The Sound of Silence Screaming

Preview

Homestuck
Prompt: How much of it can you really forget? And how much of it stays with you?
Category: Friendship/Angst? (Not really)
Rating: Teen, I guess? If It gets really bad, I’ll change it.
Pairings: EVERYONE. (Although I still haven’t decided whether or not the trolls will come into it.
Summary: An AU sort of? The kids have finished the game and dropped into a world where Sburb never existed. They don’t remember anything that happened. They don’t remember each other. Except on some level, they do.

The cool fingers of night air brush softly against pale, warm skin. They rustle and shift, settling between the folds of a slipping gown and a light, knitted blanket. It’s two in the morning, and the darkness is soft, simply muffling the sharp edges of the landscape without obscuring it.

 Rose Lalonde is sixteen and awake, and the world is spread, wonderful and impossible, before her.

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Empty Arguments 8 (Preview)

He’s the first one who tries to leave the Team. His shoulders are hunched and his posture is angry, and a terrifying cyclone of grief and despair and fury are driving through him, propelling him on, and on, and on, until the training dummy is nothing but a few scraps of cloth and a handful of foam pellets on the gym floor.

It’s the third one he’s destroyed in half an hour.

He yells and screams, and even when that stops, his silences still manage to convey the full depth of his wrath, perhaps all the more terrifying for the abstractness of the threats. His presence in the Cave only persists because he isn’t quite sure, just yet, where he’s going to go.

His rage is split; towards the Shadows, who are going to kill her; towards himself and the Team, for their inability to help; towards, most of all, their mentors, who had it within their power to protect her. Towards the Justice League, towards Superman, who were supposed to stand up for Justice and Honour and Fair Play and Decency. Who wouldn’t even kill one of their enemies, wouldn’t even condemn them to their death.

And it’s telling, this disgust, this ferocity, because one day while M’gann is in the kitchen, burning something in the oven and staring listlessly at the static on the television, he finally just stands up. Wolf and Sphere follow him, needing no instruction, needing no prompting, and when he walks out of the doors to the Cave he rides with them towards the horizon, with no real destination in mind expect far, far from here.

He’s finally had what he’s been looking for his entire life – the approval of Superman himself. Except he realizes that he doesn’t want it anymore. He doesn’t want anything to do with someone who could turn his back on family – because that’s what she is, he knows, knows without consideration or questioning; she’s family – and continue with their lives, unconcerned with their fate. He almost feels the revulsion rising, disgustingly large in his throat; as if he could simply release all that bile and poison that he’d swallowed; all those lies.

They stop together, the sand skidding beneath his feet as he jumps out, walking over to the ocean on a beach across the country. Calm. Peaceful. Empty. M’gann had taken to filling his mind with images like these when he’d been restless, unsettled, angry. Images of the things that she found most beautiful about Earth – a planet where both of them were strangers. And her mindscapes were always detailed, realistic, so close he could almost swear that he was experiencing it firsthand.

But it was still second to being there in person.

She never contested that fact, never became insecure about the quality of her imagination and power. The world was so vast, she had explained, so new and precious and unknowable, that it would be impossible to capture every nuance as perfectly as life did it for you. So when they had free time, or even on nights where neither of them could sleep, they would wander to the beach and appreciate the way the waves would crash on the shore and the wind would caress their hair and they would feel like this was starting to become a home.

He kicks off his boots and wades, ankle deep in the water. A home – something that he’d always thought meant a safe place. Did that just mean that Artemis had never been a part of their home? That she’d never been accepted? His hands clench into involuntary fists at his sides, and he screams at the water and the slowly sinking sun – screams out his frustration and heartache.

How does he know if he was accepted either?

His toes dig into the sand, and he raises a hand against the glare of the light coming off the water. He could keep going if he wanted – all the way to the other side of the world. But there’s nowhere really, that he can go to escape. Not on earth. He can go wherever he wants, just by flying there. He can force his way back into a life he’d been reluctant to enter in the first place.

It’s the first time he’s ever felt more trapped than he had in that Cadmus pod.

He almost laughs.

Truth is a pointed mace

Word Count: 1,685

Rating: T

Pairings: … Spitfire. Kind of.

