magic_fratboy

NOTE: Ziyah is zee_ali and is used with some permission and great love. Carbone is mindisthemagic and all mine. Takes place tonight just after this.

Escape is based on this.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

==========

He didn’t expect the next breath to come, but it did…and with it, the sun came out.

Shaking his head, he sucked down a ragged gulp of air and tried to get his vision to clear as his hand went to his chest, where the picks still hung. Like the cuffs, they burned his skin when he touched them. His nose stung with the noxious scent of fear, sweat, and now burned flesh. There was no great power source or triumphant surge of energy to save him. It was just him, Fear, Despair, and a pair of handcuffs.

His strength was still fading, the Darkness sapping him dry like a leech glutting itself on blood.

( ............. )

Muse: Tommy Karras
Fandom: Original Character
Words: 1,471

NOTE: Effie is effiecat and is used without permission, but copious heaping helpings of love. Channing is what_its_not and Kyle is inside_mydreams, both of whom belong to me so I can murderlize them at will. :P

“Seriously, how many innocent gummy bears had to sacrifice their lives for that thing?”

Effie just stuck her tongue out at Tommy, giggling as she dipped another piece of shredded red gummy bear in her glass of water and carefully applied it to the severed head of the little candy tableaux she was creating on the café table the group was sharing stageside during lunch.

“Come on, look at that! When did Norman Bates ever look so squishy and delicious?”

( “Did Norman Bates actually decapitate anyone?” )

He spits another piece of ice into the crimson-stained drain, mouth numb and still somehow burning with agony as he contemplates the sight of his own blood marring the sterile white of his kitchen sink, offset by the coffee-stained white of the tooth he lost in the earlier fight.

It’s wrong and it’s ghastly, but he’s not shocked by it. The piece of ice glitters like a diamond, catching the color of each stain as it slides and rattles almost cheerfully when it hits the surface and settles in to nestle in the little chrome sieve just above the pipe.

( It stings…but it’s beautiful... )

Muse: Tommy Karras
Fandom: Original Character
Words: 536

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”

( In one corner of the spacious warehouse, he watched a pair of teenage boys struggling with a zig-zag box, trying to reassemble the girl they had just divided neatly into three equal sections. In another, he blanched as a second pair clumsily finished sawing another female compatriot in half... )

Muse: Tommy Karras
Fandom: Original Character
Words: 735

You were laying on the carpet
Like you're satin in a coffin
You said, "Do you believe what you're saying?"
Yeah, right now, but not that often

NOTE: takes place February 3, 2009 at 8:30 PM. All muses referenced are present at the event with confirmation of their muns, and used with greatest of love. :P

He’d been here before…in the old days, when the escapes had no coffins and too much dirt. That was their favorite place to strike, when it was easiest to make him panic. Rookie mistakes, flaws surfacing that should never have existed, everything turned against him to make sure he couldn’t pull off the escape.

They’d been waiting for this day, he could see it now. In the blackness of his casket, he could see the lifetime of planning that went into the moment that could end his existence for good.

The cuffs were too cold. Ice cold, burning into his wrists and ankles. He knew the feel of that steel, that weight drawing on his energy…

The dirt had obliterated the light. He was in the ground and on his own.

( Someone had switched the cuffs with a pair forged by the Darkness. )

Muse: Tommy Karras
Fandom: Original Character
Words: 803

Speaking for myself, and not my past lives, I never had any real serious aspirations to be a family man. I mean, maybe because I never thought I’d find someone I wanted to have kids with. I love ‘em, and they love me, I just…

I wasn’t looking for a family, my family found me and now? I can’t imagine how I ever lived without ‘em.

It might be a reflection of how bad Houdini always wanted children, but I’ve felt strangely whole since my daughter was born. It’s like just knowing Zee was pregnant wasn’t enough, it’s real now. She’s in my arms whenever Zee isn’t trying to make me put her down for two seconds, warm and alive and so…present. She’s this little human being that’s in my life now, half of me and Zee put together in the most beautiful little package I’ve ever seen.

She’s a flesh and blood personification of what we feel for each other and what we’ve been through…a walking, talking example of what love can do. Well…she will be when she gets older, anyway. With the walking and talking.

I guess that’s the biggest appeal she holds for me, and yeah: I fully admit I’m obsessed with my baby girl. Have you seen her, or the woman that helped make her? She’s a little goddess, period. Long after me and Zee are gone (or at least me, anyway, being that I’m not an Immortal) she’ll be here, along with her kids and their kids.

May’s gonna make our love eternal. Least I hope so…this is bad. Already, I’m thinking about grandkids and at the same time? I’m thinking about killing the first guy that tries to touch my daughter.

Someone save me from fatherhood: I’m ass-over-teakettle crazy about my kid.

Muse: Tommy Karras
Fandom: Original Character
Words: 298

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

Tommy didn’t have a chance against the Bringer and he knew it. He knew it beyond the waves of energy crashing over him, black and noxious, forcing his heart to cave and his spirit to bend under the pressure of complete hopelessness.

He stood in a side alley, pinned to the wall by the hand of a Bringer of Despair. Fingers of ice wrapped tightly around his throat, freezing his skin and choking off his air as he was forced to stare into the noisome void of emptiness in its face. It was a living form with breath and function, but the shape had no meaning, the face no features, and in its empty, bland, and inconceivable eyes he saw the knowledge that it was nothing, that nothing was all there was.

And though it was hopeless, though he knew he would die, he still twisted in its grip. He bucked, he writhed, and he fought.

Right up until the moment that the hand fell away and fire filled his vision.

Collapsing to the ground, he coughed and hacked, looking up to see his father standing over the Bringer with a ball of fire in his palm, waiting for the creature to make a move.

“Tom Tom?”

“Fine.” He coughed. “Go!”

Gregory Karras nodded…and as Tommy watched, his father became another man.

He barely wrinkled his suit as he lobbed a fireball at the Bringer and went on the attack, throwing punches and ducking blows Tommy didn’t know he was even aware of. Knowing his father was Fraternity wasn’t the same as seeing him fight, and as he watched him resist the energy of the Bringer, saw him spit in the face of evil quite literally…Tommy realized that he’d been born to a true hero.

When the Bringer finally gave up and vanished from sight, Tommy was back on his feet again, and certain that he had a lot of work to do before he was even half the man his father was.

As Gregory walked over and helped Tommy straighten himself out, he felt a brush against his mind, thoughts that fused with his in a clumsy and awkward fashion…but in them, he felt his father’s pride and his love.

//The real hero is the man that can hold the line until the reinforcements come, bub. I got more years, but you got more heart. Don’t you ever forget that, okay?//

Grinning, Tommy reached out and embraced his father warmly. “I got it, Dad…thanks.”

Hugging him back for a moment, Gregory finally pulled away and grinned at his son. “Come on…I left your mother in the car when I felt the Bringer. Where’s your girl?”

“Zee? Left her in the casino.” Tommy replied. “Safest place, I figure…we been waiting on you and Mom, I have no idea how to get to the venue.”

“Well, let’s go collect your mother, then, and go find your girl.” Gregory laughed, draping an arm around his son’s shoulders as the two of them started heading for the main entrance to Caesars Palace. “When Caesars Magical Empire was open, it wasn’t easy to find, and it’s even harder to locate the entrance since it went underground.”

“I still don’t get it…didn’t they tear it up to make room for Celine Dion’s theater?”

“Hell no! They just hid the joint and made it Fraternity only. And believe you me, son, the performances have only gotten better for it. Your girlfriend is in for a night she’ll never forget…”

Muse: Tommy Karras
Fandom: Original Character
Words: 588