(or: putting celine into this blender i've heard so much about) (part 1)
The Honmoon, doing its whole spiritual-magic-mystical thing, sends dreams to its hunters, often prophetic in nature. This is very useful if you are living in a pre-phone society where getting to tears in the Honmoon before they happen is a matter of a week of preparation, and very much less useful if you are the only hunter available for the Honmoon to send dreams to. And also you're trying to raise the Honmoon antichrist.
Needless to say, Celine does her best, but nobody could handle all of that psychological/psychic pressure.
She's at a public event – Rumi comes with her, because she's still not willing to let Rumi out of her sight – someone makes a comment that should be outside of her hearing, but y'know, hunter abilities and all, and, well–
Celine snaps.
Not fully, more like a still-green branch, not pulled far enough to come loose from the tree, but far enough that there's no chance of ever healing seamlessly. It's ugly (though nobody dies – barely), and extremely public, and she's absolutely involuntarily hospitalized. She has money and fame, but the government is making a push for this sort of thing, and there were extremely detailed photographs in the news the next day (the ones that could be published, at least). Her near-psychotic distress at being separated from Rumi – she knows what's happening here, she knows that they're going to take her girl away from her – doesn't help matters.
The next fourteen years are spent maintaining her physical condition as best she can in a cell with supervised yard time, trying to play 'nice' with her captors (emphasis on trying – Kang Celine does not do 'nice'), and bearing the brunt of the Honmoon's visions. Without a hunter to train the next generation, the Honmoon will do its best to guide future hunters, but Celine is still a psychic lightning rod for as long as she lives without a proper hunter to replace her.
The dreams aren't exactly precision tools – they might be visions, either of the present or the future. They might be allegorical to the point of complete metaphorical abstraction. They might be a loose manifestation of the Honmoon's mood, whether that be calm or anxious. Celine, completely cut off from accessing the outside world by normal means, at least has the entire backlog of Honmoon trash to slog through. Some of the things she sees are even true, or will be.
And at least in the dreams she can watch Rumi grow up
Rumi, on the outside, is fostered away. She's put with a nice enough couple, but she was old enough at the time to remember Celine's slow descent into disturbed sleep, the way she would insist on Rumi learning to fight even as young as she had been at the time. Her insistence that Rumi was not just special, was critical to the future of the Honmoon. Dangerously critical.
Rumi spends the first two months with her foster parents adjusting to falling asleep without Celine curled protectively around her. The two months after that are spent arguing with her foster parents over her attempts to continue Celine's training regimen – something they think is too much for someone as young as her and also far too violent for a girl. The two months after that are spent rebelling against her attempts to ground her. The media is still interested enough in the story at this point that Rumi's rebellions get public attention. She's refostered. The process repeats itself.
Rumi grows up following Celine's tenets religiously. Foster parents come and go, friends are made and abandoned and broken up with, she takes on schoolyard fights and singing competitions, but always her memories of Celine follow her. What Celine taught her about fighting, about singing, about the Honmoon, what Celine told her about the future and destiny and patterns, what happened when Celine couldn't handle the stress on her own. Rumi knows she has to be better.
Civilians don't know what her patterns are when they see them, but demons hear rumors. Rumi covers up. Rumi's less of a headline these days, but every time she gets slapped in the back of a gossip rag for getting into public fights she has to spend the next week avoiding the odd demon scout. Rumi keeps her head down. Celine said Rumi won't hunt until she draws her weapon from the Honmoon, but she'll need to be ready when that day comes. Rumi trains, and trains, and trains.
And then she meets Mira at a dive bar (Rumi's performing, Mira's working), and the two of them are frustrated and a little scared by how much unexplainable attraction there is between them until they're fighting their differences out in a back alley after the bar closes for the night and Zoey crashes into them as she's trying to get out of her own trouble, and – oh. Oh.
And on the other side of the country, Celine's eyes flick wide open.
you walked in on your boyfriend's murder, but for some reason, his murderer let you live. the fact that his murderer is a robot from the future who can transform to look exactly like him only makes it worse. Terminator 2 AU, Shigaraki x reader, T-1000!Shigaraki, kidnapped!reader, discussions of murder, threats of violence, etc.
part i part ii part iii
sentience
When you wake up, the sky is dark, the car’s no longer in motion, and your seatbelt’s off. Something’s covering you, something soft that smells familiar, and when you sit up slightly, it slips down. You and your boyfriend keep a blanket in the back of your car. He must have gotten it for you. It still smells like him. Everything’s okay.
You’re comforted by that thought for a few seconds, nothing more. Then you wonder where your boyfriend is, and you remember everything.
The wave of despair that strikes you is so strong that it knocks the air out of your lungs. You can’t cry. You can’t even breathe. Nothing is okay. Your boyfriend’s dead. A monster killed him and kidnapped you on its way to kill your boyfriend’s sister and her son, and even if there was some way to stop the monster, you and everyone else will still be dead less than five years from now. Nothing is okay. Nothing matters anymore. Not you. Not your life, or your sanity. And definitely not the news you came home early to tell your boyfriend about.