Summary: He wants to learn more about her, but there are some things she isn’t ready to share.

The days are melting together, the long winter nights moving into slower spring days with breathy gusts of wind and inconsistent showers. And the kisses have melted together too, blending into a long, warm sensation that always somehow manages to feel new and exciting with each breath. They teach each other things – sharing smiles and secrets and some spit, among other things.

He teaches her the names of all the constellations one night, as they’re walking home together from a late night showing of Braveheart, and he suddenly stops and races down a grassy knoll, rolling to a stop in the grassy plateau at its feet. She remembers the way the grass had tickled the back of her neck and the sudden flashes of fire had raced across her skin as he’d brushed across it, lying nearly cheek-to-cheek with her and pointing at the sky.

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Empty Arguments 3 (Preview)

The static is crackling and ominous. The television is jumping around, showing barely three seconds at a time (at best) of whatever program it is that he’s watching, and the noise pops and fizzles in the silence of the dark, empty room. Shadow figures are hunched in corners, spread in cracks and over the worn leather sofa, only blinking out of existence during the brief respites when the television flares back into sudden, short-lived life.

He sighs, long and tortured, and stretches along the length of the worn red leather. He picks at the stain on the armrest and decides that his parents were right – this is possibly the world’s ugliest couch. He’d been young when they’d picked it out, and he’d been sulking and moaning and making a general nuisance of himself while they’d traipsed around the furniture store. It had been his birthday – he can’t remember which anymore, maybe sixth or seventh, somewhere in that age bracket – and he’d agonized over the terrible unfairness of the expedition. So when he’d seen the bright red couch, with the yellow piping, he’d stomped right over to it and refused to move.

It wasn’t just that it had been there, and he had been tired. He’d been watching the news recently, and he’d seen the Flash, a dashing crimson figure that embodied all the adventure and marvel of the world in his adolescent mind, and the couch had been made with a very similar colour scheme.

After a scene with a sales associate and the store manager, his parents had finally relented and purchased the couch. He remembers the feeling of brash, young victory, even as his mother had leaned over the back of her seat on the way home, and told him, “Son, I hope you know that we now own the world’s ugliest couch.”

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Terrible Season 2 Feels - Unused folders and phone apps

He hadn’t really said No outright – but then, he hadn’t really said anything much at all. In some ways that was worse, because he could sense the disappointment, the hardness behind the cowl. All that thick black that he realized recently he wasn’t so sure he could penetrate anymore. He scowled, and grabbed the short, fluffy sweatshirt from his Gotham Academy days that he’d long since grown out of, stuffing it haphazardly into his duffel bag. He wasn’t even really paying attention anymore.

He was moving out of Wayne manor tonight.

It hadn’t been an easy decision – not by any means. But he was stifled and tired and afterwards, after that – he didn’t think he would be able to hang around any longer.  He knew he hadn’t overstayed his welcome; quite the opposite in fact. But he needed to learn to stretch his wings and fly, and leave all those aching, empty, clawing moments behind.

His hands shuffled through the mess on his desk, and without realizing it, they closed around a slim, metal oblong. He shook the mess of papers and angrily thrown clothing, and pulled out his old, grey phone. He smiled, haltingly and sad. Bruce had gotten him this phone when he started at Gotham Academy. He hadn’t even really felt he needed it – it wasn’t like he didn’t have a multitude of other ways to contact him – but Bruce had felt in the interest of ‘normalcy’ that he should have one nonetheless.

He’d done nothing more than add useless apps and contact information he wasn’t sure he would ever use the first two days he’d had it. After that, it sat, untouched, at the bottom of his satchel. Except – he stood, holding the phone, almost surprised when it flickered to life at his touch. He really hadn’t used it much at all; he could only vaguely remember charging it once for the entirety of his ownership. He flicked listlessly through the apps on his phone – untouched and hopelessly outdated. His finger hovered when he found it, stalling.

When he finally opened the folder, when he finally found the one photograph he had taken, he stood, stock still at his desk, staring. His breaths were even, measured, forced. And then, after a moment, he passed his free hand over his eyes, and hung his head. He couldn’t look at it anymore. He didn’t delete it – he couldn’t. Just put the phone beneath the piles of clean clothing and random toiletries at the bottom of his bag.

