Now Over At DancingThruStars

“—fuck up! 17th and Seville Rose got—!”

He declines to collect and hangs up, staring at his desk for just a little bit. Then he sighs and goes to grab his jacket. It’s a ten minute jog and that curiosity is still alive unfortunately.

When he turns the corner onto the intersection he spots them easily, a gaggle of arguing ghouls circled protectively around a stairwell alongside one of the buildings. Several of them are spattered in dark stains, hands and faces and clothes all dotted from a central point. He wonders if they notice how it taints the air around them, swirling around them like the beach at low tide. One of them, one of the older ones, gestures for everyone to be quiet as he approaches, turning to address him.

Another one bursts the second he gets within range.

“Rose fell off the roof and he won’t let us get him out!”

The older one claps a hand over their mouth, speaking up as the voice he recognizes from the phone.

“We’re supposed to be heading back to the house. We’ve got guests coming tonight and Ro wanted us to be there to meet them, but someone needs to deal with him first.”

That brings him to a pause, if only to think for a second about how most people would be calling him after someone took a dive for a very different reason. Then he waves them off, scattering them as he shoulders through to the stairwell.

“Go get something to eat, go home. He park near here?”

“No, we took the bus.”

Great.

“Then take the bus.”

He pauses at the top of the stairs to make sure they leave, then looks down into the shadows seeping over the bottom landing like fog. It’s pretty clear at a glance that Ro hit the surrounding fence first, a massive spread of black stain that explodes onto the surrounding sidewalk before slipping down the concrete to where he’s crumpled, more a bundle of loose sticks than a person. The haze blocks anything more specific, blurs the edges of his shape, difficult to determine beyond the most extreme notions—the long line of his neck bent too far, the golden flash of his tangled hair, the places where there should be bone exposed, bone extended, and is instead only black.

Anyone else would be clearly instantly dead, long gone before he could have even been told, but no, as he takes those first cautious steps down those twin lighthouses ignite in the darkness, watching him close. It would almost be comforting if they weren’t looming at Ro’s standing height, two feet to the right of his mangled body. His steps catch, instinct stopping him for only the briefest second before it’s overridden by the stench of burnt metal and stardust washing over him, petrichor and scrubbed floors. It feels like something burrowing into his lungs, spreading its claws through the meat and breath between. It feels like a tug in his gut, drawing him near. He clears his throat, grips the railing, unable to take his attention off those beaming lights.

“What possessed you to be on the roof exactly.”

The shadow in the shape of his associate splits with a brilliant smile that doesn’t fit in the incomplete shape of its head, too many teeth in a swath of void both identical and different from the rest. The voice is not quite familiar, a hum that creaks around his ears, settles down his spine, rather than coming from behind those almost-fangs. Neither of those startle him though. It’s the words themselves that send a chill through his veins, bring him stuttering to a stop two steps from the absolute void below.

“My duck, you should know by now that there’s many reasons anyone would want me anywhere.”

He’d rather eat paint than admit it but he knows this broken thing well enough, knows he isn’t one for pet names or overt sweet talk. Maybe he was, once, but Ro would be the first to say he understands how difficult his general countenance and demeanor would make it to tell he’s being genuine, knows how poorly strangers would take such things from such an even-tempered mouth. Maybe had it proved, once or twice. No, Ro is the type to show he cares with actions over anything else, to show just how genuine he always is through the power of an open door, a helping hand. A day out with his ghouls and company for dinner.

This doesn’t feel like Ro. This feels older. Much older. He pulls back a step, feels the frigid seeping dark recede off of his boots. Feels something slip off his shoelaces.

“And in this case?”

“There was a small creature stuck in the wires.”

And so he went up and fell six stories. Kids probably said something. He pulls back another step.

“Was told you need to be back home in an hour.”

“Cece is in town. Darling girl. I could use a hand.”

He bites down on his tongue until he tastes blood, tightens his hold on the railing.

“Ghouls said you wouldn’t let them down here.”

“Too heavy for them. You’re strong enough though, aren’t you my wolf?”