That thought is the one that shakes you, the one that makes you cry, and before you can bury your face in your hands, the architect of all your misery appears out of the darkness to seize your wrists. “Stop that,” the T-1000 says impatiently. “Come look at this.”
“Huh?”
“This.” The T-1000 yanks at your wrists, and you barely avoid knocking your head as he pulls you out of the passenger seat. “This. Is this normal?”
He’s pointing upwards. You tilt your head back and find yourself looking up into the cloudless night sky.
It’s a beautiful night, and you’re far out in the country, kilometers from anything that might dim the stars. You and your boyfriend liked stargazing – not enough to own a telescope, but enough to drive out of the city on clear nights and find a place to look up at the sky. You can think of dozens of nights you spent sprawled out on the same blanket that’s wrapped around your shoulders now, your boyfriend at your side. Sometimes you’d fool around. Sometimes you’d cuddle. Sometimes you’d just hold hands.
You squeeze your eyes shut, and the T-1000 shakes your arm. “Answer me. Is it supposed to look like that?”
“The sky?” Your voice wavers, but you can’t keep the contempt out of it. “That’s what it always looks like. You just can’t see it in the city because of the light pollution.”
He’s looking at you with wide eyes – not grey like your boyfriend’s, but the hideous red he wears when no one else is looking – and the contempt surges within you again. “I thought you were an AI. Don’t you have detailed files on this kind of thing?”
“I have files on things that matter,” The T-1000 snaps. “Not this.”
He gestures irritably up at the sky – but then he keeps looking at it, staring up without blinking. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter than you’ve heard it before. “It doesn’t look like this back home.”
A chill runs down your spine. “It’s darker,” the T-1000 continues. “Lower. There aren’t any of – those.”
“The stars?” you venture, and the T-1000 nods. “There probably are. You just couldn’t see them.”
“What would you know about it?”
“More than you, I guess.” This is weird. The chill runs down your spine again, a little stronger, and you pull the blanket tighter around your shoulders. “You said there was a nuclear war. When things started burning, they’d make ash, and the ash would get into the atmosphere and stop the light from getting through. Not all the light – there’d still be some sun – but the stars are too far away, and their light is too faint. So you might not have been able to see them, but they were still there.”
“Really?”
His voice. What’s happening to his voice? Why does it sound so – “They’re up there. Even if you can’t see them. Even if you never knew about them – they’d be there anyway. They’re always there.”
“What are they?” The T-1000 asks. “Stars.”
You turn to look at him directly, and whatever’s wrong with his voice, it’s wrong with the rest of him, too. The T-1000 looks – different. You could say awestruck, but you’d be wrong, just like you’d be wrong to describe him as fearful. More than anything, he looks small, silhouetted against the vastness of the sky, all-powerful over you but insignificant in the face of the universe. More than anything, he looks lost, confused. Almost –
“Do you know?” the T-1000 asks impatiently, but even then, he’s still looking up, shoulders hunched and arms crossed over his chest. “Tell me.”
“They’re made of gas,” you say. “Gas and dust. It gets pulled together slowly by gravity over time and when there’s enough of it, it lights on fire. It’s a really bright fire, usually. All the stars we can see in the sky are trillions of miles away, but the light’s so bright that we can see it here. And it takes a lot of time to get here. The light we’re seeing now left those stars a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know,” you say. Your leg hurts. Your head hurts. And in spite of the blanket around your shoulders, you’re cold. “Why did you stop here? Don’t you have a mission to complete?”
The T-1000 doesn’t answer you. “Who made the stars?”
“Nobody made them,” you say. “Just like nobody made animals, or people. Sometimes things just happen. Why does it matter to you?”
“It doesn’t,” the T-1000 says. But he keeps looking. “Get back in the car. We’ll leave when I’m done.”
You should get back in the car. Get back in the car, go to sleep, forget. But you might die tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day after that. There’s a good chance – better than good – that you’ll never see the night sky again. You’d rather look at it for as long as you can. You step around the T-1000, a few feet off to the side and out of the glare of the headlights, and lie down on your back, just like you did so many times when Tenko was here. Even as you try to lose yourself in the night, you can’t forget the empty space at your side.
It’s not empty for long. The T-1000 lies down on the blanket alongside you, just like Tenko used to. Starts with his hands folded behind his head, just like Tenko used to. Blinks up at the stars through eyelashes that had no business being that long, but when he turns to look at you, he’s shed your boyfriend’s form almost entirely. His hair is white, his skin deathly pale, his features smooth and pitiless as ever. But his eyes –
His eyes should be red. They’re always red. But even in the faint starlight, you can see that they’re grey.
So . i've been doing this AU thing with TSCC kinda (though i still need to work out many things of it) but i still ended up doing this more-high-effort than usual CSM 101 drawing... bob phillips if you will 🤫
In a blinding flash her form appeared as though wreathed in lightning. She rose from bended knee, struggled to catch her breath due to the immense exertion required by her journey through time.
A metal eyebrow arched in subtle recognition of initial success, but she stiffled any notion of joviality.
Her mission remained. Save Kathryn Janeway. Failure was not an option.
