rainofcolours

[rainofcolours]

How about Work-I-Purged Wed instead?

Sharing the one time I actually bothered to scrap a scene instead of forcefully working it in because I'd rather kill my darlings with plot than to delete anything for leisure writing ha ha ha

Yes, my angst-ridden heart wanted to include some of that pain into what is meant to be a happy fic smh

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Oops, missed Wednesday where did my week go asjsalf;jas At least I managed to write a bit today :') Hosting overseas folks for work is always a bit of a pain as an introvert ugh

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more to worry about (than me) (7348 words)

[ (7/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | hurtcember 2024 Prompt 7: Abandoned ]

Summary: Seto contends that the abandonment of self is justified in his pledge to exchange the blood of his hands for the blood of innocents, a price well worth its weight in gold. Meanwhile, Hirutani finds himself in the company of one with a particularly reckless abandon for violence. (Enjoy the whiplash from sad introspection to unhinged. Just, unhinged.) (Potential triggers in ao3 link)

Click below for a few preview paragraphs!

The palms of his doctor folded in hesitation, worry threading sunken wrinkles long deepened by the tribulations of a life afforded to others. The patient stood before him with resolution that could only be defined by denial; skin faded in reflection of the untold ghosts that haunted his night before, translucence bulged against the friction of bones, gossamer in dehydration. It thrummed, seeming to just barely contain the uneven surges of sluggish amber, poison, yet dissipated; defilement circulating in discolouration, manifesting in the unwilling pull of the neck into the grind of his jaw.

The retreat of limbs under twisted covers; the admonishment of eyes anchored in graves of blue. The unspoken refusal that rang in deafening clarity – a reminder, of a display of will none could contradict.

“Please rest well, Master Kaiba.”

The doctor bowed, the willow of his heart’s intent moderated by the physicality of his age. Seto eyed him until the heavy door of his room softly clicked shut, the unacknowledged humiliation of his transgressions preceding his usual respect for one whose hands guarded the integrity of his physical temple.

That left the presence of two others who still invaded the sanctity of his desired solitude.

(Read the rest of the fic here!)

[rainofcolours]

WIP (work-is-pain therefore Myst can't write) Wednesday

Work ramping up means I don't have the brain to write so here's another snippet from the kinda-cafe!au kaijou one-shot I'm working on instead :')

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Why am I starting another WIP when I still have the long fic I'd finally planned to completion awaiting its next chapter?

Also, have some lighthearted KaiJou before the anxiety of the work week kills me :DDD

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Turns out it is a thing to share 10 little-known or behind-the-scenes facts about your writing/fics! Totes hopping on that bandwagon! If anyone wants to share their own set of tidbits I'd love to read them too!

These are for my Yu-Gi-Oh! Kaijou/puppyshipping/violetshipping fics ofc :’)

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Top 10 Fun Ways I Like To Write Character Dynamics and Scenes in hierarchy of collapse Without Explicitly Writing Them

1. ⁠Instead of telling you what the non-POV character is thinking, a line or two about what they are doing in the scene is enough of a reflection (e.g. instead of Seto outright showing distress or anger, he drives more aggressively)

2. ⁠Because the setting is in East Asia, I love bringing in comparisons or metaphors birthed from the region (e.g. Tales of Heike, Buddhist tenets, Japanese and Chinese idioms…), and include specific things in their daily lives you tend to find there (e.g. rows of izakaya, old brutalist buildings from before the turn of the century in the working class or factories-laden areas, biz meetings in karaokes and discos my god I hated those)

3. ⁠You don’t always have the luxury of saying what you feel, so let the indirect comparisons in one’s speech and the actions taken between take you along instead! (e.g. deliberately watering down expensive alcohol before drinking it, spending time between another character’s speech attending to cooking their hotpot ingredients than eating yourself)

(Read the other 7 below the cut!)

