fleet-off

[fleet-off]

hi everyone i hope you dont mind if i

(hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws) (hits you with my paws)

[fleet-off]

[fleet-off]

ginkgo leaf wall hanging quilt commission 🌿

cotton fabrics with hand carved block prints, quilted and sewn with the free motion foot on my machine

[fleet-off]

From a chat I had with lu @lu-sn months ago, an idea that’s been living in my head rent-free. ❤️

They’re packing up Vegas’s room at the minor family compound—Pete on the floor with the boxes, Vegas on the edge of the bed and a dozen ugly outbursts.

(It is pain and presence and all Pete’s patience in the face of Vegas’s uselessness; it is a fragile, defensive rawness and a loving, too, and all of it bound up in grief and grievance.)

The packing goes more tolerably than it has any right to. Porsche never pokes his head in. Pete follows Vegas’s terse directives unerringly, sees too much but asks few questions. Three boxes and four garbage bags are filled in short order.

And then Pete comes upon Vegas’s drawer of trophies.

Not spelling bee trophies, you understand; these are the tokens of theft and successful exploits.

So here is the ring Vegas wore to visit Tawan. A forgotten earring. A pair of briefs, abandoned by a nameless squirrel-faced little twink who dangled off Kinn’s arm and Vegas’s every honeyed word.

Gifts, too: a set of ornate golden cufflinks, an enormous and tacky wristwatch. A dozen expensive baubles Vegas never used but forever gripped tight.

Here is a collection of meticulously labeled disks—one bears the squirrel-faced twink’s name, not that he’s aware—and Vegas knows the moment Pete picks up the oldest and glimpses its significance, because the corners of his mouth tighten a fraction. He sets down the disk and lifts Tawan’s ring instead, inspecting the empty promises engraved on its inner edge.

“Drop it,” Vegas bites out.

And Pete nods, and drops the ring back in the drawer with precisely as much consideration as Tawan deserves, and they move forward.

Or so Vegas thinks, except the next item Pete produces is a second ring. Gold and jade, a gift from some big-mouthed triad boy with his tongue hung so loose he ultimately lost it. “A shame,” Vegas had told Kinn at the time, airily—“It was a talented tongue, wasn’t it?”

There are at least four rings in that drawer.

The physical evidence of everything Vegas won over Kinn once brought him a mangled satisfaction. Now it is as if Pete is raising his mutilations to the light. He clung to them—they are his, as very little has been—but they are not of him.

“What,” he says sharply, “you want it?”

Pete raises his eyebrows. “I don’t think it would fit me, if I did.”

“Don’t get fucking jealous.”

Pete tilts his head. Looks up at him, thoughtful. “You’ve been a lot of different things to different people,” he says. “Did they fit you?”

(And here is the truth: sometimes, they did. Sometimes it was the wind in his face and a motorcycle engine revving under him and a rush of pure simple abandon. Sometimes the success of the lie overtook him and he became it; sometimes he ached with fragile pride for his meager wins.)

(Some nights he lay in bed with the smothering heat of a body against his back and cold sweat on his bare skin, and only his fingers dirty from touching Kinn’s leftovers because there was nothing left inside him to hold the stain.)

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Vegas says. His voice comes out strange and hoarse. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Pete.”

Pete crawls over. He picks up Vegas’s hand where it lies limp on the bed.

Despite everything—Vegas’s chest catches, watching him slide the ring onto his finger. He loathes—loves—his lungs are shot, can’t drag in enough air.

The ring dangles off his finger. Triad kid assumed his size, thought him grander than he was.

It looks gaudier now than it did the one time he attempted to wear it. Maybe it’s the absence of the family ring.

The tat and trinkets were designed for tawdry shapes, molds into which Vegas contorted himself. He is no longer capable of the imitation.

(Pieces of him continue to wear those shapes, still and forever. This alien body is an inescapable thing.)

Vegas watches his own hand clench into a fist. The urge—to unmake, to smash himself open—this too is inescapable. Easier to extract what is genuine from the beaten pulp than from the shell.

Pete knows this too, but he bows his head against Vegas’s arm before Vegas can even try. His forehead is warm—his hair soft—underneath, his hands hold Vegas’s wrist like a precious thing. Clumsily, Vegas’s free hand finds Pete’s nape.

“Be the parts that fit,” Pete tells him. “Hold what you want to keep. The rest will fall away.”

Here on his finger, a part of Vegas forcibly made native; here in the stretched-taut tendons of his forearm, the rot that is all Vegas’s own. Pete is careful with the invasive patchwork of him, but the specific gentleness he offers Vegas’s putrid inborn mess is fury and comfort in equal measure.

He strokes Pete’s hair. Slowly lets his fist unclench.

The ring clatters to the floor, bounces somewhere under the bed. They do not retrieve it.

[fleet-off]

"so how did you two meet"

she messaged me on tumblr and we became obsessed with each other literally immediately and now we are bound by the red string of fate

[fleet-off]

fic authors self rec! when you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. spread the self-love~<333333

Thank you for the ask, Yujeong! This took me a while to answer (I overthought the answers, as is my wont 😅), but it was so much fun.