Lie. He knows how terrifyingly light Ro is. And besides, Ro doesn’t lie, not really, not about the little things. It takes effort to rip his eyes away from the pair watching him but he does, focuses on the shape behind. Suddenly that long thin scar feels like a beacon.

“Ambrose, your kids are worried about you. They need you home for dinner.”

Seconds pass, the shadow moves closer. He feels rooted, suddenly, trapped and frozen. Something slips under his fingers and pulls, slowly separating him from the rail. He can’t fight it. Those teeth seem so much larger than before, seem so much more dangerous. He doesn’t know this thing. Fingers that aren’t grip his jaw, pulling him, trying to move his focus off the corpse in the corner.

He—

The next voice he hears isn’t from the shadow, isn’t curling around his neck and burrowing into his ears. It’s quiet, and warm, and he can see the mouth move.

“Sam, go back upstairs.”

It’s like the world rushing back in. He stumbles back, landing on his ass for the briefest of seconds before he manages to scramble back up to the upper landing, to the spot where the noonday sun is casting heat and light. The shadow’s smile vanishes. The yellow lamplight narrows to pinpricks. Then, all of it is gone. The fog clears.

Suddenly there’s just a broken body slumped in the corner of a stairwell, spotted and stained and not quite dead. The head tilts forward, then falls, completely gone of any and all structural viability. It sags into the chest, held on only by skin, before a hand with fingers bent the wrong way slips up and grips the blond tresses attached, pulling it back up to rest against the wall, angled just enough to look at him. The sunglasses are gone, thrown in the grass nearby probably if not completely shattered. Icy blue eyes stare up at him from a completely human face.

Somehow that’s the most unsettling part of any of this. It feels like a breach, somehow, despite everything. His shoves himself to his feet, shoves his shaking hands in his pockets.

“I’m going to look for your glasses.”

“Thank you.”

It feels like pulling against a riptide but he manages, breath sharp in his nose as he circles away from the stairs and towards the stained grass, trying to focus on the hunt and not what just happened. It’s longer than it should be before he finds them, longer still before he manages to pull his mind away from the wet snaps and visceral cracks he’s hearing from below.

He leans over the fence just in time to watch inky black sinew lash out from the remaining open breaks, pulling the splintered limbs inexorably back to place. When they’re done, Ro stretches them out with a quiet sigh, like it’s any average strain and not what it was.

Whatever it was.

“Ro.”

The neck bends to a completely normal degree this time. He dangles the glasses over the edge, drops them when Ro holds out a hand. They land perfectly in his waiting grasp. Something about the way Ro tsks at the cracked lens makes him bite down a laugh, probably hysterical. He doesn’t speak as what minutes before was little more than a heap stands to his feet and quickly hops up the steps into the sunlight. Doesn’t know what he’d say.

Ro turns to look at him, mirrored spotlights watching him from behind broken panes. They both know he should run. Should turn around and never look back. Should take this as the warning it was, an insight into why Ro makes sure no one ever sticks around too long. His blood is still rushing in his ears, his hands still shaking.

Instead he straightens himself up, approaches with careful ease. Tries not to make it too obvious he’s staring at the stains covering the bright clothes, the cheap jewelry. Tries not to stare at how his hair is unblemished, his smile clear. Probably fails entirely.

Probably, actually. Seems easiest.

On top of that, it doesn’t even fucking work that great. In the seconds between whatever gruesome demise you’ve caused yourself and waking up in the cold bath you dream of—you see—you remember—

The shade of tall trees. The way her eyes squint when she smiles. The scent of pine needles and cigarettes. The way her nose crooks from too many breaks. The one leaky part of the roof and the floorboard that’s always creaking underneath. The sound of her laughter. The. The. The.

—nothing. Meaningless tripe. Weird drudged up sensations and half-thoughts bubbled together into a stew that doesn’t exist.

Also last time you woke up you were down a hand and that seems unintentional. The eggheads are more pissed about it than you, something about needing to reset the system and how it was working so well for so long. At least they’re going to have the opportunity to finally switch to that new engram storing that was being proposed, yadda yadda yadda. They assure you it’s not a problem, you’re just going to have to switch to a new body quicker than normal.