4. ⁠Colours. I’m a visual thinker and colours play a huge part in the emotions I envision… which means they will be used as metaphors and as indirect references to the characters and their dynamics (e.g. blue in reference to Seto’s eyes for when Katsuya tries to forget him, greys for helplessness and hopelessness in reference to the barren walls and smoking habit he can’t seem to quit fully). It helps that I'm basically writing out the literal movie that plays in my head so even if they make less sense in traditional writing, I still add them in for atmosphere lol

5. ⁠Parallel descriptions are great for this pairing given their natural dichotomies! Especially for fics where both characters are physically apart but are thinking of each other or experiencing the same hurt (e.g. gold vs. blue; restrained vs. vivacious; cold apathy vs. heated anger)

6. ⁠Really like using repeated lines/quotes/sentence fragments from chapters before, usually italicised, to drive home certain themes or decisions made by the characters (e.g. sacrifice worth its weight in gold (also gold for katsuya cause why not))

7. ⁠I’m terrible at reading smut and even worse at writing them explicitly, which is why I fold everything into emotions and help those scenes along with metaphors and parallels instead (e.g. everything is just heat, tenderness, urgency and need lol)

8. ⁠Adding to the above, love myself a good homophone (e.g. feel vs fill) or double entendre (e.g. mouthing into the head and wrapping your hands around the shaft…of microphones) to push away my own embarrassment ha ha

9. ⁠Part of the fun is having your readers interpret what is going on in the characters’ heads - I say as I expressly detail their thoughts - during key moments! So instead of writing say someone had deliberately gotten Seto drunker (or even drugged), up the descriptions of the room with sentences more disjointed and filled with sensory information to suggest that confusion, peppered with passing lines about imbibing alcohol throughout

10. ⁠Last one saved for how I adore using the space as extended metaphors for their mental and emotional states! A broken photo frame? Why not use their shards as mental reflections of how they were into how they never will be again? Passing a row of working class bars before a scene happens? Why not take the time to go into how Katsuya in all his loneliness is desperate to set foot in there for human contact but can’t because of how broke he is?

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This was a fun reflective exercise! Writing to me is more about experimentation than having a scene fulfilled or to create content that’s not already out there (selfish writing is the only non-professional writing I do hoho), so it’s nice to have an opportunity to share some of what I’ve woven into my stuff!

Curious to see what y'all weave into your own fics/pairings!

[rainofcolours]

the touch of him, forever pressed into me (8164 words)

[ (6/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | @hurtcember 2024 Day 6: Touch-Starved ]

Summary: Alone, under the witness of his four walls, how can Katsuya assuage this loneliness birthed from a tenderness he could never learn to kill? (How many ways can I make Katsuya hurt – or hurt a bit less – as he goes about his day? + Myst attempts her first smut, but with hurt) (Potential triggers in ao3 link)

Click below for a few preview paragraphs!

Surrounded by his silent witnesses, these four walls his keeper – inured to the baring of hope and hurt, fears and longing, a future and the impossibility of one. Within this utterly generous extent of twenty metres squared he had loaned to his name, was this his willing prison or a borrowed refuge? Where every centimetre he stood in had been saturated, overflowing from expressions of laments, laughter, loathing, loneliness birthed from a tenderness adrift within the cage of his hollows – always aching; always alone, yet one he had never learnt to (and could not) kill.

This was his new ritual. One manifested from inhibitions of his soul untethered, calling for him from the dusk of his unattended yearnings.

Katsuya leaned his head back and sighed deeply. He held his breath as he would a cigarette – unwilling to cede, teeth lightly grinding, rolling the heat that coalesced just under his throat until it became almost unbearable – only then expelling it into imaginary spirals in the air. His physical body cried for release, held prisoner by a mind ensnared with the illusions of them he could not set himself free from.

Who needs sleep when each day brings ya closer ta ya grave?

(Read the rest of the fic here!)

[rainofcolours]

Another scenic-ish piece, this time inspired by creating something more textured so that I can enjoy the tactile sensation when it’s hung up! (Dec, 2024)

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let me taste the honey of your gold in the burn of my amber (4476 words)

[ (5/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | @hurtcember 2024 Day 5: Faint ]

Summary: If only Seto could redefine the burn of his amber into the taste of Katsuya's wild honeys and warm golds. (Drinking in the den of your enemies when you are in denial about desperately missing someone is a bad idea.) (Potential triggers in ao3 link)

Click below for a few preview paragraphs!

