#<- entirely invented between me and lis do not question it. anyway | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

pillage-and-lute · 4 years ago

Note

Prompt: Either out of embarrassment or being a little shit, Jaskier lies outrageously to Geralt about humans (on the level of “I’m molting” or “These? They’re rocks, to snack on.”) and might get away with it?

Hi Dahliavandare! I always love seeing you in my inbox. I changed this just a *teeny* bit. WARNING: VERY SLIGHTLY HORNY (it’s Jaskier, duh) There is also a little bit of angst because Jaskier gets sick.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Jaskier,” Geralt growled.

“What?” The young bard yelped. “I wasn’t even singing that time.”

“No, you just--hmmm.”

“I just hmmm what?” Jaskier asked, pausing in his near-constant strumming.

“You smell like...hmm.”

“I smell?” Jaskier said, both hands planted on his hips. “That’s pretty rich coming from you, my friend--”

“Not friends.”

“You smell like a barn. Anyway-”

“No, Jaskier,” Geralt said, running one, gloved hand through his hair. “Witchers can sort of smell emotions, right?”

Jaskier looked up at him, a sudden hint of anxiety in his scent. “I thought that was a myth.”

“Not entirely.” Geralt shook his head as if clearing a thought from it. “We can’t smell complex things, but joy, fear, anger...desire.”

Jaskier, for once, didn’t look at Geralt, studying instead the flowers at the side of the road. “Desire?”

“I-yes.” Geralt said. “And I wanted to know if all humans smell like...”

“Desire?” Jaskier said, then began talking fast. “Oh yes, of course, most humans, especially my age, well, they smell like this all the time. All the time. Naturally.”

It sort of checked out, at least to Geralt’s thinking. Young humans were horny, and although the overriding scent when Geralt was around was fear, he remembered being a teenager, with all the baggage that entailed at Kaer Morhen, and yes, constantly horny was among those memories. Jaskier himself was definitely still young by human standards, perhaps twenty or so from his youthful features.

Geralt chalked the horniness up to humanity and hormones and left it at that.

---

Later on, Geralt had other questions related to humanity, more specifically that part of humanity that included Jaskier.

“I thought humans couldn’t eat those?” Geralt couldn’t, he’d eaten one during training on a dare and spent the next day with his head in the privy.

Jaskier looked down at the mushroom in his hand. It was a beautiful, bright red, with little white spots. He’d been snacking on similar ones for the last mile or so.

“Of course we can,” he said. “Humans eat these all the time.” There was a rising tone in his voice that indicated something, but as Geralt had mentioned before, witchers couldn’t actually smell the more complicated emotions.

“They, um,” Jaskier said. “They just can’t be eaten by humans during-er- during summer. It’s fall now, so it’s okay.”

Geralt shrugged. What did he know of human biology? He wouldn’t be eating another of them ever, at any time. His stomach lurched a little just at the thought.

---

“You didn’t buy the ring.”

Jaskier looked up at Geralt, eyes bright in the sunshine. The bustle of the market around them pushed against him like a tide, but a little patch of space was left around Geralt. Jaskier stepped into the space. “The ring?”

“You liked it,” Geralt grunted. ��I could tell.” It had been a little thing, cheaply made of poor materials, but the bard’s eyes had lit up upon seeing the little buttercup detailing, and he’d admired for several minutes, although without touching.

Jaskier shrugged. “It was made of iron.”

“And?”

“Human’s can’t wear iron, Geralt.”

“Then why did the man sell it?”

“Well some humans can wear it of course, those with very tough skin, but I’m delicate.” Jaskier sniffed.

“Humans...can’t wear iron?” It didn’t sound right.

“Not right up close to their skin,” Jaskier said. “It turns us, um, purple.”

Geralt shrugged it off. He’d once been called to a castle where a baron had believed himself cursed because his finger was turning green, but he’d simply been wearing a cheap brass ring.

---

After the first winter they met again in the spring something was definitely different.

“Your freckles,” Geralt said.

“What about them?” Jaskier said, looking away.

What about them indeed. They glimmered like chips of mica. At first Geralt had thought it a trick of the light, but no, there was a definite glitter to Jaskier’s skin.

“They’re...shining?”

Jaskier cocked his head at Geralt, cheeks shimmering. “Geralt,” he said slowly. “You know humans shimmer in the spring...right?”

Shimmer?

“I’d never noticed,” Geralt said. Admittedly he paid a little more attention to Jaskier than perhaps he ought, but still, one would think he’d have seen this before.

“It’s part of the growing process,” Jaskier said.

---

“Jaskier, your cheeks are red,” Geralt said, stepping out of the small bathtub the inkeeper had brought up. He stepped closer to the bard, still naked and dripping water, and pressed the back of his hand to Jaskier’s forehead.

“Nnhgh,” Jaskier said.

“Are you well?” Geralt asked, cupping Jaskier’s flushed face with his other hand. It didn’t feel like he had a fever.

Jaskier pushed his hands away, face even redder than before.

“I’m perfectly fine, Geralt,” he said, higher pitched than usual. “Human faces get red for no reason now...put on some pants.”

---

“Jaskier you’re drunk,” Geralt said. It was a pretty obvious statement, considering he had his bard draped over him like a shawl.

“Hehe, yep,” Jaskier said, reaching up with one, long finger and tracing Geralt’s jawline with it.

“You didn’t have any alcohol, I’m sure of it.” Jaskier normally had an extremely high alcohol tolerance in any case.

“‘O course not,” Jaskier said, leaning even more fully into Geralt’s hold. “Had milk.”

“Milk can’t get people drunk.”

“Milk can’t get witchers drunk,” Jaskier slurred. “Get’s humans drunk though, dunnit?”

“Can it?”

“Yeah, definitely, not the kids, but like, how often do you see, like adult humans drinkin’ milk?”

Not often, Geralt thought. He put Jaskier to bed in the inn and it was like pouring an octopus into a bucket. One loose yet gripping arm pulled Geralt closer to Jaskier, the bard leaned in and brushed soft lips to Geralt’s cheekbone.

Geralt wondered if it was another mystery of humans that the spot seemed to tingle all night and he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it.

---

Geralt clutched Jaskier as the bard fell to his knees, groaning. His face was sickly in it’s palor and he was trembling. He’d just lurched up from the table at the inn and stumbled to the door. Geralt had followed him and the young bard had just collapsed like this.

“Jaskier,” he said, clutching a chilled cheek, his other hand seeking one of Jaskier’s. “Jaskier what’s wrong.”

“Lemon,” Jaskier whispered, lacing shaking finger’s with Geralt’s. “In the fish, there was lemon.”

“Lemon’s fine, isn’t it?” Geralt asked, slow heart racing as he looked into eyes that were becoming glassy and clouded.

Jaskier shook his head and it seemed to exhaust him.

“’S fine for humans.” He said. “Not fae.”

“Fae,” Geralt said, cradling his friend. “Jaskier you’re not making sense.”

“Mmh,” Jaskier said, smiling sadly. His face changed, his eyes going glow bright and his ears lengthening a little. His skin took on a slightly green tint.

Geralt looked into the face of his fae bard, rubbing a thumb over his cheekbone and the shimmering freckles there. “How do I heal you, you have to tell me.”

Jaskier blinked slowly, eyes dimming further.

Geralt shook him, desperation taking over.

“Jaskier what heals a fairy?”

What heals a fairy? He’d learned that at some point hadn’t he? Long ago. They were rare, and most witchers never saw one in their whole lives but if you could help one they’d grant you one wish, not tricks.

Poetry.

Fuck.

“Jaskier,” Geralt rasped, throat feeling dry. Those beautiful eyes blinked at him, slowly.

“I...I think you have pretty eyes,” Geralt said. “And I like when they, um, match the skies.”

Jaskier blinked at him in confusion, brow wrinkling slightly.

“You look pretty in blue,” Geralt managed, inventing wildly. “And look pretty in green. You look lovely in about every shade in between.”

Some of the deathly palor was fading from Jaskier’s face now and Geralt sought more words. “I thought you were pretty that day you wore purple,” he said. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, idiot he was an idiot, nothing rhymes with purple.

“I like your spirit, your moxy, your...your yurple.”

Jaskier was indeed looking better now, and he was smiling.

“I like the way you talk to me, and how you’re always there,” Geralt whispered. “I like the way you hum to me when you help me brush my hair.”

Jaskier sat up slowly, blinking in the dim light.

“I like the way you give treats to Roach, um, and I like the way you smile,” Geralt gulped at the look on Jaskier’s face. “But most of all I like how much I love you, so I want you to promise to, uh, stay? For a while?”

“Oh Geralt,” Jaskier said, cupping his cheek. “That was bad.” Then he kissed him and Geralt’s brain went very very fuzzy.

A little later, in their room in the inn, where Geralt was finishing the fish and Jaskier was having stew avec no-lemon-at-all, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jaskier tilted his head thoughtfully as he chewed a piece of potato. “Well, at first I wasn’t sure how you’d take it,” he said.

Geralt nodded. Fae were a feared and reverred group amongst humans, so caution was reasonable.

“Then it became a sort of game,” Jaskier said shrugging. “I couldn’t resist. So I left you little hints. I thought you’d figure it out for sure with the freckles or the milk.”

Geralt huffed a little sheepishly.

“I don’t care that you’re fae,” he said after a moment.

“I know,” Jaskier said. “And I don’t care that you’re an awful poet.”

“It worked, didn’t it.”

“It did, and now you get a wish, no tricks,” Jaskier held up his hand as if taking an oath. “I promise.”

Geralt thought for a moment. A wish from a fae was no small thing. It should be something powerful, something earth shattering and precious and rare.

“I wish you would kiss me again.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oop, here it is (after quite the wait, sorry about that) I’m actually so proud of this and it’s super sweet and fluffy.

#geraskier #fluff #creature Jaskier #fae jaskier #Roach borrowed the braincell and she isn't giving it back #the witcher #geralt of rivia

1K notes · View notes

zonerobotnik · 3 years ago

Text

Why "Team Awesome" is a lie

“So! Varian...we're buddies right?” “Team Awesome, remember?” “Oh...right.” ~ Plus Est En Vous Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to my attention that we have all been duped by Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure. One of the most heartfelt, genuine and fond friendships of the show...is nothing but a lie. And this friendship in question is the often-admired Team Awesome. Let me explain, before you grab the torches and pitchforks.

As you know, I am a fanfiction writer and many of my fanfics require me to watch the show over and over and over again to make sure that I get events right, because the transcripts of this show are non-existent, can someone please make proper transcripts so I don't have to keep doing this. I got off-topic. Anyways, while I was rewatching the show, it came to my attention that the only times that Eugene and Varian are “Team Awesome” are when Eugene is taking advantage of Varian in some way. Let's look at the timeline: “Team Awesome” first made an appearance when Varian, as an adorable kid, gave their budding friendship a code-name. The entire first meeting with him, Eugene was taking advantage of Varian's interest in him to get him to tell him what Rapunzel had told him to get around the fact that Rapunzel wasn't telling him anything. The very first mention of “Team Awesome” is Varian saying “Team Awesome is baaack” when he returns from the tunnels with Eugene, followed by him saying “Uh, yeah that's what Team Awesome does” when Eugene asks if they can talk. Eugene then later invokes it (“Do it for Team Awesome?”) to try to convince Varian to turn off the water boilers. The entire time he is with him, he is treating him like he's a child that doesn't know any better, acts distrusting and is just all around wary of him and his inventions. Which brings us to their second meeting, at the expo. When Rapunzel and Eugene approach Varian while he's helping tie up a banner that Cassandra left in a hurry, the following conversation occurs. Keep in mind, it has been quite a while since they first met: Rapunzel: Oh! Hi, Varian! I haven't seen you since we— Eugene: Since your last invention almost killed us! So glad you're here – with, what looks like, another invention. Well, wasn't that dripping with sarcasm? Once again, distrust and, as a bonus, passive-aggression. Nothing builds a friendship like that, right? There's no other interactions between them in this episode, and actually, their very next interaction is Varian hiding from him while Rapunzel makes excuses and lies to hide the fact that she's helping Varian steal Herz Der Sonne's journal so they can steal the Sundrop Flower. Let's save some time and space and word count and just say that Team Awesome did not exist EVER in season 1. Skipping Season 2, for obvious reasons. The only mention of Varian was Adira saying his name in reference to Quirin being his father and Rapunzel having a magical idol nightmare about him. Moving on to season 3, when “Team Awesome” is strongest. Or, well, when it actually exists. Except it doesn't. Let me explain. After Varian turns on the Saporians and joins Rapunzel's side again, Eugene is still distrustful of him right along with the rest of the town, up until “Be Very Afraid”. However, judging by Varian's complete confusion and surprise to see Cassandra the day she kidnapped him, we can assume that even Rapunzel did not trust him fully until after he had proven he wasn't going to side with Cassandra by actively opposing her to the point of being drugged, hurt and locked up in a cage. Eugene is sent out to try to help him out of the cage and together they figure out the fourth incantation. This is the “birth” of Team Awesome, the moment they actually became friends. Or was it? In truth, Eugene never saw Varian as a friend, and it's questionable on if Rapunzel actually did, really. While Rapunzel tried to include Varian in as much as she could even before he had fully redeemed himself, Eugene mostly avoided him up until his kidnapping, where he offers Varian his hand as something to rely on. But, looking at the following episodes, let's look at their interactions. 1. Race to the Spire Rapunzel finds out that Cassandra is attacking the Spire and asks Varian to help her get there quickly by modifying his balloon. (We can assume, this conversation is actually off-screen and it cuts right to Varian working on the balloon while Rapunzel plots her course and Eugene watches him work). Varian is in a pretty good mood talking to

Rapunzel about his work, but his good mood is promptly ruined when he sees Eugene messing around with his equipment like a toddler wanting to push all the buttons. He flatly and patiently tells him to stop touching things he's not supposed to, then finally decides to prank him with a scare, saying what he was reaching for was going to blow up if he messes with it. Harmless fun, right? Well, no, because pranking each other is not actually a sign of harmless fun, especially with Eugene then resorting to gluing Varian's boots to the ground in retaliation after teasing him a little by messing with his ear. You know who else teases and pranks each other? King Frederic and King Trevor. Let's just say, they aren't friends and it sounds like they never have been. Varian then disappears for the rest of the episode. 2. Flynnposter Varian is about to reveal a new invention to help the Kingdom when Eugene runs in screaming about someone that resembles him. He then, in all his wisdom, gives Lance the job of Captain while he runs off to track down the lookalike copycat thief and didn't even acknowledge Varian until he loudly cleared his throat and passive-aggressively said “I'll wait”. What kind of friend would do that? Honestly, there's nothing to work with here, it's just the next episode we see them together. No sign of “Team Awesome”. 3. Once a Handmaiden This is the first time “Team Awesome” is EVER mentioned in Season 3, actually. After using a new weapon, the amber gun, on black rocks with Cassandra's face pinned on them, Varian then says “Alright, Team Awesome! Project Obsidian is a success!” while doing a little hip-bumping victory dance with Captain Eugene Fitzherbert, who was supervising his testing of the new weapon. Then Rapunzel comes up and they explain what Project Obsidian is to her, and when Varian shows signs of animosity to Cassandra, Eugene leans on him to shut him up before Varian goes to continue his tests before he says something else to earn Eugene's ire. Unfortunately, his tests actually earn him a glare from Eugene, who is trying to assure Rapunzel that they won't be attacking Cassandra – while Varian is shooting at dummies of Cassandra, negating his words as he says them. After getting her to sign off on the use of the weapon, the two of them vanish for the rest of the episode until Cassandra attacks, where we see them on patrol together with Varian carrying around his new weapon. Eugene then tells him to wait for his signal as they get into position, treating Varian like one of his soldiers, not a friend. Please note, we have not seen any sign of them doing anything together that wasn't involved in Varian working for him and/or Rapunzel in some way. After Varian's invention “malfunctions”/is set off by Zhan Tiri, they then both evade Cassandra's attacks before fleeing the city together with everyone else. 4. Plus Est En Vous After escaping the city, the citizens of Corona hole up in the Snuggly Duckling and Eugene starts pacing, trying to figure out what to do next while Varian reads a book about Demanitus to try to find anything they can use. Rapunzel then comes in and gives a pep-talk, during which Eugene casually “jokes” with Varian about his criminal past. Rapunzel: I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. This is the biggest challenge this Kingdom has ever faced. Eugene: No offense, Varian. Varian: Meh. It's a fun little quip, but did he HAVE to remind everyone about Varian's criminal past in the middle of the pep-talk? What kind of friend DOES that? Way to make things more tense! After the pep-talk, Varian talks about a portal they can use to trap the demon in another dimension and Rapunzel takes her social circle of the season to go find what they need. On the way, Eugene takes some time to tentatively bring up the possibility of Varian's father being controlled by the Mindtrap. Eugene: So! Varian...we're buddies right? Varian: Team Awesome, remember? Eugene: Oh...right. Uh, yeah. Eugene then awkwardly glances to the side before changing the topic to the Brotherhood and Quirin's involvement,

which he does in a very careful, wary way, watching Varian for any sign of hostility – and Varian did get hostile, to which Eugene then put his hands out in a placating gesture and told him to forget it. First of all, what was that awkward look for after Varian reminded him that they were “Team Awesome”? This, to me, is the biggest evidence of “Team Awesome” not actually existing outside of Varian's mind, seeing as he is the ONLY one to mention it, and Eugene just goes along with it or reacts awkwardly. Then we get the one and only time that Eugene EVER mentions “Team Awesome” in season 3. After Quirin is Mindtrapped and tries to open the portal to suck them all inside the interdimensional portal, he is stopped by a stun mechanism Varian installed in his helmet following his conversation with Eugene, which is followed by this conversation: Quirin: *collapses* Varian: *runs to his side* Dad! Dad! Don't worry! You'll be okay, I promise! Eugene: *kneeling next to him* What happened? Varian: I thought about what you said. So, I took...precautions. *pained look* I rigged his helmet with a temporary stun mechanism. Eugene: *big grin* Score one for Team Awesome! *laughs* Varian: Heh...yeah. *glum look* Team Awesome... Eugene: *notices he's upset* Let's say we get him someplace more comfortable? Varian: *grateful smile* To me, THIS may be the only time that Eugene actually cared about him and his feelings, the only time that he showed that he just might want to be his friend. Then again, he may just be making sure he doesn't go off the deep end again because he was forced to hurt his father to help the Kingdom and no one seemed to care. The episode goes on, and we don't actually see them interacting at all for...the rest of the series. Once the danger is passed, we see Varian coming up to Eugene and Rapunzel, but what do they do? They reach for Cassandra and give her all the love and affection and forgiveness while he just looks on and everyone else, for some reason, give wide, beaming smiles. (Seriously, looking at the scene, Varian is the only one NOT smiling). But, that's a whole other can of worms. The next time they interact is Varian clearing his throat after Eugene calls him “Royal science nerd” during narration, prompting Rapunzel to correct him to “Royal Engineer”, but that's not really any evidence of them being close as it is that he still belittles him. Frankly, looking at the evidence, I think we can safely say that “Team Awesome”, as the fandom likes to see it, does not actually exist in canon and Varian is little more than an employee to Eugene. Will that change? Possibly. His actually showing that he noticed Varian was in emotional pain and offering him a little comfort does give me hope. But, as of the actual series, “Team Awesome” was just something that Eugene used to manipulate Varian into doing what he wanted, such as giving him information or building a weapon that fired off amber solution because it's the only thing that works on the rocks Cassandra controls. And thus concludes my rant on why “Team Awesome” doesn't exist. Thank you for reading.

