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rusty_kink2018-06-02 12:37 pm
gertrude_robinson) wrote in rusty_kink2018-06-02 12:37 pm
Prompt Post: The Magnus Archives #1
Rules
1. All comments to the meme must be anonymous. Linking to fills on AO3/Tumblr/website of your choice is allowed, but comments here must still be posted anon.
2. Concrit is welcome if the author requests it, but character bashing, kink shaming, and hijacking threads by derailing prompts with contrary comments or asking for additions to the prompt are not allowed.
3. Warning for spoilers and subjects such as non-con, incest, underage, character death and worms is highly recommended, but not mandatory.
4. Crossover prompts between Rusty Quill Gaming and The Magnus Archives may be posted to both posts.
5. Please link all fills to the fill post.
6. Don't be an asshole. Mods reserve the right to freeze, screen or delete at their discretion.
7. While it should go without saying (kink meme and all) please be advised that much of the content here may not be appropriate for individuals under 18.
8. Update: All prompts can be filled by more than one person. Two cakes (or three, or four) are always appreciated.
While spoiler warnings are not required, if you would like to spoiler cut anything, you can use the following code:
Prompting Guidelines
1. The prompt should begin with "Prompt:"
2. The fill should begin with "Fill:". Otherwise there should be no change to the title.
2. Include the names of the character(s) or pairing(s) in the title, followed by the kink or trope if applicable. Pairings should be formatted A/B(/C/D).
3. If you would like to provide warnings, please put them in the first line of the comment to prevent the titles from getting too long.
And example title: Prompt: Jon/Plant monster, sex pollen
Links
Ask a Mod
Fills Post
Chat and Off-Topic Discussion
AO3 Collection
1. All comments to the meme must be anonymous. Linking to fills on AO3/Tumblr/website of your choice is allowed, but comments here must still be posted anon.
2. Concrit is welcome if the author requests it, but character bashing, kink shaming, and hijacking threads by derailing prompts with contrary comments or asking for additions to the prompt are not allowed.
3. Warning for spoilers and subjects such as non-con, incest, underage, character death and worms is highly recommended, but not mandatory.
4. Crossover prompts between Rusty Quill Gaming and The Magnus Archives may be posted to both posts.
5. Please link all fills to the fill post.
6. Don't be an asshole. Mods reserve the right to freeze, screen or delete at their discretion.
7. While it should go without saying (kink meme and all) please be advised that much of the content here may not be appropriate for individuals under 18.
8. Update: All prompts can be filled by more than one person. Two cakes (or three, or four) are always appreciated.
While spoiler warnings are not required, if you would like to spoiler cut anything, you can use the following code:
<div tabindex="-1"><b>spoiler title</b><div>Some spoilery content.</div></div>
Prompting Guidelines
1. The prompt should begin with "Prompt:"
2. The fill should begin with "Fill:". Otherwise there should be no change to the title.
2. Include the names of the character(s) or pairing(s) in the title, followed by the kink or trope if applicable. Pairings should be formatted A/B(/C/D).
3. If you would like to provide warnings, please put them in the first line of the comment to prevent the titles from getting too long.
And example title: Prompt: Jon/Plant monster, sex pollen
Links
Ask a Mod
Fills Post
Chat and Off-Topic Discussion
AO3 Collection
Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (part 1)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-10 12:18 am (UTC)(link)[CLICK]
No one’s coming, then.
No.
What was it all for? This--all of this--what’s the point? Why even....? Why should I…?
[LONG PAUSE.]
I don’t know. I don’t know.
[CLICK]
Here is how the world works, now:
At times, it is almost entirely yours. You can flex through it as you did before, shaping domains and the lives in them. In these times, you keep every heart beating and every pulse flowing. When it is your world, no one dies.
Other times, the Eldest creeps in like night after day. Then, the world is as it was before, static and unresponsive to your will. When it is the End’s world, people die—and others escape.
The Eldest’s reign is merciless to these survivors. You watch them die of hunger, thirst, or exposure. A few make it to a blind spot and blink out of your vision so their fates are unknown to you. Most simply survive just long enough for you to take control again, and once again they are mired in their nightmares, undying.
It is a world of phases now, like the cycle of seasons or the split between night and day.
You watch. You think.
Here is how the world works, now:
Even when it is your world, there are places you cannot see or touch.
On one end of the world the blinding void where you know the Eldest’s creature sits, the one that originally brought death into your world. It sits unmoving, unspeaking—until you start to hear its words.
(THE MOMENT IS ALWAYS)
When it speaks, you burn. The world starts to shift and the season of the Eldest comes upon you. This is when people start to die and others start to escape.
The End’s creature does not need to move when it speaks. Instead the world moves around it, the living things nearby drawn to it like planets and stars pulled into a black hole. Sometimes, you see them enter the void, the blindspot around the End’s creature.
