#╰ (✪∀<) ~ *:･ﾟ✧ There’s no savior to recuse me from my own humanity. ✘ POST — GUILD.

[theircurse]

⊹ ✦ ꙳ ⁺ ‧ ✴ * : ★ 【 @frost-eyed-autumn 】 ★ : * ✴ ‧ ⁺ ꙳✦ ⊹

╰ ★ cont. from 「 X 」

˗ˏˋ *ㅤ★ㅤ‿︵ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤ𝑰𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒂𝒍𝒎𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒌 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒄𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝒑𝒂𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒘𝒂𝒔 as it was passed off onto their little hands. Maybe the menial office work was better than the more GRUESOME dealings of the mafiaㅤ—ㅤbut it sure was BORING ! Why did they even have to do this ?

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤUpon the man's words, their face would scrunch up into an expression of disgust. Three years older than themㅤ—ㅤthat was SIXTEEN, wasn't it ? Sixteen was still kind of a kid; DEFINITELY a lot younger than most of the adult members of the mafia. But as much as they hated to admit it, the other's words made sense. When they were both little, Dazai - niisan was always stuck WORKING.

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤ❛ㅤI GUESSㅤ—ㅤㅤ❜

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤThe child mutters as they lazily flip through the papers before beginning the tremendous task of sorting THREE HUNDRED PIECES OF PAPER. This was so stupid.

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤ❛ㅤCan't the BOSS do his own work for once ?ㅤㅤ❜

[theircurse-archive4]

╰ ★ █║ ⁞ — ˗ˏˋ    𝐓𝐀𝐆 𝐃𝐔𝐌𝐏 — verse tags !

[theircurse-archive3]

✧ * º • –– @mckiingbiird​ asked: "Here you go, little bird." He hands Yumeno a kiwi (not the fruit, the flightless bird) plushie, plus a few colorful feathers they can decorate their hat with. The gifts also come with a big mug of hot cocoa (he can't cook but thankfully his hopelessness in the kitchen doesn't extend to drinks) "Merry Christmas."

��� -: ✧ ( 'TIS THE SEASON ! ) ✧ :-

╰ ★ █║ ⁞ — ˗ˏˋ 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐄𝐈𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐃 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐄𝐄𝐍. But who cares ? Despite never, ever seeing a kiwi before ( real or stuffed ), the bird was in fact extremely FRIEND SHAPED. The feathers and the hot cocoa were a BONUS.

╰ ✗ * . ⊹     ˗ˏˋ    ' Oh, they're PERFECT ! Thank you, Harper - san ! I'm going to keep the bird forever ! '

[hanaeshi]

Verse tag test !

[sheabeeprime]

I Drive Me Mad

AO3 Link

By: @sheabeeprime for @superherotiger as part of @friendly-neighborhood-exchange -> I'm so sorry this is late. I worked really hard though and wouldn't even read my story until this was posted so I hope you love it <3

Rating: Teen + Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark

Summary:

Even though he couldn’t make out most of the distinct features that would confirm this figure to be human, let alone someone he knew, he wasn’t afraid. This man wasn’t scary like his captors had been. No, he radiated safety and warmth and through the armor plating that now gently caressed his cheek, Peter detected a familiar smell of expensive cologne mixed with motor oil which he recognized as home. “D-Dad? Please…help me,” Peter whimpered, fighting spirit returning ever so slightly as he resisted the need to allow his eyes roll back into his skull and fall into the forever slumber. It hurt to stay awake and to try and comprehend reality, but something inside of him said that he had to. He had to, if not for himself than for the blob of red and gold which held him close. He couldn’t imagine how terrible it would be for a father to lose their only child. “It’s okay Peter; you’re going to be okay." Or: In the aftermath of his kidnapping, Peter takes comfort from Tony during a Thunderstorm.

References to Torture

The first time Peter called Tony “Dad,” he was tired and 100% drugged out. Whatever his kidnappers injected him with was strong, with its effects still lingering even after his captors ceased their torture and left for him dead. Peter only hoped the reason they finally abandoned his husk was because they realized Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers were hot on their tail.

It took an additional 36 hours after that, however, before Tony and the others finally found him. At that point Peter was damn near dead.

Days prior he was still trying to fight through the toxins as they were administered. He tried to stay awake and learn everything he could about his captors... Now, the spiderling was just trying to save his energy enough to stay alive, to maintain his vital functions, even if poorly.

