Tw Gun Mention - Tumblr Posts
— born to die young.
a study in being doomed by the narrative & buying a gun
background information
west side story is an adaptation of romeo and juliet, set in 1957 new york. the sharks are the capulets. the jets are the montagues. tony is romeo, maria is juliet, bernardo is tybalt, chino is paris, and anita is the nurse. and riff is mercutio. there is no way that west side story could end happily, simply because of its origins. tony, bernardo, and riff are all doomed before the story even starts, simply because of the roles they play.
but this isn’t about tony and riff and bernardo. this is about riff. and riff, like tony and bernardo is doomed. but, unlike tony and bernardo, riff knows that he’s doomed. he’s accepted it, even. and there is no better scene to demonstrate riff’s acceptance of his fate than the scene where he purchases a gun from rory.
the scene
riff, along with some other jets, goes to buy a gun for the upcoming rumble with the sharks. his reasoning is that the sharks will likely bring some sort of weapon, so the jets have to do the same in order to ensure that the sharks don’t think the jets are weak and defenseless. there’s some dialogue about firing a gun and what the particular type of gun riff’s buying is (a smith & wesson model ten, i believe), but the important thing to know about this scene is that rory tells riff the gun is already loaded. he also tells riff to take the gun, and when riff moves to do so, rory grabs it and points it at him. riff doesn’t flinch. rory goes on to say that “you don’t even got to cock [the gun], even. you just pull the trigger, and—.” he is, at this point, interrupted by riff leaning forward and pressing his forehead to the barrel of the gun. riff tells rory that he “might as well” pull the trigger.
my thoughts/interpretation of riff’s actions in this scene
riff, at this point in his life, knows that the jets are fighting a losing battle. he’s not stupid. he knows that one gang will come out on top and the other will likely disband. (the only proof we have of this is the jets discussing their victories over other gangs earlier in the movie, and the fact that we see none of these gangs in the movie, which leads the audience to believe that these gangs likely disbanded out of embarrassment at their defeat.) so riff knows that if the jets win, the sharks will disband, and if the sharks win, the jets will disband. if the sharks disband, the jets will have nothing to fight against. the jets and the sharks seem to be the only two gangs left in san juan hill, so if one of them disbands, the other will have no enemy. and if the jets have nothing to fight against, there’s nothing really keeping them together. so if the jets win the rumble and the sharks disband, it’s not far fetched to assume the jets will disband soon after. and if the sharks win, the jets will likely disband out of embarrassment. they might not, but there’s a good chance they could.
riff doesn’t want that. he can’t have that. the jets are the only family he’s ever known, and he can’t lose them. he’s already losing tony. he can’t lose the jets, too. and in his mind, no matter the outcome of the rumble, he’s going to lose the jets. in riff’s head, the disbanding of the jets is, for some reason, inevitable. and he doesn’t want to see it happen. if he has to see the jets disband, he’d rather see it following a victory than a defeat, but if he doesn’t have to see it happen, he’d rather not.
all of this is to say that riff isn’t planning on walking out of the salt shed. if he has to live to see his family leave him, he’d rather not live at all.
Heheheh got my bingo card! Can’t wait to start torturing my favs!! >:D
Here is your card for Bad Things Happen Bingo. Happy writing!
THERE ARE PEOPLE POSTING AOBUT ME ?!?!?!?! STOP THAT !!!!!!!
Some sketches of Arthur and Luke! :D
Here’s a combo of 25 and 26! Autumn and Artificer, my newest DND character Josriel. He’s a fey eladrin/human gunslinger-warlock.
OKAY I HAD THIS CRAZY 5 MIN DREAM LAST NIGHT ABT ECHO RAPH AND A BABY. CRAZY RIGHT? WANNA KNOWS WHATS EVEN CRAZIER? I WROTE A WHOLE ASS 19 PAGE STORY ABT IT FOR A DAY. I HAVE GONE PLACES.
Anyways here's the story lol. (It's is super long I am not joking) (super unrendered and angsty so read at your own risk)
Raph comes rushing into the lair one night, beaten and out of breath. Holding something making a lot of noise. Of course this wakes everyone up.
"Raph- What the hell-?!" a very drowsy Leo groans.
"Raph. What happened." Deadpans Donnie, straight to the point, as always. Mikey gasps when he sees the scrapes on his brothers body.
"Guys, guys! Give Raph some space! Jeez!" The turtle in question exclaims.
"Red? Is that... a baby?" splinter asks with a surprised look on his face.
Everyone in the room goes silent.
Except for Raph, he still breathing hard, but not dying so it's fine.
Raph lifts part of the dirty blanket holding the baby.
Everyone has their own reaction.
Leo's wasn't the best one.
"Raph!! Why the hell would you bring a baby to the sewers?!?" Leo whisper-yells.
Raph's face turns sullen as he looks a the now sleeping baby in his arms.
"His mother was killed." He says as his brow furrows in sadness.
"Oh no..." Mikey whispers.
"She was on the way home, and some muggers tried to take her purse. Obviously she fought back. But It was already too late when I heard the gunshot." Raph continued.
"What the muggers didn't realize was that she was holding a baby and not a purse. I was... I was so angry!"
A pause.
"I beat them up. Then I took the baby and ran here." Raph finishes.
Everyones face has changed into one of horror and sadness.
Raph sniffles, "I... I didn't know what to do..."
Splinter is the one who speaks up first, "My son..." he holds his arms out and closes the distance between them.
Raph's lip quivers as he kneels down to be hugged by his father.
His brothers join the hug, Raph sobs quietly.
...
Echo creeps into the lair, just to check up on her family. And Raph, especially Raph.
She closes her hand around Raph's, and silently notices the bandages scattered on his body. She breaths in his familiar scent, and looks worriedly at his puffy eyes.
What happened to you? She thinks to herself.
Then they hear the faint sound of crying.
Raph starts to stir, but echo calms him back down, "shh, shh, it's okay baby. I've got it, go back to sleep."
He obliges and goes back to sleep.
Echo finds the source of the noise very quickly. And gasps when they realizes what it is.
"A baby..." they whisper.
She carefully picks up the crying child and brings it closer to her chest.
"Shh, shh, it's okay, it's okay. I'm here." She hums as she gazes into its soft green eyes.
The baby calms down a little, and Echo realizes it might be hungry. So she makes her way over to the kitchen to find some formula.
She soon returns to the crib she found the baby at, and thinking to herself wow that was easy, must've been a plot convenient time skip.
She shifted their weight from foot to foot in a swaying motion as the baby drank the formula. She gazed at its eyes once more, as their eyelids drooped closed.
"What are you doing."
Echo jumped at the accusation. She turned to look at Donnie.
"Oh Donnie, it's you" she said with a sigh of relief
"You didn't answer my question."
"Oh. right, right, right, sorry" Echo waves her open hand In a 'whoops my mistake' kind of gesture, "I just wanted to check on you guys"
"And Raph?"
"yeah, and Raph." Echo blushes.
The two of them stood in silence, the third was still drinking from their bottle.
"What happened?" Echo asks after a long enough minute.
Donnie looks away from echo for a moment then answerers her question.
"I'll let Raph explain it to you."
Echo turns around and looks at their bandaged and bruised boyfriend, staring back at her with an slightly open mouth.
They both stay like that, staring, each having their own reaction to the sight of one another.
Raph is the one to speak up first, "you look beautiful."
"And thats my cue to leave" Donnie turns on his heel and quicky heads back towards his lab.
Echo exhales through their nose and rolls her eyes. This gets a chuckle out of Raph.
"So, about the baby," Raph starts.
"Ohh yes about the baby, you better start explaining yourself mister Red Angel of Preventing Harm." Echo says sarcastically.
Raph brings the hastily made crib over to the couch so both turtles can watch the child but still talk. Echo lays the now sleeping baby down in the crib.
