If He Was Serious, Then He Would Not Be Carlos!

roseannevip

2 years ago

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roseannevip

2 years ago

50 coups de cœur !

A brilliant explanation of consent for anyone who STILL doesn’t get it.

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roseannevip

1 year ago

I love it!

Shocking

Fandom: Daughter of the Deep Rating: Teen Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Friendship Characters: Gemini Twain, Nelinha da Silva Harding-Pencroft made sure their Leyden guns were quick and painless. Land Institute, not so much. Whumptober day 4, shock. I had a lot of fun writing this. Still getting used to the characters for this fandom, but enjoying figuring them out, one fic at a time.

Land Institute didn’t give up.

They'd known, when they let Caleb South and the others leave on the Varuna, that it wouldn't be the last time LI came after them, but they hadn't had a choice. The other option had been to kill them all, and as Ana had said, Harding-Pencroft was better than that.

They were, and Gem hadn't been fond of the idea of killing them all, either, so he was glad that when faced with the choice, Ana had chosen to let them go instead.

That didn’t make the relentless pursuit any more enjoyable, though.

With the destruction of the Aronnax, LI had lost any ability to match the Nautilus in the seas. For all that she was old, and her back-up engine was run on coal of all things, she was also an absolute marvel of engineering that had the Cephalopods still in complete awe even months after first boarding her. Gem, Ana, and the rest of them were well aware that LI still had the plans for the Aronnax, and that one day LI would build a new version that likely wouldn’t succumb to Romeo so easily, but until the other submarine appeared, they were safe in the water.

On land, not so much.

The Nautilus could do many, many things that completely boggled Gem’s understanding of technology and had yet to be explained by their resident Cephalopods, but she could not magic supplies out of nowhere. Lincoln Base made up for most of the deficit, but sometimes, they had to make a run to occupied land in order to retrieve a few extra necessities that Nemo hadn’t developed alternatives for, likely because he’d never felt a need for them in his lifetime.

Land trips, when they happened, were always meticulously planned. Gem took point on the logistics, and always made sure most of the party were fully-armed Sharks, just in case LI made an appearance, but sometimes there were things on the shopping list that Sharks wouldn’t be able to identify.

Or more specifically, that Nelinha and her fellow Cephalopods didn’t trust them to identify.

Gem didn’t know if he and Nelinha would ever be friends. He had a lot of respect for the Brazilian girl, and a lot of remorse for his part in tarring her with the Scholarship Kid brush back at HP, and if she was open to the idea of friendship, he would gladly take it. So far, however, their relationship was one of mutual understanding – both of them had claim to Ana as a friend (although Gem knew, understood and accepted that the Indian girl would always pick Nelinha first, if she ever had to make a choice), and had reached a point of compromise that occasionally bordered on camaraderie.

He enjoyed their banter, when Nelinha wasn’t buried in the inner workings of the Nautilus, and he hoped that she did, too.

While essential, this particular supply trip didn’t need a huge party. There were only a few, select items on the shopping list, none of which Gem could identify, but all considered of vital and immediate importance by the Cephalopods, who had quickly persuaded Ana and their resident adult supervision (barring Luca, who had been one of said persuading Cephalopods) that the trip was worth the potential exposure to Land Institute. After much debate, and a few near-arguments before Ana stepped in, it had been decided that just Gem and Nelinha would be enough. Nelinha, for identification and acquisition of the parts, and Gem as the necessary gunslinging Shark on protection duty just in case.

There had been no sign of Land Institute in the area – Lee-Ann and the rest of the Dolphins, including their captain, had been thorough in their recon.

Gem dearly wanted to know where the Land Institute had been hiding, and how they’d evaded the Dolphins’ searching.

He and Nelinha were cornered, not far from the dock were the Nautilus waited, but with no clear passage back. In their way, weapons no doubt trained on the exact point they would be forced to emerge through, Gem had counted four people wearing the hostile emblem of LI.

Behind him, clutching her precious purchases with one hand while the other held her Leyden gun at the ready, Nelinha was muttering in Portuguese. Gem didn’t speak the language, but he suspected he didn’t want to know what she was saying.