Peter couldn’t even hold his head up anymore; allowing it to lull from one side to the other when his mentor tried to shake him back into awareness. The unpleasant feeling of his head rolling about his shoulders, however, was just barely enough ignite the fringes of his mind with a semi-consciousness. He mentally reached for the feeling, trying to hold onto it as long as possible.

“D-Dad?” He asked, tongue thick and cottony.

It took all his enhanced strength, but Peter lifted his head up just enough so that when his eyelids fluttered open, he was looking at the blurred figure before him in their eyes.

Even though he couldn’t make out most of the distinct features that would confirm this figure to be human, let alone someone he knew, he wasn’t afraid. This man wasn’t scary like his captors had been. No, he radiated safety and warmth and through the armor plating that now gently caressed his cheek, Peter detected a familiar smell of expensive cologne mixed with motor oil which he recognized as home.

“D-Dad? Please…help me,” Peter whimpered, fighting spirit returning ever so slightly as he resisted the need to allow his eyes roll back into his skull and fall into the forever slumber.

It hurt to stay awake and to try and comprehend reality, but something inside of him said that he had to. He had to, if not for himself than for the blob of red and gold which held him close. He couldn’t imagine how terrible it would be for a father to lose their only child.

“It’s okay Peter; you’re going to be okay.”

He clung to the feeling of hope that being in this figure’s arms brought him. Hands still bound behind his back with vibranium cuffs, Peter simply nuzzled into the neck of who he hoped to be his father, breathing in a heavy and ragged way while trying to hold back tears as the man cradled him and whispered sweet nothings, only stopping on the occasion to bark orders at the other Avengers.

Peter tried to ignore how every fiber of his body seemed to suddenly be subjected to hot flames when he was finally lifted up by the red and gold. As they took off into the air, Peter moaned, head throbbing to the same rhythm of his uneven pulse. His senses were both still dulled and on overdrive. He couldn’t even enjoy the way the cool air that filtered past them brought relief to his burning body because of the simultaneous wind sounds and air pressure that pounded in his ears.

Landing had to be worse than flying though. Peter wasn’t sure how long they’d been in the air for prior to hitting the ground, but the jostle it wrought was enough to displace Peter’s empty stomach such that his body, tired as it was, instinctually lurched forward in an attempt to dry heave. The strong arms holding him tightened their fatherly grip as Peter trembled in the aftermath, praying that the numbness he felt before might return and mask this pain once again.

There seemed to be no time to try and relax though. Almost immediately after his stomach attempted to turn inside out did a group of hands try to pry the crime-fighting-spider from his human safety blanket. Peter half expected the metal man to defend him, so when the man instead began the relinquish the hold he had on Peter to the group of strangers, Peter felt fear strike his heart.

“No!” he cried out, pushing back into the chest of the one person he knew was safe while trying to violent kick at his attackers.

“Pete, it’s okay. They just want to help. You’re safe,” The figure spoke in his ear, voice smooth and even, never once showing there was a reason to panic.

The words seemed to cocoon the spiderling up like his favorite MIT Hoodie. They allowed just the smallest morsel of comfort to sink into his skin and convinced him to momentarily stop bracing against the mass of hands just long enough for them to somehow release him from confines of the vibranium cuffs.

When Peter felt the pressure on his writs dissipate, his arms immediately snapped forward to wrap around his red and gold savior, gripping into the alloy mixture without fear of denting it. The person behind the armor didn’t even flinch he crunched the suit like aluminon foil.

“Don’ wan you ‘o leave me,” Peter slurred.

A couple minutes of silence passed, where the figure just hushed Peter by massaging his arms with one hand, supporting him still with the other, until the teenager could be coaxed into letting go and laying onto a gurney. When he finally relinquished the last of his grip and the medical staff began to work, Peter felt a stab of panic into his heart again. Behind his eyes, he could see the masked faces of his captors, taunting him in his intoxicated, helpless state and reaching to inflict more pain. Before Peter could open his mouth to scream, however, the sensation of someone holding his hand cut through the vision, anchoring him to reality.

The hand was about the size of the metal ones holding onto him earlier, except this time they were made of flesh. They felt soft yet calloused; gentle yet firm.

“Dad?”

Peter blinked a couple times, double vision lining up long enough to see Tony Stark’s face hovering over his own, concerned eyes and a worried smile. He ran his free hand over Peter’s sweat and blood matted hair, just like a parent would.