#tangled the series #tts salt #salt #ZONE IS SALTY

35 notes · View notes

msmarvelouswinchester · 4 years ago

Text

Irresistibly Yours

Chapter 2 - Noise Complaint

Summary - Y/N Y/L/N moves to NYC in hopes for a fresh start after a nasty breakup. There she meets her neighbor, the cynical lawyer, Dean Winchester. A love-hate relationship starts evolving between them ever since they met in the elevator one morning but a desperate situation and a string of lies forces the two friendly rivals to go on a date or rather a fake date. Will sparks fly between them when Dean gets to know Y/N real and up close? Will Y/N finally find her Prince Charming in the grumpy, workaholic, divorce lawyer?

Pairing - Lawyer!Dean Winchester x Y/N

Warning - None expect meanie Dean (Suspicious, isn’t it?)

WC - 2154

Square Filled - Don't put me in this position ( @anyfandomgoesbingo )

A/N - I promise the next chapter will have more of Dean and more conflict! This is just the beginning of a very long ride. Enjoy!

Beta’d by @miss-nerd95

Dividers by @firefly-graphics

Series Masterlist Masterlist

The silence in the cab on her way back to her apartment gave her the quality time she needed to think. In a few weeks, Meg was getting married and now, since they knew, Y/N had to show up with her 'boyfriend’. She racked her brain, scrambling to come up with a good excuse because it was all a big lie.

Every time, however, she reached two conclusions - either make a fool of herself and admit that she lied or tell everyone that she broke up and be the one person at the wedding that everyone looks down on with pitiful eyes.

There was a third option, which was risque as hell too, cause Y/N barely knew the man and their first meeting did not go so well, but there was definitely something about him that made her blush every time she thought of him.The way he carried himself and the dominating vibes he gave off, sent shivers down her spine. Maybe he wasn't a morning person and she did start blabbering in the elevator the minute she stepped in. She swallowed hard when she remembered the way her name rolled off his tongue. ‘How did he know?’ She wondered.

As Y/N boarded the elevator, she thought about how, she wanted nothing more than to see a certain green-eyed man again. She had been residing in this complex for almost three months but she had never seen the man before. Maybe he was new here, in this apartment building, who knew? Mind plagued by millions of thoughts, Y/N trudged down the empty hallway to her cosy little home.

“Who invented these fucking heels?” She grumbled as she freed her feet out of the painful, yet pretty high heels when she reached the comfort of her own home. Shrugging her coat off, she relaxed as her ass hit the soft mattress of the couch.

“I need a date in seven weeks.” She said, making a mental note of the wedding date. This was the only wedding she ever looked forward to attending where she knew she wouldn't have to face the constant stream of questions involving her dating life and a particular man. All she ever wanted was to be with her close friend on the best day of her life.

“First dress fitting - tomorrow at 10.” Her phone lit up with an incoming text and groaning, she dropped her head backwards. Y/N couldn't even skip the wedding if she wanted to. She was one of the bridesmaids and it wouldn't be fair to both Meg and Cas, if she didn't attend it. A smile graced her frowning face when she remembered the time Cas proposed to her friend on Valentine's Day. Cliche- Y/N would say, but deep down, she knew she just wanted what Cas and Meg had.

A sigh left her lips as she got up, still in her work clothes. She put on some light music as she went into the bathroom to freshen up. After the long, tiring day she had, a warm bath and a Ryan Gosling movie were very much needed. Quickly stripping off, she stepped into the tub. She leaned her head backwards, closing her eyes, as the warm water soothed her aching body and her troubled mind.

“Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone,” Y/N sang along the song, slightly off tune but she didn't care, as she stepped out of the bathroom after some time. She let go of the towel wrapped around her body and stepped into a pair of comfortable pjs. Getting a box cold pizza out from her refrigerator, she turned up the volume of the music playing in her apartment.

“He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring, and said,” Y/N yelled out the chorus when she started to heat up the pizza. Her private singing session, however, was cut short by a sudden knock on the door. She grudgingly pressed pause as she walked up to the door to find out the unwanted visitor.

“Excuse me- Ms L/N?” As soon as she opened the door, she was met by a very familiar, deep baritone that had been haunting her.

“Dean Winchester. And please, call me Y/N,” she breathed out. The formality in Dean’s voice made her cringe. Her eyes fell as she took in the man in front.

Dean had gotten rid of the dapper grey suit and slipped into a much laid back look. A black polo t-shirt fitted over his body and plain blue jeans hugging his bowlegs perfectly. The look on his face mirrored the one from the morning and Y/N wondered if he would look better with a smile on. Her train of thoughts were again rudely interrupted by the man speaking.

“I assume you're having somewhat of a casual evening,” Dean said, his hands waving to point at her pjs, making her suddenly self-conscious of her clothing state.

“Y-yeah. How may I help you?” She asked, genuinely curious.

“See, I moved in the apartment right beside you a few days ago, and I think you might have noticed sometime or the other that there are other people living in this building as well,” Dean said, his face not imparting any sort of emotions, “You might be having a casual evening but I can assure you that there's at least one person who is certainly not. Turn the music level down.”

Y/N’s mouth fell open at Dean’s words but she wasn't going to turn down the volume just because a man turned up at her door, asking her to do so. His words were sharp, but his tone was downright rude, and it was definitely not because he wasn't a morning person. The least he could have done was ask her nicely.

“Well, listen here pal, no one's having a problem, other than you. So you can go back to your room, put on some earplugs and do whatever the heck you were doing before you decided to make my day more awful,” Y/N said, taking a threatening stance with hands on her hips, a deep frown on her face.

“I'll file a noise complaint report against you.” Dean warned with his pointer finger right in front of her eyes.

“It's just music. Learn to appreciate the little things in life.” She said while rolling her eyes.

“I'm a very busy man and I got work to do, alright? And speaking about music, play something actually good like Zeppelin and people will personally come up to thank you. This song is not even a classic.” Dean spat back.

“Believe me or not, everyone is a Swiftie at heart.” She smirked with a sarcastic shrug. Dean’s lips twitched in anger as his face grew more rigid before he said, “If you don't lower the volume, expect a noise complaint report delivered with your newspaper tomorrow.” He walked away before Y/N had a chance to even think of a comeback.

Glancing over his shoulder, Dean went inside his own apartment room right beside Y/N’s. She glared at the empty hallway before swinging her door shut and walked back to her room towards her amazon echo, turning the music down anyway. She couldn't risk getting a report filed against her, and the man appeared to be dead serious about what he threatened to do.

“Stupid Dean Winchester.” She grumbled.

Squinting at the clock, Y/N woke up the next morning to loud bangs on her door. 7:30 am, it read. Removing the covers, she immediately shivered when the cool air hit her bare legs.

Hair still a mess, she grabbed her robe from the nearby chair, putting it on along with her slippers before she warily made her way to the door. “Dean will be complaining now for sure.” She grumbled as she unlocked her door to reveal her friend standing on the other side in a dishevelled state, eyes red like a mad woman.

“Meg?” Her face scrunched up in confusion as the said woman shoved past her into her apartment. “You’re wearing your shirt inside out.” Y/N closed the door behind her as Meg took a seat on the couch.

“Can I have some water?” Y/N dumbfoundedly nodded at her friend’s request and went to her kitchen to retrieve a glassful. Handing the glass over to her, she sat down next to the brunette who gulped down the entire glass of water in one go. Setting the utensil down on the wooden coffee table in front, she turned towards Y/N with slightly glossy eyes as she spoke, “I don’t want to go and finalise the dresses.”

Her words elicited a laugh from Y/N before she said, “Okay, bridezilla, we can reschedule it. Cas should better watch out!” She chuckled out the last words.

“No, y-you don’t understand!” Meg grabbed her friend’s hands, surprising the latter, “I don’t want to try the dress on at all.” Y/N was utterly surprised over her friend's outburst.

“Honey, you have a wedding in less than two months.” Y/N cooed as a few drops of tears rolled down the bride-to-be’s cheeks. “Meg, talk to me. Did something happen between you two?”

The woman shook her head, letting the other lady in the room know that she didn't have to kick Cas’ ass to her relief, but it confused her even further. Since their engagement five months ago, Meg had been over the moon and had started planning every minute detail with high precision and finesse for her big day.

“What if I'm making a huge mistake?”

“Don’t put me in this position. You know how I am when it comes to-”

“But I need to know, and I trust you.”

Y/N pressed her lips into a thin line before she said, “Cas is the best thing that has ever happened to you-”

“You barely even knew me when I started to go out with him. We have only been together for fifteen months - five of which I have spent being engaged to him. What if I regret this later?” Meg's words were correct. Y/N used to barely talk to her when she had started dating Cas, but all through those eighteen months, as she slowly got to know the pair well enough, she knew that they were clearly meant to be in it for the long haul.

“But I have never seen you regret your decision to be with Cas even once… so why start now?.” Y/N politely answered, her hands letting go of her distraught friend's iron-clad grasp and reaching out to soothe her.

“Sometimes even if you have been with your man for what feels like forever, marrying him might seem to be the worst decision you can ever make, but it doesn't matter how long you have been with him. When you know, you know. Follow your heart.” Meg looked up at her as she mulled her words over before speaking.

“I love him.” She said.

“Then go, be with him.” Y/N smiled. Crisis averted.

A smile started to appear on Meg’s tear stained face as her eyes twinkled with a suggestive glimmer in them. Fiddling with her sparkling ring, she said, “Dean’s good for you. Don't let him go.”

Y/N was taken aback by her friend's supposition. She sat up straight in her seat as heat crept up her neck. Her mind was stuck in a turmoil as she tried to come up with an appropriate response.

“He’s not-Dean is not-” She stuttered, the words got stuck in her throat when she tried to think of a decent excuse. Maybe, this was the universe giving her a chance to take back everything she had said before, but the disheartened look on her friend’s face made her rethink her decision. After all, a little white lie never hurt anybody. “Yeah, he is a good man.” Meg smiled as Y/N played her into the deception game once again.

“Will he be at the wedding?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What are you waiting for? Unless he is a figment of your imagination, ask him! I want to meet this certain Dean Winchester.” Meg giggled.

“I don’t have such vivid imaginations, Meg.” Y/N let out a nervous chuckle. She was now being given an ample amount of opportunities to tell the truth, then why was it so hard for her to deny everything she had said? Maybe she liked living in this utopian world where for once, no one deemed her as the broken, pathetic girl who failed to make a man stay. Maybe deep down, she wanted this damn lie to be true.

“I’ll ask him but you do know how men are about weddings.” She replied, having no knowledge of how to keep her end of the promise.

Chapter 3

Feedback is highly appreciated

If you want to be tagged in the series, lemme know!

#dean winchester #dean x reader #dean winchester x reader #dean x you #dean winchester x you #dean winchester x y/n #dean x y/n #au dean x reader #au dean winchester x reader #dean fanfics #dean fanfiction #spn fanfic #irresistibly yours

126 notes · View notes

slytherinsnekxvii · 4 years ago

Text

let's talk about lily evans. she's an interesting character—or rather, the case surrounding her character is quite interesting.

i honestly don't know if i can say i dislike her. by all means, she should be a fan favourite, and she is... but for some rather intriguing reasons.

for one thing, due to the fact she's hardly expanded on in the series, certain parts of the fandom have been forced to either take the few qualities that she displays canonically and amplify them to the extreme (eg. immediate righteous anger at the slightest hint of injustice in fic) or create an entirely new personality (eg. no, i didn't actually disapprove of your pranks, it was just sexual tension). of course, the option of creating a new personality is much more tempting when you can just add amplified canon traits on the side.

for another, her relationship with james sometimes seems likes it's being weaponized against snape and his fans. i've seen arguments that go like "haha, snape just wanted to fuck lily, but james got her in the end anyway, sucks to be you", and not only does it entirely reduce her to an object, it feels like they don't even care about the relationship, the dynamics or the characters. she's basically a plot device.

and thirdly, half of her characterisation in fic is to be a peter stand-in. we don't like the rat man, so let's take the pretty girl and put her in place of the guy who was canonically a member of the marauders, even up until he was named secret keeper. suddenly, she's a prankster and an enabler.

but, snek, you may say, all of that is fanon lily, tho. you just explained that people seem to like her because they just put any personality they want into her as long as she's at least vaguely a good person. you would be right.

let's look at canon lily. she's described as the brightest witch of her age, most everyone speaks favourably of her. in fact, the only people we see actively disliking/being upset with her are petunia, out of jealousy and the invasion of privacy concerning her letter, severus, who lashed out and used a slur that also applied to him in a moment of serious distress and apologised after, and well, pureblood supremacists by virtue of her being muggleborn. interestingly enough, even this dislike manages to develop everyone's character more than it does her own.

as a teenage girl myself, let's look at her actions as a teenage girl. not necessarily in chronological order because I'm writing this at 2am and my memory is already mediocre at best.

1. she's done well enough in school to be considered trustworthy and responsible enough to be a prefect.

okay, i can respect that. a good few of the prefects at my school were really just appointed based on how much the teachers liked you, but at hogwarts, there's so few of them that they must put at least a little effort into it, so i'll move on.

2. she does not press for details when informed that her best friend's life needed to be saved by someone who has been publicly tormenting him for years

now, see, there's no reason why she needs to play therapist. it's not her job, she's just a girl, and we know that snape wasn't supposed to talk about the incident, so he would've been stuck if she had asked for an explanation. however, i also feel like she doesn't seem particularly concerned about his wellbeing, and when he brings up his concerns about lupin, rather than ask for proof, she dismisses it. which, fair enough, i would hate to listen to someone talk about the same thing over and over and over, but, i also feel like the fixation on a theory like that would be cause for concern.

3. she dismisses the actions of a group known to play tricks that harm people and have specifically been tormenting her best friend on the basis that they don't use dark magic

first, i'm going to establish what i usually assume dark magic refers to. aside from jinxes, hexes and curses, i also include anything that produces an effect similar to any of the unforgivables (takes away your life, your free will or your ability to feel safe in your own body, such as when you're in excruciating pain), and magic that would require a sacrifice of some sort.

when snape tries to point out the danger in what the marauders do, she insists that they don't use dark magic. and they don't... but they do use illegal magic. she then argues against the company that snape keeps, which, again, to be fair, is justified considering mulciber's done something to mary macdonald... it's also not a particularly realistic ask. snape probably shares a dorm with these guys, and he's a poor half-blood so he's already on the outs. as far as he knows, any dissent will be met with him getting hexed in his sleep. but, i digress.

given that the marauders have been shown to be doing extremely dangerous with little regards to anyone's safety, and actively tormenting her best friend, i disagree with her choice here. on the other hand, she's made her own friends in gryffindor and perhaps she sees a nicer side of them that we don't get to. she's justified in her actions, but i still disagree.

4. she intervenes when her best friend is hung upside down by a spell of his own invention at the wands of the people who have tormenting him for years

she does object to the marauders' treatment of him, and she does try to get them to let him down. if i were in her position, i would absolutely do the same. i respect the decision to stand up for her friend.

5. she does not seriously attempt to help him or punish the marauders

i do not respect how she handled it. at any point, she could have drawn her wand. but, snek, you say, perhaps she didn't want to get involved physically. she wanted to follow the rules. in that case, at any point, she could taken points, assigned detention, or sent someone to get a member of staff. she does none of those things and i viscerally disagree. if we were ever friends and someone tried to hurt you, i can assure you that i would try to at least see to it that they'd be punished, even if it wasn't immediate or by my own hand. lily, however, chooses to argue rather than take action.

6. she smiles when severus gets hung upside down

chances are, it was more than likely an involuntary reaction, like laughing when your friend has fallen over. however, the fact that it was intentionally written in seems like it's mean to be an indicator that the friendship was already falling apart.

7. she comments on her best friend's poverty and uses a name that's been used to make fun of him after he calls her a slur that also applies to him

she was 100% within her rights to be upset by being called a slur. it is never okay to use slurs. the only situation in which a slur could possibly ever be appropriate would be if you were an oppressed group attempting to reclaim said slur which is not at all what snape was doing here. he was experiencing cruelty, being humiliated, publicly, for no reason beyond existing and he was in distress, choking on soap and upside down. it was damaging to his pride, especially when james suggests that he needs lily to fight his battles for him (paraphrasing) which is an emasculating statement to make, especially to a teenage boy. so, snape lashes out with the most hurtful word he could think of, which happened to be a slur that also applies to him. lily was 100% justified in being upset about this, and she retaliated in kind. she was very much allowed to say what she said. i understand that she was hurt and angry and i respect that, especially as i can't guarantee that i would not have been just as upset in that situation.

8. even when the threat of sexual harassment is made, she still does nothing

i get it, at this point, she's hurt, she's mad, she wants him to suffer since she's a teenage girl and teenage girls hold grudges like it's nobody's business, but... i definitely couldn't just stand by and watch it happen. she basically just let them go through with it.

9. she does not accept her best friend's apology for calling her a slur that also applies to him, effectively burying the friendship

she is, by no means, obligated to continue being friends with him. however, if i were in that position, and the apology was sincere, i would take the friend back.

10. she goes on to date and eventually marry the guy who bullied her former best friend for his entire school life

no. i disagree. but, snek, you say, james changed. no. he didn't. we know, that at this point, james was still going after snape behind lily's back. you can say that she didn't know, but that means that she would have allowed james to lie to her and that doesn't sit right with me bc a relationship built on lies is a relationship that is going to fall apart, especially when your partner has been disappointed by your actions before. you can say that she did know, and that proves that she simply didn't take her responsibilities as head girl seriously enough to stop the head boy from harassing people when she explicitly told him not to. the point is, no. there is no way that this would have worked out as a long term relationship. james is too comfortable lying to her. i can't even say she was justified. there is no circumstance where i personally see this as okay for anybody involved.

alright, so, essentially teenage lily was justified in (most of) her actions, even if i find them questionable.

adult lily dies at 21, while saving her son, but her death also helps save the wizarding world. good job. she, as expected, did what any good mother would.

and that's canon lily.

my thoughts: she's a perfect example of why writing tips are so adamant on making sure people try to show and not tell. we were told that lily is meant to be good and pure and lovely, but the author never bothered to actually prove that, so what we're left with a dissonance between what we see and what we know.

as a result, i still don't know if i truly dislike her. her actions are justified, but they don't match with what we've been told, and we don't have any other information to go off of. at best, i can say for certain that i disagree with many of her choices, despite understanding why she would have made them (except for marrying james potter, uggghh, the only good thing to come out of that was harry and the saving of the wizarding world by extension, ig).

thanks for reading all that, btw! hope it made sense :)

#meta #lily evans #lily evans potter #anti lily evans?#just to be sure #james potter #severus snape #harry potter #thoughts #my opinion #not sure what i should tag this as #im tired and have to get up for work in like #five hours lol #anti jily #im sorry but i really can't do jily

123 notes · View notes

darkmasterofcupcakes · 4 years ago

Text

That’s Not a Smoothie

Summary: After being absent for a week, Gandra Dee shows up to the latest FOWL meeting ten minutes late with Starducks...and an egg.

@promiseddifferent @halfshellkayla

Read on AO3: “That’s Not a Smoothie”

Order was one of, if not the, most important things to be concerned about, if you asked Bradford. That also included the order of maintaining a schedule. That was the main reason why he insisted on everyone in the inner circle of their organization attending daily meetings, even if they didn’t necessarily have any plans or upcoming missions to discuss relating to their plans for Scrooge McDuck and his family, or the missing mysteries his grandmother had been searching for.

To Bradford’s relief – and he would have to admit, genuine surprise – the various…specialists he had hired to be involved at the highest level of F.O.W.L. were all very capable of sticking to the schedule he had set up for them, with minimal complaints.