A Close Shave

If running the razor down the side of Pete’s face felt intimate, the slick slide of blade against throat is something primal. Blood sings close to the surface, jugular an endless welling up, carotid a violent burst underneath. Drowning could not ease the pulse that sears through Vegas’s mind at the image—he suspects only one thing could. He could flick his wrist and end this. (He could nuzzle his face into the hollow of Pete’s neck and end this.)

In the safehouse, on the cusp of a transformation he cannot yet comprehend, Vegas shaves Pete’s face. Also a meditation on immolation and drowning. I struggle to compliment my own writing, but I think this fic has some of the best lines I’ve ever written. @sunshinesanctuary Dav did some devastating art for it, which made me cry heavily at the time and again whenever I think about it too hard (why are artists magic??).

a temporary abundance

Life used to be the means to a messy end, bodies tools given in service to a name larger than either of them. They are still learning what it means to live for living’s sake, to be made of flesh and openly want for all the things living flesh wants. It hurts because it matters. Such is living, and there is joy in being alive.

This little fic is more image than story—a golden moment of rest, Pete’s head in Vegas’s lap, and the recognition that the impermanence of stability makes it all the more precious. a temporary abundance was my first VP fic, and it has received some of my very favorite comments. It was how I met @theflowergirl Lily and my first interaction with @lu-sn lu.

Lapping at the Edges

There’s a kind of self-disgust you can find satisfaction in, narrow as the space between indignant inhale and resigned exhale. Ba, calling him a whore. The routine Vegas has straddled either side of: men much older than him, hungry for a taste of power, smiling through gritted teeth and sinking to their knees. His own knees, falling open as the world splits down its middle. Pete, frozen in the aftermath of a verbal blow. Inhale. Exhale.

Lapping at the Edges tormented me for ages—my evening of “drunk Vegas talks shit, asks to get hit” nonsense took two years to write after I trapped myself in an endless cycle of rewrites for chapter three. But ultimately, the struggle arose from my love for this story and the need to finish it right. I hope those who stuck around were satisfied by the ending. ❤️

won’t give up these ghosts

“Tell me what it’s like on the beach at night,” Vegas murmured as his head fell back onto Pete’s thighs. His mouth was a dark stain; his eyes were raptor-like. Pete caressed his head, searching for breath and words. “It’s like being the only stillness in the world,” he said at last. “The wet sand digs into your feet, and the sea is this massive moving thing you’re not a part of, and all you can see is water and sky and dark. And it sees you, but there’s nothing there to see of you. You’re safe. You’re—a void.”

All of my stories are in some sense about learning to live, but I suspect that message comes through clearest in this story, where Pete feigns death for the purpose of (nonsexual) funeral/body disposal roleplay. I love the contrast—lingering on death as an expression of the desire for life. (And Yujeong, I still often return to your comment on this one on hard days—it meant an awful lot to me.)

Passing Time

There are moments—too many, lately—when the tenderness presses heavy at the back of Vegas’s throat. Pete sits bright-eyed and pink-eared a mere breath away; he’s here, real and taking up space and confoundingly Pete and all, and when Vegas blinks he somehow continues to be. The weight of him dents his side of the couch and distorts the reindeer face on one of the Christmas-themed throw pillows.

It is a month—two, five, eight—since the world broke open and was remade in the shapes of what love is, and Vegas and Pete are still learning to live around the cracks. Writing in this kind of time-bound framework was a new challenge for me pacing-wise, and I think the result has some really lovely moments and lines. I wrote this fic as part of the 2023 KinnPorsche Big Bang, and was so fortunate to be paired with @kiiyuq yu, whose art for the piece is frankly the sort of thing that topples cities.

[fleet-off]

What if we both loved Freddie Murcury and were bisexual and we kissed? 😳

[fleet-off]

Love is the true revenge.

I’m taking your son in the truest, fullest way—

He will choose me over you.

[fleet-off]

in kpts, almost everyone in the mafia is trapped there. a good half of them clearly want out.

porsche vehemently doesn't even want in. he resists to the best of his ability, and even once he's in, he still dreams of that bar on the beach. chay would drop the mafia in a heartbeat, if he felt that it was possible. kim's already got one foot out the door. kinn wishes he could have even half of what kim has, but he's been thoroughly convinced he's never allowed to have it.

so despite all these characters who would love to be let loose, who would kill for a chance at true freedom — would run off into the sunset and never look back — it's interesting that the narrative gives the slightest promise of freedom to the two characters who didn't know it was possible, who never even thought to dream of it. vegas and pete do not understand the value of what they've been handed.

will they ever understand? will they ever see that freedom as a gift instead of a curse?

[fleet-off]

sharing music is so intimate like i'm gonna be thinking about u every time a song u showed me comes on

[fleet-off]

🌧️

[fleet-off]

I love you samosas. I love you empanadas. I love you pasties. I love you dumplings. I love you pirozhkis. I love you savory food in a convenient little carb purse.

[fleet-off]

she likes to feel tall

[fleet-off]

commission for @ameliarating and @veliseraptor 💕

[fleet-off]

can we just skip to the part where i’m coming home to my person and eating dinner across from them

[fleet-off]

Reblog if you have made a friend online that you would love to hang with, but they live far away.