You do not see them leave.
Here is how the world works, now:
Even when the world returns to as it was, there are places that the End cannot touch. Not yet. Your most sacred sanctuaries where nothing is permitted to die.
On this other end of the world, as far from the End’s creature as you can draw him--Martin.
You arrange him as comfortably as possible, given what you know of what he used to find comfortable. For a long time, you keep him encased underground where none can touch him. After an uncountable amount of time of keeping him there, unmoving, you decide to raise him up. Tentatively, you open the earth up and bring him out under your sky. There is no sun there, no blue expanse: only eye after eye staring down.
Martin missed the sky, once.
You watch him with a thousand eyes. You watch him through the sky, through the earth. You watch him through the very tendrils that wind through the veins in his arm and his chest, that force his heart to pump and his blood to flow.
You scan for any reaction to this change. There is none.
You surround Martin’s resting place with the tapes.
“I love you,” you have the tapes play for the 3,567th time. Then, although it doesn’t quite fit: “Let’s go home.”
Martin stirs for none of it.
[CLICK]
Alright. List of reasons to not die. First--
[PAUSE]
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Part of me wants to start this with... “Statement of Jonathan Sims, addressed to his future self, regarding reasons to not kill yourself.” Ha. Old habits die hard, I suppose.
I don’t want to live, most days. There is so much work that has to go into living. Into slowing the memory loss and mitigating the seizures. Medication. Exercise. Therapy.
I keep thinking, what’s the point? Why put in all this work to slow down the inevitable? Why—why should I get… all of this care, all of these resources? Why should I bother to fight for my life, when it seems like I-I’ll die alone, no matter what? I don’t deserve all this, a-and I don’t even, I don’t even want to--
(STRAINED BREATHING)
Goddamn it. Stupid. Just more wallowing again. Dammit. I-I-
[CLICK]
---
[CLICK]
First: I need to pass on the knowledge I have, while I still have it.
There are people here that Georgie and Melanie rescued. They’re recovering and talking about forming their own search and rescue team to go back. I still have a lot of knowledge about the powers, the apocalypse, and how that landscape works. So, it stands to reason that I should try to record what I can of that knowledge before I forget it all.
I can’t—I can’t guarantee that what I know can help anyone. But as long as there is a chance, I have to try. My main life project, from here on out, is going to be cataloguing everything I know for anyone who comes after me that might be able to use that knowledge.
Second: as long as I am alive, good things can still happen.
Even the smaller good things are worth it. Today I had a chat with… A-aaron, I think? A man that Georgie and Melanie rescued, who recovered from her… power. It was… it was good. Even the poem. One of the nurses today told me she believed me. Believed all of us. It—I wasn’t expecting that, but it was heartening to hear.
And... Basira visited. She’s… she called me a friend. (TEARFUL) I actually didn’t expect that. It’s, there’s so much… but I’m glad.
Even little things like this, they’re… they’re worth it.
Third: I still believe Martin can make it.
I know what Melanie said. I know it’s unlikely. I’m not going to—I’m not going to let myself have an inflated idea of what his odds are. But—
Georgie has come back from it once. The others here suffered the same condition, and now they’re getting better. Recovery can happen. Rescue can happen. Blind spots can happen. They have all happened before. So logically, there is a chance.
It wouldn’t even take a miracle. Just enough time, and the right stroke of luck.
I’m putting this all on tape, so that it won’t matter if I forget. I’m going to label it so I can return to this when I am less lucid. When I have trouble remembering why I’m still here.
It’s worth it. I choose to go on.
[CLICK]
Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (final)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-10 12:32 am (UTC)(link)Martin mentioned hyacinths in approximately 14% of all his poems. Hyacinth-hued sorrow he’d called the Archivist-shaped ache in his chest a few years ago. In lines of unfinished poetry filling the notebook you’d given him, he’d invoked the flower as a symbol of the world he’d lost.
To see those clustered starbursts bloom again—
Martin had not thought he would see them again, when he wrote that line.
Your rain reaches the bulbs, but does not nourish them. You shift nourishment into the soil and glare out your brightest lights on the soil, but it is not the light they need to grow.
You watch.
Humans say they “grow” flowers. This is inaccurate.
You can grow flowers in your world, though. You manifest them like limbs from the world that still acts as your body. In this way, you grow hyacinths around Martin’s resting place. You take their shape from the memory of a funeral, and their brilliant hue from the dream of a lost childhood home.
They are monstrously beautiful, brighter than anything from the old world could have been. They are a nightmare of flowers, stirring aching sorrow in any who might look upon them. Such it is with all things you grow.
Martin’s eyes open from time to time. Your flower gifts come into his vision, dead and glassy as it is. He does not stir.