Seto cracked his neck, vision sparking. Fire, the singular noun that looped on repeat, burning just under his skin like an itch he could not quite reach – tongue smouldering with whisky; nose and throat calcified from smoke; blood flowing with his repressed magma of emotions; skin flaring from agitation, alcohol, allergens and all that sat between. A kindled flame sat somewhere in his chest, burning, always burning, casting within its wavering light elongated shadows from the faint memory of a provenance – what he believed (had to believe) was the bottomless fount from which he fuelled the ivory tower of his convictions.

Was that white the righteousness of his knight, resplendent in opposition against the exploitation of black corporations? Or was that white the bleach that saturated his hands, until the blood of his sins were undyed? Or was that white the chalk of a future erased, one that tasted like wild honeys and warm golds?

The room felt claustrophobic – all literal smoke and mirrors, invoking phantoms he did not need to answer to; diffused by a tasteless disco ball that dangled annoyingly close whenever he stood up, scattering in its listless rotations a lurid mosaic of colours from the wayward spotlights onto the lukewarm food.

What did he eat, if at all? Not that it really mattered when everything he touched tasted of ash.

(Read the rest of the fic here!)

[rainofcolours]

Sharing my many yugioh themed Christmas presents to myself this year, wooo!

Ft. BOTH BEWD and REBD (what luck!!); me somehow gachaing the only thing I want from a blind box :’); a pair of kaijou-coloured leather cuffs I’ve been wanting to commission a local artist for since forever (literally bumped into her in a mall and placed an order there!)

(Also a decorative knife that will be our new letter opener cause why not)

[rainofcolours]

Always wanted to do a landscape piece! As it turns out, drawing a non-descript mountain (with a pointy full moon) is the quickest lol 🗻 (Nov, 2024)

[rainofcolours]

the scars that bound my present to our pasts (7905 words)

[ (4/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | @hurtcember 2024 Day 4: Scars ]

Summary: Why was it even when Katsuya was alone, eons of light years away, his actions remained shackled by the scars of his past? (Or emotional trauma meets melon soda float banter meets dodgy bad friend.) (Myst's usual brand of hurt-no-comfort Kaijou; potential triggers in ao3)

Click below for a few preview paragraphs!

He lifted his head from the coffin of his own embrace, surprised his migraine had mostly departed, eyes still adjusting to the mise-en-scène of caliginous absence that had characterised most—, now all of his daily existence. Awaiting the commencement of his wordless soliloquy, he sat in desolation – ringed by the disintegrated ashes of a will conquered; framed against a foreground of cacophonous clutter that diffused the ambient light from the streets below until all of him was pulled into a desaturated monochrome.

After minutes, or perhaps an hour – the passage of time seemed to dilate non-linearly to Katsuya these days – of impassive passivity, holding conversations he should have had but never did in the language of blue; imagining the hypothetical splintering of their history into prisms of alternate hues, Katsuya forced his mind to replace the replays with static and awaited the thrumming of his heart to slow to a more steady cadence.

Katsuya cracked the soreness from his spine, feeling his lower back cramp in resistance. I really am gettin’ old, huh. Rationalising that cleaning up the aftermath of his outburst took precedence over the affordances of wistful fancies, he drove his knuckles into the floor to unhinge his legs, forgetting the injuries he had sustained the night before.

(Read the rest of the fic here!)

[rainofcolours]

This time a proper spoopy piece for the now-past Halloween! 💀 It’s so hard to photo cause I gave it a liberal silver wash lol (Oct, 2024)

[rainofcolours]

the exsanguination of my lifeblood for yours (4713 words)

[ (3/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | @hurtcember 2024 Day 3: Blood ]

Summary: In a world where not everything can be black and white, Seto repainted his chessboard in profusions of reds. (Myst's usual brand of hurt-no-comfort Kaijou; potential triggers in ao3)

Click below for a few preview paragraphs!

By the time Seto felt the temporary effects of his breathing meditation kick in, he had managed to string together the conclusion that Katsuya was either giving the dead a run for their money, actually dead, or had ran back to whatever dismal place he was renting this season. Insistent on not removing his arm, he stretched a leg out, padding softly across the grid of his hardwood floor. Expecting the probable contact with his slippers, Seto instead felt his foot tap against the crystal of his wine glass. The same one he had sequestered in an obscured corner – away from the persona he had spent a lifetime curating; away from the smoulder of accusations from flashing amber—

He removed his arm abruptly, eyes fixated on the lack of a presence he had not realised had melded into the normalcy of his routine. The rim of diaphanous burgundy at the fringe of his vision glinted tauntingly from the shadows.