And then he sank onto his bed, head in his hands, and laughed, bitter and angry. He’d been wrong after all – they’d never had the chance.

.

.

.

.

.

“We’ll laugh about this someday.”

Empty Arguments (Preview — Revised)

Rating: T+ (for violence and character death)

Prompt: Even if you prove me wrong, I will never agree with you.

Angst/Romance

(See, this is why I should not post things that I wrote at like, 3 in the morning. This is moderately better… Ish).

From the prompt: “Even if you prove me wrong, I will never agree with you.”

He’s curled up on his side, arms shaky, circling his middle, and tries to breathe shallowly through the painpainpainpainpain. His fingers skirt, scared and hesitant, around the gashes in his abdomen, wary and nauseous when he touches something that’s fleshy, but not quite skin.  The air is thick and metallic, and it burns going down what’s left of his throat.

His thoughts are circling in on themselves, nonsensical, foggy with loss of blood and what are probably multiple concussions. He remembers, vaguely that someone is in here with him – a partner. A teammate. The thought trips him up, makes some semblance of clarity pierce through his mind, and he frantically, hurriedly slogs through his jumbled thoughts, still far too slow for his liking. He wants to heal faster, needs to heal faster, to be faster, to find whoever it is, here, with him.

He hears a sharp intake of breath, distant, and it takes him a moment to figure out that it isn’t his. He tries to turn, tries to move, tries to see, but he can’t because he’ll spill, inside out, things that should never never never, be pressed against his freckled flesh. If he wasn’t a speedster, if he didn’t have the ability – no matter if it still isn’t up to par, if it can’t heal him as quickly as his uncle, as the Flash, as the legacy – he would be dead. No question at all. And the thought worries him, causes sporadic shivers and at the same time freezes him with fear, because he is the only speedster on the team. The other one – the other victim, and the word sounds hopeless and tinny and wrong in his mind – will not have fared as well as he has. And that is even more terrifying, because he knows for a fact that he is in some deep shit right now.

He claws through his memories, broken and sporadic and frantic, and tries to remember, tries to piece things together. The end of a botched reconnaissance mission, the team loading up the Bioship, the tired happiness from the Martian, weary grunts from the muscled clone, soothing, lilting tones from the ever-fearless leader. The light, catching in the distance, the strange spark, the offers to check, to see, to make sure. Cackles following, strange filtered green off leaves, water dripping. White, blinding, hard, painful, searing, bone-jolting impact. Black. Black and pain.

Robin! His stomach lurches and he’s certain another ounce of blood has just squirted onto the floor. He’s here! And he’s – oh God, he’s here. With him. Robin; without powers, without invincibility or invulnerability or accelerated healing. With nothing but his raw skill and trained talent and clever mind to protect him. Robin, barely breathing and suffering and aching somewhere just behind him, so close but so impossibly far.

And the need to turn around and see him is increased tenfold, but he can’t. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t, because the pain and the hope and the fear and death hang above his head, heavy and oppressive. It’s stupid, he thinks, and so, so pathetic, because they’re in a square room six feet across with nothing but floor and walls and ceiling and heavy, bolted, wooden door, small and still taking up so much space. Not even enough room to accelerate even if he could move. Trapped, helpless, and suddenly the idiom ‘Shooting fish in a barrel’ comes to mind, and it’s not a reassuring thought.  

Dead, defeated, dying. Playing possum without really having to pretend.

Sweat is beading on his brow, icy and prickling, and his heartbeat is slow. Much, much too slow. They won’t last much longer.  

The soft click of the bolt as it is unlatched draws his attention, and the door swings open, sweeping through half the room to land on the side wall. And there he is, standing, casual in the doorway, and of course he’s back. Back to play another sadistic, twisted, private ‘party’ game. Because he won’t leave them here, alone, to die in the squalor and filth of their own breaking bodies. Because he’s having too much fun. He remembers the callous way he’d tossed them in here, the casual way he swung the bat, the happy, breathless light in his eyes as he brought his legs and his arms down, and down, and down. And he remembers the way he had felt Robin’s eyes on him, boring into the back of his head, eyes wide and fearful and angry and watching. At some point, Wally’s sure he passed out. Passed out far before he even got started on his friend.

