procedure. You will not be put into active service until such a time as we are satisfied that you will perform optimally in the field.”
You can’t nod. You can’t do anything. You can only blink, your eyes blurring, the bright orb of the surgical light blinding you to her face but you don’t need to see it to know it -- the beginnings of silver in her hair, the lines at the corners of her mouth. She’s in a white lab coat. She touches your forehead -- her palm against your brow warm briefly. She does not touch the recruits. She does not speak kindly to them. She does not look at you in any way but with calculation. Still, when the saline runs from the corner of your eyes, she touches your forehead and says,
“You’ve been called upon to serve. Survive. Then fight.”
The plungers drop and set your bones on fire and you --
Characters: Agent Washington (Red vs. Blue), Agent Carolina (Red vs. Blue), Dick Simmons, Sarge (Red vs. Blue), Franklin Delano Donut, Lopez (Red vs. Blue), Lopez 2.0 (Red vs. Blue), Dexter Grif, Frank “Doc” DuFresne, Lavernius Tucker, Michael J. Caboose, All the other AI’s, Vanessa Kimball, Epsilon, Donald Doyle, John Elizabeth Andersmith, Katie Jensen, Antoine Bitters, Charles Palomo, Matthews, Emily Grey, Original Characters, Felix | Isaac Gates, Locus | Samuel Ortez, Siris | Mason Wu, Megan Wu, Four Seven Niner, Malcolm Hargove, Kaikaina Grif | Sister
Additional Tags: Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Psychological Trauma, Fluff and Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, So much angst oh my god I’m so sorry, Platonic Cuddling, Artificial Intelligence, Dissociation, PTSD, Depression, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Panic Attacks, Frisbee Murder (don’t ask), Attempted Murder, Explosions, Listen there are so many explosions it’s not even funny ok, Cyborgs, Cybernetics, Space Flight, Space Battles, lot’s of swearing, Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Platonic Slow-Burn, Mental Instability, Dogs, Flashbacks, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Healthy Coping Mechanisms, Platonic Relationships, Russian Roulette, Creepy-Ass Villains, Canon-Typical Violence, Ass-Kicking, Major Character Injury, lots of blood, Lots of LGBT+ Characters, Redemption, So Many Space Dads, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Torture, cannon divergence
Summary: “With The Staff of Charon a smoking-yet-functional speck on the horizon, and the threat of an active weapons system on one of Chorus’ moons, the fight is far from over. While Locus is no longer a threat, another one of Hargrove’s former lackeys waits for the Reds and Blues as they race to stop the weapons system from coming online. Does she really want to help them? Or is she hiding a more sinister motive? And why is she so interested in Locus?!”
Welcome to Fan vs Fic! A new home for RvB fanfiction here on tumblr!
Fics, old and new alike, will be reblogged here to create a catalogue of RvB fanfic posted here on tumblr. As fandom habits shift and tumblr’s hidden rules become more difficult to navigate, it’s become a lot more difficult for writers. In theory, this blog will provide a little more exposure and also make it easier to find fanfic posted here. We can’t promise to find every fic, but we’ll do our best!
More information under the cut.
Every fic reblogged here will be tagged with a minimum of four things: rating, characters, ships, and relationship type using the same classification systems as AO3 (i.e. non-ship fics will be tagged as gen, and potentially with any friendship/non-romantic relationship tags). Major applicable warnings will be tagged as listed by the author. Other, additional tags may also be added, such as fic length (i.e. long fic or one-shot) and common tropes may also be tagged (i.e. slow-burn, friendship to lovers, hurt/comfort).
Ships will be tagged as [character] x [character], rather than by ship name, as name mushes are often inconsistent beyond the most popular pairs (and, even then, there’s minor differences, looking at you Carolina ship names and that ‘a’) and there are some rarepairs that simply do not have a name mush.
All of these tags can be found on one of three tag pages: /ship, /character, /other and these are linked on our sidebar. These pages are fully searchable, and even have a few easter egg searches hidden in them! They are accessible on mobile browser through the links at the top of the blog, but be aware they may not be as easily used.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Summary: "Everything changes," Wash says. "It's the one thing we can't stop from happening."
or: Caboose needs a haircut, but that's not really what this is about.
Notes: this fic exists within the universe of my story have you tried feeling happier?, which is a canon divergent story that steps around season 16 and takes place directly after season 15. you don't have to read it to get this, but caboose's backstory is detailed a bit in both of these. for @queen-tabris, who posted art of wash cutting caboose's hair, and then i completely lost it.
