Sitting in the library, listening to everyone, makes me want to learn Japanese and lose 100 pounds and move to Japan and never come to the US again. Just a thought, hearing it being spoken in the next cubicle over makes me just SO. JEALOUS. I could spend $1,000 dollars and take year one of Japanese, but my family would only look at me funny afterward like they looked at me funny after I took a year of German.

This just makes me upset.

Kim Lestrade

“Greg, you forgot your lunch,” John looked up from the papers he’d been looking at with Sherlock at the breathy, low voice. Lestrade, who had been standing across from them watching them work, started and turned around. His face was turning into a smile from what John could make out, and John followed the man’s eyes to the ma—woman?

“Kim! Thank you, I was in such a rush this morning and Sherl—“

Class

I burn out in creative writing classes really easily. There is just so much crap that we have to read that it is misery on my poor writing sensibilities (though my fanfiction tendencies probably would do the same to all the good writers I know) to endure weeks and weeks of it. But this term has been pretty good. I have two friends and a new acquaintance in this class and yeah. The four pieces we've had to read so far haven't been awful and we just got a fifth today. Well. No. Three of the four so far were decent, the last of which being actually sort of awesome. The first story we read was tripe.

Brothers of the Smithy

He flirted with her even before he’d known about her purposeful omission of gender. Gimli thought back on it the day after their little ones—because Boromir and Gimli were often in charge of the Hobbits’ well-being—had stumbled across her bathing. Boromir had been so careful and sweet—and she realized now, no trace of relief had flooded his eyes. She was used to the race of Men and their fear of becoming intimate with a woman who wasn’t barefaced, and she was also used to the relief which would flood a man’s eyes when discovering that their Dwarf comrade was a woman. They were normal in their own eyes, their affections directed at a woman. 

Jack "Halloween" Stardust

 The Stardust household had fractured that day. The day that Ziggy had made his prediction was the same day that Science had discovered the terrible truth--that Earth was dying. Ziggy's words had been the first of the day, and there was no way that anyone could have known beforehand. A few days later Science had gone to Government, all pale old men with sallow sinking faces, and the news had broken around the world. Jack, and of course Ziggy and Mother and Father, watched in awful terror as the newsmen on ever channel repeated the Government issued news.

Earth was really dying.

Jack and Ziggy were equally broken by the news, though in different ways. Jack chose to hone his skills of survival, leaving home and living from place to place on what he could find. He made up the new words that they would all need soon--because Earth would die first quickly, for five years, and then slowly waste away for decades or centuries. Not many people read the rest of the news Science had brought to the world--that it wouldn't end in a flash of light and thunder, the world would instead end in darkness and a whimper.

Ziggy chose to give the people hope, to tell them to be happy while they could be happy--and to live while they were alive. Each of the brothers saw how people would react to the news, and went their separate ways. Jack of course kept up with what his brother was doing. Ziggy was his little brother, how could he not? His heart broke as his brother, with such a beautiful voice and hands, lost himself. It was almost unconscious, but he made his way closer to where his brother was most often--that way when whatever happened to him, he would be there for him.

They'd left him for dead. The alleyway smelled of cheap beer and blood. Jack knelt and picked up his brother, so tiny with his hair pasted to his head, his lips swollen and his face bloodied. And then there were his hands. His brother's beautiful long-fingered hands, the fingertips habitually covered in calluses from his guitar-strumming ways. Those hands were crushed, bleeding and bent unnaturally. Five fingers were broken, one was missing a nail, and his hands shook still from the memories of trying to defend himself. Jack kissed each of Ziggy's eight fingers and each of his thumbs, and then he kissed his brother's forehead.

Jack walked out of that alley with Ziggy Stardust in his arms. Weird and Gilly were nowhere to be seen, but that didn't matter. They would soon meet their ends for the disappearance of Ziggy--their hands had the savior's blood on them, and his fans would see it no matter how much the two men washed it off.

Only a week later, the Earth shook--the convulsions of a dying planet. Jack nursed his brother back to health, but had trouble convincing Ziggy that what he had done wasn't wrong. Ziggy blamed himself.

Halloween Jack was born when some of Ziggy's followers found them, still needing Ziggy's voice to comfort them. They took his crooked hands--there was only so much Jack had been able to do--and kissed them in the way Jack himself had kissed them only months ago. They were wonderful--two men and a pregnant teenager, and they were wonderful because their faces brought Ziggy to sing once more in his reedy soprano. It was through their faith in Ziggy that Jack realized he had to write these times down--he had to pass on the knowledge of the end of the world, for any who might survive this generation.

He wasn't any good at writing songs, so he turned to Ziggy, and his three believers for help. So it was curled up on the tops of buildings or in small caves of rubble that he wrote the Future Legend, a tale of people who survived no matter what happened. He planned on singing it to the girl's child when it came--it wouldn't do for the child to realize only a generation had passed since the Earth began to die, it was better she thought the world had always been this way in one form or another.