When it is the Eldest’s world, you peek into it and watch things begin to sprout. Tiny green things that humans do not fear to look upon. Little growths that die almost as quickly as they come alive.
You watch. You think.
You decide to experiment.
When it is your world, again, you find that you can pull back. It is a struggle, and it pains you in the way all things do that go against your nature. Still, you withdraw enough to leave a small plot of land untouched, so the true sun can shine upon it.
You plant the hyacinth bulbs there. You nourish the soil as best you can, and then you pull back and leave the tiny plot of land in the true sun, where you can only watch.
Humans say they grow flowers. This is inaccurate. This is not a process of growing, of action that one can do or control. It is a process of allowing. Of stepping back and letting living things grow themselves.
You stay back. You watch.
The next time it is the Eldest’s cycle, you realize the areas that are entirely yours have shrunk. And then after that, when the world is yours again, the places you cannot touch are wider.
Hope is a horrific thing.
It forces its way in and digs into every feeling part of you. It makes you feel the pain of Martin’s untethering again and again, every moment as fresh as the first moment you saw him fall. It forces you to scan again and again for any twitch, any sigh, any motion or sign that he could possibly return to himself. It forces you to feel the hurt of every moment where he does not.
You have beheld the pains of hope before. You loved the pains of hope when you saw it in Martin. It is another thing to experience it in this way.
But if it’s for Martin, you cannot hate this feeling either. And so you hope, and you hope, and you hope.
Your territory continues to shrink. Your world continues to atrophy, responding less and less to your will even when the Eldest does not reign.
The hyacinths are growing.
When you notice the shadow walking through your world again, you hiss give your most hideous, terrifying hiss. You hiss through the air and the ground and every tree or shrub around her.
“Fuck you too,” she snarls at you, when she hears it and reccognizes it. “Piss off.”
You throw something at her. It misses.
The shadow continues to walk through your world, regardless of your wishes. You throw up barriers around Martin to ensure she cannot stumble across him, and then monitor her as best you can. You can scarcely do so. She continues to blink in and out, sometimes walking, sometimes traversing the landscape in a fixed up car with others--and then, she slips out of your view.
You find her again at the edge of the blindspot where the End’s creature lies. The one people go in, and do not return.
She enters.
[CLICK]
[RECORDING BEGINS IN THE MIDDLE OF MELANIE UNZIPPING A BAG.]
Right right right right. Georgie, I’m going to--
[FAINT RUMBLING.]
[STUFFING NOISE]
Ah--there we are! (DEEP BREATH) Can’t knock me flat with spooky death words if your mouth is full. You can just chew through that pastry while I talk. Hopefully that will remind you of… anything.
[NOTHING]
(DEEP BREATH) Okay, in case you can hear… I did promise to leave, but I didn’t say anything about coming back. So.
I know you said that you can’t come back from this a second time. I know you said that you can’t go to the other world now, or that you would--that you would only end up hurting people there. I know you were always saying we had to cut our losses. I tried but I…
I can’t. I can’t!
I can’t live like that, Georgie! I can’t accept a life that’s just losing one thing after another, one person after another, again and again. It’s not cutting losses anymore. It’s cutting off pieces of myself.
So, here I am. You pulled through once, right? Maybe you can again. Even if you can’t come back to the happier world, maybe we can still figure something out. Something better than this.
If I’m wrong, if you end up mindlessly smiting me right here while I hold you, I think that’s a good way to die. Okay?
[PAUSE]
[ANOTHER RUMBLE. THEN, A BREATH.]
[CHEWING NOISES.]
[CLICK.]
[CLICK.]
I know this is my room. I know it. But I can’t recognize half of the things here.
There are… four used calendars on the wall, all marked up. On the desk… I think these are medical journals? They’re (PAGES FLIPPING) mostly about various neurodegenerative diseases, and how to slow the process. I… there are notes in them, and highlighted portions everywhere.
There is a whole shelf of… notebooks? (SHUFFLING) It says “Resources for navigating things when you can’t remember.” That’s… helpful I guess. (DESPAIR) Efficient.
Is this…? It’s not going to get any better is it?
[CLICK.]
[CLICK.]
Someone visited today. Basira. She… thanked me for the guides. For the notes I had meticulously drawn up. On the apocalypse, on artifacts, on eldritch horrors.
I… I don’t remember writing notes? Or giving them to anyone?
(PAUSE)
It should feel good. Instead I feel panicked. I--the thought that there was work I was doing, important work, it’s… it makes me think I should get back to that? Keep writing records.
This (PAGES FLIPPING) I’ve been sitting at this notebook for an hour now. Waiting to remember something worthwhile. Something that could help. Something that will make me useful again.
But I can’t. I can’t.
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
There is a note, here.