That being said, Bradford wasn’t heartless; he knew that there would be times when the people he hired would be too sick or injured to physically be present for meetings, and he understood that. So, he did allow for sick days – even allowing for up to seven days paid sick leave – with the only requirement being that the members of the organization needed to contact him to inform him of their absence. That way, he would know to work around the fact that any potential plans involving that particular agent would have to be scrapped prior to any discussions or planning sessions.

Agent Dee had been absent from the meetings for almost a full week, and only the first day was accounted for.

Bradford had even asked Rockerduck (who the young woman had formed an odd sort of camaraderie with, particular after the duck had returned from the Foreverglades with a baby butler of all things) if the missing agent had contacted him at any point in the past week, only to be told that Rockerduck hadn’t heard from her, either.

By now, Bradford was beginning to get suspicious.

He already had a feeling that there was something up with Gandra Dee – she’d been acting a bit oddly for months, though she often attempted to excuse her strange behavior by claiming she was tired or some other seemingly innocent excuse. The director hadn’t been pleased by this unprofessional behavior, but he had chosen to overlook it, seeing as it hadn’t really affected her work in any significant way, nor had it had any impact of the work of others. These unexplained absences, however, were another issue entirely, and Bradford had already made a mental note to speak with her about it when she did return; and he was certain she would, seeing how the organization was the only place where she knew she’d get what she needed for her various…science projects.

For the time being, however, there were more pressing matters to attend to – most notably, their mission to possess all of the remaining missing mysteries before Scrooge McDuck and his family went on another dangerous adventure to claim them.

They had been discussing – or rather, between the various distractions and interruptions, trying to discuss – a potential plan to go after what sounded like a promising lead in St. Canard, when the door to the meeting room suddenly opened up with no announcement or warning, much less a request for permission.

Expecting one of the Eggheads, Bradford turned away from the projector screen and towards the door, ready to say something about the interruption.

“I sincerely hope you have a very good reason for this interruption, whoever you are,” he said sternly as he turned.

Instead of the Egghead he’d been expecting, however, standing just outside the doorway was none other than Gandra Dee, holding what looked like a paper coffee cup from one of those chain cafes than Bradford couldn’t remember the name of in one hand, and….something in the other; he couldn’t exactly see what it was, probably some new invention of hers, considering how tightly she appeared to be holding it.

Gandra rolled her eyes at the scolding and stepped inside, kicking the door behind her before making her way over to her usual seat.

“Hey, be glad I even came in at all,” she half-said, half-snapped as she somewhat awkwardly tried to sit down with both her hands occupied. “I still feel like someone decided to treat my body like a tube of toothpaste, but you only give us a week of paid sick days, and unfortunately for me, I need the money more than I want to just stay in bed.”

Now that she was at the table, everyone could more easily see what else she was holding….and it was definitely not an invention, not in the traditional sense. While the other agents present stared, seemingly unable to say anything at the moment, Gandra shifted her body slightly to move from her arm to her lap what she’d been holding onto so securely: an egg. She wrapped one arm around the egg, holding it close to her body – presumably the provide additional heat – and appearing to make sure she was satisfied with the position before taking a sip from her coffee cup.

The first one to speak was Black Heron. “So, Agent Dee….what do you have there?”

Gandra finished drinking from her cup before answering, “…An espresso.”

The wry tone of her voice made it clear that she was well aware of what the older woman was actually referring to.

Bradford wanted to get back to the purpose of the meeting, but he could already tell that this latest development meant that nobody else present was likely to pay much attention to anything he said; and so he decided to put the discussion on hold, for the moment.

Besides, he had to admit, he also had a few questions regarding Gandra’s egg. And there was no doubt that the egg was actually hers – Gandra Dee had never expressed any disdain for children, and in fact was among the first to warm up to the Fountain-changed Jeeves (or Jay, as some of the members of the team had taken to calling him), but she was not the type to just….adopt someone else’s egg. Though, that did raise another question.

“So, who knocked you up?” Steelbeak inquired, asking the exact same question that Bradford had been waiting to ask, albeit in a way that was much less tactful than the director would have preferred.

The bluntness of the question received glares from everyone present, save the young woman who had been the recipient, though she had bristled for the briefest of moments upon being asked.

“Beats me,” said Gandra with a shrug, placing her coffee down on the table and wrapping the other arm around the egg as well, now holding it tightly against her torso with both arms. “I had a few too many drinks after going out one night, and I think you can all figure out what happened next.”

Something about her tone seemed to imply that there was more to the story than that, but Bradford supposed it wasn’t the time for pressing the issue. He would be keeping a closer eye on her activities when he could, however, at least when she was at headquarters; he couldn’t do much when she was at home, particularly considering she’d never given him her address, preferring to receive paychecks in person.

Bradford’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of baby babbling. Apparently Jeeves had woken up from the nap he’d been taking in Rockerduck’s arms, and was now showing clear interest in Gandra’s new egg, reaching for it and making grabbing motions with his hands.

The infant’s guardian took hold of his hands with one of his own, gently pushing them down.

“Jeeves, don’t touch that,” he told the young Franken-dog. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

“Sure we do – it’s been up Dee’s c-“

Bradford spoke again, abruptly cutting off whatever it was that Steelbeak was about to say. Whatever it was, he was certain it was not appropriate subject matter to be discussing in a workplace environment, and he said as much.

“Could we not discuss this at the meeting? Or, preferably, at all?” Bradford asked, with a tone that made it clear that this was an order, not a request.

The rooster opened his mouth, appearing ready to continue the conversation despite the order, only to snap it shut with an audible clank; presumably he recalled the fact that Bradford could, and would, force him to stop talking if need be. That at least took care of that problem, for the time being.

However, there was still another issue to attend to – the issue of Gandra Dee and this egg of hers. He didn’t need to ask if she intended to keep the child; the way she was cradling the egg, and particularly her venomous glare at the way the other agents were looking at it, as though expecting them to try and take it from her, was enough of an answer.

“Is this going to impact your work performance?” Bradford questioned, looking directly at Gandra and waiting until he knew she was actually listening before asking. He didn’t want there to be any confusion between them, or even just her trying to claim she hadn’t heard the question.

Without hesitation, Gandra shook her head.

“Definitely not,” she replied. There was a brief pause during which the smallest hint of uncertainty showed on her face, though it was very subtle. “I mean, I guess that I’m not really going to be that good for field missions until after it hatches, but it’s not like I’m usually put on those jobs anyway, right?”

Well, at least she was honest about the impact this was going to have on her ability to take on certain assignments….And she did have a point that she wasn’t usually sent on the more physical field missions – Bradford tended to prefer having his agents work with their strengths, and Gandra Dee’s strengths lied in computers and other technology that Bradford could never be bothered to figure out past the basics. Which, fortunately, meant that her new responsibility wouldn’t have too much of a direct impact on operations at FOWL, much less Bradford’s own plan to put an end to Scrooge McDuck’s adventuring once and for all.

“And I would assume that you’ll want a short maternity leave after the child is hatched?”

It took a few seconds before the young woman responded; the expression on her face made it look like she was thinking about the question, or possibly about how she was supposed to answer. Most likely, she was wondering if he would withhold her pay if she said she would need time away from work following the hatching. And, honestly, Bradford was quite insulted by the thought; he might be admittedly stern, but he knew how to run a proper business, including providing certain benefits if they were needed.

“Kinda, yeah. I mean, even if I’m doing experiments, still going to need to adjust to the whole thing,” Gandra finally replied after seeming to consider the question for a few moments. Her expression made it look like she was expecting some form of argument, and it melted away to shock when Bradford immediately replied with, “Very well, then. As I have always made clear, I am not a villain, so we can discuss the matter more in the future.”

A quirked eyebrow indicated that the young woman expected there was a catch to the director’s generosity; but in Bradford’s eyes, this meeting had been put on hold long enough. He gave her a pointed look that silently told her that they could discuss the issue privately, after the meeting was adjourned, and that seemed enough to satisfy her for now.

“Any other interruptions?” Bradford asked, glancing around the table for answers, direct or implied. Heron, Blot, and Steelbeak all seemed ready to continue – though whether the rooster would actually pay attention was another question; while Gandra’s focus seemed split between the egg on her lap and Bradford, and Rockerduck was busy rocking a now fussy baby Jeeves in an attempt to get him to sleep.

Bradford sighed; all things considered, he supposed this was the best he could ask for, for now.

As he resumed the meeting, he took a brief glance over at Gandra, making a mental note to keep an even closer eye on her activities on the FOWL servers…as well as look into the other network that she was connecting with so often. He had a feeling that would be very useful information to have in store for the future…especially now that it seemed that she had other priorities besides their mission to put an end to adventuring.

#DuckTales 2017 #Bradford Buzzard #Gandra Dee #John D Rockerduck #Baby Jeeves #Black Heron #Steelbeak #Phantom Blot #Rockerdad #Background Fendra #Fendra #DuckTales Fanfic

54 notes · View notes

bestworstcase · 4 years ago

Note

What are your opinions on the whole Rapunzel-Varian drama in S1 post Queen For A Day, especially with the whole "Rapunzel should've checked on Varian after the snowstorm" or whose fault it was for their conflict?

tbh… if i had to pick one single representative example of the tts fandom’s general inability to handle nuance in fictional conflict, it’d be the QFAD discourse™

because! while this isn’t to rag on anyone, if you pick a random person with an opinion on this question, chances are they will fall into one of two camps. either: 1) corona’s treatment of varian was horrifically unjust and everyone involved except him is a terrible person, or 2) rapunzel did what she had to do and varian’s anger is irrational, unfounded, and fundamentally unfair.

people in camp #1 tend to believe that rapunzel was simply being selfish and acting like a sulky child when she failed to check up on varian after the storm. people in camp #2 tend to point out that rapunzel was traumatized by the events of QFAD too, and believe that this justifies her failure to check up on varian.

but the thing is imo the conflict in QFAD + the rest of s1 is just as complex and messy as the argument cassandra and rapunzel have in RATGT, in that there is no One True Right Answer and no person who is one hundred percent “at fault.” the question of blame is… honestly sort of beside the point if you ask me. to break this down:

#1: rapunzel is a sheltered teenager with minimal social skills dealing with a national emergency halfway through her first unsupervised couple days on the job.

the girl has had like eight months tops of training for the monumental task of ruling a country. she grew up in a situation where the only choice available to her was how she would wile away her free time inside her tower; gothel exerted total control over every other facet of her life. and while she has a little more wiggle room now that she’s out of the tower, she is still basically living her life with all the big, consequential choices made for her.

QFAD was intended to be her first taste of true authority, while still being ultimately inconsequential. if all had gone according to plan, corona would have ticked along more or less on autopilot—just as frederic left it—while rapunzel got in a little practice making judgment calls about minor, unimportant things, like mediating small interpersonal disputes between her subjects.

nobody expected, and rapunzel was absolutely not prepared for, a legitimate national crisis to explode in her face out of nowhere. this was supposed to be pedaling by herself for the first time with training wheels and what she got instead is careening down the freeway on a motorbike at 95mph with zero warning. it is a miracle that she held things together as well as she did.

#2: varian is a child with an emotionally distant, unsupportive father who sets him up for failure.

he’s smart but he’s also fourteen. he has little if any formal training in alchemy, he’s figuring stuff out by trial and error, and he has zero adult supervision. his efforts have caused significant levels of destruction twice in only a few months—the exploding boilers in WTH, and his invention going haywire (with a little help from st. croix) in GE—and it’s implied that this is a fairly regular occurrence with him.

and yet quirin does nothing. he shouts at varian, shuts him down, and at several points orders him point blank to stop messing with alchemy… but he makes no effort to connect with his son or understand where he’s coming from; he doesn’t try to impose reasonable restrictions (like “don’t mess with volatile chemicals unless i’m there to help”) that would allow varian to pursue his passion while minimizing the danger; and he doesn’t create an environment where varian feels able to turn to his father for help. and then with the black rocks, he lets varian come along to see the king, but refuses to explain why he “lied” (/spoke in code) to the king, destroying any credibility he had in varian’s eyes and making varian panicky and desperate because it seemed like no one else cared.

so the end result is that varian feels like he has no choice but to sneak around behind quirin’s back. he can’t rely on his dad for help if anything goes wrong, but the situation is so dire that doing nothing also isn’t an option. he tries his best to be careful (before quirin barges in on him, varian is attempting to put just one drop of the amber serum on the rock) but even if quirin hadn’t startled him, a terrible accident was bound to happen sooner or later, and the responsibility for that lays just as much if not more on quirin’s shoulders—the adult in this situation—as on varian’s. the kid is FOURTEEN.

(i think a neat argument could be made for varian as a deconstruction of the teen/YA fantasy trope of the hyper-competent teenager with absentee parents whose absence allows the teen to get on with the important work of the high-stakes fantasy plot; but that’s a whole different post)

#3: rapunzel did the right thing, but lost control over the situation due to lack of experience.

it would have been wrong to abandon everybody in corona to run off into the blizzard with varian, and frankly it wouldn’t have helped quirin anyway. he was already encased in amber by the time varian got back to old corona, and rapunzel couldn’t have done anything in the moment had she been with varian then. the only benefit to her presence would have been to comfort varian—which is not a small thing, obviously, but it’s not in any way a reasonable exchange for the hundreds or thousands of lives that would have been lost if she left corona completely without a leader in the middle of a crisis. so broadly speaking, staying in corona was the right call.

however.

rapunzel was not in control during that scene in the palace. varian bursts in, panicking, explains his situation and begs for her help—and rapunzel just says, basically, “i can’t help you, there’s an emergency.” then nigel comes in and reinforces that, which makes varian freak out; he grabs rapunzel and shakes her, nigel signals for the guards in response, and varian gets dragged out of the palace while rapunzel pleads with the guards not to hurt him.

(sidebar: the hate nigel gets for describing varian as “attacking” rapunzel is unfounded. varian grabs her and shakes her roughly back and forth and that is, in fact, assault. nigel is not wrong to describe it as such.)

anyway, notice two the things that DON’T happen here:

1) rapunzel doesn’t offer up any alternative solutions. a more experienced or better prepared leader could have responded to varian’s plea with a plan of action, like: i need to stay in corona to oversee the evacuation, so we can’t leave right this minute, but cassandra will take you to ask xavier for advice right now and the minute it’s safe to leave we’ll go together to help your father. or whatever—the point is to engage proactively with varian’s problem, make him feel heard, and give him something productive to do so he isn’t just sitting around fretting in the palace or struggling back home by himself in the middle of a blizzard.

2) raps doesn’t challenge nigel’s decision when he summons the guards to throw varian out of the palace, which is something she absolutely could have done. she could have said no, i can’t go to old corona right this minute to help him, but we are not throwing him out into the storm again, he stays here with me. this is, again, a sign of her inexperience; she’s not used to being an authority, she’s never been in a situation like this before, and she’s under a ton of pressure—so when an older adult whom she sees as an authority (he’s her father’s advisor!) makes a judgment call, it probably doesn’t even occur to her that she can challenge it.

this is why i say that rapunzel lost control over the situation—because even though she made the Right Decision, she got a kind of awful outcome, ie varian being tossed out into the blizzard to struggle home by himself to deal with his problem without any support, and rapunzel inadvertently breaking her promise from earlier.

#4: rapunzel doesn’t immediately go to check on varian after the storm because she’s traumatized, busy, and trusts her father.

painter’s block is all about how the trauma rapunzel feels as a direct result of her decisions during the storm destroys her ability to choose anything. she feels so debilitated by the fear that she will make the wrong choice—because she worries that she chose wrong when she allowed varian to be sent away—that she can’t do anything at all, let alone find the emotional strength to go to old corona and confront her mistakes. and while she tries to process and move past this trauma, mrs sugarby exploits it in an attempt to force her to free zhan tiri.

the next episode, not in the mood, involves rapunzel being put under enormous pressure to entertain an irascible ally of corona’s while he and her father negotiate a trade deal with the threat of a war breaking out if they fail. NITM is a silly episode, but it has the highest non-magical stakes of any episode in the entire series. this isn’t an event rapunzel could have reasonably skipped out on for the sake of one person, no matter how much she cares. she’s slammed. she’s still being forced to prioritize just like she was in QFAD.

and in the third episode after QFAD, rapunzel is tormented by nightmares about varian and what happened to his father, so she presses frederic for information about the rocks and varian’s safety. and frederic assures her that everything is fine. he lies to her face about the rocks having been removed, and rapunzel has no reason to doubt him, so she relaxes… until varian contacts her directly, and she immediately jumps to help him.

#5: at the same time, varian has been forced into hiding because frederic is attempting to cover up the rock problem.

what happens to varian after QFAD is plainly unfair and unjust. his father is trapped in amber, the rocks have completely destroyed old corona, most of the villagers have presumably moved to the new land frederic set aside for them, and frederic’s secret police are crawling all over the village trying to suppress information about the rocks (and fred’s role in creating them). the blame for this lies squarely at frederic’s feet, and varian is right to be angry.

i believe that varian interprets rapunzel’s absence as a sign that she’s complicit in what frederic is doing, making his anger at her justified as well. he doesn’t have access to the information we do about why rapunzel doesn’t seek varian out immediately—he doesn’t see how distraught and shattered she is after the storm, or the high-stakes political nonsense she has to deal with, and he certainly doesn’t see her trying to pursue the matter of the rocks and varian’s safety with her father and being flatly lied to to convince her to stay put in corona. all he knows is that rapunzel kicked him out and now she’s ignoring him and her father’s agents keep chasing him away from his home, and he draws the conclusion that makes the most sense to him, ie rapunzel must be okay with all of this because otherwise she would be here.

and once he has that idea in his head, the fact that rapunzel immediately jumps to help him when he contacts her isn’t enough to dislodge it. he’s a scared, lonely fourteen year old boy looking at this situation through a purely interpersonal lens while rapunzel is an overwhelmed eighteen year old doing the best she can while juggling about a million things at once and putting varian low on her priority list because she’s been told by a trusted source that varian is fine.

they both make mistakes, they’re both missing important contextual information, and neither of them handles this situation in the best possible way. but neither of them is “at fault” in the sense of being purely in the wrong, and—imo—frederic and quirin hold the lion’s share of the blame here, because they had all the information, and they refused and refused and refused to deal with the black rock problem until it overwhelmed them both. varian and rapunzel are both just kids scrambling to deal with something that should not be their problem to solve, and both of them fuck up! (and even then—the best fred and quirin could’ve done was just be honest and upfront about what the problem was. neither of them had the means to fix anything, and neither of them was responsible for the very unfortunate timing of the blizzard. so it’s not as clear cut as everything bad in s1 happens because fred and quirin stuck their heads in the sand. a lot of it honestly was just sheer bad luck.)

a n y w a y, i think by s3 and after a lot of introspection, varian has figured a lot of this out, and that’s why he’s so quick to let go of his lingering grudge against rapunzel. he’s realized that at the end of the day, rapunzel was just as unprepared and lost in that situation as he was, that she’s not responsible for (and wasn’t complicit in) her father’s decisions, etc, etc.

#rta #this is a bit of a ramble but yeah #tangled-dreamer-97

299 notes · View notes

edge-lorde · 4 years ago

Text

the religion of the galactic horde

“You seem reluctant to help me. But I only wish to use your weapon to bring peace to the darkest corners of the universe. (Glimmer: Peace? If you activate the Heart of Etheria, there will be no one left.) Yes. No war, no pain. Old worlds swept aside, a new beginning for the universe.” --Horde Prime explaining his motivations to Glimmer

the horde in shera was definitely inspired by Christianity and uses a lot of its imagery, the most iconic being the baptism scene. it certainly gives off the vibes of a christian or christian adjacent cult, but what is its actual doctrine? i have some thoughts about that.

first here are what i consider to be the 3 main differences between real christianity and the horde:

Their jesus didn't ascend to heaven. He's still with them.