“It’s okay, little Bambino. I’m not going anywhere.” ~~~~~~~~

Peter didn’t remember calling Tony “Dad.” Actually, Peter didn’t remember much from his recuse at all. He wasn’t as embarrassed about it as his mentor, and even he himself, thought he was going to be though. Peter had recused people from kidnapping situations before and accepted that sometimes they say and do weird things. Never mind the fact that he had been fighting off calling Iron Man “Dad” in everyday conversations about a month prior to the incident.

Surprisingly, Peter was more flustered to find out that, true to his word, Tony stayed with him through all the poking, prodding, and evaluating. Even when surgery was deemed necessary

to reset some broken bones Peter had, Tony was there while he was put under and prepped for surgery. It was not until the lead doctor, Helen Cho, insisted that his presence in the surgery suite would be unsanitary and could inhibit the team of doctors that the billionaire finally did step aside. And even still, Tony’s face was the first he saw when he woke up.

Peter made a pretty quick recovery after that, all things considered. Once he gained enough weight back for his super healing to begin and work again, his bones and wounds seemed to knit themselves back together at an astronomical rate. 48 days after the incident and Dr. Cho even cleared him to be Spider-Man again, to Tony and May’s disgruntlement.

But Peter figured, this kind of thing…it happens to heroes. It happened to Tony. Sure, that was before he became Iron Man, but it still counts. And anyway, he didn’t want it to stop him from helping people; from preventing that kind of thing from happening to anyone else. He did the time in the hospital, he went to Tony’s mandated therapy, he should be able to be Spider-Man. It was the best thing for him anyway; to just move on.

Because that’s what heroes do.

Right?

But while he may have recovered from his physical wounds, his mental ones seemed tattooed with ugly ink on the back of his skull

Peter found he no longer felt safe in the apartment, with the sounds of the city beneath him. Whenever he closed his eyes, the dripping of their old bathroom faucet, or the sounds of his neighbors arguing, or the smell of the trash on the curb somehow brought him back to that grimy warehouse he had been kept in.

And when he was out and about, Peter’s Spidey Sense would constantly thrum. It made him seem paranoid. He would jump at just the sound of car doors closing or cats meowing or even just his friends approaching from behind. Everyone felt too close, but also too far.

The nightmares had to be the worst of it. Every night, he felt tortured again. Sometimes they were memories, sometimes imaginative scenarios, but always his fears playing out before his eyes. He tried to immerse himself with Spider-Man patrols and schoolwork in the late hour of night when sleep felt like imprisonment, but that wasn’t helping his mental state either.

That’s how Peter found himself sleeping at the Tower.

Peter wasn’t sure if being so high up and far away from the streets was what helped him calm down, or the bullet proof windows, or if it was just being close to Tony, but something about the Tower allowed him to sleep, even if only a little bit.

May was the first to approve of the arrangement.

“Anything to help my baby get better,” she said.

Tony had been pushing for him to stay anyway.

“It’s safer,” the genius would claim. And he was right, but there was more too it than that.

Either way, the Spiderling now had his own Star-Wars themed room in the Stark penthouse, down the hall from the master bedroom. And he would be lying if he said staying with his mentor hadn’t been great. The long lab days, the movie nights, the expensive family dinners, all of it was wonderful…except for one thing.

Thunderstorms.

KA-DUUUM!

Peter snapped forward in his bed, a mangled shout caught somewhere in this throat, never to make it out into the open. His eyes darted to the window which was being battered by rain. Part of him was thankful for the thunder for waking him from his impending nightmare. The other part of him, however, knew that this was almost worse.

FU-FOOM!

Another burst of noise had Peter jumping from his bed and into fighting position, hands balled into fists to keep them from shaking.

The tower was not soundproof. And being so high up, Peter felt the sounds of the storm were the only things that were made to be even louder.

Peter could feel see his veins throbbing with increased blood pressure. He squeezed his eyes shut to try and focus on his breathing, but the darkness behind his eyelids made his mind swim with anxiety.

“There is nothing to fear. There is nothing to fear. I’m safe here. I’m safe here,” Peter whispered to himself.

Logically, Peter knew this was just a harmless storm. He used to love watching them out of the massive windows in the tower. But ever since he came home from being kidnapped, he couldn’t handle it. The noises, the flashes of light, the way the tower seemed sway in the wind, all of it was too much for his heightened senses. The worst of it was, he didn’t know why. Maybe it was because it had been storming the night of his capture, or maybe it was just his PTSD, but either way it was driving him insane.

BARROOOM!

