#short!

[joshuaballsett]

[darkartcorner]

And another Iterator, hehe

Distant Pulsar, the youngest and the shortest (in puppet and superstructure) member of [STARCHASERS], close friend of Gazing Upon the Stars, even if he doesnt share all his views

(Note of advise: do NOT call him "short", he's quick to anger and always very 'tense")

And another lovely work by @voxiecal

[befuddled-calico-whump]

Easy Work

cw: beating/interrogation, emeto, mild dissociation

T$$ Masterlist ///// Next

~

He doesn't have a name today.

It's pragmatic. No name means no answer for the men who demand to know who he is, who hit him whenever he responds with only a glaring silence.

The spy doesn't mind the blows. He's had worse.

When one of his captors pulls out a camera, he knows the drill. Threats and recorded pain, in an effort to force a viewer to act. Could be an efficient strategy, if the viewer in question wasn't Shepard Vic his superior.

Vic doesn't care what the spy has to endure; he knows his subordinate can take whatever's thrown his way. Likewise, the spy understands that he shouldn't expect help, rescue, or sympathy.

One of the men who has him jerks his head up by the hair, and the other shoves the camera in his face, muttering something to its intended audience. The spy barely pays attention to his words; he's too busy watching the man himself.

He walks with a self-assured step, confidence oozing from his voice and eyes. A man who believes himself on top of the world, not seeing how easily he'll topple if only pushed at the right moment.

The man behind him loosens his grip, and the spy lets his head drop, taking a deep breath in the instant of reprieve they've allowed him.

It doesn't last long.

The man's fist buries itself in his gut, and the spy hunches forward, reflex overcoming his bearing. Mentally, he recoils from the nauseating blow, burying that still-soft part of his brain he could never kill completely. He's tried not to hold it against himself. It's only human to hurt.

The man hits him again and again, until the spy’s nausea becomes too much and he empties his stomach onto the floor, thinking only of how this man's blows seemed to weaken after the third hit.

He may be strong, but he tires quickly.

Had he encountered this duo in an even fight, face to face and aware, he'd have disposed of them swiftly and been on his way. As it were, the pair had ambushed him with a gas attack, drugging him unconscious in order to get him here. As soon as they put the camera away, they'd be wishing they'd given him a stronger dose. Neither of them would leave this building alive.

The spy's torso throbs from the hits he's taken—they’ve been attempting to persuade him to speak since the dawn first shone through the cracks in the ceiling—but he doubts it will be much of a hindrance. He'll make quick work of the pair, pain or no pain.

From there, it'll be back to the compound with the intel he's collected. Back to the new team that's usurped the life he's grown into, that he works so hard to keep at arm's length. He needs them to hate him as much as he craves their respect.

The spy still doesn't understand why Vic insisted on collecting such a group, but by now he knows not to question his master's will.

The camera is shut down. Its wielder carries it up the stairs, likely to upload the file it contains and ship it off.  In approximately ninety seconds, the spy will break free of his restraints and kill the man’s partner.

Easy work. Two quick jabs to the throat if he's facing him, seize his weapon and pull the trigger. If he's stupid enough to turn his back, the first step will become unnecessary.

The spy will be free of this place in less than six minutes. Free to return to the cage home that is the compound.

Free to return to the name Sahota.

~

@theonewithallthefixations @violet-prism-creatively

[sr-sam-bodypillow]

i spent way too long editing this im sorry

[vollzz]

Droplets staccato onto the rooftops beneath her feet. Metal clangs against the material where she’d been just a moment ago. She leaps, aiming for a carved-out facade of a building’s third floor.

His strides are like wingbeats, always following, always right behind her. Just a little further now, and she can-

The aging brick edge crumbles under her weight. She scrambles, desperately aiming for purchase, barely grasping onto stable ground. She heaves herself upwards, only to hear the balls of his feet land gracefully next to her.

Small, lethal shards of metal have already left her fingers in trajectory to his face. He strikes them away and descends upon her in fury. They’re a tangle of nails, bared teeth, enraged vocalizations. He’s got her in a headlock, arms trembling with fear, with remorse, with desire.

“I should kill you. I should fucking kill you-”

She strikes him with a sharp elbow, breaking free, running once more. An arm wraps around her waist and tosses her back into the ground. He’s on top of her, the full weight of his form pressing her into the brick of the rooftop. Rain drips through the cracks in the faltering floor above them. He’s pressed the silver of a knife lovingly against her throat, his other hand entangled in her hair. No words leave his mouth, though the widened emotion in his eyes leaves nothing unsaid.