And to be clear, it is normal. They’re the ones who told you to be reckless, you can’t be judged for dying on average once every job or two.

They shuffle you off to sit in the prep room while they hit buttons or something and you stretch out on one of the benches, examining the stump of your hand. It’s not like you woke up actively bleeding or anything, it’s just…not there. Like it failed to grow entirely. You could probably still work with it, honestly, but if they’re willing to just slap you into a new body before you get back to business…?

The shortstack they keep partnering you with would probably say that this is a sign of some kind, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. That there has to be a reason why they offered this insane mad scientist bullshit up to you with the only caveat that you do jobs you’re getting paid for anyways. That there’s a reason they’re only annoyed in moments like these with your repeated deaths. You think she’s probably overestimating, after all you’ve had plenty of free lunches through the liberal application of extreme violence and no one’s stopped you yet. And besides that, you think it’s pretty obvious what they’re getting out of this. You’re guinea pigs for moments like this, for troubleshooting a thing they’re probably going to sell off to the highest bidder once they’ve got the kinks worked out.

Also it’s very likely they’re selling your medical data to someone, that just seems fair.

One of the younger nerds comes and retrieves you, asks you to stand in the biohazard shower so they can ‘recycle this one’. The euphemism makes you laugh, just a bit. Her eyes flicker with eager delight as one of the guards approaches you with an unholstered gun.

These dorks are about as transparent as it comes, you can’t imagine what she thinks could possibly be happening that isn’t already supremely obvious. But then again, what do you know? She doesn’t die anywhere near as often as you, maybe she knows something you don’t. Maybe she’s just scared. Probably that, honestly.

Later than intended the next morning he gets to experience an objectively attractive man offering him a couple freezer waffles and yet another juice box, and that’s nice too. Usually he has to lie to get anything resembling that.

He still heavily debates fleeing the city once he gets back to his hotel, but it’s the thought that counts. He even gets as far as getting his shit back into his bags before giving up on the idea. It’s tempting, sure, but laying it all out in front of him really highlights just how little he has, how significant the risk of his head on a platter still is out there. Better to stay here, connected in the way all big beautiful cities are but separate all the same, hemmed in by deep water and some home-spun ‘outsiders don’t get it’ mentality.

It’s fucking weird here and that works well as cover, basically.

There’s little of that left now. What remains has been shredded, suffocated and masked by slavering and panting and hunger. His hide is scarred, his teeth are cracked, and very soon he will die and the thing that rules him will move on to another, continuing its vicious cycle forevermore.

Not far from there is a man shaped like a wolf. He lives on the edges of town, busies himself with a faltering garden and a rotting house. Others look to him and see a beast, hulking and silent and there, failing to see the downturn of his eyes, the tremble of his hands. No one is born that way, they whisper. He must be other, some foul thing given improper form, some failure abandoned at the outskirts.

Changeling, they whisper. Monster.

Soon he will prove them all right, and it won’t even be his fault.

For now though, a stranger blowing into town. Small and unimposing and bereft, possessed only of a medicine bag and the cloak on his back, velvet crushed dark with weather and blood. Struggling to get where he’s trying to be and running from where he’s been.

Chased by something shadowed and indistinct. Wanted, needed, required. A constellation of gaps in his flesh, space beneath like that above. A singing song of the cosmos bubbling under the thin layer of his skin.

He goes to their doors, asking, begging. Somewhere to stay the night, somewhere to rest. A prayer of hospitality, of desperation.

From behind the crumbling mossy stones he rarely crosses, a man doomed to become both catastrophically more and terrifyingly less watches as each turns this other wounded soul away, venom-wrought suspicion carving away what they could be and leaving only what is. He watches that tiny shape melt further and further into a shadow of hopelessness, and when their eyes meet, dark and darker, he simply nods his head towards the crooked hinges of his door.

Void-struck and bloody-destined, they make an awkward pair that night. And the next, and the next, and the next. Each day the traveler plans to leave, means to move on, and each day he stops at the boundary line, at that simple broken circle of what might have once protected what lies within, and cannot bring himself to move to what’s beyond.

Each day he turns back to the hulking shape quietly pulling weeds, forever resigned to this lonely thing, this disparaged existence, and cannot abandon such kindness.