He’s here to twist their bones and push and push and push to see what it takes to make them break. And Wally almost snarls, low and feral in his throat, but the ripping and bleeding makes it unfeasible. He’s going to have a long wait then – he can crush them and torture them and kill them, but it is near impossible to break them. And he thinks he can stand up to it (metaphorically of course), endure and hope and wait for them to come. For them to arrive and save them.  But then, their captor, their torturer, their host, turns around and beckons behind him.  Invites. Welcomes. And Wally realizes he was wrong. He is much more fragile than he realized.

She saunters into the room, boots whisper soft on the ground, relaxed and confident and so at home. Her hip cocked, hair swinging elegantly behind her, she looks down at them and he sees nothing. Artemis is gone, wiped clean with that expression of casual amusement. And her lips quirk upwards in that smirk that is so, unquestionably hers, and she spits on those days of friendship and trust and happiness together with one, short, breathy sentence. “This probably goes without saying, but I’m off the team.”

And he wants to yell and scream and screw up his face in anguish and terror and anger and so much goddamn disappointment. But he can’t be vocal – not anymore – so he does the only other thing he can think of. The only other thing that could possibly elicit a response. He pretends that it doesn’t bother him. That it doesn’t matter, that he couldn’t care less that she defected, that she burned their hope and their reliance and their belief in her to the ground with nothing more than a careless quirk of the lips. He tries to convey his apathy, his acceptance, his conviction that he knew what she was like, he had anticipated it. And his anger burns inside him, so bright and deep and disbelieving that he thinks it will kill him before they do – consume him from the inside out until nothing is left but the charred, smouldering remains of idealism and hope.

“Go ahead, baby girl. Show them how it’s done.” The voice is low and amused and her expression never changes. Light, smiling, strange. And she steps casually over to him, her eyes empty and suddenly so, so black. Never changes, even when the sole of a heavy combat boot crushes what’s left of his knee. Even when he’s too tired and defeated to scream. The blood gushes from him, increasing in flow from the jolt caused by the blow, adding to the litres of contaminated, spilt, dirty, blood pooling on the floor. They’re swimming now – floating face down in a pool of red; drowning. And she’s going to let them.

Deep, guttural laughter then, from the man in the damn hockey mask, stained dark brown from dried blood. He moves over to the acrobat, lying prone and probably unconscious on the floor mere inches away, and lifts his boot to mirror his lovely, brutal daughter. Wally wants to spit on him as he passes, but pain is clouding his vision and the effort it would take would likely just rip his guts apart. He’s surprised then, when he hears the low grunt of pain – impossibly deep and masculine. Robin’s never sounded like that, and he can’t understand, doesn’t know what it means, until the dirty blond head comes crashing to the floor next to his, blood seeping from somewhere just above the straps of his mask.

He’s down, with just one well-placed … something. And his heart swells with hope and he realizes she’s a much better actor than he ever gave her credit for. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” And he doesn’t sound surprised, just angry, just terrifyingly vengeful at the very idea that she would have the gall to turn this back on him. A heavy boot, crushing his face, cutting off his airways, before he can even move, so swift and fast and terrible that for a moment, even Wally isn’t sure he sees it coming. His breathing stops and she leaves it there, waits for a good six minutes with her fingers lightly ghosting over his wrist, checking his pulse. “Sorry, daddy.” And her tone is light and soft and just so easy as she carefully rips off his mask. “I was never very good at following orders.”

She turns to Wally then, turns to her teammates, never letting her back face the heavy man on the floor with his nose bleeding, likely broken. “You look like shit.” And he almost laughs, he really does, but the beginnings of one die in his throat and he just quirks his lips instead and says, croaky and soft and terribly, terribly weak, “You’re late.”

She bends down, taking a small syringe from a side pocket on her quiver, uncapping the needle and tapping it, pushing a small amount of fluid out of the tip. “This might sting a little.” And one eyebrow lifts up in jocular amusement, because really, it can’t feel like more than a bite compared to what’s going on with the rest of him. Her lips quirk, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, still, and he realizes that the absence of expression deadens them, makes the grey turn to stony concrete.