Words: “i go to class from 8 to 5 then cry because my bones hurt so this took a long time to finish” (2,222)
South loved sand, at least at the beach. Building sandcastles (and knocking them down), digging around by the surf for molecrabs, it was sand made all that possible. She remembered her mother’s trick for getting sand off of them before they got back into the car. Baby powder would always make trips to the beach look like North and South had played kickball with a bag of flour.
The desert was far less inviting than the beach.
“Alright D, we’re here, sync up,” She muttered, tapping the back of her helmet. Delta synced up, the world blurring and her balance skewing for just a moment at the sudden rush of data. South forgot that he couldn’t offload his statistics to the storage unit.
“Are you alright South?” His voice was too loud, echoing from every direction. She kept her feet planted, waiting for the world to refocus as Delta’s form faded to a ghostly afterimage.
“Give me a minute,” The numbers running through the back of her mind weren’t nearly as distracting or as overwhelming as they had been the first time she had synced with Delta, but it was still disorienting.
“We might not have that long. With North’s motion trackers in his possession, we only have thermals to determine where the Meta is, and they have a very limited range.”
“But he won’t follow into the desert, right?” South started her walk into the desert, the edge of the brush and grasslands fading into pure sand with only the skeletons of ill-fated plants littering the endless wastes, dunes rising in the distance like a wave of gold against the blue sky.
“He likely doesn’t know about the UNSC soldiers, in which case he would have limited knowledge on the size of this desert and our survivability chances. He would likely stick to the mountain base, where he would have more cover. But if he does know about the soldiers, he’ll be sure to steer clear. No data shows that the Meta will attack groups of more than four even when presented with larger groups, and a UNSC platoon as small as thirty in that desert will likely be close-knit.”
“So all we have to worry about is Illinois?” She hated how her armor weighed her down, feet sinking just a little too deep into the sand to comfortably walk.
“For whom we have countermeasure prepared for. I have synthesized much of the video data related to his sister’s death as obtained from security tapes and drones with Theta’s projection system.” South avoided the brief flickers of data that Delta added to her own memories, focusing on the background noise of calculations. “He would be able to run it smoother than I, but it should buy us a few seconds, or more depending on Illinois’ reaction. The Counselor kept very little data on Agent Illinois. Likely because he was not on the leaderboard nor competitive for a place-”
“Are you sure we’re going to make it?” South thought, looking back across the expanse. The green of the distant fields was a thin strip on the horizon, disappearing as she climbed down the first sand dune of many in this trip.
“Of course. But the sooner you start walking the sooner we reach the UNSC encampment.”
“Right…” She knew Delta could feel her anxieties, her thoughts seamlessly translating to the A.I. implant faster than she could think.
“Your planned lies are acceptable. I will add corresponding data to the Freelancer data base.”
“Will the Project know?”
“Unlikely. The Project processes hundreds of simulation troopers from the UNSC. One more will not spark suspicion.” The files were sent. Hopefully the PFL database wouldn’t flag them as fraudulent. South felt a flicker from Delta, his tone softening. “Are you sure it is wise to disclose your affiliations to the UNSC, if asked?”
“No,” She laughed, alone in the desert dunes, hoping to sound lighthearted. “But the only installations that aren’t UNSC or civilian on this planet are Freelancer. They know their own, so they wouldn’t buy any records you spoof for long, and if somebody strolls up in full armor with weapons, they aren’t exactly a civi, ya know?”
“I know, but even as our best option, the likelihood of our identity remaining concealed during our stay is only approximately 26% confidence. This increases likelihood of mission failure from 12% to 39%, which, though within acceptable barriers…makes me nervous.” His presence in her head suddenly reminded her of Theta, the uncertainty and fear creeping in and invading the corners of their shared mind.
“Hey, we’re gonna be fine,” She needed to get his mind off his worried. They were keeping good pace, but she getting tired. “You got the life support on tap?”
“Life support will kick in automatically when vitals drop below normal. Water recycling is at maximum efficiency. You should eat something now, you’ll be hungry later but also too hot to eat and you’ll just end up nauseous and tired.”
“Pft, sure mom,”
“I am not your mother,” Delta said, sounding almost concerned. South snorted, coughing as a breath of sand clogged her helmet’s filters. She shook away the dust, a smile tugging at her lips.
“Delta,” South felt him relax at her tone, a small, robotic, and unconvincing laugh echoing from the artificial intelligence. He didn’t quite get the joke, but at least he understood that it was intended to amuse.
“Acknowledged. I will be in sleep mode to help conserve energy, but I will be integrated with your suit. Just call when you want me,”
“Sure thing, mom,”
---
The grind of sand between South’s armor pieces was grating on her nerves, and the wind constantly whipped blasts of sand against her armor. She wondered if the paint was holding up but instead focused on the mapping in her HUD. A few more miles. A few more dunes.