This time, Peter darted out of his room and into the hallway. Instinctually, he wanted to seek out comfort from the only other person in the house: Tony Stark. However, Peter was also trying to hide his fear of thunderstorms from his mentor, and up to this point he thought he had done a pretty damn good job. He had even had Ned hack FRIDAY so she wouldn’t alert Tony when he wasn’t sleeping well. He just didn’t want anyone to worry about him more than they already did. Which was a lot, by the way.

Tony didn’t need anything more weight on his mind, in Peter’s opinion. Despite how he hid behind a mask of sarcasm and sunglasses, Peter knew his mentor blamed himself for the world’s problems and carried that weight on his shoulders at all times. What kind of person would he be to add to that weight?

So, the young superhero padded past the Stark master bedroom and instead went into the kitchen to grab some water. He was about halfway done with his glass when another flash of lightening caused the kitchen-living area to momentarily flicker to life with a blinding white light. He could feel his stomach drop and hairs stand on end in the pitch black that followed, waiting for the room to be filled with sounds of thunder.

WA-BAMM!

CRASH!

Peter dropped his glass to the floor and jumped to the ceiling, whimpering when the glass he was using shattered beneath him. Tears pricked at the corner of his eyes as he crawled into the safety of a corner.

“Peter?”

Tony poked his head up over the back of his luxury couch, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes to help them adjust to the dark as he scanned the room for the spiderling. It wasn’t long before he spotted the human-sized form on the ceiling, huddling in a corner, silently sobbing.

“Oh Pete…”

Before Tony could even get up to go collect his kid, thunder struck again.

BUUU-DUDUMM!

Inhibitions falling, Peter scurried across the ceiling and dropped down on the couch next to Tony, curling up into his side like an infant.

“Dad, I’m sacred…” he mumbled into the genius’ oil-stained shirt, fear completely taking over.

Tony was sure Peter was unaware of what he had called him, but one look into the teen’s desperate, pleading eyes, and Tony decided he would let it be. The title gave him a warm, tingling feeling anyway. He knew in a second, he would be honored to be this kid’s Dad.

So, Tony did what any Dad would do and wrapped his arms around the boy, rubbing circles into his back and told him it would be okay. And they sat like the for the whole duration of the storm, until sobs became sniffles.

Peter was the first to break away, although not far enough that he was out of his mentor’s strong hold.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark. I don’t know what came over me,” he said, faced flushed from both crying and embarrassment.

Tony gave him the same concerned eyes and a worried smile that he vaguely remembered from his rescue. The man then ran his hand through the boy’s curls and, in a move that surprised them both, kissed the top of Peter’s head.

���You have nothing to be ashamed of. I know how difficult recovery can be. After Afghanistan…well…I guess you could say storms bothered me too, and I don’t have your senses,” the billionaire admitted.

Peter was shocked.

“Really? Is that why you were sleeping on the couch?” he asked.

“Uhh, actually, I just stay out here because I worry about you…ya know, in case you need me,” Tony answered, looking away a little nervously. He felt exposed, although deep inside knew his kid would never exploit that.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Peter said quietly.

Tony noticed his guilt sinking in and immediately looked back at the kid and squeezed his arm so Peter would do the same.

“Hey, don’t be sorry. I really don’t mind.”

Peter looked skeptical.

Tony sighed.

“Listen. You are so good, Pete. What happened to me, I deserved that. But you? You do nothing be help people who have no advocate. I am so proud of you and the least I can do is be here when you need me. I’m not particularly good with my emotions but know that just how Iron Man will always look out for Spider-Man, Tony Stark will always look out for Peter Parker. Okay?”

Peter smiled. A genuine smile. Tony could swear it stopped raining in the moment and the room seemed almost brighter.

“I’m here for you too,” Peter said.

Damn this kid was too good.

“It won’t always hurt like this. It’s okay to lean on other people. I guess that’s something I’m still learning too.”

“We’ll get through this, Mr. Stark. Together.”

Tony smiled down at his kid, but a sudden thought turned his sweet smile into a mischievous smirk.

“Don’t you mean ‘Dad’?”

Peter flushed.

“Mrrrr. Starrrkkk.”

[archiveofprolbems]

The Shadows By Megan O’Grady

These days, artists of all kinds are expected to be available for public consumption. But a small and highly influential group of them has chosen to disappear from society in favor of letting their work speak for itself. What does it mean to be inaccessible in an age of oversharing?

FOR THOSE OF us old enough to remember an era when we didn’t account for our existence on social media, when we could attend a dinner party without being tagged like a shot deer on someone’s Instagram story, when privacy was respected and deeper meanings had room to quietly take root and bloom, it is no surprise to see artists flinching from the din of publicity. How can we really look and listen when we are so busy being seen and heard?