Jack Stardust after that went by Halloween Jack, for the legends he spoke of so pointedly that the people he encountered soon forgot the world they'd lived in before. Instead they chose to remember the world which he sang of, and sat at the feet of the girl and her baby as he told them of the Sweet Things--the women who had to be cared for and fed and didn't it seem so easy to help them out? Didn't they seem so young, and wasn't that just the way of it these days?

Halloween Jack traveled from town to town, almost always found on the highest building he could find, with a broken-handed quiet red-head who murmured to visitors that they were wonderful, a broken-voice coming from a brokenly-smiling mouth. Wrapped around him was a man with only eyes for him, while sitting between the redhead and Halloween Jack was a young family with a little baby named Sweet Grace.

The people eventually forgot Ziggy Stardust, whose only lasting message was that they were wonderful--but after a while that got forgotten too. The people, Jack knew, would eventually forget the people he traveled with, and would eventually forget even him. But he could help them for now, in his own way. Whenever he coaxed someone away from the idea of jumping or giving themselves over to the gangs of Dogs--the Diamonds being particularly vicious to their prey--in hopes of getting food, Ziggy would wake from his daze for a moment. His younger brother's crooked smile would flicker on in that moment, and Jack knew he was doing right.

The Atomic Bomb

The end of the world will be at eight fifteen in the morning, on August sixth. That’s the long and short of it. The air won’t taste differently, the sky will be blue—or overcast, or cloud-strewn, the weather will be no different than ever before. Alarm clocks will go off, children will go to school early and play in the gardens. Doctors will be administering their doctoring, a child weak with fever—skin smelling strongly of sweat, bedding damp around them—or a nurse sterilizing knives one by one by one by one. Her hat is at a cocky, flirty angle because she was alone when she put it on in front of her mother’s mirror. Women will sit by their husbands, watching them read the newspaper as their children play at their side. Paddy cake, paddy cake, baker’s rye. The newspaper is folded over itself, but still thin because he has been giving her the sections he’s finished with. Bank tellers will just be counting the money out for the day and brewing the complimentary stale, weak coffee and setting out the stale, dried out cookies. Napkins, cream, one kind of sugar substitute, red plastic stir-sticks. Outside on the street, a bus driver will be stopped briefly—looking left to safely make a right turn.

And then the world will end. 

Immediately and completely, all humanity will go out of the world. A bright, Godly light will come over the hill. So bright that turned away with your eyes shut, it comes through the back of your head and you can still see it. You see God. You see God and He is terrible. The light is hot, so hot that the sweat that jumps to your skin will evaporate immediately. Your flesh will start to burn, and with that you finally turn to meet your Unmaker. This is not a creator God, because no one ever sees their Creator when they die. 

They see their destroyer, a God of Death. You realize slowly as the cloud goes up that the world has ended. Not just for you, you realize as that cloud goes up faster than your eyes can track as you get used to the heat. This is the end of all things. No person will ever live in the innocence of a drawn-out death, no one will go to sleep in one of the bunkers knowing they may die in a bomb-blast. As a black, roiling cloud follows that bright, beautiful light, and before it buildings, trees, cars, and people explode as they fall. 

You don’t close your eyes. 

To close them would be to hope. The prayer to meet a Creator demands to be made, but to close your eyes would be to hope for that. Nothing will survive this wave, the world is ending. There would be nothing to create with after that black cloud hits you. Perhaps not everyone saw that light in their bones, and perhaps not everyone will be shredded before that inky line. But the world has ended, so you don’t ask those questions too hard. 

The doctor and the bus driver and the nurse die instantly. You have become a god of death yourself, you realize, for only one such as that would know of and understand their deaths. They are your elder fellows because their eyes were turned toward that light the moment it struck the earth—they knew far more intimately and simply the fate of the world. That it was over. The bank tellers die slower. The shrapnel in the black destruction came from their suffering as the wooden paneling on the brick walls came apart—peeling away from the walls slowly, splinters careening towards them at the inexorable speed of adrenaline. The splinters move just slow enough for their eyes to widen, whites visible the whole way ‘round—and screams curdle in throats while sluggish hearts endeavor to pull reluctant muscles in frozen arms to protest such a sudden, horrific death. 

And then the bodies are gone, and they join you after their death-throes. 

The slowest to die are the children and the family. The family’s house is entirely collapsed above them, the whirlwind of black death shoveling more debris above them. They slowly suffocate, their awful cries to each other—of comfort, remorse, and love—strengthening the effect they will have over the world as it ends. Their bodies will be found unrotted, corpses preserved in that airless and cold cavity of their home. The children in the gardens are swept, still alive—still breathing, still fighting, still half-heartedly wondering if this is a continuation of their game—and are never seen again. 

Their world, your world, the entire world. It all ended. It ended on August the Sixth, at eight fifteen in the morning.