He assessed his own arsenal, rather more extensive than Nelinha’s single Leyden gun, but not quite as much as he would’ve liked – even wearing the recognised Shark insignia, there were only so many weapons he could visibly carry in public before people started getting twitchy. He was limited to his SIG Sauers and their comforting weights on his hips, a single bandolier of flash-bang grenades hidden under a coat, and a Leyden gun. Nothing fatal – the SIG Sauers were loaded with rubber bullets as always – but enough to give Land Institute students a headache.

Unfortunately, they knew where he and Nelinha had been forced to shelter, and in order to get a lock on a target, Gem would have to step out and make a target of himself, first.

He fingered a flash-bang grenade, lifting it clear of the bandolier but keeping the pin firmly in place as he showed it to Nelinha. Cover your ears, he mouthed, also miming plugging his ears with his free hand. She knew what they did – there wasn’t a single piece of Nemo tech that she hadn’t given at least a cursory inspection of over the past few months – but Gem refused to take any chances.

He had to get her safely back to the Nautilus. Failure was not an option.

Her eyes focused on the grenade and she frowned, but obeyed, holstering her gun so that she had her hands free to plug her ears. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would have to be enough. Gem slipped wax into his own ears, giving them a moment to settle, before tugging out the pin with his teeth and lobbing it out towards where the LI were waiting.

The grenade sailed around the corner and he saw the edge of the flash a second later. The ground beneath his feet vibrated, suggesting the bang part of flash-bang had activated as it was supposed to, and he ran out of their small area of shelter, firing at the LI students.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Four rubber bullets, four dropped students. They wouldn’t be out for long, but it would be long enough to get back to the Nautilus.

Gem turned back and gestured for Nelinha to emerge, giving her sharp signals to stay low and move quickly, in case any of them had a particularly thick skull and wouldn’t stay down for long. She obeyed, and Gem had a brief moment to be thankful for the fact that their relationship had improved to the point where she would listen to him without complaint when they were in a combat situation. He scanned the downed LI students – none of them familiar, and from their ages likely freshmen – for signs of life as they started to move out cautiously, but none of them appeared to be unusually thick-skulled and showed no signs of stirring.

Neither he nor Nelinha needed any encouragement to be swift as they broke away from cover, though. Gem still had the wax in his ears, but there was no opportunity to take them out, and as long as all four hostiles stayed down-

Something stabbed him in the shoulder.

He flinched, almost dropping his gun, and spun around to see where his attacker w-

Agony.

Gem had been on the receiving end of a Leyden gun before. Dr Hewett’s demonstration had been all too brief in his memory, but he still recalled the feeling of his nerves tingling until they set on fire, before darkness had extinguished the flames and he’d woken up a few minutes later feeling absolutely fine.

HP’s Leyden guns were set to incapacitate with the least amount of pain.

LI had no such principles.

Gem felt rather than heard the scream that tore itself from his throat, muffled and tinny through the earplugs but vicious against his vocal cords. Stars exploded in his vision, linking themselves together with flashes of lightning static. The charge jetted all through his body, sending his muscles into uncontrollable spasms, and he faintly felt his knees crash into the ground, rapidly followed by his shoulders and then his head. His pistols slipped from his fingers as his body instinctively curled in on itself, desperately trying to get the pain to stop, but it wasn’t working, wasn’t easing, and the screams still echoed hollowly in his ears.

Then it stopped.

The lightshow behind closed eyelids faded away to nothing, and the hoarse screaming died shortly afterwards. His muscles still spasmed, but the lightning arcing through them had gone.

Suddenly, the darkness seemed very inviting as it lured him closer, a promise of oblivion and respite from the pain that still danced along all of his nerves.

A hand landed on his shoulder and he heard a whimper. Fingers pried at his ears and he tried to recoil away, but his body wasn’t responding. The world made a strange pop as the wax in his ears was plucked out.

“Spidey!”

Nelinha called him that more often than not, and Gem still hadn’t worked out if it was malicious or more banter. He knew most of the Spider-Man references muttered behind his back before LI had blown up their school had been the former.

“Gem, can you hear me?” Hands shook his shoulders roughly and he gasped as it made fresh little arcs of electricity run through his body. “Gem!”

She sounded worried. Gem took in a deep breath.

“I hear you,” he gasped, choking a little at the pain talking provoked.

“Good,” she replied, and the hands shifted until they were grabbing him by the lapels of his coat. “We need to get out of here before more show up. Can you stand?”

