#writebeeps

[chronokai]

sifting through my inbox and i forgot i put this in there as a draft. this is how pietro and wanda's relationship in mcaau could have gone, but they suffer so much in canon that i didn't want them to be like that.

[chronokai]

found this sitting in my drafts. this is a reaction post i was gonna do after the parahuman reveal in LV, but i didn’t finish it in time. it takes place about a week and a half - two weeks after the news breaks.

"what happened to your eye, man?"

it’d take less effort to raise jesus than it would to lift your head from where it hangs over the back of your seat, which is why you only glance sideways at your best friend and frat bro as he slides into the spot next to you. with the exception of your girlfriend, marcus has seen you stressed out, run down, hungover, and generally worse for wear more than anyone over the years — if he’s asking, then whatever it is must look beyond shitty.

when your only response is to arch an eyebrow, which takes far more effort than it reasonably should, he opens his laptop, angling it towards you. the built-in web cam sharpens into focus on your gaunt face. you stare blankly at your time-delayed reflection in the window. the white of your left eye is dark and bloody — burst capillaries, probably from scrubbing so goddamn hard in an effort to stay focused. lately, you’ve been so exhausted that your body has apparently deemed it a conservation of energy to just fuck depth perception and shut down one side of your vision altogether. even when you were driving, you could barely able to keep both eyes open longer than a few seconds before one would flutter shut again. against the green of your iris, it looks a little like christmas jizzed in your eye, and the bags you’re sporting beneath could probably walk at fashion week.

"work," you slur, stretching your long legs out as much as possible under the seat in front of you. the lecture hall is barely a third full and you doubt anyone else is coming. campus has been something of a ghost town since the news broke about the existence of non-humans, with UNLV’s population reflecting the state of the country at large — a lot of students have gone home, wherever that might be, to be with their families, whether out of fear for their safety or to escape the chaos in the city. the ones that stayed are taking sides, religious or social or their own.

you? you’re here to sleep, something you’d ideally be doing at home, but have essentially given up on ever since the media hounds figured out where you live. unlike bran, you don’t have a property-wide, AI-protected security system to encourage them to fuck off.

to be fair, you and mona could just move to the primm compound — bran made you a standing offer the second the first reporters started popping up — but the fact of the matter is you haven’t actually seen your boss in person since their arrest, and from what little you’ve spoken with them on the phone, just to report in and keep them updated on the status their empire, you’d prefer to keep it that way. like a vast majority of the world-conscious population, you watched the trial via livestream and heard what bran agreed to submit themselves to.

maybe it makes you a coward for not wanting to bear witness to the aftermath of that kind of suffering — it definitely makes you an asshole, but that’s not exactly breaking news — but the thought of it makes you uncomfortable on more than just a moral level. if you were poetic, you’d say it feels like cold hands gripping your rib cage, squeezing until you’re struggling just to breathe normally.

(that’s how you described it to mona, the one time you bothered to mention it. she said that’s what an anxiety attack feels like. because of course you wouldn’t know.)

so mona’s been staying with salem and ringer, and you’ve been making due with the very legitimate excuse of working your ass off keeping everything running. societal upheaval, it turns out, is amazing for business, which makes sense when you stop to think about it -- you were only eight years old when the whole Y2K scare happened, but you can remember it was pretty much all anyone talked about for months, all that was shown when your parents turned on the tv in the evening. police with their riot control gear, religious cults with their signboards and koolaid, apocalypse survival nuts with their kits and premiums on underground bunker real estate — mass economic exploitation at its finest. as of this morning, stock for caesars entertainment alone was up 16.81%. every hotel on the strip is booked out past january and traffic coming in from mccarran and i-15 is more or less rush hour status around the clock. the lifeblood of vegas surges, people rushing to spend their life savings in a frenzy of desperate hedonism. after all, you can’t take it with you, right?

the corner of your mouth quirks in spite of your exhaustion. if this were a competition between the demonic paragons (and you’re not entirely sure it isn’t), greed is totally winning right now. you aim to keep it that way — if nothing else, at least you can offer bran this.

"demons, man," marcus shakes his head — clearly he’s doing some contemplating of his own. "that’s some anime shit."

you snort quietly. “scared?”

"you’re not? no, of course you’re not." he rests his chin on his fist, studying you semi-accusingly. "you knew the whole time, didn’t you? that was your boss on tv."

you shrug one shoulder. “first rule of fight club.”

"yeah, ‘cause fight club totally wasn’t a fucked up cult or anything," he mutters, before sobering. "people are saying it’s the end of the world. what if—"

"mr. baxter and mr. young," your professor intones from the front of the lecture hall, hand hovering in front of a whiteboard full of bullet points you should probably be writing down. "you’re aware you don’t have to be here right now.”

marcus has the good graces to appear sheepish on both your behalves. “sorry professor.”

you close your eyes as soon as she turns back to the board — it’s probably because you’re half dead, but her fiery aura is kind of hurting your head today.

"trust me," you murmur, just loud enough for marcus to hear. "if the end of the world comes, you’ll know." you pull your hood low over your face in the universal gesture of take-notes-for-me. "wake me up when lecture’s over."

[chronokai]

attempting to clear out some drafts, so glasgow au thing i started a longass time ago and never finished.

Bran is the first and only one to notice when Gordon starts disappearing in the middle of the night. It's more surprising than immediately concerning, because Gordon is usually the first one out, and between his anemia and all the long hours awake at the wheel, he sleeps like the dead they're fighting metaphorically should and unfortunately don't.