Each night the ragged sheets of their makeshift beds move closer, rotted wood at their backs and wanted warmth close, so close, but never quite there.

I’m writing this with the knowledge I might not post it, I might get embarrassed about it and I might delete it but. I want to try.

Let’s be a little frank about what this blog’s been, as a whole.

It’s been a place for me to write, yes, but it’s also been, full honesty, an escape, a panicked and grieved one, away from all I was before. I grabbed my funny little Star Wars OCs and my loose concept for a Mars story and I ran out the door. I made a blog that for years had a header title specifically referencing that it was somewhere new. Somewhere different. Hell the name of the blog itself was that too. I didn’t want to lose all I worked on but I couldn’t bear to be in the same place as it anymore.

I still, frankly, can’t be. The part of me that craves validation and misses all that old feedback, even when I can acknowledge to myself that I wasn’t getting any of that anyways, really. Not towards the end. The peak of the glory days of the Achievement Hunter fiction community had, admittedly, passed a while before I closed up shop. It was nice having what I personally considered a Big Follower Number, but I’d watched plenty of people move on over the years. I’d made several posts half-joking about it in the year leading up to the Big Move alone but it was happening before that too. It wasn’t fun, I got really genuinely upset over the fact that in the middle of all the things I’d cared about writing, the quick brainworm things I slammed out in two hours were the only things that really got traction, but it wasn’t unexpected. It happens, people grow into and out of fandoms and followings and the beginning of the end for AH in the state it had been felt looming on the horizon well before…everything that happened. And everything since.

I don’t mean to dredge old wounds. It’s dramatic to say but I still find mine plenty raw, four years down the line. It aches at me that I can acknowledge, objectively, just how Mine everything was towards the end, how little I’d even really been watching videos and being influenced by them, and still be unable to even brush the edges of character descriptions, much less names. For a very long time I couldn’t even go back to look at my old work, though that particular aspect has gone away through slow and steady effort.

Anyways.

My tenure on satansprettyprose ran a little over five years. It had a huge impact on my life, with reverberations I still feel, and then it was over.

I left a lot of stuff behind when I moved here. A lot of things I loved, a lot of things that filled me with joy. Concepts of ideas, plans I had, conversations I wanted to continue and people I wanted to hold close. Not every attempt to bring any of those back to life has succeeded. Some have failed to such an extent I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to even shape the edges of them again without feeling it in my chest. Some things I might never be able to use again.

To be entirely transparent, the reason I pushed so hard last year to write once a month is that I felt myself drifting away from writing at all. I felt like no matter what I wrote it didn’t matter, it wasn’t what people wanted to see, it wasn’t what I’d done before, what I couldn’t go back to. Writing gives me such joy and I was losing my grasp on it because it felt like it was just me and the big dark shadow of the Before, even while I was actively running away from it. I don’t even talk about writing outside of here and my friend group and that was happening less and less. So I figured I’d give myself one last shot and see if I could even still do good consistent writing anymore. And I’ll be honest, I think I’m a worse writer now than I was. I’ve let the muscle atrophy.

But this last year I wrote some damn good chapters of Orbit in Decay and got us at least lined up for the real meat of the story to get going. I wrote Neighbors, a good amount of it, and got to play with different styles I’d been nervous to touch again, on top of having a lot of real genuine fun with opposing viewpoints. I wrote proper Star Wars things, pieces I’d been holding back on for years because I couldn’t get myself over the hurdle of my own self-conscious hurdles.

But more than all of that, I started working on things like what I’d loved. I started writing the still-unnamed fae stuff, which was and is a blatant rip of the ELR longform spy rewrite I’d been working on, just with supernatural elements and different characters. I started working on some old-fashioned tolsmol stuff, one of which went out last week. Another, which involves some mushrooms and star-void, is still rather piecemeal but has had some space to grow anyways.

And then last month. Last month I made Jay and Obie. Last month I broached the writing topic I was terrified to come back to the most. I wrote criminals. More than that, I wrote a lot of criminals. I’ve still been writing a lot of criminals. And it makes me so so happy to do.