Once Raph and Echo sit down, Echo's expectant eyes stare deeply into Raph's waiting for an explanation.
"So I was on patrol-" Raph starts.
Jokes aside, Raph thoroughly explained the baby's story, and by the end of it Echo was being held by their partner as she stared at the baby with a newly found sorrow.
"That's what happened?" Echo croaked softly.
"Yeah..." Raph was involuntarily rubbing Echo's shoulder as a way of comforting both echo and himself.
Raph stayed silent as Echo was processing the new information he gave her.
"Are you guys keeping her?" Echo asked softly.
Raph's throat made a rumbling sound, "No, Donnie says she wouldn't be safe if she stayed with us."
Echo pressed closer to Raph's body, and squeezed his bicep has she turned her head away from the crib.
"I know, I know, baby" Raph solemnly soothes.
"I... why..." Echo didn't have the right words to express how she felt, so all she could do was cry into her boyfriend's bandaged bicep.
Raph pulls her closer to his body, so no one would see her weakness sadness.
...
They don't know how long they've been up talking untill Mikey walks into the room.
"Oh, you guys are up early" Mikey says, surprised.
Raph whips his head around to look at his younger brother, "it's morning already?!?" He exclaimes.
Echo and Raph were previously watching the baby and letting her explore Echo's various scars and markings. Enjoying the little baby noises she makes sometimes.
The baby squeals, mimicking Raph's outburst.
"And you too!" Mikey coos, walking over to the couch to play with the baby's fingers.
Mikey looks back at the two older turtles and asks, "long night?"
"Didn't feel like it" Echo replies with a weak shrug.
Mikey does a double take as his eyes land on the dark circles surrounding his siblings eyes.
"Uh huh, and I have three arms" Mikey says sarcastically.
Raph snorts.
"But seriously, you guys need sleep." He deadpans.
"Ok ok we will, Mr. Wakes up at ungodly hours of the morning" Raph shoots back.
Mikey sticks out his tounge and picks up the baby and walks away.
Echo tilts their head back and stares drowsily at Raph's eyes. Raph looks down to stare at hers in turn.
"Yeah we do need sleep." Echo chuckles and starts to get up when Raph stops them.
"Ah ah ah, you need more sleep than I do. Please, allow me, my queen." Raph humbles.
Echo giggles, "Pip pip good knight"
They both giggle at their sleepy roleplay. Mikey smiles and rolls his eyes in the other room.
Raph carries his larger partner to his room and jokingly drops her on his bed. Echo exclaimes joyfully as her boyfriend playfully growls and crawls into bed.
"What a terrible knight! 0 out of 5 stars" Echo exclaims in a posh accent.
"Well, perhaps my lady needed a different kind of service" Raph replies in a similar accent.
"And what kind of service is that?" Echo questions.
"The best kind" Raph smiles and churrs into her plastron.
Echo churrs back in response, sleep overtaking her eyelids.
"Mmmmh yes, the best kind..." Echo trails off.
They both fall asleep in each other's arms. cheesy, yes I know, but it's cute and I like it so there.
*The end*
Oh you made it to the end? Good for you buddy, I'm sorry that you had to go through that. (Lol thanks fr sticking w/ it)
I think having at least two band kid ninja and one of them being Lloyd would be so funny because I remember my high school band teacher saying something along the lines of “if a shooter enters the band room and we have to fight them off, I give you my full permission to throw your instrument at them.”
So of course in Ninjago High the equivalent would be “if one of Garmadon’s generals enters you can throw your instrument at them.”
Now here’s the thing about Movieverse Ninjago City: everyone thinks Lloyd’s working with his father.
So just as everyone’s deviously grinning at Lloyd and at least one piccolo has already been thrown at him (one of) the other band kid ninja (prolly Zane if I had to guess) has to be like “And no, this does NOT include Lloyd.”
I've got a gun and I will shoot their ass
and i've got my dad's boat's mast
i had a dream that i put on my own urinetown production and suddenly martyn from inthelittlewood and skizzleman came in and martyn said "im auditioning for little sally" , skizz said "im auditioning for mr. cladwell" and i got so shocked i pulled out an ak-47 and shot both of them while screaming because their skins were these fuckers but really gargantuan
Yo it’s me the asker and funny enough from what I remember
Both are correct
I remember seeing people buy guns
At Walmart
It is also sometimes legal to carry guns
At Walmart
:)
If TMA was set in America Jon would have just fed on statements by going onto r/ask Reddit and then would have shot Elias
IM GONNA CRY WTAF LMAO,,, having a fat giggle over this
I saw a post a while ago saying that tma in america just. doesn't work. because americans are nowhere near as cagey as brits?? that is SO TRUE.
american tma is just a compilation of r/AITA posts from elias, jon, melanie, tim, sasha, martin, daisy and basira. the statements are all from r/confessions.
i had shared what is happening in sudan on a long facebook post last night, but it virtually received almost little to no engagement or shares from the nearly 600 “friends” i have on the site.
this morning, my great-aunt was shot by the soldiers fighting for power, and God forbid, i lose more of my family members before eid this friday.
please read below to understand what is happening and how you can help my country. i hope the tumblr community can show more kindness than the lack of support and advocacy i’ve seen elsewhere.
يا رب اجعل هذا البلد آمناً 🇸🇩
the lack of awareness and advocacy from the African, Arab, and Muslim diaspora and the human rights community has been painful.
while Western media has done little to no coverage of the ongoing conflict in the capital city of my motherland, Sudan, it appears that the rest of the world also partakes in normalizing crimes and violence against SWANA people.
violence and war hurting the SWANA region are NOT ordinary occurrences — no one, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, religion, and gender, should experience the unprecedented amount of violence that harms my two living grandmothers, aunts and uncles, and baby cousins who live in Khartoum.
your decision to ignore reading or educating and discussing with others about what is likely to be a civil war is complicity in viewing SWANA people as individuals who regularly experience conflict and are undeserving of help.
the silence is damaging, and it is up to us as privileged members of the diaspora (or individuals living in the Western world committed to human rights) to support the people of my country and their dream for a stable, democratically elected government.
what is happening in Sudan is a fight that started on April 15 between two competing forces for power — the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — neither groups are representative of the needs of our people. The Sudan Army is loyal to the dictator, Omar Al-Bashir, and the RSF is responsible for the genocide in Darfur.
with both power struggles backed by different Arab and Gulf nations, the two parties have been fighting for power for the last few years. While they worked together to try and end the people’s revolution, they lost. however, they are now in a constant power play of who will get to rule the nation.
this all means that war is NOT a reflection of my country — violence does not represent the SWANA people. Sudan is a nation of beautiful culture, strong women, intellectual and influential Islamic scholars, poets, and youth at the front lines of the revolution. we are a people committed to a region of peace for ourselves and the rest of the Ummah.
my family and the rest of Sudan’s innocent civilians are at the most risk, with many currently without drinking water, food to eat, electricity, and complete blockage to any mosques during the final nights of Ramadan, our holiest month of the year.
i ask that you please keep Sudan and our people in your prayers — donate to the Sudan Red Crescent or a mutual aid GoFund Me, email your representatives if you live in a country that can put pressure on either competing force of power, discuss this with your family and friends, and please do not forget to think about SWANA people — our brothers and sisters in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and many others need our love and support.
الردة_مستحيلة ✊🏾
#KeepEyesOnSudan
Meeting
Whoo first chapter! meet my little beans as they meet each other.
Contains= Gun mention, usage of said gun, violence, attempted kidnapping, restraints, gag, swearing, minors using vapes
Tatiana
--- I felt a little empty. Like always.
Staring at the board, I waited for class to start, barely able to ignore the noise.
I heard the teacher yell for silence and stiffened, breathing in. My heart pounded in my chest and I had to resist the urge to run out of the room.