He finds Gordon, thankfully, still within sight of the arcade, out by the chain link fence that divides their parking lot from the next one over. Bran moves carefully, settling behind an abandoned car far enough back that Gordon doesn't realize he's been followed. While he could easily justify spying by the fact that secretly going off on one's own potentially puts the entire group at risk, the idea of the ex-student being angry at him, as opposed to just perpetually disgruntled -- not to mention almost certainly losing his trust -- is way more upsetting than he'd like to admit.

Gordon, wisely enough, is far removed from any of the remaining working parking lot lights that would make him visible at a distance, and Bran has to squint to make out his shape as his eyes slowly adjust to the dark. He catches a flash of bare arms and shoulders -- Gordon is stripped down to his black beater, and that's weird in itself because he never, ever goes outside without his leather jacket as a barrier between his skin and the jaws of the undead.

In one hand he's carrying his axe, red finish all but non-existent for the amount of sharpening he's subjected the blade to. In the other, he's dragging someone large and heavy behind him that they all recognize a little too easily now -- a body. Bran squints a little harder -- it has to be the corpse of one of the zombies they put down earlier (is that even the right term if all zombies are technically corpses to begin with?). They were going to burn them tomorrow, when the flames wouldn't be such a huge fucking beacon in the daylight. Bran watches as Gordon drops the arm, rolling his shoulders before gripping the axe with both hands.

The first swing impacts with a dull thud, and Gordon tosses away a foot severed neatly at the ankle. The next one is louder, crunching into bone. Bran hears Gordon's annoyance in a hiss of breath, planting his shoe down to dislodge the blade before taking a second swing, and then a third. This time, he comes away with a whole arm, fingertip to shoulder joint.

Limb by limb, he takes the zombie apart, sometimes pausing to choke up or down on the handle, swearing quietly when it takes more than one swing to separate a body part. Bran's eyes are adjusted now, and he can see gordon's face when he raises it from the shadows on the upswing.

It's not anywhere close to cold tonight, but Bran feels a shiver crawling down his spine all the same.

Maybe he was expecting anger -- it's the emotion Gordon is best at expressing, after all -- but watching the axe rise and fall over and over, he realizes, no, it's simpler than that, even pragmatic, and somehow that makes it that much more fucked up despite Bran being fully aware that this is the kind of person Gordon is. He's too methodical, his aim way too precise for this to be venting or stress relief or anything. The axe comes down with the same kind of focus as Bran used to see in him whenever they had a test, the determination of a straight-A student dead set on going pre-med who wouldn't settle for anything less than 100% success. Gordon has never been athletic, but he's also never not been able to do anything he worked at. Bran gets it now, why on their last raid they barely expended any ammo, why Gordon's been collecting kills like he probably never collected boy scout badges, even though he probably would've been great at it. The sadistic almost-grin on his face as he took apart zombie after zombie was practically identical to the one the kids in Bran's troop had whenever they got to burn shit.

So Gordon practices taking bodies apart, and he enjoys it, and Bran wonders why his instincts are still telling him he ought to be very fucking worried about all of this.

By the time Gordon gets to the head, he's got his form down perfectly. It flies off with one swing, rolling so far that Bran has to white-knuckle his shotgun to keep from reflexively kicking it away when it emerges from underneath the car and stops against his shoe. Even in the dark he can tell that the blood pooling onto the concrete is red, not the poisonous brown-black sludge that leaches from the undead. He toes it, carefully, quietly, teeth digging so hard into his lip that he tastes blood himself. He's been teaching home ec long enough to know how fresh meat is at a glance, a skill that, in a perfect world, ought to have zero application outside a kitchen context. Right now, that skill is assisting his brain in supplying him with the phrase "Hannibal Lecter sashimi."

He wishes he could be surprised, that the head he turns over doesn't belong to a zombie after all.

"Survivor scout. That group we ran into three days ago."

To his credit, Bran's far too busy willing himself not to puke to flinch at the voice. Gordon stares down at him, pale eyes as intense as ever, but otherwise looking far too relaxed for someone who presumably just murdered and dismembered another human (a human, not a zombie, jesus fucking christ). The axe is resting heavily over his shoulder, and he's breathing evenly, if not slightly heavier for the amount of effort he just exerted. His face is back to its usual expression, somewhere between blank and ambiguously irritated.

"Guess 'survivor' isn't really accurate anymore, though," he amends, gaze flicking towards Bran's feet. He brings his free hand up, absently wiping a stray splatter of gore from his cheek with the inside of his wrist. It doesn't do anything except smear it further.

"Yeah," Bran croaks, trying hard not to think about shitty hack-n-slash movies and whether or not he could get a shot off before Gordon could swing. He's almost certain he could.

Gordon's attention snaps back to Bran so suddenly that this time, Bran does flinch. The edge of his mouth quirks into something that isn't really a smirk, unreadable. He mouths something that Bran misses under the pounding in his ears. When Bran doesn't move, he repeats it, extending his hand.

"--back inside."

Bran's not sure what else he's agreeing to, but he nods. Back inside is good. His fingers ache when he finally manages to uncurl them from his shotgun, long enough to grasp Gordon's hand and allow himself to be pulled to his feet.

"Probably ought to expect the rest in the next day or so," Gordon says. "They'll be wondering what happened to their friend."

"Yeah," Bran repeats blandly. They're not the only ones.

Gordon offers him another not-smirk, and for one horrifying second, Bran thinks maybe he said the second part out loud -- but then Gordon turns and takes off without so much as a backwards glance. He doesn't see the way Bran stares after he narrow expanse of his back, searching for... something. Guilt, remorse, concern (not fear, he's never seen fear from Gordon and maybe that should've been his first clue). But there's nothing. Just the wrong shade of blood on gleaming metal.

Bran exhales, slow and shaky, and follows him back toward the arcade. When resets his hands on his gun, he does it with one finger hovering over the trigger.