I’ve written so much this last year I’ve had to start sorting it aggressively so that I don’t lose everything.

Here’s the point.

It’s been four years here. I’m older, I’m more tired, my health is worse and it’s harder to want to keep the ball rolling. I’m rarely on here, and I’m aware of that. There were some months this last year where it was all I could do to kick out something short at the very end of the month for the sake of checking that box and very little else. I’ll never match the person I was, but ultimately I think that’s what happens with time anyways. So, what then?

The answer is that I’m going to try. Like I’ve been but also more than that. I’m going to stop living in the shadow of it all. I want to write what I want to write and I want to create what I want to create. No more clinging to the idea that I can’t even acknowledge all I did because of all the guilt and rage and grief. No more forever reminding myself that I can’t because it was something else. I miss writing things, so I’m going to write them.

It won’t be the same, obviously. See the fae stuff, see Jay and Obie, hell see the clone lesbians I’ve been toying with. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a way to write a revenge story I won’t find utterly lacking and I know with a certainty that tears at me that I won’t ever be writing a massive longform polyamorous corruption arc again. No matter how much I miss it.

But we’re going to find rhymes, going to make new suspiciously similar OCs, going to write new and weird things, and some old and weird things too. And I’m really hoping it’ll make some people smile like it used to because I know it’s done that for me.

He didn’t know exactly why, maybe he thought the way the little flame flickered was pleasant, perhaps he enjoyed the way the thin trail of smoke danced above it.

Perhaps he was distracting himself from going back to sleep, the latest nightmare still fresh in his mind. He could almost feel the cold water invading his lungs.

So he distracts himself with the little flame.

“For how long, I wonder, can I keep this flame alight?”

He stayed awake all night, observing the little flame, feeding it small scraps of paper when it flickered too weak, gently patting it down when it consumed it’s candle too fast.

Exhaustion was creeping on him, he could barely keep his eyes open anymore, his common sense telling him he should put the little flame out before he fell asleep on top of it.

He ignored this advise.

Instead, he so carefully moved the little flame from it’s almost completely melted candle to a new, unused one.

Hopefully big enough to last quite a few hours.

Almost fearfully, he collapsed in bed, waiting for the horrible and familiar feeling of the icy waters encasing him on his sleep.

Instead, he dreamt of warmth.

—

Another day went by, then another, then a week, then two.

He learned how long each type of candle lasted, what sort of fuel feed the little flame the best.

It was now a bit of a pet project, to see how long he could make it last.

He remembers fondly how the little flame once encased the entire candle at once, flickering almost playfully.

Or how it hissed almost in annoyance, when he had to flicker it with water dropets to get it to a manageable size again.

He wasn’t sure when the pet project became just a pet.

Perhaps it was when he caught himself thinking up names for the little flame.

Perhaps it was when he decided on Orion.

In the following months not once did he dreamt of all encasing cold nor the impenetrable darkness of the depths.

He dreamt of warmth and light.

—

It was a holiday night, the kind that had most houses empty as entire families flocked together.

He was alone with Orion when the burglars broke in.

They weren’t expecting witnesses, just an easy job.

Though a single terrified man wasn’t too hard of a job.

They bought him down easily, and violently, demanding riches he didn’t have.

Orion gave a fearful flicker with each hit, it shook with each threat.

But when the bored and disappointed burglars took out the weapon, Orion roared.

The candle was ablaze in one second, the desk in two, and the burglars in three.

The little flame, now a massive, enraged inferno, embraced him fully and protectively.

He felt as much heat, as one would fill drinking hot chocolate in a cold winter night, with the company of a fully stocked fireplace and a warm blanket.

Orion’s body grew and grew, soon encasing the entire house, the flames growing so high and wide, and flickering so violently, they almost looked like flapping wings.

Later they will find nothing but an empty, charred plot of land, and blackened trails following the direction of the wind.

He left with Orion that night, never to feel cold again.

—

There’s the common misbelief that dragons hatch from eggs, when in reality, the infant form of a dragon is so frail, so small, that a misplaced breath might be enough to extinguish them.

But if one were to care for them long enough, love them long enough, the dragon will grow big and powerful, and return the favor.

—