#dsytopia

Title: Be Silent In That Solitude Author: @amypond45​ Artist: @midnightsilver Pairing/Ship: Sam/Dean implied Rating: PG-13 for show-level violence Word Count: 6K Warnings: implied minor character deaths off-screen Summary: Chuck leaves the world to end, slowly and painfully. When the Winchesters hit the road after two years in the bunker, they learn an awful truth. The world is dying, all right, but Chuck’s made sure the Winchesters never will.

story on ao3

sure thing

 💰 She flicked a rock out of her boot and scowled at the large rusted gate doors that she had been kicked out of not even five minutes before. 

💰 He tapped his fingers against the top of his cane, trying to think of ways he could help his team with this mess. 

💰 “Now is not a time to back down. We have to be ready. We have to work together.”

💰 He shook the can of spray paint, looking up at his message. It was too big to ignore. 

💰 She dipped her fingers in the mix of dirt and water, dragging the markings along her forehead. She was ready. 

💰 Their fingers entangled in the kid’s hair, the weight of their head on their leg reminding them of the inevitable fight in both of their futures. 

💰 At some point during the night, they had received a coded letter with instructions on how to find their base. 

COSMOS AI Poems Published

evil_computer_is_evil_by_insanefangirl_d32vpue-fullview COSMOS AI Poems Published Raven Cage Zine will publish my COSMOS AI poems in their next (66th) issue. COSMOS Evil AI Takes Over Poems Shadow on the Snow, The Last Ground Hog Day COSMOS Bans Ground Hog COSMOS Takes Control COSMOS Had Other ideas Cosmos Declares Humanity is the Problem COSMOS Takes Over the World Killing Machines They…

So, since you have to be all declared about where you stand on everything these days, I'm going to go out on a big limb here and express my strong support for the notion that the Police shouldn't straight up murder people they find inconvenient.

Oh, yeah. Also, when they do murder folks, it would be swell if there were some kind of attempt to make them accountable for their actions. Just a thought.

But far be it from me to tell people who live in fucked up, violent police states how to improve their lot. It's not like folks in any such countries are running around telling everyone theirs is the greatest country on Earth. Nor are any of these countries using their jackbooted military to kill indiscriminately as they force their exploitative economic system down colonized people's throats.

The embassy had fallen. The last and greatest monolith of democratic civilization had collapsed, and with it, so had everything else. The final shred of optimism and expectation had finally fallen away. But statements of that caliber are melodramatic and generalizing. No more faith had been placed in that ancient stone building, as had been placed in man. It was a token failing whose only significance, was giving the people who had been left some moment in time to point to and say, unequivocally, this is the moment when the world began to end. All other indicators had been false starts. Famine, wars, outbreaks of incurable and deadly disease –all of these were events that had occurred cyclically since the beginning of time. Elements of support to help thin out populations that had overgrown their borders and resources. A humanitarian way of culling the masses without resorting to more barbaric and systemic routines of decimating entire peoples and populations.  A natural way. A way in which the hand of man could not intervene, and therefore it was decided and determined to instead be, an act of God, and therefore, in its own way, right. If the world fell apart in these ways, man could always wipe his hands free of the blood, able to, at the day of Judgment, raise his hands above him and declare, we did everything we could, but we were not the cause, we were not the executioners of our own fate, just the victims, the fall of man does not weigh heavy on our heads, but Yours. You killed man. You did this.

It was a propagated statement every preacher-man, every politician, every talking head, every person with enough sense of inbred deflection and denial, a case of “it wasn’t me” , sprouted the closer whatever doom and destruction and hellfire drew near. I had since packed up what little I could carry on my back in a rucksack and running counter to the masses that instead sought to find refuge and safety in numbers, fled out of the cities. Abandoned any sense of familial connections and bonds and didn’t look back. I’m sure they would have done the same.

 You always grow up with an ill-conceived notion that in the face of adversity or struggle that you, unlike your neighbor, will rise above and risk life and limb to save your fellow man, to rescue him like the good Samaritan we are all taught in grade school to be, or to, at the very least, cause him no harm. But I have never been so noble. I have lived twenty-five years on this earth, and within the past three I have resorted to more nefarious, corrupt and insidious maneuvers than I ever have in the whole of living. I do not regret it. Regret means second-guessing, means having been wrong and needing to make amends, and the only thing I have left to offer—to forfeit—is my life, and even in this godforsaken time, when whispers and echoes of ancient days and foretold end of days, merge into one, it is a mixture of fear, and hope, that keep me here, among the living. There is no room for regret.