They don't have a larger creator god. They worship horde prime like he is a living god but they don't believe that he created the universe.

They have no focus on the afterlife

this is going to be long.

before i begin heres the sparknotes version of christianity for anyone not familiar. I am not evangelizing this, just think of it as LORE.

Once upon a time there was a guy named Jesus. He was the son of the one true god, who both created everything in the universe, is everywhere and knows everything, and controls the afterlife. Jesus is god born as a mortal person, sent by god to teach all of humanity the errors of their evil ways so they can repent and go to the good afterlife when they die. There're two afterlives, a good one and a bad one, heaven is the good one and its run by god and his army of angels, which are divine beings that god can send to earth to do things. The bad one is called hell.

Anyway, in his time on earth jesus was the only person ever to never do anything bad ever (called sin). He tried to teach people how to be good but was Too Good for this Cruel World and was killed. 3 days later he came back from the dead, proving his divinity. Some time after that however, he ascended into heaven without dying, telling his followers to spread the word because hes going to be coming back. Christians today are still awaiting his return. In the meantime, christians follow his teachings left behind in holy texts.

The crux of christianity is to get to heaven when you die, and this can only be done by following the teachings of jesus christ, believing in god, and believing that jesus was the son of god. Its a given that everyone will do bad things at some point in their lives so you're supposed to pray to god and ask for forgiveness regularly and if you really mean it then god will forgive you.

thats the basics.

to my first main point from above, if we posit that horde prime is the jesus equivalent of the horde religion, because hes treated as a living god, his goal is to spread his philosophy throughout the universe, then in the horde religions jesus never ascended into heaven. this would be like if jesus in our world rose from the dead and just picked up where he left off, and never died after that and was alive today. that would be pretty good proof of divinity.

to my 2nd point, theres nothing in the show that suggests that horde prime thinks that he created the universe. this means that he did not get his divinity from anywhere but inside himself, hes not claiming that hes the rightful ruler of the known universe for any other reason besides his ideas are the best.

the 3rd point is that the show does show horde prime or the horde caring one bit about the afterlife, save for one line from wrong hordak.

"Brother, I hope you, too, are full of only love for Horde Prime and have no crippling doubt eating at your soul."

meaning that they have the concept of the soul. which is very interesting and ill get to it, but on the whole the hordes focus seems to be on the here and now. this is a huge departure from christianity because chrisitanity is all about getting to the afterlife. that is the reason that christians are supposed to follow christ and recruit as many people as possible to do the same, because if they dont, they or other people will supposedly go to hell when they die. i say supposedly because at funerals, even if the person who died wasnt a believer, in my experience no christian would ever ever ever insinuate that someone went to hell.

but the difference still stands. following real christian ideology is supposed to have benefits for the individual in the afterlife, while in the horde religion salvation seems to only be found by submitting to prime in this life and being either a tool that he can use to further his goal of purifying the universe or by letting him remove you from it.

on top of all that, horde prime has the hive mind, which he uses to control the thoughts of all his followers. this means that theres no room for a bible study, no need of a holy text at all in fact, and no room for interpretation. horde prime delivers orders to your brain directly and can tell if you think anything out of line. real Christianity does have the idea that a sin that you just think about doing is as bad as actually doing it, but in the horde these thoughts can be easily discovered and punished.

the horde religion seems to me to be a strangely secular version of christianity with only the bad parts remaining; the control, the blind faith, the certainty that you are right and everyone else is wrong, the not questioning authority. with none of the good aspects like community, and good deeds. it is a cult in the truest sense of the word, a religion that begins and ends with one person only, that person being horde prime.

so, if you take horde prime out of the equation, what, if anything, would be left?

i find the plight of the horde clones here to be the most interesting. we know that they do have thoughts about their religion, as it was hordaks belief that he could earn his way back into horde primes god graces that kept him going all those years in despondos, and wrong hordak is distraught when he discovers that horde prime lied about krytis.

unlike both the chipped people we see in the show and real religious converts, the clones were born into this cult that values blind obedience only, and have no prior ideology or cultural identity to fall back on when they are taken out of it.

so to answer this question, i must add some conjecture to horde primes backstory and how the clones see themselves in horde primes universe. I already wrote up a brief backstory idea for horde prime/the clones and have it posted on here somewhere. I'm not going to dig it up but you could probably find it in the #horde prime tag on my blog if you dig hard enough.

To summarize it though, I have it as horde prime was once a regular (bad) dude who became a cult leader under the premise of preaching peace --> he becomes disillusioned with people and even his own followers because he doesn't actually like people, he likes manipulating them. --> this and the power of being a cult leader go to his head and he starts to think that he is the only person in existence capable of living a moral life and everyone else needs to be saved from themselves, the world would be a better place if he could just make everyone's decisions for them. --> he somehow gets a hold of the technology needed to set up the hive mind, be it by inventing it himself, stealing it, finding it, or being gifted it.

I'll pause here to address the theory that horde prime was originally an eldritch being that simply possessed a dude who would become the template for the clones. I think there's enough stuff in the show that this is a valid read and might even be canon but i don't really care for it. For me, what makes horde prime a compelling villain is that he's a very human evil, so having him actually be an evil demon thing instead of a really bad but believable dude who got near ultimate power weakens his character. BUT, i’m not going to address it in my comic so i'll leave it open as to whether he's got that going on or not. If he is, the clones don’t know about it and neither they nor the other characters have any way of discovering it. IF he is though, it would happen here. I could see it being a cool idea for him to get the hive mind from the eldritch being that would then possess him and haunt his lineage for time immemorial as a deal with the devil sort of thing, but he has to be a bad person before that.

Anyway he gets the hive mind--> he gets all of his followers to chip themselves --> gets those people to chip everyone else on his home planet --> use his planet wide army to harvest all resources on the planet and build his first space fleet and take to the skies and start his conquest--> realize that if he is to succeed hes going to need to both become immortal and find a steady source of new followers because chipped people die eventually and he doesnt care about people enough to figure out a way to keep a self sufficient population of followers alive, he just wants people around to adore him and do his bidding--> invents his cloning system-->

and heres the big one,

his original body has to die so he can upload his consciousness into a new clone.

and THAT, to the clones, would be the moment that horde prime becomes a god.

his reliance on the hive mind and vast network of followers are what give him his godly abilities, but just as the horde clones could not exist without being cloned from horde prime, so too could horde prime not exist as he does in the show without them.

i see it as both a christlike sacrifice and a cyclical system of debt and sacrifice. horde prime dies for our sins, so that he might continue to purify the universe so that there will be no more death and more clones will be born, while the clone hes possessing has to essentially die by giving himself up entirely to become the new prime so all this can happen too, and to repay primes death. not all clones can become the next prime however, but all must be ready to die for him, hence horde prime having clone infantries despite also having robots he could send instead.

i dont have clear thoughts about what the green goo is, but horde primes words about his brothers lending him their life force go along with this idea. the clones give him theyre life force, so he can give it back to them.

another interesting aspect of this is that prime always portrays himself as a brother to his followers, never a father as christ is portrayed as in christianity. i know this is from hordak and horde prime being actual brothers in the 80s show but ive seen this trope come up a few times in media before, where a man raises a kid but has them call him their brother instead of dad. it seems so deliberate. because a parents job is to take care of you, but a sibling, might take care of you sure, but thats not their job. its like hes deliberately trying to place himself on the same level as his ‘sibling’ so he can demand the same amount of respect you would give to a parent without taking on the responsibility to not... ya know... screw them over in the head? idk it seems very slimy to me. but that says more about prime as a character than how the clones see him.

and we still have the concept of the soul to fit in here somehow, and do they have an afterlife? im going to say no to the afterlife. theres just not enough in the show to go off of and everything that we do know about horde prime points to him only caring about himself in life. HOWEVER, there is nothing more quintessentially christian than the concept of hell and i think that will be of use here.

since the creation of the clones is tied with the creation of their religion, this would put the clones themselves less as allegories of people who need to be saved and more as the horde version of angels. in my telling here, horde prime views all people who do not submit to his will as net negatives to the universe who have to be removed for peace to exist, so by this view the chipped people are the saved, the people that horde prime kills are the sinners, and his military campaign is one long apocalypse slowly working its way through the universe, with the clones carrying out his righteous judgement. but the afterlife isnt involved in this, so even if some chipped people are left alive, eventually they will all die out, and then it will be just horde prime and is clones in a perfect, peaceful starless sky, and thats what heaven is.

getting to heaven is the main goal of real christianity and it is the same in horde religion, but heaven isnt a place in the horde cosmology, its a physical goal that has to be created. not all clones will make it to heaven of course, because most will die before they reach total destruction of the universe but the clones arent supposed to think of themselves as individuals anyway. they have to be willing to die for horde prime and die for the cause or be cast out and thats hell.

i dont see prime as someone who would kill his own followers outright too often even though he could. plus they arent supposed to value their individual lives the same way normal people do anyway it doesnt seem like a real punishment, they need something worse than simple death to fear. so by my view hell for the clones is separation from prime. it can be in life or death. no matter how bad it is in the horde being on the outside of it has to seem worse, and thats where the concept of the soul comes in. when one is a part of the hive mine, their soul is with prime. they are not supposed to have a will or any thoughts beyond love for prime, its essentially the same as not having a soul but they think of it as being at peace. being cast out is to be never at peace and would be told to them as being the worst possible thing that could ever happen to someone because it corrupts the soul.

“a lot of unpleasant things happen in the horde so just imagine how terrible it must be outside of it! you cant because i protect you from that. now get in the goo, this is for your own good” - horde prime probably

this is why outsiders are so resistant to submitting to primes light and also why its ok to kill them, in the hordes view.

so, to start wrapping thigs up, there is no horde without horde prime. the religion starts and ends with him. because he is supposed to be the only person ever to be able to make true moral and just decisions, without him is followers cant take any actions without worrying that they are going against primes will. since they have no holy text they cant extrapolate and try to figure it out either. its up in the air whether or not they are going to find a way to get the horde to make the jump from cult to regular religion.

its late i got to go to bed now

#shera #spop #the horde #the galactic horde #horde prime #horde clones #horde #rambling #Thoughts #this is really long and rambly but i think most of my thoughts got in there #im falling asleep as i type this #might redo this if i can think of a more concise way to say it

40 notes · View notes

hallowxiu · 4 years ago

Text

Unlikely Competition

pairing: Mammon/gn!mc

word count: 1.5k

summary: You’re not the only one who’s been practicing pick up lines.

a/n: part 9 of the mc isn’t good at pick up lines series. let me know if you have any requests or suggestions :)

part five | part six | part seven | part eight

You’ve been laying off the pick up lines for the last week and a half. Not because you had run out of them, you definitely hadn’t, but your last encounter with Simeon, like Levi’s, was… unsettling, to say the least. You felt like Simeon had told you something that you weren’t supposed to know, and now you didn’t know what to do with that information. These pick up lines were putting you into more hot water than they were worth, and you decided to finally lay the idea to rest. And that’s exactly what you did. However, the universe was not your friend, and if the universe wanted you to do something then it would surely get its way.

The first time you felt it was in the library. You looked up from the textbook you were reading from to see Satan sending you a weird look from across the library. Before you could even ask him what the matter was, you felt an icy stare on your back, the type that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand. However, when you turned around to investigate, you saw no one there. You glanced back at Satan, but the demon only shrugged and went back to his own book. “I don’t want any part of this.”

The second time it happened was at RAD. You felt the cold glare again when you were in the middle of a conversation with Belphegor and Beelzebub in the cafeteria. The twins were chatting across from you while you picked at the food on your tray. Your eyes widened slightly and you visibly stiffened when feeling attention on you. You quickly spun around in your seat, however, much to your dismay, no one was there.

“You okay?” You turned back around at Belphie’s question, a sheepish smile on your lips. You probably looked like a basket case.

“Ah, I thought I heard someone call my name.” You scratched at the back of your neck as you lied. As well as not being observant, you also weren’t a very convincing liar. “I must’ve imagined it.” Belphie looked at you with a quirked eyebrow, though he didn’t press on the topic further when Beel asked for your roll. You were in the middle of handing over your roll when Satan and Leviathan sat on either side of you. You felt your cheeks instinctively redden when glancing over at the third eldest demon. You had to play it cool. “Levi.” Your mind blanked again. “H-Hey.” You choke a little. Nailed it. You turned away from the purple haired demon before he could respond, staring at Satan with a forced smile. “Hey.” The blond looked at you with a raised eyebrow and only shook his head in response.

The third time it happened was in the middle of dinner. You were listening to Asmodeus and Satan gossip about a student from school when you felt the cold glare settle over you, the sudden feeling causing you to choke on the food you had just put in your mouth. Satan’s hand comes down firmly on your back, the brothers all looking at you with a concerned look. You blinked several times after swallowing the pesky food.

“What in the Devildom just happened?” Lucifer asked from behind you with his hand gently soothing down your hair.You hadn’t even noticed him getting up from his seat. “Are you alright?”

“It’s really bad for your skin to choke like that. You probably just took a few years off your lifespan.” Asmodeus comments from your right.

“Thanks for the concern.” You breathed out as the tears formed from your choking clung to your lashes.

“Humans are so fragile.” Beel said to no one in particular while he swiped Levi’s food when he wasn’t paying attention.

And now you’re here, locked in your room by the orders of Lucifer for nearly dying over dinner. After scolding you for not resting enough, he sent you to your room for the night. With nothing to do, you let your mind drift towards the icy stare you kept feeling for the last several days. You had started to wonder if the stress of finals were finally getting to you, or if you had actually managed to piss off one of the brothers. You couldn’t recall any of the demons acting any different around you, but admittedly you also weren’t the most observant person in the world. With your bottom lip tucked between your teeth, your eyebrows furrowed together as your mind racked through all the possibilities.

You sat up slightly when a knock came from the other side of your door. “Come in.” A wide smile tugged at your lips when your favorite white haired demon stepped inside. “Mammon!” You had just started to get out of bed to hug the man, but paused halfway through when seeing the look he was giving you. Ah, so that’s who’s been glaring at me the last week… “Why are you glaring at me like that?”

“I’m sorry for makin’ ya choke at dinner.”

“Uh… it’s okay..?” Your head tilted to the side while you stared at him with a confused expression. Why was he apologizing if he was still seemingly upset with you? “But why are you glaring--”

“I’m tryna do somethin’, stop starin’ at me because it’s makin’ me nervous!” You felt another smile tug at your lips and you sit yourself back down on your bed.

“Is that why you’ve been glaring at me all week? You know, that was really creepy at first. I could literally feel your gaze on me, you know.”

“Yeah, well…” Mammon’s cheeks instinctively reddened as his eyes avoided you and changed his gaze toward the floor. “That’s because I was tryn’ to approach ya!”

“When have you ever had an issue with approaching me?”

“Because--!” His eyes widened slightly after nearly giving himself away. “Just… listen.” You shot him a suspicious look but stayed quiet anyway. “Let me tie your shoes.”

“Uh…” You glanced down at the fuzzy socks you had on. “I’m not wearing--”

“--Because I can’t have ya fallin’ for anyone else.”

Your eyes widened in realization and you pointed a finger at him. “You’re trying to beat me at my own game that you somehow managed to talk me into in the first place!” You rambled out without taking as much as a breath.

“S-Shut up! I’m not! But it took me near a damn week to come up with that!” He shouts in his defense, arms crossed across his chest. A week? Well, that’s unexpectedly cute. “A-Anyway,” Mammon awkwardly clears his throat, “I don’t really know much about the human realm, but I know this is a line, I think. Are ya from Tennessee? Because you’re the only ten I see.”

You stared at the demon who’d been practically glaring a hole into the floor the entire conversation, his face redder than it had ever been. “I wish I were cross-eyed so I could see ya twice.”

“I’m no photographer but I can picture us together.”

“If you were a chicken, you’d be impeccible.”

“Are ya a bank loan? Because you’ve got my interest.”

“Life without ya is like a broken pencil. Pointless.”

“Did you invent the airplane? Because ya seem Wright for me.”

You blinked several times, a blush creeping across your cheeks and over the bridge of your nose. “You came prepared.” You comment dumbly.

“Did you- did ya like them?” His hands are stuffed into his pockets and for the first time since he came in, his gaze met yours. The focused glare is gone and replaced with a softer expression. “It turns out this shit is harder than it looks.”

You snorted quietly and tapped the empty spot beside you. “I’ve been trying to tell you that it’s harder than it looks.” A bashful Mammon takes a seat next to you, both of your faces equally as red. “That was really cute, Mammon.”

“Cute?” He whipped his head in your direction and stared at you with a fallen expression. “Just cute? Ain’t it supposed to woe ya or somethin’?”

“Oh shoot, I’m sorry. Let me- Mammon! I’m so wooed right now! Catch me while I throw myself into your arms!” You shouted dramatically before throwing yourself into a flustered Mammon’s arms.

“T-This ain’t the time to be jokin’ around!” Pushing yourself off, you get stopped halfway through only for Mammon to pull you closer, his face redder than it was before. “I didn’t say I wanted ya to stop though.” He huffed under his breath.

“Mammon, you can throw pick up lines my way whenever you want, you know that right? We’re partners in crime, remember? I’d never judge you for that.” You reminded him happily as you nuzzled your face into the side of his neck. “But can I say something?”

You felt him inhale nervously as he glances down at you. “What?”

“Never stare at me like that again or I will come after you.”

“A-Ah, wait-- ya don’t have to word it like that--”

#drabbles #drabble #shall we date obey me #obey me shall we date fluff #obey me x mc #obey me #shall we date #mammon #mammon x mc #mammon x reader #mammon one shot #mammon drabble #mammon imagine #shall we date obey me one shot #shall we date obey me imagine #obey me imagine #mc is gender neutral #mc is gn

97 notes · View notes

3laxx · 3 years ago

Text

Beneath Hexside High

When Boscha accidentally trashes the gym in Grudgby practice, Luz panics and pulls her in Gus' tunnel to avoid getting in trouble. Unfortunately for them, that only gets them in more trouble, as they discover some dark secret beneath Hexside...

Luz and Boscha fall through the floor into their rival school's ruins, Glandus, and discover that they aren't alone down there. Begrudgingly, they have to work together.

The summary is a little questionable but I'm tired xD I'm glad it attracted you anyway! Also I'm very open for summary suggestions, just shoot them in the comments!

In any way, have fun with this Oneshot, I had a lot of fun writing it and will hopefully be able to write more over summer.

Ao3 / FF.net

---

Grumbling, she leaned against her locker and let her head knock against the hard surface. How these things were actually alive while feeling so much like metal was still a mystery to her, even after the four years she had spent on the Boiling Isles.

She was nearing graduation now, and her choice to take all tracks took its toll now. Nowadays, she was hurrying from one class to another, trying to perfect her glyphs skills while also trying to cram as much theory into her head as possible.

Her ADHD wasn’t making her life easy, with just scribbling down notes while listening to professors droning on about something, but usually, it helped when the magic theory showed itself in the more practical lessons. Naturally, she had a lot more trouble getting all the history right, since the Boiling Isles had an entirely different chronology and events from the human world.

Here, nobody knew about the invention of the printing machine, the World Wars, or John F. Kennedy.

Instead, she was learning about the Savage ages, the emperor’s version of the history of the Boiling Isles (while Eda was teaching her all about the true history) and the different laws and establishments made over the past fifty years.

Well, her friends kept an eye on her at least.