Art, as Susan Sontag wrote in a 1967 essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” has acquired a spiritual quality in secular culture, becoming a place to reckon with and question the human project and, perhaps, even transcend it. To create, in other words, isn’t only about self-expression; it is also a realm of mystification, satisfying our “craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech,” as she puts it. Silence is an essential part of the creative process, opening a space for contemplation. “So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience,” she goes on. To withdraw from the public is “the artist’s ultimate otherworldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter and distorter of his work.”

All art legislates between private and public spheres; it has also often been a way of hiding in plain sight, a place for coded identities, for the obliqueness of lyricism. As Marcel Proust claimed, “That which enables us to see through the bodies of poets and lets us look into their souls is not their eyes, nor the events of their lives, but their books, precisely where their souls, with an instinctive desire, would like to be immortalized.” And so it fits that Sontag — both an outspoken critic and a novelist — would appreciate these tensions: the artist’s need for abstraction and ambiguity, the critic’s desire to elucidate. That she wrote this before the art market exploded, before artists were deified and cast as saviors of a broken world, before we looked to them not only for beauty, inspiration and affirmation but also for a form of self-critique, surely had a lot to do with her own fraught relationship with celebrity. Sontag, one of the last public intellectuals until her death in 2004, knew firsthand the cost of attention: what a distraction it could be; the risk of self-censorship to buff one’s own image. (Even posthumously, her biographer, Benjamin Moser, took her to task in his 2019 book, “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” for not speaking out about her own sexuality during the AIDS crisis.) Today, we expect artists to perform a public role, to assent to interviews and magazine profiles in which they explain and justify their work, to attend openings in enviable clothes, to hold forth on feminism and racism and social injustice and the latest catastrophes, political and environmental.

YET THERE HAS always existed a small but powerful shadow world of creators who have managed to outfox public expectation to varying degrees, evading de rigueur press and book tours while making their impact resonantly felt. Some have pulled this off with pseudonyms, among them Banksy and Elena Ferrante, who has written copiously on the liberation she found in detaching her public face from her work. Others have employed alter egos to convey their message, like David Bowie, who adopted the persona of Ziggy Stardust, an alien rock star who comes to Earth with a message of hope only to be destroyed by his fans and his own excesses. It is one of music’s great commentaries on fame, created at a time when Bowie himself was self-destructing in celebrity’s glare. As a critic whose work hinges on the notion that there’s a great deal of value to be learned from the particular contexts, personal and otherwise, in which art is made, I find myself shuttling between two impulses: the desire to get closer to those difficult truths and to understand the very real costs to exposure. I want to protect inspiration’s riverbank, those Romantic “thoughts of more deep seclusion,” as Wordsworth put it, while also making space for the kind of powerful storytelling possible in art, stories that, so often these days, seek to fill a historical void.

Rare, in fact, is the artist who has succeeded in entirely separating personal identity from work, like Martin Margiela, one of the most influential designers of all time despite the fact that few fashion insiders know what he looks like; his name has become a metonym for avant-garde cool. In fine arts, withdrawal from public life is often interpreted as an extension of a larger artistic project, as when the conceptual artist Lee Lozano pulled a Duchamp and retired with “Dropout Piece” around 1970, refusing contact with longtime friends and collaborators and essentially drawing a frame around her own absence, writing in her notebook that it was the “hardest work I have ever done,” because it “involves destruction of (or at least complete understanding of) powerful emotional habits.” Cady Noland, still among the highest-selling living female artists, stopped showing her work around 2000 and even began to disavow some of it: In 2011, she renounced a damaged 1990 silk screen, “Cowboys Milking”; in 2014, it was her 1990 sculpture “Log Cabin Facade,” which had been extensively restored without her consent or consultation. Like that of the interventionist artist Laurie Parsons, who left her art career in 1994 to become a social worker, these women’s departures feel not so much like the “ultimate otherworldly gesture” but rather a deliberate form of resistance to a patriarchal and market-oriented art world. But few artists have been as successful at this kind of recusal as a form of protest as David Hammons, among the most respected contemporary artists despite the fact that he rarely submits to interviews (he likens them to police interrogations) or attends his own openings. This, too, has largely been viewed as a commentary on the art world’s smug — and still largely white — self-regard, but the artist, who is black, has said that he is simply too private to talk about where his work comes from, that doing so would feel like a bodily violation.