  I met him six months into my flight into the countryside. One of those reformed preachers that the catastrophe of uncertain times gives birth to. He was spreading word of some new religion, or some new sect of an old religion re-done to best accommodate the pocketbooks of the scared and the confused, but the just rich enough to buy a little salvation, and just dumb enough to believe it. I had been purposely avoiding any attachments at all. I had read enough journals and psychiatric books in the past—when these things could be speculated and conjectured on, safely, from a distance—to know that in times like this, the fewer unnecessary attachments, the better. But even in a place as plentiful and perfect as Eden, human companionship was in want, and so I gravitated to James, more so out of a need for connection than I ever had of love or devotion, or belief in whatever he was advocating and preaching. In that regard it was easy falling into step with whatever wild and fanciful delusion he declared would best alleviate the pain we all felt—the 50 or so who actively followed him, and the steady stream of wayward flock that sought him out as well. He wasn’t convincing, and he was an even worse lover than he was speaker, but he was naïve, and at least a convincing enough liar to believe his own delusions. So it was easy—easier—to turn a little blind, or a little deaf, to the message he was standing behind. He offered something that standing governments failed to. Structure, connection, a way out. And when whatever actions we preformed failed to bring about an end to our collective suffering, it was not an indication that we had failed or were following the wrong orders. It was simply a minor crisis of faith. An ever persistent and nagging suggestion to try harder. We never killed anyone, so it seemed safe, relatively, to continue playacting that what we were doing—communing together, pooling resources, meditating in mass, gathering around daily to express our fears and hopes for the future—but these were avenues of life that had worked for a time that didn’t exist now and more extreme measures were deemed necessary to engage in, in order to receive the sort of return we had yet to experience. The sort of relief you don’t get from barbaric times by being a Mother Teresa.

Those aren’t times I like to remember. It made me more fearful of what fate my own family had fallen into, and the call to return back home, whatever state that may have lain in now, was its strongest at that time. But roads to the cities had since been blocked off—whether by natural means or by human—and I had not communicated with them in months. The world had fallen into disarray, and I with it. Hedonistic acts, acts of survival, action in its most simplistic form had come into dominance. There is no room for regret, or looking back, but my subconscious does it anyway, every now and again, and there are some images, some words, some cries, that no amount of sleepless nights can dull or seek to negate. I had fallen into step quietly with James and what can only be called his budding cult—his gang of increasingly angered patrons who all demanded more, who wanted results, reprieve. We started out as a shambling group of men and woman and children who were still fogged by the smoke of our burning homes, our lives wrecks now piled haphazardly upon itself. And as rumors of famine spread, as a greater increase in assassinations became reported, and the rumor of wars with inescapable nuclear fallout reached us, a pooling feeling of desperation made its home in that encampment. Like the world, we fell apart gradually, slowly. Imperceptible. And once we had fallen so far, it seemed foolish to try to turn back.

The natural order of things—that’s what the world had fallen into. A reasonable response to unreasonable occurrences, which led to maddened outcomes. A fanatical anthem of denying the most natural of these natural things—our own deaths. And since we could not truly control the fall of our own lives, we sought to dictate and orchestrate the fall of the lives around us. Perhaps if there were fewer people in the world, in our own vicinity, perhaps nature needed a bit of coaxing, a little push, a little help. We weren’t doing anything but helping along the natural order of things. Although we had pre-selected our own lives as being worth just a little more than those outside of our numbers, and eventually, worth just a little bit more than those within our own numbers and ranks. And wasn’t the natural order of things not loyalty to ones fellow man, but to the self, after-all? And couldn’t this all be traced back to the dawn of man? The one from texts now burned up and ripped apart, that might as well have been from millenniums ago. Survival of the fittest, survival of the most cunning, survival of the one who feared death the greatest but was still willing to live out a bleak and condemning existence.

 I killed without much convincing, with very little manipulation. I could lie and say that I had been coerced into murdering in cold blood, murdering under false pretenses that innocent blood might be able to stave off what terrorizing fate man had collectively built up for himself to one day endure, but I hadn’t. And it had been far easier than I had ever imagined it would ever be, taking a life and sacrificing it to whatever force seemingly more powerful than my own self and will, in an effort to prove myself more worthy, more capable, than the person beside me. Lying about that would mean that I had shame, that my actions were somehow flawed or misguided, or wrong. But there is right, and then there is death, and there are shades of grey in the middle of these absolutes that one can cling to in order to justify staying alive. The world had fallen away. And so had any sense of moral failings, and my effort to justify that, what I have done for the sake of staying alive—for the sake of staying alive at all costs, was as much a byproduct of external madness that had seeped in, as it was a latent, and potent optimism. The world didn’t right itself during my time with James, but maybe, one day it would, and whatever sins and acts of rebellion against man I had engaged in, would be brought forth and tried. I don’t believe that—I didn’t have the sense to believe that then, and I still don’t believe it now—but there are plenty of things people have grown to come to know as a sort of truth that they don’t really believe in. For some, like James, they became martyrs because of it.

  This was my third year though, of living in the sort of halfway living the world had become accustomed to. The state of the world hadn’t seemed to get any better, but it also hadn’t appeared to get any worse. Disease was still rampant, pockets of violence still burned hotly in scattered areas and food supplies were still at a precarious shortage, but life, or some shadow of it, still persisted. For better or for worse. A loose structure of government—unaffiliated with any one nation—had been raised and hope began to feel more than some garbled, fledging prayer the dead and dying uttered before death. A better life, if not a rough semblance of the life we all had been forced to leave behind, seemed to lie on the horizon. And like anyone who had lived and endured during the times of fallout, I was skeptical, some part of me knowing it was to be short-lived, a moment of held breath that would usher in a final exhale that would serve as the final cessation of breath. But I, like everyone else who remained, had been fighting this long for survival, or the illusion of it. What was one more delusion in the grand scheme of things, especially if it meant, just for one more day, a few more hours, breathing and enjoying what remained of this since tainted gift of life.