Eda always made her eat enough, so much that she started reminding her of her mom back in the human realm by now, and King always managed to make her smile.

Willow and Gus helped her with Plants and Illusions and when Boscha had started being a little more open to the friendly human, her clique had started helping Luz along as well. With their help, Luz had managed to find a lot more glyphs still, and now at the age of eighteen, she had mastered plants and ice magic, as well as discovered useful glyphs for abominations, oracles, lightning, teleportation, and her personal favorite, mist. Well, it was more of a combination between fire and ice glyphs, which she had first discovered by mixing up drawing her glyph in class and accidentally created the mist glyph, which held properties of both the fire and ice glyph.

She could also summon clear water and had even managed to find a shield glyph, making it a lot easier on Eda and Lilith to protect the House from boiling rain.

She had even been able to find a healing glyph, which she had immediately given to the Healing Coven as well because they had a deeper understanding of their magic, and paired with the glyph, Luz had been able to learn advanced healing outside of Hexside classes together with some glyph interested healers.

By now, she could easily attend to scratches, wounds, lacerations and even ease the pain of broken bones. The healers over in the Coven loved using the glyphs as a first-aid painkiller.

The best aspect of staying here on the Boiling Isles was, of course, her chosen family and friends, but one person had managed to make her stay way sweeter.

Her girlfriend.

Opening her eyes, Luz smiled towards the chattering group of her friends closing in on her locker and locked eyes with Amity. The young witch smiled back and, upon reaching her, leaned next to her on the lockers, not minding the eye above her head blinking sleepily before closing again, and took Luz’s hand to interlace their fingers.

“Hi babe.”, she greeted and got a small meep! in return, making her smirk. Amity was still so easily flustered, she almost felt bad.

“Hi. You look tired.”, there it was. Luz hummed when she gave a noncommittal shrug, then she turned to Willow who was waiting for her attention to talk about the upcoming test in plants.

Amity and she had started dating two years ago when they had confessed during their Azura Book Club meeting. Or well, Amity had confessed, Luz had awkwardly laughed and kissed her hand.

Fond memories.

She bit back a chuckle before answering Willow while squeezing Amity’s hand softly.

“Hey Willow, by the way. I’ve had some trouble with the speed of growing flowers. Either I grow them too fast and they break or I grow them too slow and can’t get them to full bloom. What’s up with that?”, she asked, getting Willow’s full attention – and enthusiasm – for her question.

After Willow had switched to the plant track, it had become evident that the plat witch not only had quite some skill to show for this track but also the enthusiasm and interest to study hard for it. She had caught up with theory a lot faster than Bump would’ve anticipated.

Her girlfriend rested her head against her shoulder before answering Skara who had been gushing about some up-and-coming singer she heard about, and Luz couldn’t help but overhear the mini yawn she tried to cover. Apparently, she had studied all night again, and then she was calling her tired.

Luz nodded to the answer Willow gave about managing to bring the flower up to full bloom before keeping it right there, when the bell screamed and she reached down to shoulder her bag again, waving the others goodbye and tugging Amity along who was just laughing about a joke Gus made before turning back to her.

Another little yawn.

Luz hummed at that, kissing her temple. She didn’t even get a chastising clap on her shoulder, just a quiet, satisfied hum. Normally, Amity was pretty adamant about keeping public affection to a minimum, especially while they were nearing graduation. But sometimes, Luz couldn’t resist.

“I look tired while you’re dead on your feet.”, she mumbled and Amity tried to bite something back but instead, a big yawn now sounded. She grinned at that and lifted their hands, pressing a soft kiss to her fingers and coming to a stop in front of the abomination’s classroom.

Luckily, they would attend a practical class today. She was sure Amity would doze away otherwise with the state she was in. Humming, Luz turned to her and softly took her in her arms, resting her chin on the side of Amity’s head. Thanks to her heels, Amity was just tall enough for Luz not to reach the top of her head, but she was still small enough for Luz to cuddle her in properly. The abominations professor would still take a while, Luz had heard about some hold up in the oracles hallways and he had been called there to keep whatever it was under control.

Amity sighed and buried her face in her girlfriend’s uniform, before nuzzling her way up to Luz’s neck, breathing against her brown skin. Luz loved the way she was snuggling up to her, like a little cat. Whenever she was given the chance, Amity would take up any and all physical affection. Preferably in private, since she wasn’t a big fan of being observed doing so, but with her sleep deprivation, her boundaries had seemed to be somewhat adjusted.

Not that Luz minded. She loved affection from her, and she didn’t care about being in public. Sometimes she even liked it, because she could show people how much Amity was her little girlfriend.

“… Mm md m stud all nmmght…”, she mumbled and Luz strained her ears but couldn’t actually make out what Amity had meant.

“… What did you say?”, she asked and the witch huffed, before turning her head a bit so her mouth wouldn’t be pressed up against Luz’s collarbone and muffle her words.

“Mom made me study all night.”, she replied, now much clearer and Luz grumbled at that, “For the last test I got.”

Furrowing her eyebrows, Luz held her tighter, genuinely confused.

“Your last test was an A, how could she be angry with that?”, she asked and Amity huffed.

“I don’t know. I think she had a bad day.”, she sighed, then she pressed a small, hidden kiss to Luz’s neck and shook her head.

“No talk, more hug.”, she demanded and Luz knew exactly why. After this class, she would have to go to the gym to train for Grudgby and Amity didn’t like hugging her when she was sweaty. She assumed her girlfriend just didn’t like the smell. And after lunch, they both had some extra activities, which meant no Azura Book Club for the afternoon.

Luz already missed her until tomorrow.

Even after two years of a happy relationship, the longing for close proximity hadn’t lessened. Even a weekend occasionally was too long, resulting in some snippy, well-meaning comments from Eda until Luz would see her again on Monday.

The witch nuzzled closer to her and Luz leaned her head against hers, experimentally blowing some tiny baby hairs that stood away from her little ponytail, observing how they fluttered in the wind. Amity had tried resisting her mother’s demands to dye her hair again about a year back but had quickly lost the fight. Luz wondered what her hair would look like now since Amity had let it grow out a little more and kept it wilder and unruly. She would really like to see her naturally brunette hair on her. Maybe as soon as Amity turned eighteen, she was allowed to let it grow out.

Humming, Luz let herself fall back against the wall, pulling Amity with her and letting her rest on her chest due to the slight angle they stood in now, but Amity didn’t seem to mind. They waited for another bit until it became clear that the professor wouldn’t turn up anymore, so Luz coaxed Amity into following her to the communal space of the graduates, a room that was reserved for the grad class only, where they lied down on a couch together.

Sitting down against the backrest, Amity immediately slumped against her and Luz adjusted accordingly for her girlfriend to sit comfortably, before nuzzling her nose into her hair.

“What class you got after abominations?”, she asked softly and Amity hummed, a little strained.

“Runes. Can you just hide me?”, she asked and Luz had to smile about that, softly kissing her temple. Amity wasn’t even bothered by the handful of other students in the room, which painted a full picture of her exhaustion for Luz.

“I don’t think I have room to hide you in my Grudgby uniform.”, she timidly replied and Amity let out an exasperated groan, before turning to Luz and throwing both her leg over her lap and her arm around her chest.

“Pleeease, I’m so tired, I don’t wanna go to Runes.”, she whined and Luz decided she had never heard anything more adorable than her girlfriend’s whining.

“You’re top of the year. You’re not allowed to say stuff like that. Others are looking up to you.”, she jokingly mumbled, to which she finally earned the well-deserved jab in her ribs.

“You’re not allowed to say that to me, you’re my girlfriend.”, Amity grumbled and Luz giggled, somewhat sliding to the side so she leaned against the armrest instead and put her legs up on the couch after kicking off her shoes and coaxed Amity to follow her suit. Which she did and a minute later, they were lying down on their sides, cuddled up together.

“Sorry, Mi Amor, I won’t do it again.”, she mumbled, then Amity pressed her cold nose into the crook between her jaw and neck, which made her shiver. Amity loved to do that because she always had an exceptionally cold nose tip.

“Good. Accept defeat.”, the young witch huffed and Luz couldn’t help but giggle at her sleepy voice, softly kissing her forehead, before nudging her so Amity would look up. She looked up blearily, her eyes barely opened so Luz couldn’t even make out the molten gold of her iris, then she kissed her nose tip before Amity was allowed to lie back down on her chest, her nose pushing right back to the junction of Luz’s neck to her jaw. She supposed she wouldn’t ever be able to get Amity to stop that. Honestly, she didn’t want to, anyway.

“I accept defeat, oh almighty overlord.”, she softly mocked the girl in her arms and got an indignant, but nonetheless content huff back. Smiling, Luz listened to her breaths getting longer and calmer, while she kept her nose buried in her hair, enjoying smelling Amity’s very own scent paired with the shampoo she was using. Humming, the Latina finally closed her eyes as well, smiling to herself.

It didn’t take long until Amity fell asleep against her and Luz was just glad that the twins didn’t attend Hexside anymore since they had graduated two years ago.

It wasn’t that she didn’t miss their antics, but it sure made Amity a lot more comfortable not being annoyed by her older siblings all day long, since they still lived at home and she had them all afternoon still.

Luz was leaning against the side rest of the couch now and Amity had her arms slung around her torso, her cheek squished against Luz’s chest while she slept. The human smiled softly, before taking a picture on Amity’s scroll phone for her to find later, then she rested her head back against the cushion and hummed, closing her eyes as well.

She trusted the bell’s screaming to wake them up in time, so she let herself doze away softly, enjoying the feeling of her girlfriend in her arms and her head rested on her chest, their steady breathing aligning until they created a calming symphony.

Little did she know Gus found them as well after Luz had also dozed away, and taken another picture to send to them later, before sitting down on the couch next to them and starting to practice an Illusion spell he had been working on together with Luz, who had found the Illusion glyph just about a week ago.

---

Luz groaned when her head slammed into the stone floor and she opted to just stay on her back until the white spots of pain would stop dancing in her vision.

This decision wasn’t hers to make, though.

Because a rough pair of hands ripped her up and pulled her into a sprint. Or well, she was stumbling more than she was running actually until she regained her footing and was able to carry herself across the bumpy, uneven floor while behind them, a growl sounded.

“For fucks sake, Noceda!”, an incredibly charming voice yelled into her ear as if she hadn’t just taken the brunt of the fall for them both and she winced with the volume.

“Boscha, I swear, if it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t be in this situation!”, she grumbled, rubbing the spot where she had hit the stone, then she glanced over to the triclops girl.

The other teen didn’t spare her a glance while her seeking eyes followed the hallway they were running down, seeking a hideout or an exit or anything.

“That’s because you insisted on using that stupid tunnel the small faker dug to get away from Bump!”, Boscha growled and Luz finally ripped her hands away, so she could be running freely again.

“First of all, Gus is an Illusionist, not a faker. And it’s not my fault you trashed the gym just to show me off!”, she shot back and followed Boscha taking a sharp right.

“And it’s not my fault your stupid face makes me wanna throw things into it!”

The human groaned. They wouldn’t get anywhere with this.

After they had once again gotten into a fight in the gym, Boscha had absolutely trashed the place, leading to Bump demanding to speak to them and Luz, handling out of panic, pulling Boscha into the tunnel Gus had dug under the school.

The tunnel floor had opened up under the weight of the two girls, and given way to a hidden set of hallways, looking like the school floors above them. Luz had a bad feeling that they had been hidden and sealed off for a reason. Didn’t Grom live under the school or something?

She definitely remembered that Hexside had been built on the ruins of their opposing school, Glandus High. Were these ruins of the former Glandus school?

Well, it didn’t matter anyway. Because right after they had fallen into these forgotten hallways, something had started chasing them. Boscha had said it was something like rats, just essentially bigger versions from the human realm, but at the same time, she had been pretty uncertain.

That wasn’t anything like critters living off of crumbs down here. She was pretty sure it was a lot worse, maybe even Grometheus himself, but she absolutely didn’t want to find out. And to both their dismay, in their panic, Boscha and Luz had managed to find what was probably the only other hole in the ground and fallen through that as well. Now they were a long way under the school with no way back up.

Boscha took another aimless left and Luz huffed, still rubbing her head before running straight into a wall, along with Boscha who had looked behind them. Now, this was a dead end.

“Fuck. Any ideas?”, the three-eyed gaze found her and Luz quickly got up to grab Boscha’s sleeve in turn now and dart back to the hallway they had been coming from, before running again, away from the direction they had been coming from.

“I think these hallways are somewhat structured like Hexside above. If we follow this one and take a right, we might find some stairs and breakthrough.”, she rambled, her brain running a thousand miles an hour while she was trying to navigate through this maze. She hoped there would be some sort of stairs.

“Are you sure about this, Noceda?!”

Rolling her eyes, Luz shrugged and let go of Boscha’s sleeve.

“I’m assuming these are Glandus High hallways. I hope Bump somewhat resembled Hexside from it.”

Now it was Boscha’s turn to snarl.

“You really think Bump would resemble the infrastructure of our rivals?!”, she asked and Luz grimaced. She admitted, it seemed super unlikely, but if she was being honest, she had no idea. She just wanted to keep running for now. What was worrying her more was that the walls all along the hallways were somewhat lit. Which meant there was still magic lingering around here.

Was this a good or a bad sign? What if the creature chasing them was feeding off of it? Or even worse, it was the one keeping the magic alive down here?

Growling, Luz tried to keep her mind in the game instead of lapsing into theories.

They took another turn, running down a hallway and past a few abandoned rooms, but soon it became evident to Luz that if the hallways were somewhat close to Hexside above, they should’ve stumbled across some stairs by now.

“Maybe we can hide out in one of those rooms for the time being, until that thing forgets us!”, she yelped, pinching her aching sides, but Boscha didn’t lessen her sprint.

“That thing found us immediately when we fell down here! Pretty sure it uses magic tracking us!”

A nod was all Luz could muster. She groaned, taking a turn to some sort of communal area, then they sprinted into another hallway branching off of it, spending no time looking around. And sure enough, a few seconds after they left the room, she heard one of the old chairs cracking.

“Shouldn’t we find any sort of way upstairs, soon?!”, she questioned and the other teen growled, “I mean, we’re two levels below, somehow they had to be connected!”

After taking another turn, they stumbled into a big room, looking almost like an auditorium, and Luz had to break her sprint into a jog, favoring her aching sides.

“C’mon human! We gotta go!”, the witch yelled when she turned, but Luz was heaving. She couldn’t go on like that.

“I’ll try to block off here! Go around!”, she ordered and pulled a glyph, turning through the door they had been coming through. Boscha knew Luz was right. They couldn’t keep on running away like this, and she preferred the open space to the hallways as well. Grumbling, she jogged backward, then she turned and sprinted out into the hallway to go around. Luckily, they seemed to stretch all around this auditorium or gym.

Meanwhile, Luz tried to regain her breath as she threw the rock glyph, creating a wall underneath herself so whatever followed them would be confused first. Huffing, she crouched down on the ledge she had created for the beast to show itself. It had started chasing them down immediately after they had entered these halls and not let off of them. Maybe it was territorial, but it shouldn’t have found them as easily.

Groaning, Luz rubbed her sides. She was not used to sprinting that much, even after playing Grudgby for four years now. Against Amity’s endurance and Willow’s strength, she was still very much a nerd. Suddenly, silence filled the catacombs down here and the scratching and huffing from whatever had given them a good run for their lives stopped. For a short moment, Luz feared it had gotten Boscha, but she would’ve heard her screams. Probably.

Holding her breath, she fixated the door while she pulled the next glyph, a fire glyph, and remained quiet. Apparently, Boscha did the same, as she couldn’t hear a sound whatsoever anymore.

And then, hell broke loose.

Something was barreling through her wall and the next thing she knew she was falling down to the ground. Rocks of her summoned wall fell around her and dust filled her lungs before she roughly slammed on the tiles below, her elbow cracking and her head, once again, connecting with stone.

At this rate, she should consider wearing a helmet.

Quickly coming to her feet, Luz stumbled out of the dust cloud and for the first time, got a proper look at the beast that had been following them around for the past few minutes. It was big and scaly, but she couldn’t define what exactly it was. It almost looked like a mix of a rat and a lizard, just a lot bigger than was still acceptable. Its skin and scales seemed worn and battle experienced, but the beast didn’t seem old. On the contrary, it seemed quite full of energy.

A scream escaped her throat and the thing turned towards her. Where there should be eyes, there was just head. Her gaze flickering around, she saw no eyes. This thing had nothing that resembled eyes. Apparently, it was blind.

Figures why it found them so quickly.

It was completely relying on its hearing, judging by the big, mouse-like ears on top of its head. Luz breathed through. Maybe she could befriend and calm it down. After all, they fell into its territory, maybe they could satiate its rage somewhat and leave before anyone came to harm.

When it opened its big snout, though, Luz gulped and reconsidered.

These teeth looked very much made for killing.

She doubted this thing grew them for no reason. They looked like they could smash and swallow cows in whole. The thing started charging at her and she couldn’t move in shock until a fireball slammed into the side of its hideous head and she looked over to see a furious pink head between the rubble.

“Human! Do you have a death wish?!”, she heard and resisted rolling her eyes.

“How do we escape this?!”, she shot back and Boscha jumped over the debris of her failed wall, before joining her side, grumbling when she summoned fire around her hands.

“We kill it.”, she hissed and Luz slanted her lips, but she readied a glyph.

“I don’t feel like that’s the right thi-”, she began, but the triclops sent another fireball after the beast before grabbing her neck, her hand clasping too tightly she almost complained and forcing her out of the way while it charged.

“Either this thing or us!”, she called and the human sighed. Fine, she could see that logic. That still didn’t ease her mind.

“It’s blind! We could use that!”

Boscha shot her a glance and, while obviously heeding her useful information, she still seemed aggravated and annoyed with her. There was just no way to make Boscha happy.

Keeping their mouths shut and their feet planted to the ground, they held their breath. The beast shook its head after slamming into the wall, then it began sniffing around and Luz had to muffle a disgruntled groan of annoyance.

Cool, it could smell them as well. So much went for keeping quiet if it could still locate them.

Picking up her scent, it turned towards her and once again opened its snout, revealing its multiple fangs, before charging back at her and Luz could just so jump out of the way while it rushed past her.

“It can smell us!”, she yelled at Boscha who summoned some lightning to throw it at the beast, confusing it for a moment while she joined back up with the human.

“Alright then, new plan.”, the pink-headed witch shot her a glare, readying her stance, “We finally turn deadly.”

Grumbling, Luz pulled out a few new glyphs, furrowing her eyebrows.

“You do. I’ll try to cage it in.”, she held back and Boscha growled in frustration.

“Fine, you do you. As soon as you trapped it, I can kill it.”

She was just about to disagree when Boscha was already on the move. The witch sprinted towards the beast and sent powerful blasts after it, while Luz still pondered. She didn’t want to kill it. They had intruded into their territory. On the other hand, it was probably powerful enough to break out of everything Luz would cook up for it as a cage. And even if she could somehow capture it, it’d most likely starve once they left.

Huffing, the human gripped her glyphs tighter and ran after Boscha. She couldn’t prevent it and most likely, Boscha was right. They would either kill it or be killed and if she could choose, she preferred the first option to the second.

Slapping a glyph on the floor, she let a thorned vine shoot towards the beast but it smartly dodged the plant and instead opted for trampling Luz down in a big cloud of dust, while Boscha didn’t stop shooting it with everything she had.

Dazedly, Luz got back up after having felt her ribcage being compressed by about thrice her weight, then she threw another glyph to hinder it from reaching Boscha. An ice pillar slammed into its side just as it got ready to snap at the Grudgby team captain, then she huffed and propped herself up on her knees.