I gripped the edge of my desk, and my music blasted in my ear, and I practiced the breathing exercises my therapist taught me.
I somehow heard footsteps in my left ear and looked out the corner of my eye to see a ginger with blue streaks in her hair. She was tall, her shoulders broad, and she looked like a confused puppy. And I found her beautiful.
She wore sleek black headphones, a black leather jacket, and black leggings, and her gray bag had a keychain of a white, plastic balloon animal, as well as a blue wolf with wings. Her eyes were a strange mix of green, blue, and gray, with one much lighter than the other, and a few fiery golden flecks were visible.
I wished I were prettier in that moment, so I’d even stand a chance with her. I had blue beads braided into my hair, but that was only temporary. My olive skin was patchy and had darker discoloration, I was short, and my face had a beauty mark on my left cheek.
She looked at the teacher, who finally noticed her and told her to sit down next to me. I felt my skin burn and let her.
“Alright, class. First product of the quarter, we’ll be doing partner work. Pair up with your seat partners, and if you have any grievances, talk to me,”
She looked at me and whispered, “So, we’re doing this together?”
I nodded, and Mr. Simmons explained the instructions. We’d be researching what an assigned country did during World War one throughout the whole quarter, and I pulled out my mom’s old work computer when we were assigned Brazil. The other girl pulled out a nearly shattered HP computer, and Mr. Simmons took attendance.
Her name was Chamomile, and corrected him in a whispery, yet strong voice, “I prefer Cami,”
“Apologies, Cami. Also, please take off your headphones,”
Just as he had when he told me to take out my earbuds.
Cami pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her bag and said, “It’s in my accommodations list,”
She handed him the paper, then took it back when he read what he needed to.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “However, I’m sure you don’t need it,”
He took her headphones, as he had with my earbuds, and set them on his desk next to my things.
“You can collect them at the end of class,”
She tensed, and when people started working and we’d been assigned Brazil, she covered her ears and didn’t talk for the rest of class, only writing what she wanted to say down on a whiteboard she pulled out of her bag.
“Hey, are you alright?” I asked multiple times. Each time, Cami shrugged and wrote, ‘Could be worse.’
Eventually, the bell rang and she went and got her headphones as I got my ear buds, and she left.
I walked to my next class, where I saw my friend Ashley. I hugged her, and her feline pupils dilated to saucers. It’d been a week since we last saw each other, as she’d gotten covid, and while her voice still sounded scratchy, she wasn’t sick anymore.
As a kenomi, the last remaining kind of shifter, other than the dragon-folk, who refused most contact with society in favor of the non-shifting dragons, she was a tiny bit cat. She had cat ears, a tail, the amber eyes of a cat, while most didn’t have cat eyes, and all of them, but those afflicted by an illness that shifters could get, could shift at will. Those with the illness would randomly shift, and on full moons, they’d be too dangerous to be around. Most died after their first shift.
Ashley, thankfully, wasn’t one of them.
We walked into our class and the teacher told us we could sit where we wanted. We sat next to each other, and a girl with light brown hair and blue eyes that came in almost late, sat on my right.
We had a getting to know you activity for class, in which our teacher asked for us to answer questions on a survey, then write a short paragraph on our summers.
When the bell rang an hour and a half later, Ashley and I went to chemistry next, and Luna came by and hugged us both. Many people called her Moon, including us, not because of her name, but because her blond hair looked like the moon.
She was coming from AP biology and going to math class, as it turned out, meaning we had the same lunch, last lunch.
Ashley and I were not table partners, I had someone I knew from the psych ward, and their name was Bramble. Bramble was another kenomi, they had light brown ears and a light brown tail with a white tip, as compared to Ashley’s charcoal gray ears and black tail.
They hugged me and said, “Long time, no see!”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, I’ve been out for the past- well, since you last left, actually,”
Three months.
“That is a shockingly long time for your parents,”
“Yeah- they tried, but I kinda ran away for two days, and they took the hint,”
Their voice broke into a song-like tone as they spoke those words, until they got to, ‘They took the hint’. There, it changed to a normal tone.
We’d exchanged numbers at one point, but we didn’t really use them considering Bramble’s parents put them back in the psych ward every few weeks when Bramble did anything vaguely ‘depressed’. Normally complaints about life in general. Bramble may have been actually depressed, but their treatments were working on them. Not like my treatment.
We weren’t doing much, the teacher just wanted to see what we already knew and getting to know us.
When the bell dismissed us for lunch, I introduced Bramble and Ashley, and they started talking to each other and exchanged information pretty early on.
They twined tails and we set our things at an empty table that seated eight, then saw Moon and waved her over.
Moon left her other friends and sat down next to me.
I saw Cami, and she sat at our table, the only empty spots. She didn’t interact with us, just stayed silent.
Moon tried to interact by saying, “Do you want to tell us your name or…?”
Cami looked up and mumbled, “Um- no- sorry,”
“So, what are your interests?”
“Medieval history,”
“Anything else?”
“Um- wars. Especially the goofy ones. The lobster war, Emu war, Soccer war, things like that,”
“Never heard of any of those,”
She immediately went into a tangent on the Lobster War, “fought” between Brazil and France.
I added that much of my dead family was actually living in Brazil at the time of the war and we still had one of their lobster costumes.
Cami looked like she’d just had the best pie in the world as her first pie.
“Can I see it?” she asked.
I texted my mom for a picture of the costume, and said, “By the way, my family couldn’t really afford to do the schools for dance, so it's very…” I paused, searching for the right word, “...strange,”
It was dulled, moth eaten red fabric with a rusted, ruined wire frame to keep it up. Strange was an understatement, but it was all they could afford. I was glad my family was better off now.
My mom sent me the photo and I showed it to her, and even though it was essentially over glorified garbage, she looked even more ecstatic than before, practically jumping up and down in her seat.
She then showed me a picture of a helmet and said, “This is a brodie helmet, I found it buried in a trench when my mom took me to visit her hometown in France,”
“You stole the lobsters?” I jokingly said.
“What- no my mom isn’t a fisher- she was nob- she’s a doctor,”
“It’s just a joke, sorry I confused you,”
Her eyes brightened and she looked a bit nervous as she stuttered out, “Oh- um, okay,”
“From now on, you can ask me if I’m making a joke, okay?”
She nodded and said, “Thank you. I just realized- I don’t know your name,”
“Maria Tatiana, everyone calls me either Tatiana or Tati,”
“Oh, cool,”
Cami took out a book called A History of France and started reading.
The bell rang and Cami stood, as did I.
We went to the same class, me, Cami, and Moon. The door was locked, and there wasn’t a teacher, so we waited, and Cami and I somehow veered the conversation to the dynamics of a steam engine, then to crocheting in about two minutes.
The teacher arrived and opened the door, and directed us to our seats. He prefaced that he’d heard about Moon and I’s friendship and had us separated, then told us to take our earbuds and headphones out. He was much more understanding to Cami and I than Mr. Simmons when we told him we had the accommodations and let us keep them with the preface any music played had to be low.
I sat in my chair, and Cami was sat next to me, and other students slowly trickled in. I recognized a few, one of Moon’s friends, a girl named Marina, and her twin brother with the scars on his face I could never remember the name of. He sat next to us, and Cami stiffened and made an almost dog-like whine.
He sneered at her and snapped, “Not so wolf-hearted now, are you?”
“Leave me alone,” she squeaked. “It’s been five years, please,”
“Well, wolf-heart,” he said. He leaned in close and whispered something, and she abruptly stood and walked over to the teacher, tears glistening in her eyes, before a light blue paper was handed to her and she left.
“What did you say to her?” I accused. He didn’t answer.
The teacher moved him to a solo desk next to him and started talking, introducing himself, then having the small class of about fifteen people say their names and one fun fact.