Hammons is famous enough to let his work largely speak for itself, not unlike the author Thomas Pynchon, whose reclusiveness hasn’t diminished his eminence or influence on American letters (arguably, the opposite is true). And yet withdrawing from public life entirely is never without risk: I suspect for any Pynchon or Greta Garbo or Hammons there’s someone like Lee Bontecou, who was one of the most exciting names in 1960s art before she left New York in the early 1970s and faded from view. The first woman represented by the powerful gallerist Leo Castelli, Bontecou was known for her strikingly original, imposing wall reliefs made of steel and canvas; often, they featured the motif of a black hole. At the time, it almost seemed as if she had disappeared into one of her own works when in fact she’d only moved out of the city with her husband and daughter (and continued to teach at Brooklyn College for the next two decades). She never stopped making art, as a 2003 show at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum revealed: Over the course of three decades of relative isolation, her work had evolved into more delicate, elaborate sculptures that evoked celestial bodies, solar systems and star charts. It’s hard to imagine that without this period of seclusion it would have looked quite the same. Her story is a reminder of just how arbitrary — and how irrelevant — public accolades can be to creation itself. As the artist once told Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer, “I’ve never left the art world. I’m in the real art world.”

How much do we need to really know about the artists we admire? I thought of this recently when reading a Pitchfork profile of Dan Bejar of the music act Destroyer, who claims that some of his best shows have resulted when he turns his back to the audience and sings toward his bandmates. “As a member of the audience for all the shows I’ve ever seen, I just wanted to be flummoxed. That’s all I ever ask from art. Just stagger me, stop me in my tracks. We don’t need to go through something together,” he said. But surely we do go through something together — or at least, that’s the spell cast by the song or novel or film we “love”: The very language we use to talk about art is suggestive of romance. It’s difficult for me — hearing the voice, reading the words — not to feel a connection to the person behind any creative work that succeeds in truly flummoxing me. Like love, this experience of art is rare and real and wonderful and ultimately unpin-downable; like love, it is privately felt and personal in origin yet publicly affirmed by our culture. And so we seek to know more, to maybe even find ourselves in the artist’s story and become part of its mystery. It’s worth the risk, we think, of actually solving it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/t-magazine/artist-recluse.html

[theircurse]

ˏˋ *ㅤ★ㅤ‿︵ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤ𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒈𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒂𝒔 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒍𝒚 as it could have; especially for such a SIMPLE mission. Bringing about the downfall of a bunch of dumb adults that the Boss did not like for some reason or another should have been easy with their ability. Yet somehow, they had near caused the end of YOKOHAMA itself.

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤThe child was no idiot. From the moment they had come to, they already knew that HELL awaited them once they were returned to the Port Mafia. The Boss hardly took kindly to even the smallest of failures.

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤBut for now, they had to get through this ' check - up '. Easier SAID than done. They hated DOCTORS, after all.

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤ❛ㅤYeahㅤ—ㅤit is.ㅤ❜

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤTheir voice comes out as a mutter; not even bothering to correct the woman or tell her that they actually DISLIKED that particular name. Those heartbeats that reverberated into the woman's stethoscope were beating just a LITTLE too fast; despite the child appearing so withdrawn from her.

⊱ ★ ⊰ㅤ˗ˏˋㅤ❛ㅤAre we almost DONE yet ?ㅤ❜

she didn't want to be there. if she'd been less skilled, she was certain it would show in the crevices of her weary features, magentas shifting to and from all corners of the room that housed them both and the two insurance - cards stationed at the door. useless, really, without dazai. he would be there soon, she'd seen the texts but it still rendered in a sticky situation, caught between some frigid half - assed deal between the ada and the port mafia to finalize the temporary ceasefire. yosano knew very little about her new patient, seated atop the makeshift examination table, that wretched doll sitting on a chair nearby the door — but she knew how important they were, given the measures everyone had gone through to rescue them. or, perhaps, rescue was a rather strong word.

@theircurse : ❛  this  is  the  worst .  ❜

eyes blinking, as if she'd just tuned back into what she needed to be doing. it was hypocritical of her — they were just a child, just as she'd just been only a child once before. used and battered and exploited by one person for the sake of an entire organization, held prisoner and locked away just because of the cruel fate of being born with a coveted ability.

“ sure seems like it. i'm sorry. ” vocals steady, genuine, silky smooth as she carefully kept watch of their wounds, ensuring she wouldn't accidentally injure them in the process of a so - called check - up. stethoscope gently pressed to the center of their back, “ deep breath in, and then deep breath out, please. ” she was listening intently, the heart - beat not to be missed. “ q, is it ? ”

[theircurse]

TAG DUMPㅤ—ㅤVerse tags !