Her life support systems had kicked in during the last 24 hours, water reclaimer struggling to meet more than the baseline hydration. Another dune passed under her feet, South sliding down the steep embankment out of exhaustion. She crawled back to her feet then kept walking. Delta came online.
“We’ve got company,”
“Who?”
“I picked up on a PFL vehicle tracker, seems to be a warthog,”
“Illinois,”
“Likely,”
“Can we outrun him?”
“If you start running now,”
South was sprinting across the sand, but she could only move so fast. She was dehydrated, and exhausted from days of walking. Still, she made good time. She made it to the top of a particularly tall dune and looked down to see the UNSC base. It bustled with life, mongooses rolling around the temple’s pillars, tents well-kept despite the years of desert sun and wind.
“On your right,” South reacted to Delta’s warning without thinking, throwing herself to down the dune, looking up at Illinois as she slid down the sandy slope.
“Race you to the base, fucker,” South shouted, a grin across her face as some of the still distant soldiers took notice of the individual wearing bright pink, sand scored power armor running across the sand toward the military camp.
Everything was going to work out. Hopefully. If Illinois tried to attack her, he would draw unwanted UNSC attention to the Project, which was explicitly against Recovery agent protocol. Now all she had to worry about was the UNSC soldiers killing her.
The first soldiers to meet her had ridden out on a mongoose, wearing their fatigues rather than power armor. South had almost forgotten how low tech the average UNSC soldier lived, the luxury of Project Freelancer’s technological marvels so long a constant in her life.
The two mongooses flanked her, the four soldiers letting the machine’s idle softly. Behind her, Illinois was calmly making his way to the group, weapons holstered. He knew the situation would require finesse if he wanted to leave the encampment alive, let alone finish his mission to recover South’s armor and the Delta A.I. fragment.
He sidled up to South, standing just behind her on her left. And he stayed silent, the group quiet except for South’s rattling pants. One of the mongoose riders stepped down, her visor dark. She was stout but broad shouldered, looking up at the armored soldiers with guarded curiosity.
“Who are you?” The million dollar question. And South wasn’t about to let Illinois get a word in edgewise.
“I’m Hattie Sanderson, he’s Billy West. We’re from Outpost 35-C, the Island Fortress down by the coast,” She sounded confident, and believable, she hoped, as she put an arm around Illinois’ shoulders, pulling him closer to her side. “Boy are we glad to see you guys!”
“I do not have a file prepared for Illinois’ alter ego,”
“Then make one, quick,”
“This is a suboptimal situation,”
“Thanks Delta! I couldn’t tell!”
“I am capable of recognizing sarcasm,”
“I know, now make sure the files are in line.”
“Outpost 35-C isn’t UNSC,” The woman said, not moving from where she stood. The driver of her mongoose pulled out a tablet from the vehicle’s storage, the glowing screen reflecting off his visor.
“It’s from the Freelancer Project,” South saw the soldiers physically bristle at the mention of the Project. They knew about it, maybe not much, but what they did know wasn’t good. “We were on the sim trooper teams out there, he was blue, obviously, and I was the red team leader.”
“Sim troopers?” The woman sounded curious, that was good. She flipped up her visor, dark eyes scanning the power armor. “Pretty fancy for a…simulation trooper,” The soldier with the tablet nodded to the woman. Delta’s data showed that he had been looking at their records, and everything checked out.
Delta scanned the woman’s face, pulling her UNSC file to South’s HUD. Ivanka Roberts, 39, Captain of the Canary Squad, stationed on the planet of Talitha at the ancient alien temple in the western desert. Calculating, cautious, and by the book. She would need a thorough convincing.
“Yeah, they hooked us lowly sim troops up with implants and power armor on the first fucking day. Can you believe that shit? Those Freelancer fucks could slap an A.I. in our skulls like we’re some fuckin’ Masterchief type badasses, but no, we’re the target practice and the guinea pigs for their tech upgrades.” South put her hands on her hips, huffing in annoyance. “If the UNSC has got so much functional tech I don’t see why you field soldiers live like it’s the 2030s while we’re out here debugging power armor upgrades and training some super soldier cunts in how to use their tech,”
Roberts looked hard at South, the group silent except for the hum of mongoose engines and whir of the power armor. Her HUD suddenly beeped, the water reclaimer was dangerously ineffective. With a sigh, she removed her helmet slowly, combing back her helmet hair with one hand while holding the empty helmet at her waist. She opened her mouth to speak, but Illinois interrupted.