I am a ghost of who I was though. Some days I forget what my life had once been before. I have begun to wonder why I have gone this long living in the sort of means—by the sort of means—that I have chosen to. It is too late to have a crisis of faith though. I am alive. To begin to question that, now, after all that I have seen, all that I, with my own two hands, have done, negates nothing. It brings back no more life than was taken, and conjures up no rectification. To talk of suicide now, would be madness. Would serve no greater purpose than to mean more food, more resources, for someone just as corruptible as my own self.  When the new government was declared though, I did make my way eventually back to the city. Some city, whatever remnant of the place it was that still stood. Its infrastructures for the most part had either been burned or bombed down. Some—most—roads were impassable and even from a far it was apparent that these blocked off sections of past civilization were quarantined areas that still reeked of mass death and decay and needed to be avoided anyway. This wasn’t a city my family, or friends, had once lived in, but sometimes this too I forgot and would find myself venturing out at odd hours of the night in search of them. I would call out for my mother occasionally—my father had grown hard of hearing and I knew if the two of them were together, as I would imagine them in these late night hallucinations, she would be the one to hear and recognize my voice, and would pull my father close to her saying,

“Jethro, that’s her. Come on before we lose her again.”

And he would grunt and perhaps strain to hear for himself, because my mother was optimistic kind and was always the more creative of the two, and perhaps was only hearing things, because she needed to hear things. Like her daughter now.

It had been on one of these careless escapades that I had stumbled onto a scrawny little punk of a kid, of a child, that was dirty and threadbare. Abandoned with the beautiful blue eyes of a vulnerability it was easy to turn away from because those sort of tactics—using children to prey upon those who still had bits of their hearts and humanity in tact—had been the sort of tactics James’ cult had resorted to using. It had been a ploy, that at least for a little bit of time, spared what children remained in that cult, giving them a role that helped to secure their places and give them necessary value. But when I came back that morning, and later that afternoon, the boy was still there, and against what judgment and common sense I had gained that had helped keep me alive, I decided to take him in. He was easy to carry, no more than five, maybe six, terrorized into muteness. His only indication of thanks the spasmodic shaking of his hands that rested clasped around my neck. I refused to give myself the chance to turn back or second-guess the decision I had made. There hadn’t been room for regrets before, and there was, now, in this moment, still even less room for it. So we moved on, the two of us, under the cloak and disguise of night, to where I had been staying for the past few weeks now.

He said nothing as I sat him down, exploring with only his eyes in what little light there was available, the new place he had come to rest in. I waited for him to scream, to cry out in alarm or to run away, alerting whomever might have charge over him where potential—resources—lay. But he only sat there, watching me just as intently, eyes moving from my own to the makeshift weapon that rested beside me. I had been charitable, but I wasn’t dumb. There were limits to my deathwish. Eventually he fell asleep, or pretended to. His tiny chest rising and falling in short, staggered breaths that I watched with envy, trying to recall and simultaneously deny, a time when that had been my own form, and my own parents had been watching over me. I felt the crushing weight of vulnerability that had been building itself up slowly, and fell asleep.

There had been a loud explosion and a gasp, high-pitched and cut-off that waked me. I closed my own mouth, realizing that the outcry had come from my own lips. I reached for the boy first, pulling his wide-eyed frame close to me, the walls of the tiny enclosure we had sought refuge in shaking and thrumming in time to whatever destruction called the building to bow to it.

“Did you lead them to us?! Are you a spy?! Are they coming here to kill us?!”

My irrational brain took flight and I squeezed the boy ever close to me still. Shouting above the noise into his ear, knowing no band of vagabonds could devise such an elaborate and convincing scheme of explosion and allowing myself to feel the flood of regret over all the years I had been less than, that I had fought off fear just for it to find me cowering in a dark corner pissing myself and clutching a hold of a tiny child as armor and anchor. The dim echo of screams reached us and I could feel whatever promise had been told us of a renewal of life as we had once known it, go slipping out the back door, taking with it what hope had been left. As my mind began to lapse back to all the things I had denied ever regretting, I felt the tiny hands of the child beside me grasp and crawl for me to hold him tighter. He began to cry, the choked sobs of someone it felt, regaining their voice.

“I don’t want to die.”

He repeated, over and over with the hysterical whispered breath of a child having their world collapse before they were ever allowed to pull and stretch at the seams to see how far it reached. And this would be my last act of charity, I knew. The last redeeming moment I would have to maybe take back a little, never all, of the things I had done in the name of selfish survival. But life has never been kind. It is cruel, and it is unfair. And I was too scared, too slow, to bring comfort, even in the form of a lie, to this child beside me, this last flame of redemption that had been offered up to me. The world had been collapsing for a long time. The embassy had fallen.

“Neither do I…”