That had been close. The beast got back up way faster than she had been able to recharge and whipped its tail at the witch, but she managed to slam it back with a shield, causing an explosion where the tail connected with the shield.

“Human!”

Luz reacted fast and jumped to action, letting a plant glyph grow underground to resurface right before Boscha and foiling another attack, at least stalling the beast for a moment, until the witch could get herself a little farther away. She stumbled back, summoning lightning to disorient the attacker, then she made a run for it, past Luz and towards a wider space, so they could fan out and take it into their crossfire. The demon tried snapping at both of them but they were standing too far apart, both attacking it with the best they could muster until the beast managed to break through Luz’s defense and slam her into the wall behind her.

Groaning, she fell to the floor and immediately smelled the horrible stench of decaying organic material around her. The beast had her now.

She squinted her eyes and felt teeth snapping at her, yet the attacker was pulled back and only managed to bite onto her leg, dragging her with.

Opening her eyes, Luz saw Boscha having summoned a leash on which she had tried to pull it away from her.

“Fuck’s sake, Boscha! Let it go!”, she screamed in pain and gave it her best to punch and kick the beast wherever she could, but she had yet to find a weak spot.

“If you wanna be eaten, sure!”, the witch yelled back and despite the pain, Luz couldn’t help but groan in frustration. Sure, thank you, she was hanging onto that thing Boscha had caught.

Growling, she slapped a rock glyph on the floor and conjured a spike to impale the beast from beneath, but it jumped to the side. At least she had left an anchor to hold onto now, which she promptly did.

Immediately, the pull on her leg made her scream, and the beast snapped after her again in the hopes of getting more of her.

“LET GO RIGHT NOW!!”, she screamed and the pull stopped when the beast was released and jumped forward, ripping her in a different direction now, but she was prepared. A well-aimed blast from her explosion glyph shot the snout of the thing right open as the side of it had been exposed. Luz rolled away and tried coming back to her feet but there was no use.

“Strap it down!”, she yelled at Boscha who was already way ahead of her. The witch jumped past her and used the leash spell again to trap it, yelping when its razor-sharp teeth grazed her arm, then Luz slapped a glyph on the ground and a gigantic ice shard rose from the ground, impaling the beast right through the stomach and out its back.

Panting, the two teenagers watched its breathing stopping, then Boscha dropped down to the ground next to Luz.

“Titan’s fucking asshole, human.”, she fell flat on her back, panting, “Luckily for us I got skills.”

At that, the human could merely snarl as she sat up a little straighter, slapping a healing glyph on her impaled leg and making it a little better. She couldn’t quite heal up, but at least she had stopped the blood flow.

“Lucky for us I got enough glyphs packed for some reason. Oh wait, I know exactly why! Because I knew you would get us in trouble in training.”, she shot back and Boscha couldn’t do much else than laugh.

“… We’re actually a good team, Noceda.”, she finally said and Luz plopped down next to her before using her last healing glyph to stick it to Boscha’s arm, causing a low grunt from the witch as the pain subsided.

“We actually are, huh.”, grinning smugly, she turned back to the other teenager, “… ‘s that mean I’m off the bench?”

Boscha merely gave her a glare.

---

After a few minutes of catching their breath, they decided not to take their chances with the family of that thing.

Luz had discovered her arm that had taken the brunt of the fall from her wall was bruised and she shouldn’t move it more. At least she could move everything else. All over her body she was sporting scratches, smaller and bigger ones, and her leg had started bleeding again after the magic of the glyph had faded, even if the wounds had gotten smaller. The back of her head felt wet due to hitting it on the ground two or three times – she didn’t even remember anymore – but she didn’t dare to check if she was actually bleeding. For now, it was just a feeling and she couldn’t do anything about it anyway, because she had used up her healing glyphs.

Boscha looked just like her, except she had a laceration on her forehead from when the beast had decided to hit her force shield and sported some nasty gashes along her arm. Just like Luz, she was bruised all over.

Unwillingly, she still offered her support when Luz couldn’t put weight on her leg and let her wrap an arm around her shoulders before they could start to make their way towards the next hallway. Luz hobbled along to Boscha’s dragging steps and they made slow progress, but at least they couldn’t make out any other hostile noises for now. She didn’t suppose they could last another fight, Boscha’s bile sac was probably drained and her glyphs wouldn’t last them long anymore.

Luckily for them, they actually found a flight of stairs. It didn’t get them far, but at least they got back up to the level they had fallen into from Gus’ tunnel. Luz would really have to inform him of the maze down here, to mind when he would continue on his tunnel, not to fall down here on accident.

On the other hand, if she told him, he’d probably go down here on purpose to explore. Grimacing, she decided to tell Willow, so she could at least attempt to secure Gus’ tunnel enough so he wouldn’t do the same as Boscha and her.

Up here, the torches were all lit as well. In the dimmed light, they could see well enough to navigate around and watch for possible holes which they had been able to avoid on the level below. Which implied that this basement actually went down at least one level deeper than where they had been. At one point, Boscha requested a break, and Luz more than willingly agreed, groaning when she sat down and leaned against the wall. She had used her jacket as a makeshift sling for her arm and her leg was bleeding, not immensely, but she figured the amount she had already lost would be piling up in the future. It was just dribbling, but continuously. Boscha’s arm as well.

“Think we should just blast upwards? For all we know, Hexside’s halls should just be above us.”, the witch requested and Luz shook her head.

“There’s at least the height of Gus’ tunnel between us and Hexside’s ground level and the danger is too big that we’ll actually hit a wall and cause structural damage. Plus, we could be hurting other students.”, she quickly said while leaning her head against the wall, grimacing while she pulled her pants tighter around her wounds, in an attempt to make them stop bleeding. With just one hand that proved more difficult than she thought.

“Well, what do you propose, then?”, Boscha snarled and Luz sighed. She was not up for the snappy nonsense Boscha was pulling right now.

“We search the hole up to Gus’ tunnel and go up through there. We just took some lefts and rights. How hard can it be to find our way back?”

Boscha merely gave her a suspicious glance, then she sighed and shrugged, before helping the human back up to her feet.

“Fine, we can try that. I think it was a right, then left and two rights?”, she guessed and Luz furrowed her eyebrows.

“Wait, but wasn’t that left, right thing a dead end? Where we ran into the wall?”, she leaned against Boscha and the teenager groaned, closing her lower eyes in frustration while the third kept open, not to lose the direction of where they had come from.

“But wasn’t the big gym thing another left?”

“I think it was a right.”, Luz pondered, then she shrugged, “We’ll find it, pretty sure. We could follow some noises if you can hear some!”

Instead of broadcasting her frustration again, the Grudgby captain just started walking and pulled Luz along who tried to hobble the most balanced she could, before pulling a light glyph and activating it so it’d illuminate the way before them and help them have a little more sight than what the torches did. They bickered sometimes about the directions and ran into the wrong hallways quite a lot, but in the end, Boscha’s ears flicked when she picked something up.

“Hey, wait, I think there are some voices in that direction!”, she excitedly quipped and Luz considered this being the first time she actually saw Boscha being genuine. Just as quickly as that excitement came, she stopped it, though, “Thank the Titan, I was getting really fed up with you.”

At that, the human couldn’t help but snort.

“And what would you have done, huh? Just left me at some corner?”

Boscha shrugged non-committal and continued on until they finally saw a light that didn’t belong to the torches or the light glyph Luz had activated. Now she could also hear the voices of the students through the ceiling and let out a big breath of relief.

“Thank fuck.”, she sighed when they arrived at the hole up to Gus’ tunnel. Apparently, nobody else had discovered the hole down here. Which meant they couldn’t just pop up there looking like this.

Luz helped Boscha up into Gus’ tunnel and in turn, the triclops pulled her up. Deciding to follow the tunnel to the Grudgby field not to pop up somewhere in the school and attract any attention, they crawled their way to where Gus had shown Luz the tunnel ending beneath the bleachers. They emerged unseen and Boscha helped Luz hobble out towards the side where the bleachers were open, then they both breathed through. The sunlight hit their faces in what felt like hours to them when in reality, they couldn’t have been down there for longer than an hour.

“So, infirmary, huh?”, Luz finally broke the silence and Boscha nodded with a grimace.

“Maybe we can pretend we settled our dispute on the field.”, she added and Luz chuckled before agreeing. They made their way around the school and entered through the main entrance because that was the one closest to the infirmary when suddenly, a voice made them stop dead in their tracks.

“Stop right there!”

It sounded angry.

Luz gulped when she turned to see Amity stomping towards them, trailed by a furious-looking Willow and a guilty Gus. Trying a smile, she managed a small voice. Her girlfriend was looking like she could rip her up in the air. She was actually baring her fangs, and Willow wasn’t looking that much different.

“H-Heeey, Amity! Good that you’re here, actually, because-”

“Save it!”, she snapped and glared at Boscha who had shrunk just as much as Luz had, then she cupped her face, inspecting her up and down. When Amity pulled her fingers back out of her hair, they were tinged red, just what Luz had expected from her rough falls. Meanwhile, Boscha was arrested by Willow who was still trailed by Gus, with his shoulders pulled up, watching Willow grabbing Boscha’s ear and pulling her right to the infirmary while the Grudgby captain was weakly complaining and whining at the way she was being handled.

Luz fixated back on her girlfriend who was still looking at her red fingers, then she looked over the human once more, only now registering the injuries she was sporting. One twinge in her expression told Luz that their Grudgby lie would not hold up against her bitten leg.

“… Oh Titan, what happened to you…?”, she softly asked, so softly that Luz almost hadn’t heard her. Grimacing, she tried shrugging it off, even if her heart broke with Amity’s scared expression.

“I-I’m fine, Amity, I’m okay, it’s actually just-”, her girlfriend looked up to her and Luz cut her sentence off right when she saw her watering eyes catching her gaze.

The witch leaned towards her and pulled her head down with her hands cupping her neck, then their lips connected. Luz closed her eyes at that, savoring every little second she got of Amity’s kiss.

In the two years of their relationship, they hadn’t kissed in public, just little cheek or hand kisses. But never real kisses, on the lips, because of the public display of affection that Amity wanted to keep at a minimum.

Luz leaned into the kiss and hummed softly, enjoying how Amity’s body was pressing against her despite the pain. Her arms slowly weaving around her waist, Luz pulled Amity even closer, feeling Amity pouring all her concern and fear into the kiss. She couldn’t imagine how worried Amity must’ve been. First, they trash the gym, then they vanish completely, and now Luz turns up bleeding and injured. She must’ve been worried sick and Luz was feeling more and more guilty the longer she thought about it. Their kiss came to a gentle stop, but Amity didn’t have enough yet. She nuzzled back against her human and Luz captured her lips back, sighing with the small love confessions Amity granted her. She tilted her head a little more, allowing Amity more control, and even felt her girlfriend whining a little, mewling into their kiss. This was more of a reunion than it was a make-out.

Her fingers softly weaved into the locks around Luz’s ears, before she pulled back and her gaze sought out her human’s gaze again. Only now did Luz realize that her eyes were actually wet and that a tear rolled down her cheek.

“Oh gosh, Amity, are you crying?”, she reflexively asked and her girlfriend’s expression very quickly turned into something else. Something very different. She almost looked angry again.

“Yeah, of course, I’m crying!”, she suddenly shouted and pinched Luz’s ear, causing her to flinch and yelp, “I was worried sick about you! Nobody knew where you went until Gus said you might’ve used his tunnel and Bump got all weird about that! And now you come back injured!”

“Ouch, Ami, my ears!”, she tried but her girlfriend wouldn’t listen, “A-And about that, could we actually-”

“No, you’ll be listening to me now!”, she snapped and Luz immediately sealed her lips, her shoulders pulling up, “What you did in the gym was irresponsible and childish, and then disappearing like that is just plain careless! Am I being clear?”

Luz nodded, then she tried suppressing a little groan but Amity had caught it, her eyes suddenly widening.

“Oh Titan, that’s right! We should get you to the infirmary, immediately!”

The human nodded to that again and managed a strained smile before her girlfriend summoned an abomination to scoop her up and carry her to the healers’ office.

“… You don’t wanna carry me yourself?”, Luz dared to ask quietly and Amity turned around to chastise her more, though she could recognize a little teasing glimmer in her eyes.

“You’re covered in questionable substances and I don’t wanna touch that. As soon as you’re cleaned up, I can carry you around.”

Luz grinned at that.

---

Leave a like and reblog if you liked it! <3

#the owl house #toh #luz noceda #boscha #amity blight #willow park #gus porter #lumity #beneath hexside high #fanfic

16 notes · View notes

chiseler · 3 years ago

Text

Hammett Made It Easy

To put it bluntly, it is simply, humanly impossible to watch Roy Del Ruth’s original 1931 film version of The Maltese Falcon without drawing comparisons and parallels with John Huston’s much more popular (if not exactly “timeless”) version from a decade later. After all, in many fundamental ways the films are a nearly identical match, scene for scene and line for line. Almost, anyway. Enough so that you’d notice.

The fault for this lies squarely on the shoulders of author Dashiell Hammett. whose 1930 novel made straying from the original source material extremely difficult. The sharp dialogue, the snappy pacing, and the already cinematic scene structure are all so very good that there was little reason to go messing with it. In fact, as the story goes, when screenwriter John Huston made the decision to move into directing, Howard Hawks gave him a copy of the book as a potential first project shortly before Huston left on a vacation. Huston handed the book to his secretary and told her to type it up in script format. She did, and it was that initial version straight from the book that was green-lighted by the studio—even before Huston had had a chance to read it.

Huston later made a few minor changes and additions, but one has to wonder if ten years earlier screenwriters Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes didn’t work much the same way, given how much of the 1931 film’s dialogue reappears verbatim in Huston’s—with the notable exception of the Shakespeare quote that closes the latter (a line supposedly suggested by Humphrey Bogart).

Granted, Huston’s film runs twenty minutes longer than Del Ruth’s spiffy 80-minute number (for a number of reasons, including a much larger role for the hapless gunsel Wilmer and an extended final sequence), but nevertheless if you remove the script from the equation, comparing the two films becomes much easier. At that point the remaining important factors are the directors and their styles, and the casts and their performances.

By 1931, Del Ruth was already well underway in a directing career that would find him making comedies, musicals, dramas, Westerns, and even the occasional horror film. Although comedies were his real forte (he would soon direct Lee Tracy in Blessed Event), taking on something like the Hammett novel was not that unusual. He was not a particularly remarkable director, and stylistically his films resembled most other standard films of the day. The scenes were quick, the camera was static, he didn’t have much time for pizzazz. As was the case of so many of the films of the era, his pictures often resembled filmed stage plays. He was on a tight schedule, and as soon as he finished one he had to be on to the next in a couple days. In the end he crafted an entertaining, well-told story, and that’s all the studio and audiences were looking for.

Meanwhile, The Maltese Falcon was going to be Huston’s directorial debut after having solidly established himself as a respected screenwriter. Some of the suits at Warner Brothers were hesitant to let him make the leap, so he had to prove to them he could do it, and approached the film with the kind of energy and big ideas you find with so many first-time directors. Although the film wasn’t as flashy and inventive as Citizen Kane, Huston did pull out a few tricks, like the famed seven-minute take, and the camera work was fluid and energetic. Even if audiences didn’t notice a number of his little flourishes, it was still a very confident film. More importantly, it was an entertaining, well-told story—and that’s what the studio and audiences were really looking for.

(It’s worth noting, however, that Huston’s version was much tamer than Del Ruth’s—perhaps for obvious reasons. In Del Ruth’s version there’s no pussyfooting around the fact that Sam Spade really is having an affair with his partner’s wife. Nor is there any question what happens after Spade accuses Ruth Wonderly/ Brigid O'Shaughnessy of only using money to buy his allegiance.)

What Huston really had on his side was, if not star power exactly, then at least a handful of familiar faces. It might have been Sydney Greenstreet’s film debut, but audiences certainly recognized Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, and Bogart. Up until this point of course Bogart had only been a character player, but his star was definitely on the rise, and broke with this film.

Del Ruth, on the other hand, was working with an armload of good, available B actors. Most of them worked regularly, but they weren’t exactly Joan Blondell or Douglas Fairbanks.

It’s in looking at the performances of the two groups that the real differences between the films arises. Take the character of Sam Spade, for instance. Bogart’s performance as the womanizing, sharp tongued private dick always struck me as stiff and stagey—you can almost hear him thinking of each gesture before he makes it, and each line before he speaks it. There’s something tangibly artificial in his performance, the feeling that we really are watching an actor, and moreover one who’s not trying very hard. Or maybe one who’s letting his stage training get the better of him, thinking the dialogue alone will carry the day. I of course love Bogart, just not here, particularly.

Ricardo Cortez (in reality the NYC-born son of Austrian immigrants) portrayed a much looser, more easy-going Spade, always ready with a quip and forever chasing skirts. He gives a much more relaxed performance that often borders on the straight comic. In spite of the fact that Cortez is much more comfortable in the role, it seems, his Spade is almost out of place here, smirking his way through a double murder investigation.

Seen today, Greenstreet’s Gutman seems so unique a performance that it immediately became iconic, and a character and performing style he would go on to recreate for the rest of his career. It seems unique anyway, until you see Dudley Digges Gutman from a decade earlier. The similarities between the two performances are shocking. The intonation, vocal tones, the side mutterings, the laughter, the gestures, even the facial expressions are so nearly identical it’s almost as if Greenstreet studied Digges’ performance closely and decided to recreate it for the remake. Strange thing is, for American character actor Digges, it was a unique role quite unlike anything else he’d played before or would play again. Unless you care to argue that the spirit of the true Kasper Gutman inhabited both actors (and then stayed in Greenstreet), it’s a mighty remarkable coincidence.

One of the more interesting distinctions can be seen in the character of Spade’s secretary, Effie Perine, and more specifically it boils down to a single line reading.

In one of the first and most famous lines of the film, Effie informs Spade that a new client is waiting to see him. In the Huston version, bubbly Lee Patrick says, “You’ll wan to see this one anyway—she’s a knockout!” She seems awfully enthusiastic about it, happy to encourage her boss’s assorted flings. It seems a little odd, but then she spends the rest of the film running errands for Spade and we never give her another thought.

In Del Ruth’s version, Una Merkel’s Effie does not smile and does not chirp when she says dourly, “You’ll want to see this one anyway. She’s a knockout.” There’s so much stifled bitterness, frustration, and jealousy in the line that we can read her entire character—almost her whole life—in those few words. And for the rest of the film, whenever Spade asks her to run another errand or do another favor, we know what she’s thinking when she agrees. Thanks to Merkel, Effie becomes the one honestly tragic figure in the entire story, with the possible exception of Wilmer.

As Gutman’s henchman and punk, far be it from me to compare anyone with the great Elisha Cook, Jr.—unless of course it’s the equally great Dwight Frye. Sadly Frye has been given very little to do here except look sullen and angry. In fact he’s only been given a single line of dialogue (“I’ll fog him”). Still, he’s always fun to watch—though admittedly not as much fun here as Cook, who gets to give Bogart a vicious kick in the head.

In the end and over time, the choice of which, if either, version is superior is a simple matter of taste. It does become easier to understand, though, why in the 1950s Del Ruth’s version was redubbed Dangerous Female in order to distinguish it from Huston’s.

by Jim Knipfel

4 notes · View notes

flickityfics · 4 years ago

Text

Ch.10 A Day Without Zuko

a/n:Warning: smut

Hi, Gaang! The construction is going to take another six months but it's coming along nicely. I've met a lot of people and they're all use to me being around, they've helped me as well so it's been great knowing everyone and being a regular here. I learned things down here doing laundry, cooking and I'm always doing my training of course, gotta stay sharp you know! Katara, I'll never underestimate women ever again. I've seen first hand how hard it is for girls to be taken seriously or respected, its brutal and outrageous. Let me know how you guys are doing by the way, its taking a long time to see you guys again and I wish I could be over there helping you but as long as I know you guys are okay, I don't mind staying longer to help out over here so just take care of yourselves .