[theircurse-archive3]

✧ * º • –– @longerhuman​ asked:             ❝  yumeno - chan ,   wake  up .  you’ll  be  coming  with  me.  ❞    he  took  advantage  of   his  partner’s  post  -  corruption  exhaustion  to launch  another  plan  into  fruition  —  one  a  tad  bit  too  personal  for  his  liking.  ❝   you  don’t  have  the  strength  to  resist ,  it’s  pointless  to  try.    ❞

//  consider . dazai taking yumeno after the love-craft fight instead of sending them back to the mafia 🤔 

                           ⮩      【      unprompted.    】  

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ              THEY WISHED THE WHOLE THING WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A NIGHTMARE; nothing but a bad dream. Surely, they would wake back up in the cells soon; another hell but at least one that they were FAMILIAR with. Yet, as bleary eyes slowly opened; they began to realize that everything that happened up to that point was REALITY. Soft, green grass replaced cold, bloodstained concrete and the scent of fresh air was far from the iron - tinged stale atmosphere they were used to breathing. The PAIN still lingered though; echoing through their thin bones and flesh oozing red from reopened wounds underneath their sleeves. They didn’t want to get up; they didn’t even want to be AWAKE. 

                    But as their eyes fell upon an ALL too familiar face, 

He’s RIGHT. Those accursed vines had squeezed the very life out of them for far too long. Even STANDING was something they dreaded. But they had to get away while they were STILL OUTSIDE. Otherwise ...

                    ‘ N - no ... no, you’re NOT taking me back to the mafia ! ‘ 

                    With what little strength they had in their thin, broken body, they managed to stand up on their two legs. Though, they fail to get very far before they fall back to the ground in sheer EXHAUSTION.

[theircurse-archive3]

✴ * :  ･ﾟ ★  【  @etherealflora​​​​​ ( Poe ) 】

                               ⮩ cont. from  「 X 」

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ           ALAS, THE STRUGGLES OF PARENTHOOD … and the struggles of childhood, even ! Who could blame them for wanting to experience all these things that most other normal children got to ? THEY never had the experience of storytimes and having books read to them. All they ever had was the merciless abuse and torture from the Port Mafia. They’d had the idea on their mind ever since they saw the sheer AMOUNT of books the man wrote … and now was their PERFECT chance !

                 ‘ Okay ! ‘

                The child chimes; clearly excited as they would hurry over and sit right next to the other. The entire time, they would listen intently; leaning over his side slightly to peek into the man’s book. Every little detail that he had written, from the characters to the way to the scenery was set up to the riveting plotline; they were taking it ALL in; fully absorbing everything he was saying. Though, they do say ONE thing.

                ‘ So what were you talking about ? You’re GREAT at reading out loud ! ‘

[theircurse-archive3]

         Verse tags !

[theircurse-archive3]

✧ * º • –– @mckiingbiird​​​​​​​​ asked:       Maudie the Canadian goose stares at Yumeno for a long moment, a wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her beak, then waddles towards them and drops said treat in their hands with a honk much softer than usual, even nudging their hands with her beak as if to encourage them to eat.

                                   ⮩      【    Unprompted.    】  

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ         WHERE DID MAUDIE - CHAN get a whole wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich ? Should they even ASK ? Not as if  they could ask Maudie - chan anyway. They don’t have Harper - san’s ability to talk to these birds. 

                  It LOOKED like Maudie - chan was inviting them to eat. Was this the REALLY the big HORRIBLE GOOSE that Harper - san was warning them about ? She didn’t seem THAT bad to them. After all, not every bird just gives you FREE FOOD.

                  ‘ Thanks, Maudie - chan ! ‘

                  The child takes the sandwich; unwrapping it from its plastic and begins to take a few bites. A simple snack, really but SWEET JELLY and STICKY PEANUT BUTTER weren’t things they got often at all. 