Mine was that I was bilingual, while everyone else’s was something goofy like the time that one kid broke his arm when he was two.
Then came Marina’s twin, Hunter, and his fact was that he was attacked by a wolf five years ago, giving him the scars on his face.
Cami re-entered eventually, and said, “Guidance wants to talk to you, Hunter,” before sitting down next to me.
“Okay, so, would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”
Cami shook her head with her eyes wide.
“At least your name?”
“Chamomile, but most people call me Cami,”
“Thank you, Cami,”
She breathed out a sigh of relief, and her shoulders relaxed.
When class was over, Hunter still hadn’t returned, so we left and I didn’t think much on their interaction.
Cami
----
I left the audition, left the school, and got in my cousin’s car. She’d lied to me my whole life about her name, at least until about three years ago.
Lyorna’s girlfriend was in the car with her, meaning I had to call her by her given name, and Lyorna immediately started teasing me.
“So, how was your first day of school?” she said in a very joking tone. Some people I could read more than others. Lyorna was like a book at this point, Tatiana, though I liked her, was like a stone wall I had my eye pressed up to. I couldn’t yet tell if she wanted to be my friend or was just a sweet person.
Lizzie smiled at me, looked over at Lyorna and mouthed with a sleepy grin, “We finish later,”
“Finish what?” I asked. Lizzie’s lipstick was smeared, I realized. “Oh… never mind,”
“Good, unless you want all the smutty, smutty details,”
I turned up my music as Lyorna started talking.
Lizzie pulled out a vape, and used it. It was sticky sweet- too sweet.
I covered my nose and said nasally, “Please stop, it smells awful,”
“Oh. Sorry, Cami,”
She opened the windows and let the smoke air out as Lyorna started driving. I’d never understood why anyone liked vapes if they smelled like the embodiment of a sugar buzz, but that somehow worked for some people.
I looked out the window and eventually, Lyorna dropped me off, and I started up the long, windy gravel path to my house. My mother was an immortal being, and had bought this land roughly two hundred years ago when she’d moved out west. She had spent twenty years on the house and path. Twenty, long years. In those years, a friend of hers named Mary Magdalena Jones had died, and her husband at the time, a dragon-shifter named Balan, or Prayer, had been paralyzed waist-down by a tree collapsing on him in a storm. In the end, she had a house roughly five thousand square feet and eight bedrooms and she was pretty well off at the time for compensation of helping the union army with weapon supplies. The mansion had since been fixed up more and more until it resembled a big brick house, the only things that remained suggesting its ancientness being the cornerstone that said, ‘Est MDCCCXCVII,’ or for simpletons, 1897, and the inner walls being wooden slats.
Good ol home. I unlocked the door and set my bag inside, and my brother, Corey, ran up to me and gave me a tight hug.
He had no control over his shift, as he’d never been interested, and as such, he went to a private school that was all shifters. The same one I went to until I got expelled after I broke an asshole’s jaw after she called me the r-word and gave me a bloody nose. I still had to deal with her in my pack, and she still hated me.
I retreated to my room and stayed seated. Olivia texted me, and I went out to meet her.
She looked like what most people thought a dragon shifter looked like when in her hybrid form. Olive skin, big dark eyes, ears like an avali’s but scaly. She had white and gold scales in striped patterns, and serrated dragon-like claws at the end of her fingers if she wanted them out. Keyword ‘like’. Dragons’ claws typically weren’t serrated and therefore weren’t war crimes, they were more like a bayonet, triple edged. Just no gun underneath. But as we weren’t sure what she shifted into, she called herself a dragon shifter for simplicity's sake.
We walked along the path from my house to the hiking trail, and we walked along for a while. Eventually, Lyorna came by, and we talked and joked for a while, when Olivia squealed and said something amazing.
“Viper finally said I’m ready to be a healer!”
She was jumping up and down and her magic glow shooting everywhere.
“Funny, considering you still faint at the sight of blood,” I joked.
“We were twelve-!”
“I wasn’t,” Lyorna laughed, cutting her off.
Olivia stuck her tongue out at Lyorna and I heard a gunshot.
We instinctively hid under bushes, and in the earth; in Olivia’s case, and I felt someone grab me by the back of the neck and hold a gun to my throat.
I twisted before they could shoot, and flipped them over, then felt the bullet hit me in the foot. I shrieked, and Lyorna knocked out the other person, emerging from behind him and punching him in the back of the skull.
She lifted me and kissed my forehead, then called for Olivia.
Olivia emerged from the earth, the spaces between her scales caked with earth and grass. She shook her scales loose of dirt and put her glowing hand on my ankle and healed the foot over the course of an hour.
“Thank you,” I croaked.
I tried to stand and fell, and Lyorna giggled, “Oh, do you want mommy to come and kiss your little boo-boo-”
I stopped her and said, “Don’t finish that fucking sentence or I’ll take that gun down there and shoot,”
“Sorry,” she said, “Too far?”
“Too far,” I confirmed.
She carried me as a bundle in her red-mud wings for a while until I could stand again, and we walked for a while longer, when Lyorna’s ears twitched, and she pulled all of us off the path.
A blond girl I recognized as Tatiana’s friend jogged by, eyes filled with tears, an adult’s handprint on her cheek, and a small, half-filipino girl that looked about eight but talked like a ten year-old that followed after.
The little girl went ahead and Moon stopped, bending over and stretching.
The girl turned, and walked back to Moon, then Moon lifted her up, when came a gunshot, and Moon ducked to the floor, the little one almost completely hidden.
Someone walked by us, and I ducked further into the bush and closed my eyes.
“Where is Chamomile Malkom?” Hunter hissed.
“Hunter- What are you doing?” Moon whispered. I heard her backing away from the crunch on the gravel path.
“Luna, don’t play dumb. Where is she?”
“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” she screamed.
I heard rapid footsteps, and dared to open my eyes. From what I could see, Hunter had wrapped a pistol around Moon’s throat, and her face was turning red from lack of oxygen. The child was trying to pull Hunter away.
I decided to act at that moment.
I howled, and he let Moon go, who rubbed her throat and sank to her knees, tears falling even harder.
I crawled out in my wolf form and nudged her with my snout.
“Cami, what are you doing?” Olivia hissed in the dialect of the shifter tongue we spoke.
“Relax,” I said.
I nudged her again, and she took the hint and started running, when Hunter ran out of the bushes and laughed.
He shot me in the side, and I roared. Moon returned to me and I accidentally bit her. She collapsed, and Lyorna ran out of the bushes, grabbed her and the little girl, and flew upwards to get them to safety.
Hunter didn’t chase them.
“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he snarled.
I started laughing. “With your patience? You insist on using the scholar’s mate opening so the match is over quicker,”
He turned red and shoved his pistol into my mouth. With difficulty, as I was over a foot taller than him. And most people.
“Shut up,” he snarled.
I nodded.
He chained my wrists behind me, and I heard Olivia following us.
I didn’t really try to fight back, I have to admit. I was only playing a game with him.
He eventually settled for weakly punching me in the jaw, and I faked a blackout. He dragged me along for a bit, and I had to resist the urge to laugh at him.
---
Eventually, he stopped after dragging me down a flight of stairs and called, “I found a were-bitch!”
At that moment, I decided to open my eyes, and as the Critura of my pack, I was able to turn people into shifters if they made direct eye contact with me when I had my eyes glow gold.
One of them seized up, and they immediately blindfolded me and gagged me. I heard one of them approach me and kick me in the gut as I tried to spit out my gag.
I doubled over, and roared loud enough to make at least one person’s ears bleed.
Someone tilted my chin upward, probably to make me meet their eyes, and I spat in their face, then threw out one leg, swept the other person and pulled apart the silver cuffs with brute force.
I pulled off my blindfold and immediately ran away, ignoring the pain in my side.