There are a lot of notes here. But this is--I haven’t found an explanation for it, in other notes or in the tapes. It’s just--
(CRINKLE) “Martin says it’s not your fault.”
I… I don’t… remember… (ROUGHLY) I don’t remember you, Martin.
I know you were so, so important. There is a--an engulfing sadness when I say your name. Martin. I remember you were afraid of me. I remember that fear the way I imagine a blinded man might still remember colors. Martin.
I think I failed you.
Your name is in so many notes, and in so many tapes. But I didn’t have the foresight to write down anything about you. What did you look like? Was your voice high, or low? What did we do together? What were you to me?
It’s all gone. All gone. But--
“Martin says it’s not your fault.”
I see this every day, and I know that you cared about me. That someone did. Enough to want to excuse all my mistakes.
I… the “reasons to keep going” tape says that you can still make it. I… it’s hard to grasp that now. What that hope felt like. I also said “good things can still happen” and that… also is hard. But even so, every morning I see this and I remember that someone cared… that’s one more good thing.
Even if precious few good things happen, now… it’s enough. It’s worth it.
[CLICK]
Long after the shadow has gone, the hyacinths bloom.
You bring them to Martin through shifting of the earth, careful so as not to crush them. Your hold on the earth is so feeble after this, and the movements so slow. Still, you bring it, even if each new inch you carry it seems to drain your will out of the landscape.
When you arrive, you hold the flowers by Martin’s resting place and you bring down the gentle rain, because he loved it once.
Martin’s eyes open at the feeling. Still glassy, with no thoughts behind them.
You babble at him in your own voice a moment, all soothing nothings. You have a question. You rewind the tapes and search for the right words through them.
“If I had been--better,” the tapes screech as you search through them, “If I had been--something kinder--gentle--would you not--have destroyed--yourself?”
Martin does not stir.
You let out another noise. The world becomes numb, now. Your vision starts to blue, and even the tendrils you have in Martin’s veins and heart to keep him alive slow.
You lay the flowers on his chest: the first thing you have given him untouched by fear or pain.
Martin shivers, and blinks.
You freeze. You open a dozen new, trembling eyes around him, watching. Your anticipation is an earthquake, rumbling through the ground as you watch.
Martin feels. He feels acutely the tendrils around him running into his veins, as though he is only now realizing they were there. He feels the way you curl around him, how his resting place trembles with your wretched anticipation. He feels the rain falling upon his face, and the gentle brush of hyacinth petals on his collarbones.
He remembers that he loved the rain, once. He knows, suddenly, that it was put here for him, because he loved it.
At least you can’t hurt me, now.
A thought. A single, clear thought. You let out a cry of joy, and curl tendrils weakly close to him. Eye after eye of yours closes in the sky.
Martin’s heart slows. You whimper and try to pump as fast as before, but your tendrils weaken by the second. You fade by the minute, and Martin with you.
Martin’s mouth opens, but all he can do is let out a death-like rattle. He grips the tendrils running into his veins with all the strength his atrophied hands allow. He gnashes his teeth for a moment, and tears pour down his face. Eyes close, and close, and close, but you turn every last one you have on him.
Martin will be the last thing you look upon.
He starts as though to get up. Unable to, he instead looks at the sky, where your giant eye no longer burns him. You look back down at him.
And finally, long after it has ceased to truly matter, Martin realizes he is loved.
Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (final)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-10 04:44 am (UTC)(link)Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (final)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-10 09:52 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (final)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-10 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)And, in the end, The Eye has exactly what it wanted in a glorious Pyrrhic victory. Congratulations on the end of this tumultuous journey.
Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (final)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-10 10:02 pm (UTC)(link)Pyrrhic victory for the Eye is right! It got exactly what it wanted in a way that /hurts/ it.
Thank you so much for commenting!
Re: Apple of Your Eye 15/15 (final)
(Anonymous) 2021-04-15 04:43 am (UTC)(link)WOOHOO final chapter! This has been such a pleasure to read and follow!
Jon’s story is heartbreaking, but so good—I love that he’s finally gotten to take back little pieces of himself, that his knowledge is being used to help and not harm, and that the tapes are literally helping him remember/be remembered. The fact that it never occurred to him that he would have to write down details of Martin destroyed me.
I love how Melanie and Georgie’s story wraps up, especially after reading that side fic—Melanie going back for her, after everything. [CHEWING NOISES], aaaahh. (You’ve singlehandedly made me care about them as characters, and then turned around and made me sad about them.)
Ahhh Martin and the Eye though—the tragedy of the Eye learning too late to understand what it was like to *experience* hope and pain, and to relinquish control in order to allow things to grow… And *MARTIN*. “at least you can’t hurt me now”, when for him pain and love are so entwined… I’m dying, this fic has murdered me.
Thank you so much for writing it!