Cosmic_Retribution
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Summary
Leigh clenches her fists. And she can’t help it— she laughs.
A myriad of emotions pass over Lyle’s face in short succession: confusion, then hurt, then shame. And then something she doesn’t expect: anger. It only makes her laugh harder still, bent double in bitter mirth.
Finally she looks up with an unsettling grin, wiping the corner of her eye. “Oh, it makes you feel human, does it?” Leigh snickers. Lyle glowers down at her, small and defensive, a storm with no bark and no bite. And Leigh says, “come on now— we both know Sam is the only one of us who still gets to be human.”
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Or: two diametrically opposed views on what it means to be a monster come to a boiling point, and Sam is caught in the middle.
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Sam had gasped, then, like a drowning man suddenly coming up for air. He had twisted himself free, staggering, stumbling, unseeing, bracing himself on the back of the sofa and leaving thick red handprints in the upholstery. Leigh had been fumbling for the light, and when she found it on the seventh try Lyle had bit down hard on a scream that had threatened to claw its way from his throat as the overwhelming brilliance pierced through him. He felt overexposed.
She had slid down against the wall, wheezing out a hysterical sound that might have passed for a laugh in another life. Joel had folded himself up underneath the kitchen table like a frightened animal, curled in on himself a dozen times over. And Sam had staggered to the bathroom to wash the blood from his eyes.
And there, inside, after a pause that seemed to suck the oxygen from the whole of the apartment, Sam had started to scream.
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The ritual was a failure. Now there is only Sam, and the mirror, and Sam and the mirror, and the thing that isn't Sam anymore in the mirror staring back at him.
...And Lyle, who foolishly won't let go of him. Like he could gather up the remains of all that Sam ever was in hand after hand after hand.
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first love and remembrance by Cosmic_Retribution
Fandoms: 3rd Life | Last Life SMP Series
27 Jul 2023
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Summary
He’d already had half a mind to pack it up and head off to the desert, at that point, had come across it in his travels already and had the idea in his head that controlling the sand was his best bet at carving out a place for himself in this world. As the days passed and Grian stayed, Scar kept finding excuses to stay in his orbit, kept talking his way into more of Grian’s time. He savored every mischievous smile, oh, he hung off Grian’s every word. They just clicked, and for a while everything made sense.
Suddenly his daydreams of running off to the desert started leaving space for Grian’s small silhouette, without him meaning to.
Suddenly, the daydream wasn’t really so much about the desert as much as it was about a future where he got to keep Grian with him, despite the odds.
Maybe that should have been his first warning sign.
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On the morning he dies, Scar picks flowers.
Series
- Part 2 of never our blood on this sand again
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Summary
The Red King’s men erupt into stammering and chaos, and none of it matters. Grian sinks down beside the body. He doesn’t feel it. The blood rushing in his ears blocks out all the rest, numb with shock and wracked all at once with the nameless enormity of a grief he can’t bring himself to swallow. They were so close to making it out of this, he doesn’t understand, it— it wasn’t supposed to go like this. Martyn’s calling his name somewhere a thousand worlds away and it doesn’t matter, he can’t hear it anymore. He could almost laugh. It feels so unfair, but how was this ever not inevitable? All he can do is stare at the frozen half-smirk on Scar’s face and the blood dripping from a wound that shouldn’t have killed him and it isn’t real, this can’t be real. None of this is happening.
They were meant to see tomorrow. He’d been so certain. He can’t breathe.
His vision goes white, and he doesn’t feel anything anymore.
And… he opens his eyes, back in the desert.
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There's got to be a way out of this game that doesn't end in losing him.
(The world won't let Grian go until he finds it.)
Series
- Part 1 of never our blood on this sand again
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Summary
The Watchers had seemed so nice, is the thing. So… disarmingly hospitable.
When they’d set out for the ruins, they’d gone in search of some magical beasts reportedly plaguing the area, according to the flyer they’d taken. What they’d found instead was an empty city and a group of mages and scholars studying… something. They’d been cagey about what. Certainly not the history of the place— the Watchers arrived long after the fall of Dogwarts, content to live and work inside the city’s corpse with no special reverence for the grave it lay ruined in. They had no stake in its fall, or its future, or the preservation of its once-hallowed legacy— but its bones, certainly, served as protection enough for their studies.
The beasts were the only thing troubling the Watchers’ work, or so they’d said. Strange, then, that Grian and his party never once saw a trace of them.
How long after, until his friends realized Grian was gone? That they weren’t safe?
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Two decades ago, the city of Dogwarts met its demise. Today, a traveler meets a god wearing the mask of a merchant, looking for a miracle.
These two things are not as unconnected as they appear.
Series
- Part 1 of stained glass sunlight
Recent series
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never our blood on this sand again by Cosmic_Retribution
Fandom 3rd Life | Last Life SMP Series
27 Jul 2023
- Words:
- 8,905
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