She struggles, but his grip is firm. This is it, then - in a strange way, it amuses her that he’ll finally get what he’s wanted.

Slowly, she tilts her head backwards, exposing herself more, feeling the bite of the cold steel. A peace offering.

“Go ahead.”

Scarlet beads bloom from the newly created wound. His gaze’s trajectory hesitantly lowers to take it in. A breath catches in his chest. For a moment the fierceness in his eyes grows and the blade presses even further. She feels the warmth of a few droplets of blood run a crimson trail down the side of her neck. Her eyes close. A hiss of pain escapes her lips.

“Fuck.”

The knife is tossed somewhere, forgotten. A thumb caresses the small wound, smearing the red. She opens her eyes once more as he shifts his weight, freeing her hands. The iron grip on her hair softens, the fingers spreading outwards. His red-smeared thumb comes to rest on the protrusion of her jaw bone. They sit in silence, their eyes cautiously looking at one another, their hands slowly moving to new destinations. A temporary truce.

His mouth descends on hers with the same rage as before, though now there’s something else behind it. She smiles.

Rain pounds on the rooftops.

This is how it will always end.

[binch-i-might-be]

I've started writing something... but not something I should be writing rn

[windupnamazu]

last resort

ffxivwrite2020 #12: tooth and nail || masterlist || ao3 mirror

⮞ lunya, haurchefant, & reese. mentions of «balefire». 654 words. ⮞ heavensward, canon-divergence: the vault. ⮞ the one where lunya opens the seventh gate just to spite jannequinard (and for other less petty reasons, but mostly that).

"with all one's resources or energy; fiercely"

Her life—though she doesn't think it precious, doesn't see how others saw a point in nurturing its flame—is not hers to throw away.

It is her mother's life. It is her father's. It belongs to Noraxia and Moenbryda and the broken bodies of the Scions she had to bury, to the lives that were given so she and the others could continue moving forward. It belongs to a little girl in Ul'dah with hair as pitch as night and an all-consuming love for her family that drove her beyond their ken, and it belongs to an old man from the east who died during the night of a falling moon to save her. To desire death or to let it take her within its grasp without a fight is to spit in the face of everyone who brought her this far, who kept the blood in her veins flowing and the rise and fall of her chest going.

Her life is hers, there is no mistake—but it isn't hers to throw away, so she's not going to die here.

That's what Lunya has to promise herself as she takes a steadying breath, reaching out to grasp for a tendril of aether, finding Haurchefant's among the bright din of the Lifestream. The others are watching, shellshocked or helpless, exhausted from their rampage through Ishgard's holiest building in a bid to rescue Ser Aymeric. Among their healers, she's the only one left who can try; Duscha and Theo have both expended their mana and the remnants of Reese's own attempt to mend the wound still linger on her friend's shaking hands and in the glowing crevasse in her beloved's chest. She knows A'dewah would bleed himself to death if he could but she will not let him, not when Reese asked her personally, though she knows Reese hadn't known what a drastic extent it would take for something like this, to drag someone back from the brink.

The final heaven's gate does not open to her so much as it bursts beneath her beckoning hand.

To open the seventh gate is impossible, she remembers from the bitter, half-hearted lesson Jannequinard gave her once, and were it not for the immense flood of astral magic crushing her now she would smirk. Except upon death.

And how convenient it is that she has already seen the face of death and kissed her goodbye once, isn't it?

"LIVE!" The swansong light of a star collapsing in on itself drowns the platform within the welkin, and the world warps around her, the moonlit skies of La Noscea swimming within her vision and swelling her lungs with empyrean wind. With freezing palms and a boiling in her stomach, she reaches heavensward and knows that no matter how highly the cards are stacked against her favour she will turn the tides; the stars are her birthright and she is coming home.

(She is only mortal, though, and knows that if this pushed her to her limit, if this could end up breaking her soul as it did to Kichirou on the night of the Calamity, it would be a lovely, lovely death indeed, to return to dust among the stars and have nothing left of her remain. But fear does not make victors or champions of the realm.)

And when she entwines Haurchefant's aether with her own, a binary star given form, he breathes, taking the force of Vylbrand's storms straight from her chest and into his own.

The light of their forced stasis fades as her knees give out beneath her and she sways, pulled forward by the invisible tether between their aether. The last thing she feels before the night swallows her whole is Zaya's scaled arms wrapping around her and holding her close, and her last thought is a promise to not go supernova while she is still a gentle, nascent star and she has not yet finished burning.