                    ‘ We should get you something to eat too ! ‘ 

[theircurse-archive3]

✧ * º • –– @algizkali​​​ asked:   " oh, q, i've been looking for your everywhere. i'm so sorry. " ahmya wanted to run towards them, but instead just sunk to squatting on her knees. carletta stood behind her, clothes messy and disheveled, they had been running amok around the whole city trying to locate them. " are you okay, are you mad ? " ( perhaps post the guild arc ? )

                                   ⮩      【    Unprompted.    】

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ            HOW LONG HAD THEY BEEN RUNNING ? How far had those monsters that called themselves ‘ THE GUILD ‘ taken them from the city up in flames ? It was impossible for the child to think; let alone ponder the answers to those meaningless questions. To even be standing; let alone have dragged themselves however far they had was a feat not even THEY thought they could manage. Not when those PHANTOM VINES squeezed upon already sliced - open arms and near skeletal figure. Fatigue weighed upon their body and they just wanted to collapse right then and there. Yet, they COULDN’T. The moment they saw that executive passed out on the ground and left behind by his so - called partner, they KNEW that this was their ONLY chance to escape. 

                     The sound of approaching footsteps made their HEART STOP; images of men in shades and suits flashing through their eyes. But it’s not; no, it’s only the FEW people that actually cared about then in this nightmarish world.

                    As they were approached, it was clear that they themselves were in a PITIFUL state. Their characteristic jacket and scarf were entirely missing; revealing their white shirt stained varying shades of CRIMSON all about the limbs. Monochrome strands were tousled into a unkempt mess. And the look upon their face bore nothing but EXHAUSTION and EMPTINESS.

                    ‘ I ... ‘

                    What were they even supposed to say ? Their mind was a muddled mess; still struggling to properly process everything that had happened. In a singular day; the entire city of Yokohama nearly fell into ruin; all because their ability was PUSHED over the edge. How the HELL were they supposed to inevitably show their face to the mafia again without being killed ? Did they even WANT to think about such a fate ? All they knew was that they were NOT at all okay.

                    ‘ ... I’m tired. ‘ 

[theircurse-archive3]

mckiingbiird​:

@theircurse asked:

GOD OF WAR: RAGNAROK SENTENCES

"Perhaps it started as a way to keep you entertained, but honestly, I've come to enjoy it as well. I thought it'd be too dangerous, but Maudie has proven to be quite skilled in not getting caught, so I have no objections, not that she would listen even if I had any. Beside, she seems to enjoy it as well."

Said goose honks as if to agree, almost dropping the plastic bag in her beak. More spoils from yet another successful ambush on a certain blonde mafia brat.

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ          𝐅𝐔𝐍𝐍𝐘 𝐀𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐖𝐀𝐒, it was just a little WORRISOME. When that girl got mad, she got MAD. Could an angry goose take on an angry ability ? Who knows. But there was NO WAY they were going to stop that goose. They couldn’t if they tried.

                  ‘ Well I hope she doesn’t get caught ! Because Elise - chan is REALLY MEAN when she gets mad ! ‘

                  ‘ What’s in the bag ? ‘ 

[theircurse-archive3]

✧ * º • –– @deprcvities​ asked: ❛ i hope you haven’t been standing out in the cold this whole time. ❜ miyuki

                               ⮩      【   𝟐𝟎𝟎 𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐎𝐌 𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒.  】

               ‘ Just for a little bit ! ‘

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ         THE CHILD REASSURES THE MAN; even if they have been standing outside just a bit longer than they had wanted. They’d been waiting; HOPING that Naomi - neechan would notice them outside and let them in. But maybe Naomi - neechan wasn’t at the Agency today. And certainly, no one else would let them in.

              Still, at least THIS MAN was nice enough. He was a lot nicer than the other Agency members.

              ‘ Naomi - neechan isn’t here right ? ‘

[theircurse-archive3]

✴ * :  ･ﾟ ★          Starter for @heirofkhaenriah​ ( Kyouka ) ( shamelessly stolen from X )

                  ' It’s NOT safe for people to see us together. ‘

╰  ★  █║  ⁞    —     ˗ˏˋ            THE CHILD’S WORDS WERE ALMOST INAUDIBLE as they stare at the ground; trying to avoid contact with the girl’s azure hues. It’s not as if they DIDN’T want to see her. Oh, they were OVERJOYED despite their somber appearance. But things weren’t quite the same anymore. The two of them were of DIFFERENT worlds now. And those two worlds just COULDN’T co - exist. 

                  Should the ARMED DETECTIVE AGENCY catch the girl with the Port Mafia’s weapon of mass destruction; they would surely bring harm to the BOTH of them. If the Port Mafia were to spot the two of them just out in the open like this, that horrible organization would no doubt try to drag the BOTH of them back into the darkness.

                  And if nothing else, if THEY could never be free; they at least wanted HER to be free.

                  ‘ REALLY bad things would happen, Onee - chan. ‘