Gem’s legs were still twitching as the leftover electricity juddered through them and he doubted they’d take his weight without complaint. He also knew Nelinha was right and they needed to move.

Hauling himself to his feet was difficult; without Nelinha gripping onto him and all but dragging him upright, he wouldn’t have managed it. As it was, he was still a juddering, gasping mess of pain when she finally got him to his feet, one arm draped liberally across her shoulders.

Walking was even harder, his feet not wanting to even consider placing one in front of the other, but despite being shorter than him by a not inconsiderable margin, Nelinha was used to hard physical work lugging around heavy pieces of machinery, and to Gem’s relief it translated to being able to drag him along like a semi-sentient sack of potatoes.

“Sorry,” he rasped, as his feet tangled together and almost sent them both sprawling out onto the ground.

“Don’t be,” she replied shortly, staggering but keeping her balance and yanking Gem forwards some more. “This is Land Institute’s fault, and if you weren’t with me, I would never have got out of there.” He felt her muscles heave as she pulled his arm further around her shoulders, and dimly noticed that she had her Leyden gun unholstered again.

The lack of continuing hostile fire suddenly made a certain amount of sense.

Gem’s muscles did not recover from their near-constant spasms on the awkward trip back to the Nautilus’ dock, although his vision slowly faded back into focus, if with the addition of white sprites darting across the world.

They didn’t recover as Nelinha all but dragged him back on board their submarine, either, to the concerned chorus of their classmates, and Gem couldn’t protest the stretcher he was bundled onto, especially as his nerves took that moment to almost fully reignite and give an agonising encore of the original attack.

“What happened?” he heard Franklin demand of Nelinha, echoed by Ana across the tannoy system. The Cephalopod, perhaps predictably, launched into an explanation of how the Leyden-harpoon Gem hadn’t even seen before it hit him appeared to work, complete with estimates on voltage and other hair-raising numbers that made Gem feel lucky to still be alive, let alone conscious.

Semi-conscious, if he was being accurate.

The Orca prefect was clearly not impressed at LI’s new and increasingly aggressive weaponry, and Gem had to agree.

He was pretty sure that at some point between being loaded onto the stretcher and arriving in the Nautilus’ infirmary, he passed out. His eyes only drifted shut for what felt like a moment, but when they re-opened his muscles felt sore, as though they’d had a solid workout that had gone on far too long, but no longer spasmed uncontrollably, and there was a comforting haze of painkillers lurking at the edge of his awareness – accompanied by the blissful lack of pain.

More bizarre than the seemingly-sudden shift from pain to anaesthetic was the girl sat by his bed. Despite the similar colouring, it wasn’t the girl that Gem might have thought would drop by, Ana taking her role of captain seriously when it came to her crew – and also a good enough friend to worry about Gem.

Nelinha was tinkering with something in her hands, because no true Cephalopod sat still and did nothing when there was technology to play with, and the Nautilus would never run dry of interesting technology to play with, but that didn’t make her presence there, at Gem’s bedside, any more understandable.

“Nelinha?” he asked, pushing himself up on his elbows. His shoulder complained loudly, and a glance showed neat white bandaging around it. She jumped.

“Spidey!” She made a few more twists with the unidentifiable mass of metal and solder in her hands. “You know you’re not supposed to get hit with the pointy things with highly electric currents, yes?”

Gem winced at the reminder. “It wasn’t my intention,” he defended himself weakly. The girl huffed.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Don’t do it again.” Somehow, she got a piece of wire to materialise out of the little project in her hands, and looped it around itself. Gem still couldn’t tell what it was, or what it was supposed to turn into once the Cephalopod was done with it. Nelinha eyed her project critically before standing up. “That body armour isn’t going to build itself,” she commented, and Gem wondered what body armour? but he didn’t get a chance to ask before the girl was walking away, little gadget in hand, as though she’d simply been waiting for him to wake up before returning to her main project.

Nelinha waiting for him to wake up? That didn’t seem right, but Gem didn’t have another explanation, and a small flicker of hope made itself known, although he was careful not to let it run too rampant, in case he was wrong.

But maybe one day they could be friends, after all.

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roseannevip

1 year ago

Both my husband and my lover have the same number of votes!!!!!

Edit : Oh wait no, my lovers winning

53 notes View Post

roseannevip

2 years ago

This is so freaking true

Hello, love (seductive)

Hello, love (soft)