Three chased after me. My history teacher, Hunter, and my guidance counselor. Mr. Simmons had a rifle that he periodically tried to shoot me with, Hunter had his pistol, and my guidance counselor had a dagger that she didn’t throw.
I eventually threw them off, and the adrenaline caught up with me.
I was aware when my cheek hit the ground and less so when Olivia and Lyorna lifted me.
Meeting
Whoo first chapter! meet my little beans as they meet each other.
Contains= Gun mention, usage of said gun, violence, attempted kidnapping, restraints, gag, swearing, minors using vapes
Tatiana
--- I felt a little empty. Like always.
Staring at the board, I waited for class to start, barely able to ignore the noise.
I heard the teacher yell for silence and stiffened, breathing in. My heart pounded in my chest and I had to resist the urge to run out of the room.
I gripped the edge of my desk, and my music blasted in my ear, and I practiced the breathing exercises my therapist taught me.
I somehow heard footsteps in my left ear and looked out the corner of my eye to see a ginger with blue streaks in her hair. She was tall, her shoulders broad, and she looked like a confused puppy. And I found her beautiful.
She wore sleek black headphones, a black leather jacket, and black leggings, and her gray bag had a keychain of a white, plastic balloon animal, as well as a blue wolf with wings. Her eyes were a strange mix of green, blue, and gray, with one much lighter than the other, and a few fiery golden flecks were visible.
I wished I were prettier in that moment, so I’d even stand a chance with her. I had blue beads braided into my hair, but that was only temporary. My olive skin was patchy and had darker discoloration, I was short, and my face had a beauty mark on my left cheek.
She looked at the teacher, who finally noticed her and told her to sit down next to me. I felt my skin burn and let her.
“Alright, class. First product of the quarter, we’ll be doing partner work. Pair up with your seat partners, and if you have any grievances, talk to me,”
She looked at me and whispered, “So, we’re doing this together?”
I nodded, and Mr. Simmons explained the instructions. We’d be researching what an assigned country did during World War one throughout the whole quarter, and I pulled out my mom’s old work computer when we were assigned Brazil. The other girl pulled out a nearly shattered HP computer, and Mr. Simmons took attendance.
Her name was Chamomile, and corrected him in a whispery, yet strong voice, “I prefer Cami,”
“Apologies, Cami. Also, please take off your headphones,”
Just as he had when he told me to take out my earbuds.
Cami pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her bag and said, “It’s in my accommodations list,”
She handed him the paper, then took it back when he read what he needed to.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “However, I’m sure you don’t need it,”
He took her headphones, as he had with my earbuds, and set them on his desk next to my things.
“You can collect them at the end of class,”
She tensed, and when people started working and we’d been assigned Brazil, she covered her ears and didn’t talk for the rest of class, only writing what she wanted to say down on a whiteboard she pulled out of her bag.
“Hey, are you alright?” I asked multiple times. Each time, Cami shrugged and wrote, ‘Could be worse.’
Eventually, the bell rang and she went and got her headphones as I got my ear buds, and she left.
I walked to my next class, where I saw my friend Ashley. I hugged her, and her feline pupils dilated to saucers. It’d been a week since we last saw each other, as she’d gotten covid, and while her voice still sounded scratchy, she wasn’t sick anymore.
As a kenomi, the last remaining kind of shifter, other than the dragon-folk, who refused most contact with society in favor of the non-shifting dragons, she was a tiny bit cat. She had cat ears, a tail, the amber eyes of a cat, while most didn’t have cat eyes, and all of them, but those afflicted by an illness that shifters could get, could shift at will. Those with the illness would randomly shift, and on full moons, they’d be too dangerous to be around. Most died after their first shift.
Ashley, thankfully, wasn’t one of them.
We walked into our class and the teacher told us we could sit where we wanted. We sat next to each other, and a girl with light brown hair and blue eyes that came in almost late, sat on my right.
We had a getting to know you activity for class, in which our teacher asked for us to answer questions on a survey, then write a short paragraph on our summers.
When the bell rang an hour and a half later, Ashley and I went to chemistry next, and Luna came by and hugged us both. Many people called her Moon, including us, not because of her name, but because her blond hair looked like the moon.
She was coming from AP biology and going to math class, as it turned out, meaning we had the same lunch, last lunch.
Ashley and I were not table partners, I had someone I knew from the psych ward, and their name was Bramble. Bramble was another kenomi, they had light brown ears and a light brown tail with a white tip, as compared to Ashley’s charcoal gray ears and black tail.
They hugged me and said, “Long time, no see!”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, I’ve been out for the past- well, since you last left, actually,”
Three months.
“That is a shockingly long time for your parents,”
“Yeah- they tried, but I kinda ran away for two days, and they took the hint,”
Their voice broke into a song-like tone as they spoke those words, until they got to, ‘They took the hint’. There, it changed to a normal tone.
We’d exchanged numbers at one point, but we didn’t really use them considering Bramble’s parents put them back in the psych ward every few weeks when Bramble did anything vaguely ‘depressed’. Normally complaints about life in general. Bramble may have been actually depressed, but their treatments were working on them. Not like my treatment.
We weren’t doing much, the teacher just wanted to see what we already knew and getting to know us.
When the bell dismissed us for lunch, I introduced Bramble and Ashley, and they started talking to each other and exchanged information pretty early on.
They twined tails and we set our things at an empty table that seated eight, then saw Moon and waved her over.
Moon left her other friends and sat down next to me.
I saw Cami, and she sat at our table, the only empty spots. She didn’t interact with us, just stayed silent.
Moon tried to interact by saying, “Do you want to tell us your name or…?”
Cami looked up and mumbled, “Um- no- sorry,”
“So, what are your interests?”
“Medieval history,”
“Anything else?”
“Um- wars. Especially the goofy ones. The lobster war, Emu war, Soccer war, things like that,”
“Never heard of any of those,”
She immediately went into a tangent on the Lobster War, “fought” between Brazil and France.
I added that much of my dead family was actually living in Brazil at the time of the war and we still had one of their lobster costumes.
Cami looked like she’d just had the best pie in the world as her first pie.
“Can I see it?” she asked.
I texted my mom for a picture of the costume, and said, “By the way, my family couldn’t really afford to do the schools for dance, so it's very…” I paused, searching for the right word, “...strange,”
It was dulled, moth eaten red fabric with a rusted, ruined wire frame to keep it up. Strange was an understatement, but it was all they could afford. I was glad my family was better off now.
My mom sent me the photo and I showed it to her, and even though it was essentially over glorified garbage, she looked even more ecstatic than before, practically jumping up and down in her seat.
She then showed me a picture of a helmet and said, “This is a brodie helmet, I found it buried in a trench when my mom took me to visit her hometown in France,”
“You stole the lobsters?” I jokingly said.
“What- no my mom isn’t a fisher- she was nob- she’s a doctor,”
“It’s just a joke, sorry I confused you,”
Her eyes brightened and she looked a bit nervous as she stuttered out, “Oh- um, okay,”
“From now on, you can ask me if I’m making a joke, okay?”
She nodded and said, “Thank you. I just realized- I don’t know your name,”
“Maria Tatiana, everyone calls me either Tatiana or Tati,”
“Oh, cool,”
Cami took out a book called A History of France and started reading.
The bell rang and Cami stood, as did I.
We went to the same class, me, Cami, and Moon. The door was locked, and there wasn’t a teacher, so we waited, and Cami and I somehow veered the conversation to the dynamics of a steam engine, then to crocheting in about two minutes.
The teacher arrived and opened the door, and directed us to our seats. He prefaced that he’d heard about Moon and I’s friendship and had us separated, then told us to take our earbuds and headphones out. He was much more understanding to Cami and I than Mr. Simmons when we told him we had the accommodations and let us keep them with the preface any music played had to be low.