“Listen we’re tired, thirsty, hungry, and have been travelling for several months. If you want us out of your hair ASAP and don’t want two corpses out in the sand tomorrow, we just need enough supplies to make it out of this sandpit. We’ll stick around and help out if you want us to, like, pay off the supplies or whatever but I’m this close to keeling over dead so please direct me to the nearest shallow grave or let me know if we can work something out.”
South did her best to keep her expression neutral but couldn’t hide a blink of surprise. As thankful as she was that Illinois was willing to play along, she hated not being in control of such a sensitive situation.
Roberts look between the two armored soldiers, then nodded to her own troops.
“Get them to Megan, she’ll look them over.” The captain turned back to the Freelancers. “Your armor and weapons will be stored in our armory, and you will surrender any Freelancer technology to our database. Is that understood?”
“Yessir,” South and Illinois said in unison, weakly saluting the woman. Roberts cracked a small smile and crossed her arms.
“Megan will take care of any injuries and make sure you’re hydrated and ready to help us bunker down for a sandstorm that’ll be moving in tomorrow, and soldiers,” Roberts tilted her head slightly, scanning South’s face for reaction. “We will further discuss your stay here once you are settled in, dismissed.”
South heaved a sigh of relief, disguising it as a yawn. Even in the bright sun, in terms of a 24 hour day, it was late, and she was exhausted.
“That could have gone better,” Delta lamented as South climbed onto a mongoose, Illinois dangerously close to her on the small vehicle as the driver transported them closer to the temple base.
“Could’ve gone worse too,” South closed her eyes, bones tired from days of walking and lips dry from thirst. “This’ll only be a few days, and we can handle Illinois while he’s here,”
“How do you propose we do that?” Delta read her thoughts, a flicker of horror, disgust, and delight flashing through his presence in her mind. “That is terrible idea, but, it is statistically plausible,”
“Yup. The Dakota special. Ideas so stupid that they might actually work.”
---
Sorry this took so long I’ve been taking Game of Logging certification courses for the past two weeks and I’ve just been too burnt out to work on this TvT. BUT! Y’all will finally get Wash next update. I’ve still got some surveying and mensi classes for the next month or so, and after that I’ve gotta work for the summer, but I’ll keep working on this! Thanks to all y’all that add comments or tags or shit when ya reblog, really makes my day.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Red vs. Blue
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Agent Carolina & Leonard L. Church
Characters: Agent Carolina (Red vs. Blue), Leonard L. Church, Vanessa Kimball, Emily Grey, Michael J. Caboose, Four Seven Niner (Red vs. Blue), Agent Washington (Red vs. Blue)
Additional Tags: Rosh HaShana | Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur | Atonement Day, Developing Friendships, Sibling Bonding, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Cooking
Series: Part 6 of The Best of Carolina The Teenage Witch
Summary:
With the approach of Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur, Carolina struggles with the absence of family. Thankfully she has people around her, including Church, who gets introduced the emotional whiplash that are Disney movies.
Series summary: Carolina: The Teenage Witch was a sitcom series that aired on ABC, and then the WB network, over the course of six seasons, airing directly after its parent series Sabrina: The Teenage Witch each Friday night. Similar to its predecessor, it centers on the life of Carolina Church, a teenager who discovers on her sixteenth birthday that she’s a witch. Although a spin-off, Carolina: The Teenage Witch featured a host of original characters, with the occasional guest star and name drop from its parent show, and rare crossover episode. It also took a more serious tone, focusing on the half-mortal witch and mortal discrimination and the corruption within the Witches Council.
Notes: A self-indulgent Sabrina The Teenage Witch fusion that has gotten out of control, but I’m having fun with it!
Friendly (get it?) reminder that RvB Platonic Week is October 15-21. Which means you have one month left to get your fanworks ready. If you haven’t decided what you want to contribute, now is a great time to start thinking about it!
The schedule:
Day 1 - Oct. 15 - Opposite Sides
Day 2 - Oct. 16 - Ladies Night
Day 3 - Oct. 17 - Hurt/Comfort
Day 4 - Oct. 18 - Family
Day 5 - Oct. 19 - Hugs/Cuddling
Day 6 - Oct. 20 - AIs
Day 7 - Oct. 21 - Alternate Universe
(Every day, of course, is leg day.)
Remember that we have an about page with more rules and details, as well as a page explaining all the prompts. And the askbox is still open!
PLEASE NOTE: there was an error in the original announcement post. The correct tag for the event is “rvb platonic week.” When you post your works in October, please use that tag, or else mention @rvbplatonicweek in the post so it turns up in our notifications.
(The original announcement post used hyphens instead of spaces in the tag. Unfortunately, Tumblr can’t track tags with hyphens in them.)