That is none of your business, Jounouchi.

He shifted his gaze from his bed and surveyed the rest of his room.

A singular king bed stood starkly empty in its centre, flanked by a carved wooden desk and a single business chair. Since a year ago, its perpendicular edge was framed by a worn settee his occasional companion favoured – one Katsuya had finally managed to convince him to move over from his family home. The rest of his room was filled with empty walls and white lights, a staged set of still life; devoid of warmth, vacant of soul – did his space always feel this cold?

(Read the rest of the fic here!)

[rainofcolours]

Getting a little bit more comfortable with the medium a month later, so more work angst 🏆 (Sep, 2024)

[rainofcolours]

blue, white and brown (1980 words)

[ (2/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | @hurtcember 2024 Day 2: Breakdown ]

Summary: Now that he and Seto have parted ways less than amicably, Katsuya is left with the ghosts of blue, white and brown. (Myst's usual brand of hurt-no-comfort Kaijou; potential triggers in ao3)

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“Go ta hell, Seto Kaiba!”

The cacophonous banging of erratic fists on wood exhausted.

Katsuya hung his head in the gallows of his wrists; each uneven rasp he drew stilted by the weight of iron buried somewhere in the grave of his chest. With every surge of his veins, he felt the sear of pain burrow deeper into his left eye, coating his vision in a miasma of grey. Was it the void of solitude or the taint of his resentment that filled the darkness he was seated within?

He rolled his neck, imprints of his rage still reverberating in his ears. The cold metal of the chair an uncomfortable anchor for his limp body, limbs distending until they grazed the floor as he gave in to the weight of his own gravity. There, Katsuya sat, unmoving – his inner hurricane encased in the vacuum of Domino’s midnight; dim eyes, unfocussed, at the far wall – wondering if it was the absence of light or his own delusion that made the edges undulate and distort.

How did we end up like this?

The darkness was a kind tormentor: Within its negative space breathed that which was coveted; what the heart wanted, the darkness granted. Ideals and caricatures alike strung to life by determined longing, dancing in the wisps of suggestions in your mind’s shadow. Its stage was built upon your projections – helping shed your armour, creating the suggestion of safety, and catching when your knees buckled in confession; so it could coax inspiration from the deepest alcoves where you thought amnesia had long put what you held most precious to rest. 

(Read the rest of the fic here!)

[rainofcolours]

hierarchy of collapse (2400 words)

[ (1/? hierarchy of collapse) | Kaijou/Puppyshipping | @hurtcember 2024 Day 1: Collapse ]

Summary: When it's apathy and not acrimony that precipitates the collapse of one's not-really-relationship.

(Myst's usual brand of hurt-no-comfort introspection-driven Kaijou)

Click below for a few preview paragraphs!

Shades of grey pooled in the tired corners of Katsuya’s eyes, filling the spaces between the faint spirals of misted dust agitated by his overly-eager slamming of the shutters. He gave the aluminium rolls a kick in farewell, hearing the rusted hinges buckle and sway piteously upon impact. In the outskirts of Domino where aged brutalist buildings sit silently in the shadows of the steel and mirrors that dominate the heart of the city, crime was slow and business was slower. Even for the most opportune criminals, the prospect of extracting Schrödinger’s loot from a locked store with daily footfall that rocks a naught point something seemed too much effort to bear.

If Katsuya had any other options, he would have left this god forsaken city years ago.

The dull rhythm of the floor’s yellowed clock, stubbornly clinging in precarious balance to the bent nail hammered in before the turn of the century, echoed across the silent corridor, mocking Katsuya’s fading footsteps as he trundled out of his occupational prison.

Katsuya inhaled the December air deeply, feeling it expand into the tension of his extremities. He breathed – carefully pulling it close into his weary chest, folding it into tessellations of wordless regrets before willing it past his throat and into the coils of his neck; twisting, tightening his tongue until the last of its crispness dissipated into the dryness of his mouth.

He felt his fingers itch in response, uninvited twitches as they distractedly fumbled towards the familiar side pocket of his backpack, reaching for the zipper that always hitched unless it was yanked at an awkward angle—

“You are late.”

(Read the rest of the fic here!)