I sat in my chair, and Cami was sat next to me, and other students slowly trickled in. I recognized a few, one of Moon’s friends, a girl named Marina, and her twin brother with the scars on his face I could never remember the name of. He sat next to us, and Cami stiffened and made an almost dog-like whine.
He sneered at her and snapped, “Not so wolf-hearted now, are you?”
“Leave me alone,” she squeaked. “It’s been five years, please,”
“Well, wolf-heart,” he said. He leaned in close and whispered something, and she abruptly stood and walked over to the teacher, tears glistening in her eyes, before a light blue paper was handed to her and she left.
“What did you say to her?” I accused. He didn’t answer.
The teacher moved him to a solo desk next to him and started talking, introducing himself, then having the small class of about fifteen people say their names and one fun fact.
Mine was that I was bilingual, while everyone else’s was something goofy like the time that one kid broke his arm when he was two.
Then came Marina’s twin, Hunter, and his fact was that he was attacked by a wolf five years ago, giving him the scars on his face.
Cami re-entered eventually, and said, “Guidance wants to talk to you, Hunter,” before sitting down next to me.
“Okay, so, would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”
Cami shook her head with her eyes wide.
“At least your name?”
“Chamomile, but most people call me Cami,”
“Thank you, Cami,”
She breathed out a sigh of relief, and her shoulders relaxed.
When class was over, Hunter still hadn’t returned, so we left and I didn’t think much on their interaction.
Cami
----
I left the audition, left the school, and got in my cousin’s car. She’d lied to me my whole life about her name, at least until about three years ago.
Lyorna’s girlfriend was in the car with her, meaning I had to call her by her given name, and Lyorna immediately started teasing me.
“So, how was your first day of school?” she said in a very joking tone. Some people I could read more than others. Lyorna was like a book at this point, Tatiana, though I liked her, was like a stone wall I had my eye pressed up to. I couldn’t yet tell if she wanted to be my friend or was just a sweet person.
Lizzie smiled at me, looked over at Lyorna and mouthed with a sleepy grin, “We finish later,”
“Finish what?” I asked. Lizzie’s lipstick was smeared, I realized. “Oh… never mind,”
“Good, unless you want all the smutty, smutty details,”
I turned up my music as Lyorna started talking.
Lizzie pulled out a vape, and used it. It was sticky sweet- too sweet.
I covered my nose and said nasally, “Please stop, it smells awful,”
“Oh. Sorry, Cami,”
She opened the windows and let the smoke air out as Lyorna started driving. I’d never understood why anyone liked vapes if they smelled like the embodiment of a sugar buzz, but that somehow worked for some people.
I looked out the window and eventually, Lyorna dropped me off, and I started up the long, windy gravel path to my house. My mother was an immortal being, and had bought this land roughly two hundred years ago when she’d moved out west. She had spent twenty years on the house and path. Twenty, long years. In those years, a friend of hers named Mary Magdalena Jones had died, and her husband at the time, a dragon-shifter named Balan, or Prayer, had been paralyzed waist-down by a tree collapsing on him in a storm. In the end, she had a house roughly five thousand square feet and eight bedrooms and she was pretty well off at the time for compensation of helping the union army with weapon supplies. The mansion had since been fixed up more and more until it resembled a big brick house, the only things that remained suggesting its ancientness being the cornerstone that said, ‘Est MDCCCXCVII,’ or for simpletons, 1897, and the inner walls being wooden slats.
Good ol home. I unlocked the door and set my bag inside, and my brother, Corey, ran up to me and gave me a tight hug.
He had no control over his shift, as he’d never been interested, and as such, he went to a private school that was all shifters. The same one I went to until I got expelled after I broke an asshole’s jaw after she called me the r-word and gave me a bloody nose. I still had to deal with her in my pack, and she still hated me.
I retreated to my room and stayed seated. Olivia texted me, and I went out to meet her.
She looked like what most people thought a dragon shifter looked like when in her hybrid form. Olive skin, big dark eyes, ears like an avali’s but scaly. She had white and gold scales in striped patterns, and serrated dragon-like claws at the end of her fingers if she wanted them out. Keyword ‘like’. Dragons’ claws typically weren’t serrated and therefore weren’t war crimes, they were more like a bayonet, triple edged. Just no gun underneath. But as we weren’t sure what she shifted into, she called herself a dragon shifter for simplicity's sake.
We walked along the path from my house to the hiking trail, and we walked along for a while. Eventually, Lyorna came by, and we talked and joked for a while, when Olivia squealed and said something amazing.
“Viper finally said I’m ready to be a healer!”
She was jumping up and down and her magic glow shooting everywhere.
“Funny, considering you still faint at the sight of blood,” I joked.
“We were twelve-!”
“I wasn’t,” Lyorna laughed, cutting her off.
Olivia stuck her tongue out at Lyorna and I heard a gunshot.
We instinctively hid under bushes, and in the earth; in Olivia’s case, and I felt someone grab me by the back of the neck and hold a gun to my throat.
I twisted before they could shoot, and flipped them over, then felt the bullet hit me in the foot. I shrieked, and Lyorna knocked out the other person, emerging from behind him and punching him in the back of the skull.
She lifted me and kissed my forehead, then called for Olivia.
Olivia emerged from the earth, the spaces between her scales caked with earth and grass. She shook her scales loose of dirt and put her glowing hand on my ankle and healed the foot over the course of an hour.
“Thank you,” I croaked.
I tried to stand and fell, and Lyorna giggled, “Oh, do you want mommy to come and kiss your little boo-boo-”
I stopped her and said, “Don’t finish that fucking sentence or I’ll take that gun down there and shoot,”
“Sorry,” she said, “Too far?”
“Too far,” I confirmed.
She carried me as a bundle in her red-mud wings for a while until I could stand again, and we walked for a while longer, when Lyorna’s ears twitched, and she pulled all of us off the path.
A blond girl I recognized as Tatiana’s friend jogged by, eyes filled with tears, an adult’s handprint on her cheek, and a small, half-filipino girl that looked about eight but talked like a ten year-old that followed after.
The little girl went ahead and Moon stopped, bending over and stretching.
The girl turned, and walked back to Moon, then Moon lifted her up, when came a gunshot, and Moon ducked to the floor, the little one almost completely hidden.
Someone walked by us, and I ducked further into the bush and closed my eyes.
“Where is Chamomile Malkom?” Hunter hissed.
“Hunter- What are you doing?” Moon whispered. I heard her backing away from the crunch on the gravel path.
“Luna, don’t play dumb. Where is she?”
“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” she screamed.
I heard rapid footsteps, and dared to open my eyes. From what I could see, Hunter had wrapped a pistol around Moon’s throat, and her face was turning red from lack of oxygen. The child was trying to pull Hunter away.
I decided to act at that moment.
I howled, and he let Moon go, who rubbed her throat and sank to her knees, tears falling even harder.
I crawled out in my wolf form and nudged her with my snout.
“Cami, what are you doing?” Olivia hissed in the dialect of the shifter tongue we spoke.
“Relax,” I said.
I nudged her again, and she took the hint and started running, when Hunter ran out of the bushes and laughed.
He shot me in the side, and I roared. Moon returned to me and I accidentally bit her. She collapsed, and Lyorna ran out of the bushes, grabbed her and the little girl, and flew upwards to get them to safety.
Hunter didn’t chase them.
“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he snarled.
I started laughing. “With your patience? You insist on using the scholar’s mate opening so the match is over quicker,”
He turned red and shoved his pistol into my mouth. With difficulty, as I was over a foot taller than him. And most people.
“Shut up,” he snarled.
I nodded.
He chained my wrists behind me, and I heard Olivia following us.
I didn’t really try to fight back, I have to admit. I was only playing a game with him.
He eventually settled for weakly punching me in the jaw, and I faked a blackout. He dragged me along for a bit, and I had to resist the urge to laugh at him.