-Sokka

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Suki its so hard being a girl. So many creepy guys hit on you or don't think you can do a job on your own, its annoying. Then they're the girls who starts fight with each other or looking at you with disgust and pure hate, you just can't win with anyone when I'm just trying to mind my own business here. Anyways I'm working different jobs here, still searching on how to turn back when I can, mostly stuck at the library with no answers and just crossing things off that don't make sense with my situation. I'll probably have to look into some spirits like you mentioned before. Oh and what could really help me is if you can tell me different parts of my body and what it does? Maybe even draw me a diagram as a reference please and thank you, so sorry for this uncomfortable favor. I'll keep my head up and keep trying to work this out. Hope you're doing fine on your side, write me whenever you have the time, take care.

-Sokka

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sokka mailed off the letters deciding to use his free time before work to put up the posters he made earlier of Appa around Ba Sing Se. He just wanted to do his part in helping out the gaang however he could. It took about twenty-five minutes to get all the posters everywhere before taking a snack break. After a small meal he headed to his new job.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Sokka came into the Jasmine Dragon exhausted and ready to vent at Zuko but caught Iroh instead by himself in the kitchens.

"Hey uncle, where's Lee?" he asked curiously looking for the scarred teen.

"Ah, my nephew went on an errand getting new tea sets and tea." Iroh expertly lied.

Sokka couldn't help being suspicious since it was late to be getting stuff at this hour but he also didn't know how businesses do there whole delivery system so he'd just question Zuko later and see if their story matches up.

"Guess I'll just have to settle with talking your ear off old man." He grinned to the elder.

Iroh grinned back, "Well you know this old man is a big talker so go right ahead." He waited curiously knowing the young girls story will be interesting from the conversations he's overheard from her and his nephew.

"I just can't seem to find a job that I enjoy or liked to stick with. This is already my seventh job and I want a new one already but I'm limited to jobs because of stupid men not thinking I'm capable or not deeming the workplace fit for women. On the other hand I can't be too picky either because I have living expenses and don't want to come off as unreliable from switching jobs so much, I'd like to find my calling and enjoy a job I'm passionate about. I have skills but they can't be utilized because dumb men don't want to hear opinions from women. I know how to fish, somewhat fight, I'm good at planning, being a strategist, fast learner, strong, learning how to take charge and great with organizing and planning. I've just got all these good ideas and things to invent but no one wants to hear me out or to take me seriously." Sokka was frustrated with these types of problems, he realizes what a complete jerk he's been himself towards his sister and other girls but he's definitely gonna try being a better person seeing all the efforts they put in but don't get the same efforts back.

"What do you think uncle? Am I asking for too much?" He asked.

Iroh stroked his beard, "Let me get us some tea." He then left the young girls side to prepare the tea he had in mind.

Sokka could only lift his brow at the old man, watching impatiently as he took his sweet old time with the tea.

"Now it's not bad trying out different things to find what you're good or passionate about but I do see where it'll be difficult since most people are set in their ways and not wanting change. You are young and strong-willed, I believe you have the courage and strength within to make these changes possible no matter how slow the progress may be so long as you do not give up." Iroh really believed in his words about Miyuki, she was quite stubborn and willing to tell people off for any injustice she felt towards herself or others. It's why he's liked her so much near his nephew.

Sokka really thought about the uncle's wise words, it seemed so simple hearing it out like that. All it takes is small steps and he knew he wasn't one to give up....well, maybe only when things are really looking bad. In all honesty Sokka was sure he could keep up and handle being a girl a bit longer even though he'd really like his body back but he's gotta do what he can to live comfortably as is for now. It may not to be as freely as when he was a boy but he could handle putting some rude men and or women in there places if need be.

"Thanks for the pep talk geezer, that actually helps clear my mind, guess I just needed someone's perspective on stuff." He was happy talking with Zuko's uncle, it really helped him get things off his chest and feel heard. Normally these would be talks with Zuko but the jerk bender just had to be off on an errand.

"I'm gonna take off now, can you let Lee know I stopped by?" He asked.

"I'll let him know. I'm glad you drag him along places, thank you." Iroh was really grateful towards Miyuki always taking his nephew out, she brings more life into him he noticed.

Sokka waved off the old man as he left the tea shop. The sun was down and already the streets were lit. It was a nice, calming walk with the light buzz of late night activities. He really did enjoy the weather here in Ba Sing Se instead of being in layers, he had loose pants with a dark green tunic. As he kept walking he noticed off to the side a wanted poster that caught his eye, he walked over seeing a vaguely familiar mask but not really remembering, scanning the words he mumbled to himself, "Blue Spirit wanted blah blah may be a ghost? uh..Kidnapped Avatar, hmmm... feels like something I should know." The poster piqued his interest for a short while before he shrugged it off as no importance to him and went his merry way towards the inn.

Back at the inn Sokka felt like a nice hot bath would be perfect to relax at the end of the day. He went straight for the bathroom as he got back in his room, did some cleaning around the room as he waited for the tub to fill. He still felt awkward with his body but today he felt sure to do some more exploring.

The warmth of the water relaxed him to the bones, it felt like such bliss to feel the nice heat incase his whole body. He splashed around a bit making ripples in the water. This was the first time he took a bath with his eyes opened, he tried to avoid washing for two to three days and when he did it was only a quick rub down and rinse with eyes closed the entire time. But now? Now he watched himself as he slowly moved his hands on his new girlish thighs, he could feel hairs along the way, they were actually quite long, he knew Katara and Suki kept they're legs smooth but not how and now there's another embarrassing question to ask Suki later.

He tried again groping his chest just going for it, squeezing and moving them in all directions, it didn't really feel much to him still. He just kinda bounced them but couldn't feel anything sexual, he was sure if he had a girl in front of him and not his own body that it would be more exciting. Going a bit more down, he played with his soft little plump of a stomach, he definitely missed his flat stomach that he was working so hard on for nice abs. Eyes scanning further, he thought his feet were kinda cute not to say he checked out feet but he totally lucked out in cute feet as a girl.

--Warning: smut--

Now for the part he was anxious to explore more thoroughly. With a deep breath he ran his hand down feeling the dark course hairs covering his newly made vagina. He split the wet hairs just twirling them and rubbing between his fingers just curious at how they felt and looked. They felt much the same as his so no difference there...well besides the obvious missing usual protrusion. It was kind of fun playing with it and sorta felt good to. Closing his eyes he slipped a finger in his folds noticing it wasn't as wet as the other times he felt awkwardly aroused as Suki embarrassingly explained through letters. Sokka rubbed at the nub he felt and added pressure realizing the pleasure it caused, he pressed down harder rubbing slow circles. As he rubbed himself he could feel his wetness making the pleasure easier. After feeling the fun sensation for a bit he then lowered his fingers again feeling a dip into a small hole, it felt tight but once he tried to dip his finger in he flinched from the dry pain he felt. "Okay, that definitely didn't feel nice." It was actually quite scary he thought, he waited til his body relaxed once again before foregoing that area and sticking with the pleasure he got from the small bud up top. He didn't think of much besides building the pressure towards this nice pleasure he felt, it was like a nice slow yet intense build up to an amazing uncontained burst. He couldn't stop himself from speeding up his fingers and thrusting his hips slightly to catch that release, his fingers were aching with the pleasure that was sure to come. It felt completely different from his own body but totally awesome still. His hand was cramping, he could hear the splashes in the water but all he cared about was that sweet peak and nothing else, he was so close, so close.

"Ah, ah right there. " Sokka let out his moans as he felt his hips shake and hand move faster finally falling into an amazing orgasm. He had to catch his breath and remove his hand gently now feeling the unpleasant cramping. "Oh that was different but so so amazing." He tilted his head back enjoying how relaxed he felt and finishing up in the bath. He emptied the tub and rinsed once more getting out on slightly shaky legs.

--End smut--

He was back in his room relaxed and feeling good. He did feel kinda weird about the whole self pleasure with the new body of his but it was great once trying it. Before heading to bed, he did some light combinations of kicks and arm movements along with some breathing techniques he's learned form Zuko. He started doing them every night and morning as Zuko suggested, 'dang, that violent jerk is actually giving him good habits to learn from.' he realized. Everytime he tried to repeat how dangerous and horrible Zuko is it just gets overruled by the Zuko he's been getting to know now. And that's how the tanned teen slept, with thoughts overflowing with prince Zuko.

#zukka #atla #zuko x sokka #boylove #smut #rating: mature

7 notes · View notes

lilhemmo · 5 years ago

Note

honestly i love how much you love vegeta! and i really like the way you write him! would you be able to write something around the majin saga?? not necessarily in the saga but centered around the same type of things?? maybe vegeta admitting that he misses the way he used to be when he didn't care about anything and didn't have any attachments?? and then something happens to make him realize that love isn't a crutch but a weapon? thank you in advanced!!!

a/n: thank you so much, you sweet little thing!! i hope i do your request justice :)

a/n x2: wow i am pretty much just rambling in this fic. hopefully it makes some sort of sense.

“I will not be bested by that sad excuse for a Saiyan again!”

You hear the roar from across the courtyard and it piques your interest. You look outside to see Vegeta panting, chest heaving as he blasts through a training session. You want to laugh, but this time is different. Vegeta has always been tense, but the past few weeks have been excruciating.

“Vegeta!” you call, leaning out the open window of the kitchen. He turns just enough that you know he’s recognized your voice and you smirk, “Lunch is ready.”

“How dare you interrupt my training?” he scoffs, snatching a bottle of water from the countertop. Vegeta drinks the entire bottle, crunching the plastic between his hands before tossing it perfectly into the trash can.

You take a breath, “Are you okay?”

Vegeta pulls a plate of food from the counter and broods over the top of it for a moment before eating a few bites. He’s surprisingly reserved today, which only makes you even more scared and confused.

“I refuse to fall behind him any longer,” Vegeta scowls. His jaw trembles under the stress of his teeth as he grinds them together roughly. “Even in death, he surpasses me. I can sense it.”

You shake your head and lean against the counter, your arms tucked around your abdomen. “I think that’s part of the reason you’re having issues.”

He raises a brow and you swear you see his eyes start to glow. Vegeta grunts before shoveling another mouthful of food between his lips. he doesn’t answer you immediately, but when he does, the sheer anger that is simmering just beneath the surface of his words sends a chill down your spine.

“I would rather die than be bested by that terrible representation of our race.”

You swallow and respond despite everything in your body telling you to tread carefully, “I don’t know what crawled in your armor this morning, but you need to calm down. Your whole life doesn’t have to revolve around Goku, you know. Maybe try just getting better for yourself?”

“You foul woman,” Vegeta growls, grasping you by the collar to pull you close. “How dare you speak out against me, Prince Vegeta?”

“Talking about yourself in third person won’t make you any more intimidating,” you narrow your eyes at him and wedge your pointer finger into the hollow of his throat. “I’m sick and tired of this back and forth, Vegeta. It’s redundant for you to believe that all there is in life is for you to be better than Goku.”

“Kakarot,” he huffs under his breath.

You roll your eyes again, “Regardless! Haven’t you seen that there is so much more to life than just the next fight? You’re absolutely ridiculous!”

Somehow you manage to slap his hand away so he releases his grip on you. You turn on your heels and don’t look back over your shoulder as you make your way back to the engineering building, ready to fill your mind with busy work so you don’t have to worry over the frustrating prince.

Something shifts the next time he’s in the med bay.

You’ve engineered a new type of spray on bandage that minimizes healing time by half, which is much better than your last invention. You’re rubbing in the adhesive when you notice the Saiyan’s eyes are on you.

You tilt your head up in silent questioning. He does not say anything.

Vegeta’s dark eyes are difficult to look away from - he commands you with just a glance and you know he would have made a strong king, if his planet were still around. He would have been a proud Saiyan, one who led his people with honor.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks you, breaking your mind from your imaginative state.

You can’t help the small grin that perks your lips, “You.”

It’s bold, and daring, but you do it anyway.

His voice catches in his throat as his Adam’s apple rakes across the thin skin of his neck. Vegeta tenses under your hands, but you continue your ministrations despite it all. You are wrapping gauze around his bicep when he asks why you’d be thinking about him. If you weren’t so distracted by the sinew of his muscle, you’d be sure that he’s nervous.

“I’m imagining you on Planet Sadalla, or Planet Vegeta. You, as a king, with your tail.” You lick your lips and refuse to meet his eyes, you can’t handle the intensity now. A blush brings heat to your cheeks, “I think you’d have made a wonderful king, a great leader. You have honor and pride and you know your way around an enemy. I’m angry at Frieza for taking that from you; I wish I could punch him in his smug, alien face.”

A chuckle catches you off guard. You turn your head to look at him, a smile gracing his face. It’s strange, new. You want to cup his cheek with your palm and take in every curvature of his face, but you know better.

“Frieza would demolish you, little earth woman,” Vegeta cackles. His palm presses to your thigh where it’s straddling the bed next to his own body, and you feel a wave of heat and electricity spark in your veins. His eyes are hooded when he looks up at you, “I appreciate your desires, nonetheless.”

You grit your teeth for a moment as you contemplate speaking up again. Whatever emboldened you before is back at it, and when you say your next words, you confuse the Saiyan prince even more: “I hate what the world has put you through, Vegeta. You’ve been enslaved, murdered, stolen from your home, lied to, and manipulated. I wish I were strong enough to become everyone of your oppressors nightmares, but I know I’m not.”

“I don’t need your-”

Something stops Vegeta mid-sentence.

He clears his throat and starts again: “Would you like to train with me?”

“Wh-” You drop the bandage in your hand and it rolls around on the floor until it’s nothing but a cardboard tube. You tilt your head and he chuckles at the sight, “You look like a confused animal, earthling. Do you want to train or not?”

You swallow thickly and stumble over your words for a moment before agreeing. You pick at your cuticles when you speak again, “W-What would be the point? You’re so much stronger, I wouldn’t be a challenge for you at all.”

“Tch, nonsense,” Vegeta stands to his feet and flexes his hands into fists, feeling his way around the bandages there. “I trained with Kakarot, and he’s hardly more than a child in an overgrown Saiyan body.”

You shake your head. You can’t believe this.

“Vegeta, I-”

“Do you want to, or do you not? I won’t offer again.”

It’s another hour before he has you pinned to the ground, knee between your legs and a palm pressed firmly to your throat. You claw at his arms but he pins your wrists above your head with a quick side swipe.

You kick him in the back with your free leg and cry out for mercy. He chuckles as he releases his hand from your neck, but does not remove himself from you.

“You did well,” he tells you, brushing a stray lock of hair from where it was stuck with sweat against your cheek. Vegeta smirks, “You’ll be the strongest earthling in no time.”

You can’t help it when you laugh, “Vegeta, Krillin would take me out in one blow. You don’t have to lie to me, I know I’m a weakling.”

His thumb stops against your law and his eyes are like crystals when he glares down at you, “Don’t ever call yourself weak. You’re the strongest woman I know.”

The fact that he so gently left out “little earth” from before the “woman” bit does not go unnoticed by you. You take a chance and reach up to run your thumb over the pulsing muscle of his bicep.

“Gah,” he squints and steps away from you, rolling his shoulders as he stands to his full height. He shakes his head and looks down at you, “That’s all for today.”

You squeeze your palms a few times to regain feeling, noticing the small splits and cuts there. You weren’t able to get hits on Vegeta, but you did manage to slam into the walls and floors and fighter-bots a few times. He must notice you looking at them because he asks, “Does the doctor need a doctor?”

You don’t want to admit that the gashes in your hands hurt as bad as they do because he just called you strong, so instead you nod your head in the slightest. The motion makes him chuckle and you like the sight of a smile on his face.

He walks just ahead of you back to the med bay, his own bandages still fresh from the past few training sessions he’s held on his own. You find your way to one of the beds and sit a still as possible while he plucks different supplies from the cabinet. You think he’s going overboard - he’s got all kinds of things sitting on the counter now - but you dare not criticize him for fear of him possibly lashing out and you having to dress your wounds yourself.

“Thank you,” you force yourself to say before the pain of stitching you up begins. You look up at him as he loiters over you, all bulk and muscle. It’s still a strange sight to see when the smallest of grins upturns the corners of his lips.

“I couldn’t let you give yourself second-rate stitches,” he shrugs off your compliment, doling out a few anti-bacterial wipes to clean the blood and dirt off first. “If you get an infection, you won’t be able to train again.”

You nod and let him get to work. He slots himself between your knees and holds your palms more gingerly than you thought ever possible. You try your hardest not to wince when the antiseptic soaks into your open wounds, you know that Vegeta would take back what he said about you being the strongest woman he knows if he saw you squirming because of a little stinging pain.

“You can stop being so tense,” his voice is just as gentle as his touch and it startles you. You swear you hear a short bark of a laugh part his lips.

“I’m sorry.” You swallow the lump in your throat and try to relax your muscles. You swing your feet back and forth just enough to brush your thigh against his and the friction makes you both startle.

Vegeta looks you in the eye, “Why are women always apologizing?”

You’re confused by his question until you realize that you did in fact apologize. Your cheeks burn and you feel your stomach flip, “I-uh, I don’t know.”

“Well, little woman,” he grabs for the cotton bandages to wrap your clean hands so they can heal. “You should stop apologizing. You have nothing to be sorry for, not with me.”

Vegeta turns his head and glances at your split lip before silently starting to clean it as well. His thumb brushes the pad of antiseptic over the cut and you hiss at the feeling. Surprisingly, he cradles your jaw in his palm and kneels down to look at your wound closer, never releasing the cotton pad from your lip.

You go to apologize, but he pushes the pad of his thumb against your parted lips, “Don’t.”

Your brow is raised and he answers your quiet question, “You were about to apologize. I already told you there’s no need.”

The lump in your throat grows with emotion and you let him continue his ministrations. He’s close to you and his Saiyan blood pumps hot in his veins, the skin of his that’s touching you making your body boil. You lean into his hand and he doesn’t rebuff you, so you stay there while he cleans your lip.

“There,” he removes the cleansing pad from your lip and takes a half step back from you. Vegeta looks up at you and you’re suddenly aware of how close your faces are. If you were to lean forward and he weren’t to run away, you could kiss him soundly, despite the split on your lip.

It takes all of the courage in your body, but you grip him by the hem of his shirt and tug him down to kiss him square on the mouth. Vegeta lets a surprised gasp echo from the back of his throat and it turns something over in your belly. You let your fingers wander, the pads of your bandaged hands brush over the taut muscle of his abdomen.

Vegeta’s hand is still on your jaw, his thumb just under the soft part of your chin. He holds you still, his other palm cupping your thigh as it inches up his side. You whimper as his teeth graze over your lip, splitting the wound again. His tongue touches the sensitive flesh and then he pulls away, his thumb finding the wound once again.

“I guess you’ll have to take a break from training, little woman,” Vegeta smirks, eyes tracking the movement of your pulse against your neck. He snickers, “You’re bleeding.”

“As if,” you curl closer to him, your ankles wrapped around his calves. “You just don’t want to have to face me again. Like I’d give you the satisfaction.”

The look on his face is one you can only describe as prideful.

“I’m only joining this stupid competition so I can kick Kakarot’s ass!” Vegeta growls, curling his hands to fists. “If we’re here for some silly reason other than the competition, I’m going to rip you all apart!”