She turns to Robin first, injects him, and he can hear the spasm of his muscles, the way his breath hitches and contracts and suddenly goes quiet, and his heart nearly stops altogether. But he trusts her. She came to save them, she took down her own damn father, she wants them to be alright. Never mind how Sportsmaster got his grubby little gloves on her. Never mind that she is so damn prepared for this. He trusts her.

She bends down to give him the needle too, and as soon as she pushes on the plunger, he can see a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. “Art … ” And the sound is so weak he’s afraid she won’t hear, won’t be able to understand, but she swivels around and stabs the tip of an arrow from her quiver straight through his reaching hand. Blood adds to the pool in the floor, his and Robin’s and now Sportsmaster’s, and he laughs. “So I have taught you something after all. But not enough.”

He’s rolling over, about to get up, to stand, and she can’t afford to let that happen. No more stupid games – she’s done playing. Her foot comes up again, and she kicks him when his face whips back around, with the satisfying Crack! of his nose. And he sees the way she angles upwards, ferocious and contained, knows her well enough to realize it’s deliberate, that she’s trying to shove the bone fragment into his brain. That she wants to kill him.

“Artemis,” Wally starts, and it’s weak and desperate and so, so helpless. The sound grates on her, pierces her skin, but she won’t turn around, won’t acknowledge him. Can’t afford to.  “Artemis, don’t.”

And Sportsmaster is on the ground again, backed against a wall, half-dead and skull partially pierced. Wally’s frightened now, of where she’s going. Can see her, barely, hazy and confused from the medication. “Artemis. You’re better than this. I know you are.” His voice is less than a whisper, carried solely with force of will and fear and confusion.

But her arrows are nocked and ready, and she releases without hesitation, without fear, without remorse, without regret. Two arrows at once, one straight through the heart, the other through the skull. She never misses. “But I’m not, Wally.” And the sound is so low and sad and disappointed and quiet, that he wonders if it’s just a dream as he slips from consciousness. 

Empty Arguments (Preview)

Pairing: Wally/Artemis

Rating: T+ (for violence and character death)

Prompt: Even if you prove me wrong, I will never agree with you.

Angst/Romance

The soft click of the door as it opened made him open his eyes. In an industrial holding room devoid of anything but floor and walls and ceiling, the door took up nearly half the wall as it swung open on silently gliding edges. And there he was, back to play another stupid game, to twist their bones and push and push and push to see what it took to make them break. He didn’t stir. Still, defeated, dying. Playing possum without really having to pretend.

And then he saw her. Standing just behind him, half-shrouded in shadow, quiet and deadly and intense. Her eyes were burning with so much emotion that he thought she would have been able to light up the room even if the light blew out. And she was here. She could save them! And despite the intense pain he knew it would cause him, his heart swelled with imminent relief and happiness. But then, the man had stepped aside and beckoned to her. Invited her into the room. Welcomed her.

And his world was finally shattered.

She sauntered into the room, boots whisper light on the ground, relaxed and confident and so thoroughly at home. Her hip cocked, hair swinging elegantly behind her, she had looked down at them and he had seen nothing. Artemis was gone, wiped clean with that expression of casual amusement. And her lips had quirked upwards in that smirk that was so, unquestionably, hers and she’d spit on their friendship and trust and happiness with, “This probably goes without saying, but I’m off the team.”

His face twisted in such abject anguish and fury and he didn’t want her to see how much it hurt, but it hurt so Goddamn much, in so many different ways, that he couldn’t control it. Couldn’t stop it, even when the blood gushed from his ear and added to the litres of contaminated, dirty, spoilt blood pooling in the floor. They were swimming now – floating face-down in the pool of red; drowning. And she was going to let them.

Her smirk didn’t lift from her face even when the heavy, weighted boot broke his knee, and he was so defeated, so hopelessly finished, that he couldn’t scream.

Better - One Sentence Fic. (Kaldur/Bette)

He thinks of the way her hair moves in gentle waves as she walks, and it reminds him of the sand lying beneath shallower water – curled and impressed with the pattern of the ocean, a reminder of both its gentle nature and powerful force.

So does anyone else ship them? Because I totally ship them. Is there a ship name?  Because I suck at coming up with ship names. Better? Bettur? LiquidFlame? Aquaflame? Aquafire? BirdLad?