---
Eventually, he stopped after dragging me down a flight of stairs and called, “I found a were-bitch!”
At that moment, I decided to open my eyes, and as the Critura of my pack, I was able to turn people into shifters if they made direct eye contact with me when I had my eyes glow gold.
One of them seized up, and they immediately blindfolded me and gagged me. I heard one of them approach me and kick me in the gut as I tried to spit out my gag.
I doubled over, and roared loud enough to make at least one person’s ears bleed.
Someone tilted my chin upward, probably to make me meet their eyes, and I spat in their face, then threw out one leg, swept the other person and pulled apart the silver cuffs with brute force.
I pulled off my blindfold and immediately ran away, ignoring the pain in my side.
Three chased after me. My history teacher, Hunter, and my guidance counselor. Mr. Simmons had a rifle that he periodically tried to shoot me with, Hunter had his pistol, and my guidance counselor had a dagger that she didn’t throw.
I eventually threw them off, and the adrenaline caught up with me.
I was aware when my cheek hit the ground and less so when Olivia and Lyorna lifted me.
bleeding and a run
CW: blood (as per title) guns, hospital whump, being really high on morphine in said hospital, slavery mention, asassination mention, ecoli mention, mild swearing,
Tatiana
----
Several people were at my door, a girl with olive skin and a very tall redhead girl that I had to look straight up to meet the eyes of, and she carried a passed out, bleeding-in-many-places Cami in her arms. Cami was almost dwarfed in comparison to this girl. Almost. Cami was about a foot shorter.
My mother and I let them inside, then conversed for a minute in Portuguese to figure out what we’d do, when my mother recognized something about the tall one.
“Wait- are you Night- Claire Malkom’s kid?”
“How do you know her name?” the redhead asked. Her voice had lowered by about an octave.
“You’re little Magdalena? Oh my God, last time I saw you you were so little!”
“I- don’t know you,”
She backed away.
Cami’s eyes slowly blinked open, and she mumbled, “Cuz, where are we?”
“That’s Airi- Ariana’s kid?” Lara said.
Magdalena nodded.
The ambulance arrived, and Lara said, “I’ll call Ariana, okay Magdalena?”
“Okay,” she replied.
Magdalena and the other girl took Cami to the ambulance and didn’t return.
Lara took out her phone and called someone, speaking very rapidly in French. I didn’t speak French, so I didn’t get much out of it, but when she hung up, she said, “We’re going to the hospital,”
We went out to the car, and my mom drove us there, then parked and hugged a tall red-headed woman wearing a knitted sweater and sweatpants. Not ideal for August.
My mother introduced us, and Ariana smiled at me. She seemed ancient, though she looked about thirty. My mom’s age.
A man with dark hair and pale skin, holding the hand of a girl with white hair, extremely pale skin and a red and white cane in her other hand approached us and gasped, “Any update, mom?”
Ariana nodded and said, “She’s in the ICU right now, awaiting surgery,”
She hugged him and said, “Don’t you worry Jon- Xoya, she’ll make it,”
We entered the hospital, and a few hours later, Ariana was told she could go to her daughter’s room now.
We went to Cami’s room, and she lay in the bed, an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose.
In and out, in and out.
Her wrists had IVs in it, with blood in one, some fluid in another. She had patches on her eyebrow, a bandage peeked out from under the light blue hospital gown. Her hair and the blood were the only colors in the room.
Her eyes blinked open, and I saw liquid gold for a moment, then her eyes dimmed and she went limp again, her arm angled oddly to the point it would be stiff when she woke up.
Ariana moved her arm back to a comfortable position, and she rolled to the side and mumbled, “Mommy, where am I?”
Ariana kneeled close to her and whispered, “Hospital,”
“Really? Did I get ‘im?”
“Get who?”
“Hunter,” she mumbled, “Did he finally realize he needed to leave me alone?”
“I’m sorry, Cams, no,”
She didn’t notice, and squinted up at the ceiling.
“Polaris’s really bright tonight,” she mumbled.
“Cams, we’re inside,”
“Oh, really? Cool,”
—
Cami didn’t come to school for the next week, then returned in a wheelchair. She had bandages on her leg, and she looked terrified of Mr. Simmons now. I couldn’t see why, he was strict, but he was kind and gave us an extension for her not being there.
Not being at school didn’t stop her from working.
She wheeled next to me and leaned on my shoulder, then said in her forever quiet voice, “So, how’s the project going?”
“I have a bunch of photos and info now,”
“Yay!” She sounded slightly louder here.
She hugged me and said, “So, do you think Ms. Delano will be fine with me missing a week of rehearsals and showing up in a wheelchair?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty nice about things like that,”
“Thank god, last teacher I had got mad at me when I was hospitalized with E. coli O157:H7,”
“What?”
“E. coli on steroids,”
“Yikes. My mom told me about an E. coli outbreak when she was eight that killed some of her friends,”
“Damn,”
“Yeah, my mom said there wasn’t much access to hospitals at the time,”
We went back to work and I realized, I had no idea where my mother grew up or lived before here. Just that she grew up in a communidade, or favela if said by the upper class people. The places where the descendants of former slaves ended up because the government failed to provide for them.
I texted her about it when I got out of Mr. Simmons’ class, and she said about an hour and a half later, an entire other class passing, ‘It's a complicated story, one I’ll tell you someday.’
Someday. A nice promise, although non-definitive.
After Chem was over, I went to lunch, and Moon brought her friend Marina over. We tolerated Marina, not some of Moon’s other friends who’d annoyed all of us, and certainly not Kira, who enjoyed spouting slurs and getting scolded by everyone else about it.
Even Moon barely tolerated her.
Kira decided to come over. She had dyed snow-white hair to match her white ears and tail, and at the time, she wore all dark colors, an odd contrast.
She slammed her hands in front of Cami and hissed at her, and Cami ignored her.
“I’m talking to you,” Kira snapped.
Cami looked up with a bored expression and said, “Could’ve sworn you weren’t talking,”
Kira’s left ear twitched and her lip curled into an animalistic snarl.
“Shut up!” She snapped.
“You’ve done most of the talking,” Cami remarked.
Kira’s hair and tail bristled, and Cami looked up at her for a moment, and I saw a golden glow for a split second.
Kira opened and closed her mouth, then hissed, “How dare you?”
“How dare I what?” Cami asked, her tone just as gentle as when she started talking.
“You know what I mean!”
“I really don’t,”
Kira snarled louder and called her an awful word.
Cami’s expression hardened, and she snapped, “You’re lucky I can’t stand right now,”
I heard rain above, even though the weather could normally be seen for miles, and there was no trace this morning. Lightning struck right outside the school, and I jumped when I saw the burning almost-white light hit a tree. Murmurs of worry echoed through the cafeteria, and at our table, all but Cami looked spooked. Cami, instead, looked exhausted and tilted to the side with the next lightning strike. She stayed upright because of the wheelchair’s seatbelt, but we weren’t sure what to do. As the storm continued, her breathing slowed, and eventually, just as quickly as it began, it ended, and she opened her eyes and gasped for breath, almost choking.
Almost, thankfully. She was fine after a moment, just- off. She didn’t know what was going on until we filled her in.
Then she wheeled away, took out her phone and texted for a moment, then returned.
The bell rang, and I tried to ask her what happened, and she blew me off and said, “It’s nothing, I have… narcolepsy,”
Liar.
But I didn’t press.
I didn’t change how I spoke to her, either, it was her business, not mine.
When class went out for the day, she went straight to the theater after giving me a hug, and I went to the bus.
Cami
----
“So, what happened?” Addy asked.
“I got shot six times,” I replied.
“Oh.”
I wheeled myself to the edge of the stage, tried my hardest to hop up, only for pain to shoot through my arm, and I fell back down.