Goku is standing in front of him, halo hovering over his head, and it’s like a billboard that displays all of the Saiyan prince’s inequities. The kai’s share their ideas and it only makes Vegeta’s blood boil.

A heat begins to pulse at the back of Vegeta’s head and he hears a voice, small and slithering like a tendril of smoke. It threatens to take over his mind if the plume grows too large.

I will give you the tools to overpower Goku and take back your Saiyan pride once more.

Vegeta shakes his head, the voice pounding against the sensitive spots just behind his eyes. He swallows the lump growing in his throat and tries to ignore the temptation.

You will finally be able to surpass the lower-class Saiyan and prove that you are the almighty Prince Vegeta!

A searing starts on Vegeta’s forehead and he doubles over in pain. He screams, attracting the eyes of those around him.

I will help rid you of all your possessions that are holding you back! You will be the mightiest warrior!

“Vegeta!”

He turns his eyes to see you in the bleachers, your hands cupped around your mouth as you shout out to him.

The way tears sit in your eyes makes his heart clench in his chest, but the burning keeps coming. The cloud of smoke is burning just behind his eyes, clouding his mind until it hurts to keep his eyelids open.

Your steps are quick as you rush down the bleachers, pushing past security. He can sense your energy as you come closer, and the closeness of it pulls him from his fog. He winces as he looks up at you, falling down to his knees as the writhing pain continues.

“What is going on?” you ask him, mirroring his position. You shake your head, “Hey, talk to me.”

“Get away from me, you foul woman!” Vegeta snaps.

You can see the tears in his eyes, and you know that there is something sly afoot. You run your hands over his shoulders and up his neck to cradle his jaw, “Stop this. What’s happening?”

Vegeta winces, “I-I said to get away.”

You notice there is a symbol pulsing red on his forehead - it looks similar to the letter “m”. You brush your thumb over the spot and Vegeta whimpers in pain.

“I need to beat Kakarot,” he murmurs, blood trickling from his nose at the struggle. “I am sick and tired of these earthly tendencies I’ve picked up. I’ve forgotten what it means to be a proud Saiyan!”

You tilt his chin upward and he looks you in the eyes and you can see that there is some horrible internal battle that he’s going through. You’re not sure if you can do anything to help him.

“Vegeta,” you whisper, your knees digging into the dirt. “I’m not sure who is trying to overpower you, but you’re so much stronger than this. You don’t need anyone else’s help to pass Goku’s power level. You can do it on your own!”

You palm his cheeks, forcing him to look at you. His eyes are dull and you feel his spirit fading as the mark on his forehead grows more opaque.

“I don’t need you,” he grits the words between his teeth like they hurt. Blood trickles down his nose as he continues fighting. His palms dig into the dirt, his Super Saiyan form threatening to break through. “I don’t need you!”

You try not to take it personally - he’s going through something and you must be a part of it. You swallow your pride and force your tears to stay locked away, “Vegeta. I can feel some negative energy. Please, tell me what’s going on.”

She does not know what it means to be a proud warrior. She is but a mortal! Get rid of her, she is the problem. She has made you weak, she has softened you. She is what is holding you back from becoming a true Saiyan warrior!

“You’re the issue,” he grumbles, looking you in the eye. His eyes glow blue and the aura around him starts to shine golden and you know that Super Saiyan is on the way. “You’ve made me weak, you frail, pathetic earthling! I’ve grown too comfortable here, too complacent. I’m a pathetic Saiyan - I should be proud! I should be formidable! Instead, I’ve become satiated. I’ve lost my drive!”

A resounding SLAP can be heard across the entire courtyard.

Vegeta’s cheek is bright red and your hand is ready to come back around for another smack. Your lip is trembling but you force yourself to speak, “Your doubt in this moment is what’s making you pathetic, Vegeta.”

His jaw goes slack and he tries to formulate a response but you notice the dark symbol on his forehead is beginning to fade just slightly.

“You having something to fight for makes you that much more powerful. When you have nothing to lose but yourself, it’s easy to fall, it’s easy to take a loss because it doesn’t matter.” You coddle his cheek, feeling horrible for the action but knowing it was necessary nonetheless. You lick your lips and feel your voice growing heavy, “Whatever this is that’s tempting you to break away from the path you’re going down, it’s lying to you. It’s manipulating you.”

“How dare you!” Vegeta’s brows are raised, eyes wild, “How dare you insinuate that I, the mighty Prince Vegeta, can be manipulated!?”

Your lip quivers, “Go on, then,” you shrug, falling back on your heels, “make it easy. Say I never mattered to you.”

Flashes of memories burn behind your eyelids. Moments of lips and hands and skin. Moments of secrets and truths and laughs. Moments where you thought the feelings blossoming between the two of you could mount to something much more permanent.

“I-” Vegeta’s voice is caught in his throat, his fingers shaking at his sides.

He’s looking down at you and trying to beat out the cloud in his mind, the voice that’s telling him how you really shouldn’t be important. He can’t help but feel that it’s all lies - but if it’s lies, then why does it feel so right?

That’s right, Vegeta. Let go of her. Let go of your attachment. I can make you powerful, but you have to let go.

“Listen to me, Vegeta,” you pull at his cheeks again, forcing his gaze to fall on you. You run your hands against his face and push his hair back out of his eyes, “I don’t know who is on the other side of this, but don’t let them win. You’re the strongest, smartest, and most capable fighter I know. You can beat this!”

Vegeta grips his hands in his hair and squeezes his eyes shut, letting out a feral scream. Tears surge down his cheeks and he starts talking in an ancient language that you don’t understand, and to someone that you cannot see.

The symbol on his forehead glows bright red before fading away.

He releases a puff of breath through his mouth before falling to the ground, the exertion from the internal struggle wearing out his body and mind.

You catch him against your own body, resting his head in your lap, “C’mon,” you look up at the others, “I’m going to take him back to Capsule. It looks like you guys have a fight to win.”

When Vegeta awakens, he’s surprised to find you curled up in a chair with a small scrap of a blanket covering only half of your body. There are gentle snores rumbling in your chest and the Saiyan finds himself grinning at the sound.

“Hmm,” you murmur as you readjust, your eyes opening just enough to check on him. Once you’ve realized that he’s awake, you leave your eyelids cracked so you can keep a closer watch on him.

“You stayed,” Vegeta manages. He doesn’t reach out to grasp for you - he doesn’t feel like he has the right. Not after what he said at the arena earlier. He never has really deserved you, but now he knows that you should run far away from him.

You nod and tuck the blanket up under your chin, “Yes, of course. Someone had to make sure you didn’t try for world domination in your sleep. You were under some heavy medicine.”

“I’m so sorry,” he blurts.

You’ve never heard Vegeta apologize for anything, ever.

Your body is moving before your mind can comprehend. You’re climbing into his hospital bed, holding onto your scarce blanket as to not totally invade his space. You tuck yourself into his side and take a deep breath.

“You were being controlled by a wizard, I know that now.” You brush your thumb against the bulging muscle of his bicep. “I’m so sorry, Vegeta. I just want you to have some peace.”

He turns, much to your surprise, and envelopes you in his arms. Your ankles cross and you hold back tears at the thought of what he was going through silently. You feel the warmth of his kiss against the top of your head, “I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I didn’t mean them. I-I was...frightened.”

You tilt your head upward, the corner of your mouth grazing his jaw, “I know. I can’t even imagine.”

Vegeta swallows and brushes his thumb over the shell of your ear, lingering against the corner of your jaw. He smiles, “You got me through it. He was trying to use you against me, to tell me that you were the reason I was weakening. And yet, knowing that it was you trying to talk me out of it was the very thing that convinced me to break out of the wizard’s control and come back to my senses.”

“I-I,” you take a short breath, unsure if you want to make your admission out loud. Instead, you back pedal, “You’re important to me, Vegeta. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

He tilts your head upward and you feel his lips before you can blurt out anything else emotional. Vegeta’s palm stays against your neck, so he can feel your pulse. For some reason he needs to be sure that you’re real and that you’re safe.

“You foul woman,” he murmurs against your lips, and you can feel the smirk in his voice. “How dare you make me fall in love with you?”

You smile in return, your body melting as he holds you close. You shrug, running your thumb over his collarbones. “I hope that won’t be a problem, Prince Vegeta?”

His eyes turn to dark, crystalline orbs that take in your every minuscule movement. Vegeta’s breath hitches, “No, little woman.” He presses a warm kiss to your lips, biting down on your lower lip with his sharp canine teeth.

“I don’t think it will.”

a/n: I HOPE THAT YOU LOVED IT. FEEL FREE TO REQUEST MORE! SORRY TO THOSE WHO HATE ME WRITING THIS WAY BUT IDC I LOVE IT AND I’M WATCHING SUPER RIGHT NOW AND IT’S GOT ME IN MY FEELS FOR GEETS.

#vegeta #vegeta dragon ball #vegeta dragon ball super #vegeta x reader #vegeta dbs #vegeta imagine #vegeta fanfic #vegeta fanfiction #vegeta one shot #vegeta story #my writing

168 notes · View notes

whitherliliesbloom · 4 years ago

Text

hello, goodbye

[ ffxivwrite2020 ] ★ [ my writings ] [ prompt #13 (free write) - farewells ]

[ alphinaud/wol ] ★ [ 2,231 words ] ★ [ plastic memories au ]

in a world with declining birthrates and where loneliness is a growing issue, androids named giftias were created for the purpose of forming connections with humans. however, giftias only have an approximate lifespan of about 912 days. the giftia retrieval service is an organization put in charge of the retrieval of giftias that were nearing that lifespan. illya, a giftia working for the retrieval service is given a new human partner, alphinaud.. who soon realizes that illya was herself nearing her own lifespan.

may you one day reunite with the person you love and cherish

Her smile was contagious, upsettingly so. She shone like the stars that hung in the sky, like an angel descended from the heavens. Her smile was more human than most humans - even when she herself was only ever meant to be a creation that imitated the concept of humanity.

But there wasn’t a single person within the retrieval service that could bring themselves to smile for long in her presence.

Because they knew - they knew of the truth that laid behind her smile. An expression built on a mountain of lies, of false emotions. And yet it was not because giftias were fake humans.. nor did anyone argue over the genuine feelings giftias could form.. that was, after all, what they were made to do. To emulate and form connections with humans, to fill the void in the hearts of people who lacked the family and friends to do so.

Illya’s smile was but a mask - a well rehearsed act played by the master of faking her own happiness, hiding away the words she truly wanted to say. It was a familiar sight in the office, but one that brought only a scalding pain to those around her. And the pain only grew with every day that passed.

For a long time, it’d remained that way. Her smile however dazzling and bright, was always met with a cursory glance and a curt response by her human colleagues. Even her old partner, a woman whose face wore the wrinkles that spoke of her experience and time in the field turned colder and colder, despite her own best efforts to smile warmer and warmer. But that was fine. A life void of color was most fitting for a machine.

She thought herself to be fine with not ever seeing the warmth of another person’s smile towards her, resolved herself to being but a doll made to fulfill her duty and naught else. Life is cold as her circuits were. If she did not feel, her impending farewell will taste less bitter.

But her new partner had contrary plans - a human who was determined to see her smile shatter into pieces, to see her suffer.

She still remembered the day they met - and the first time she’d seen a human smile as warmly as he had towards her on that day in what feels to be her entire lifetime. And she smiled back, facade unbreaking, as she offered him a warm cup of tea before leading him to his seat. It would only be a matter of time before he too turned cold and looked away from her like the others did. As long as he figured out how much time she had left, realized that he was talking to a machine on the verge of shutting down.

But that day never came.

“Are you okay, Illya?”

He’d always ask without fail every morning, and it’s vexing how concern towards her was feeling more and more familiar. Unplugging herself from her aged charging station was becoming a chore, one that her roommate and partner ever took great notice of.

“I’m fine.” but she’d always answer, as ever with an unfaltering smile upon her face that was only met with a deepened scowl from him. She was used to her smile bringing pain to others - and yet she’d sensed that it wasn’t quite for the same reason as Alphinaud did now.

With a soft buzz of life, she turned off her own port, and spared not even a single glance towards him as she saunters towards the kitchen as nonchalantly as she could best act. Giftias had no need for sustenance - eating was but yet another act of human activity to sell their own humanity. But she was always strangely fond of cooking - of preparing food with her own two helpless hands and bringing joy to others, even when she could not herself partake in such a joy. She wouldn’t allow herself to.

“Ah, let me help you.” Alphinaud clumsily tosses aside his blanket, rolling up the sleeves of his pajama shirt and taking his spot next to the bewildered giftia.

“I-I’m fine. I don’t need your help.”

“I will, anyway. It’s the least I can do.” He flashes her a smile at a time when his smile wasn’t at all appreciated, and Illya has to turn away to hold back a frown beneath grit teeth.

Stop being so nice to me.

She’d always knew him to be different from the others, or at the very least much unlike her old partner who had been more practical than she was emotional. He treated her in a way she never knew she wanted to be treated, he was at once her biggest headache, but also a salvation she never asked for.

He was her biggest fear realized, a smile that mirrored back at her, and a frown that was birthed out of genuine concern for her feelings instead of his own.

“You’ve been staring at that flyer for a while now. Is something the matter?” Alphinaud had asked once while they were out on an assignment.

He was also, infuriatingly observant of her behavior, something she’d grown so lax about after getting into the habits of being nonexistent in presence to everyone around her.

Illya would clutch the hem of her skirt, fiddling with the lanyard around her neck that held her identification card. And when silence would not suffice to appeal him, she’d hide her face beneath the shadow of her bangs and stutter.

“N-nothing.”

“That’s an advert of the coming festival, right? Would you like to go?” He willfully ignores her attempts to brush his question off with yet another infuriatingly radiant smile.

“No.” her swift answer only comes naturally, accompanied with yet another fake smile of her own. But the muscles of her face aches even more than ever, and she has to force herself to shut her eyes when she feels a burning behind her lids. “I’m not interested.”

What was the point in going anyways? What was the point of seeing the lights when eternal darkness was all that she will see in her near future? She didn’t know life outside of working, and when she hadn’t been working, she would sit perched upon her station with the lights in the apartment turned off, drifting in and out of dreams that she was terrified of having.

But she wasn’t surprised when he’d turned up in their room that very same evening with two tickets to the festival anyway, loathed how genuinely over the moon she had been when she’d realized that he saw her through her blatant lie and went against her wishes.

“It would be fun.” he’d said with the most awful, joyous voice he could muster, and the incandescent smile he wore upon his face nearly breaks her.

Why do you want to see me cry so badly?

It truly had been the most fun she’s ever had, and her own happiness upset her. The past two years of practiced nonchalance and lack of a care for her own well being had swiftly been undone within a matter of a mere few fleeting weeks. Weeks filled with a roller coaster of emotions, of dreamlike excitement.

The fireworks that burst into a kaleidoscope of colors and bright lights in the sky deafened her, the weight of the jacket he’d insisted on slinging over her shoulders felt heavy. And as if it hadn’t been torture enough, twelve curse the man for slipping his hand into hers, knotting his fingers in between her own and pulling her close, forcing her to feel each and every inch of his warmth and kindness.

She’d assume his attempts to break her was out of ignorance if she wasn’t acutely aware of the pain he was going through himself. If only she hadn’t been eavesdropping.. hadn’t heard of the way his voice shook and trembled when their manager had informed him of her remaining lifespan.

Under the dazzling starmines, were a pair of fools hellbent on hurting one another.

“Why?” her resolve dashed, she cannot help but to ask with a hushed voice, barely audible in the midst of the booming fireworks and laughter of the other festival-goers rising into the air. “Why are you being so nice to me.. even when you know that i’m..”

For a moment he was silent, and she wonders if Alphinaud heard her. She wouldn’t minded if he hadn’t, perhaps convinced herself for a moment that that would have been for the best.

“Do you not want to have happy memories before then?”

Illya manages a smile out of habit, but she has no expectations of it managing to fool him this time.

“If I’m going to shut down, then I’d rather not have any memories at all.”

She remembered uttering those very same words to many giftias she’d spoken to, giftias who were themselves nearing their lifespan, and were due to be separated from their families and loved ones. And as varied in personality as humans were, those giftias gave her different responses to that very sentiment.

A handful had agreed with her, lamented their coming termination and cursed the system they had been born to serve and die under. Many others however had disagreed, and the smiles they wore upon their faces as they’d recounted the joy and love they had been showered with haunted Illya to the core every time she had to watch the lights from their eyes fade.

That should have sufficed as proof that memories formed by plastic would amount to nothing but pain in the end.

“And leave this world without having truly lived your life? That’s not right, Illya. You deserve to live, more than anyone else in the world.”

Giftias were extraordinary, a true marvel of human invention and technological advancement. And more than anything, they lived up to their namesake of being gifts to mankind - to bring happiness. Giftias never truly needed to be happy themselves, or to live.. as Alphinaud would so insist otherwise. But what difference was metal and wires to flesh and bones if they could feel and think the same? A sentience that could suffer was worthy every bit of happiness they could experience.

“I want to be part of your life, how ever long or short it may be.”

She could never forget his words, could not drown his sincerity from rippling through her. His voice replayed in her head again, and again, long after the colors of the sky had faded, and naught but faint dots of light hung above their heads.

The pale moon looked so much more sorrowful on that night than ever before as Illya sat upon her station, staring listlessly out the window. The only thing louder than the buzzing of her own circuits was Alphinaud’s breathing and the rustling of his sheets as he tossed and turned. And when her racing mind had finally settled on that accursed number plastered onto the back of her mind, her resolve shatters.

“Alphinaud.” He awakens to the girl standing over his bed. And though his vision is blurred, he could faintly make up the outline of her trembling form. When she speaks up again, the clarity behind her sorrow alarms him. “I can’t sleep.”

“W-what’s wrong?” the young man forces himself to sit up, but so nearly falls onto back onto the bed when Illya throws herself into his arms.

His warmth hurts her, the tight hold of his arms that wrap around her to pull her closer to his chest is suffocating. But she can no longer find the strength in herself to smile.

“I’m scared.”

She felt like a failure, of a retrieval service employee and a giftia both. She understood fully why the people around her became distant, watched as her world grew colder and devoid of life in the past three months of her remaining lifespan. And she never once bemoaned their choices, because to associate with a dying person was to willfully subject themselves to even more pain.

Yet she’d selfishly and secretly longed to be proven wrong, wished for a warmth and joy that she could take with her past her last moments. And when she’d finally had her wish fulfilled, she could only tremble and cry at this gift, this treasure that Alphinaud has given her that she truly didn’t deserve. She would pay for this honesty with even more pain, she was sure of it.

“I don’t want to say goodbye.”

“I know.”

She feels Alphinaud press his face into the side of her head, and his hand rises to begin stroking through strands of her hair, and she apologizes for the tear stains she leaves upon his shirt with choked sobs, spilling forth months of pent up regrets and sadness. Her last recollection of that day is the feeling of a blanket being draped over her, of Alphinaud pulling her against his chest and allowing the sounds of her weeping to grow fainter as she drifts to sleep.

Her charging port is left neglected for a bed bathed in a gentle moonlight that watched over them as they slept in each other’s embrace. In the midst of that sorrowful and tearful night, it had been the warmest Illya had felt in a long while.

#ffxiv #ffxivwrite2020 #ffxivwrite #alphinaud leveilleur #alphinaud #illya skawi #we've come so far #plastic memories au #kiwisffxivwrite2020 #fanfic #mine #this was supposed to be a lot longer and could have been #were it not for WRITING BURN OUT WOW #will i ever write a fanfic of their actual last moments together #:thinking:

19 notes · View notes