I got back in the chair and wheeled the long way, through the back. Thankfully, there was another way, through the chorus room.
I had to be careful wheeling down the ramp in the room and wheeled backstage.
Eli was doing the first scene. The play we were doing was an old classic from back during the first Civil Rights movement, a love story suggesting that shifters get equal rights as well. Most involved in the movement agreed, but the humans in charge at the time sucked and said no. The vice president at the time was actually assassinated by a member of congress for pushing for a shifter rights bill in 1968. So we waited for twenty years for the second movement, and that one, humans finally relented and now the kenomi and dragon-folk had rights. The dragon-folk often lived in the packs, however, and often didn’t care. Olivia was one of the non-traditional dragon-folk, both physically, as a more unique thing that couldn’t fly, and mentally, she had a dream, and she longed to make sure that no one would ever forget it. She wanted to make it safe for all of us to return as ourselves.
Eli shifted as the script said and a voiceover would allow them to speak on the show night. Many shifters couldn’t speak in our animal forms. I wasn’t one of them who couldn’t, I just didn’t enjoy doing so, it felt weird.
When they got off the scene, they high-fived me and said, “How’d I do, Critura?”
“Great!”
I looked at my book as I wheeled onto the scene, in the middle of the other’s monologue as the book told me. Seeing my wheelchair, it threw my scene partner, Sebby, off a bit, but he quickly stopped his surprise and continued the scene. I got to tell his character off for being an ass, as I’d adopted Eli’s character, Jenny.
It was really fun.
He stood there, character dumbfounded for a moment, and we exited in opposite directions. Me, stage right, him, stage left.
I didn’t have to go back on ‘til scene four, an ensemble scene in which people were gossiping while I told Eli’s character to go straight to the press about the mistreatment at work.
Eventually came four o clock, and we all had to go, and I wheeled out when Xoya called me. They and their girlfriend, Winter, were in Xoya’s SUV, and Winter looked in my general direction, smiled, and greeted me when I got in the car.
We didn’t talk much of the drive, though I wanted to tell them everything that had transpired.
Don’t worry, Cams. Xoya’s mental voice touched my mental form.
“Don’t do that,” I said, “Its weird,”
“Well, if you bothered with the exercises I gave you, I wouldn’t be able to,”
I threw up a wall of my magic internally, solid rain dust, almost like what littered the ground after that storm I’d accidentally caused. That beautiful dust didn’t always come, but when it did, you could tell exactly where I exploded.
Xoya dropped me off at the gravel path, then started their journey back to theirs and Winter’s shared apartment. I walked up, then got inside and went into my room, and lay back on my black and navy-blue bed, the only orderly part of my paint splattered walls. All had meaning, yet to most, it looked eccentric.
My closet was black, the color black helped me to calm down. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my calming, black leather jacket anymore because of the amount of times I was shot in the torso the week before. My ceiling was navy blue. The color for sleep.
I’d go over the rest, but I wouldn’t have the energy to write all that, so just imagine an abstract painting of all colors. And I do mean all of them. Every color I knew.
I peeled off my shirt and traced the old scars that ran down my torso to my thigh. The long gone pain that made me feel as I made my former friend feel.
I missed Hunter. I wondered if Marina missed me, if Hunter told her. I wasn’t about to ask, on the chance she got scared and stayed away.
I pulled myself onto my bed and shifted. I got off and walked out the room, and I walked through the woods. I was strong in this form, and I needed to stretch my legs.
—
I lay down on an angled log and ate some termites and probably decimated the population while I was at it, but I couldn’t help it. It tasted like wood grilled meat, although I wasn’t sure what kind.
Someone approached me, and I looked up and saw Lyorna and Lizzie, about three hundred feet away. Lizzie was so excited and kept bouncing up and down, but I wanted to be alone.
I stood and padded away, and heard Lizzie following after me, despite Lyorna’s protests about how it was probably a bad idea to touch a wolf.
The Critura of the Snowdrift pack eventually managed to lead Lizzie away, and I decided to return the favor. I stalked them for about an hour before the wind changed, and Lyorna looked right at where I was in the shadows and giggled.
“Lena, what’s up?”
“Just thinking,”
I emerged and let Lizzie touch me, as she so clearly wanted, then I continued on my walk, laughing.
I lay in some sand and rolled around, when I tasted human on the air.
I went underwater, then rolled until my dark patches were on top, careful not to let out my oxygen. I occasionally craned my neck to poke my nose out, breathe out and in, and lower it again.
Something grabbed me, and I twisted, kicked, then swam to deeper waters. My feet couldn’t touch the ground in my human form, I doubted what grabbed me could. A fish passed by, and I resisted the temptation to eat it as I kicked to stay above water.
On the opposite shore, I saw several people, but I have pretty bad vision. But I recognized the scent of them and swam towards them.
Masterlist
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I've always been a little thrown off by the way the characters (the team and the passengers) react to Reid trying to talk down Ted, and I've never liked that the episode ends with Ted being shot (although I appreciate that he survives).
I'm not saying this to be critical of the characters: the team doesn't have audio, and the passengers (save for Elle and the incapacitated psychologist) don't have the knowledge to see Reid getting through to him, but:
I don't know. Look at Ted's face. I'm bad at reading expressions, but at the very least, this doesn't seem like the expression of someone unaffected by what's being said to him, or the face of a man who's about to start shooting people. During the conversation, Ted stops aiming the gun at Reid, and yells at Leo to shut up when he tells him to shoot Reid.
I really think that Reid was on his way to talking Ted down, and I wish he'd gotten to do it. I don't think Elle hitting Ted while Reid is talking him down makes a lot of sense*. She's one of the few passengers who can understand that Ted is calming down, and I think she's at the right angle to see his changing expression. I wish Reid had gotten the chance to keep talking, because I do think he was close to ending it without anyone else getting shot.
One other thing I noticed while watching this episode—throughout the episode, Leo has always been onscreen while he speaks, either in the same frame as Ted, or the camera cuts to him while he speaks. However, if you rewatch the scene, notice that whenever Leo speaks during it, not only is he always offscreen, but his voice has an echo to it that wasn't there before. I don't think most of the analysis I post is reflective of the writer's intent, but that seems very intentional to me, symbolizing that Leo is becoming less real to Ted and therefore losing his grip on him.
*this is a criticism of the writing, not the character. yes, elle is impulsive, but the choice to hit ted while he's being talked down and is no longer aiming the gun at anyone seems like a strange and risky choice.
Redacted Characters And Listeners That Should Not (under any circumstances) Be Handed a Gun:
-James (Will face first degree murder charges for killing several of his superiors.)
-Milo (Should face a first degree murder charge for killing at least one individual, but there is not enough evidence to make this possible.)
-Angel (Will lose the gun.)
-Kody (Because obviously.)
-Hush (OBVIOUSLY)
-Sunshine (Will kill off everyone in CloseKnit no questions asked [but would that be such a bad thing?])
-Guy (The worst he'll do is shoot a hole into the wall [on accident?] but that's already enough of a reason to never hand this man a firearm.)
-Bright Eyes ("Hey, Fred? Wanna find out how many bullets a vamp can take?" - "No thanks!" - "Chill out, I wasn't gonna test it on you." - "*sigh of relief* Oh thank god... Wait, you're not going to try and kill Vincent again, right?" - "Of course not!" - "Okay good." *silence* "Wait, Bright, no!")
Just rediscovered the cold dead corpse of an old fic I started a year or longer ago in which Quinn straight up shoots Darlin's unempowered friend in a room full of people which prompts them to follow Sam back to Dahlia to run away from Quinn. This is a band AU.
hihi!! quick theory abt niffty’s death:)
i just noticed this while drawing her, but i think she was shot bc of the pattern on her chest.
they look like gunshots with blood right? idk if this theory has been made b4 but yknow
just a theory:)