#(I was projected an A and ended up with a C) and ended up with a first!!

[tartagliove]

7:00pm

who knew that being friends with Kaveh meant befriending his friends—including the General Mahamatra?

cyno x reader ✧ 1.2k words fluff, mentions of a minor injury

If someone told you three months ago that you would be a regular guest at Kaveh and Alhaitham’s home, you would not believe them. But after working on a project with Kaveh, you have been slowly introduced to his friends, including the General Mahamatra. 

Cyno was intimidating and stoic at first, eyes of flame piercing through you. You struggled to talk to him, even in a group setting. His stoicism has not left, but you’ve learned to read him and are much more comfortable in his presence now.

Which is why you and Cyno are sitting across from each other at the living room table, stomachs full from dinner with your friends. Kaveh, Alhaitham, and Tighnari have moved into one of the studies to discuss something, but all your focus is on the Genius Invokation TCG cards and dice spread across the table. All the game pieces belong to Cyno. After you had asked him to teach you his favorite card game a week ago, he carefully curated a deck for you to start playing with so you could discover what playstyle you like before buying cards to form a deck of your own.

“I’ll use three Cryo points and have my Kaeya attack your Pyro Fatui agent with his skill.” You push three elemental dice toward the center of the table, then look up at Cyno. “I can do that, right?”

He inclines his head. “That falls within the rules of the game.”

“Oh, good.” You move to withdraw your hand, but Cyno’s eyes narrow and he quickly reaches out, fingers wrapping around your own. He pulls your hand toward himself, making you stretch a bit awkwardly over the table. “C-cyno?”

“You’re hurt,” he says. “What happened?”

You look down at your hand, held in his warm grasp. Dirty bandages wrap haphazardly around your pointer and middle fingers, tied in a messy knot at the end. Under Cyno’s sharp gaze, embarrassment makes your face hot at the sloppiness of your work.

“I scraped my knuckles while working on a project,” you tell him. “It was a bit hard to bandage everything up with only one hand.” 

Cyno lets go of your hand at your explanation. “I see.” 

You sit back in your chair, noticing how your hand suddenly feels colder. Blowing  out a breath, you look at the card game before you. “Anyway, it’s your move.”

Cyno is quick to have his Diluc card attack your Kaeya. But when you start thinking about how to retaliate, he stands up. “I’ll be back,” he says to the wide-eyed look you give him.

“Okay,” is all you manage to respond with before he leaves, walking into the study. You can hear his steady voice interrupting your friends’ conversation, though you can’t quite make out the words.

You try to turn your attention to the cards in front of you. There aren’t enough elemental dice with the right elements for you to use your cards’ special attacks, so…what was it that Cyno said you could do? You don’t remember. Sighing, you gingerly cross your arms on top of your cards and rest your head on them. Your eyes flutter shut.

“If you’re tired, we can end the game here and continue another time.”

Cyno’s reappearance surprises you into jolting upright, messing up your cards. You look down at them with a pout on your lips. “Yeah… I think I might need to head home and rest soon.”

Instead of sitting back down across from you, Cyno settles right next to you. He places a wooden box onto the table and flips open the lid, revealing a collection of bandages, small jars of salve and medicine, and cleaning alcohol.

“Wait, what-”

Cyno doesn’t let you fully express your confusion. “I’m dressing your wounds properly,” he states. He holds your gaze, unwavering stare letting you know that he will not budge on this.

You can’t help but squirm a little, eyes flickering away as you lift your hand and rest it on his outstretched one. His hand is warm and rough, calloused and scarred from all the battles he’s fought. Yet he is gentle as he unwraps your bandages, cleans your cuts, and carefully spreads a healing salve over them. 

The salve stings, but your attention is drawn to his long eyelashes as you study him. They cast a slight shadow onto his cheeks, although his bangs partially obscure one eye from view as he looks down at your hand. From the slight furrow between his brows, you assume that the limited vision bothers him. 

Without fully thinking about it, you brush his bangs back with your free hand, tucking the hair behind his ear. He looks up at the action, warm orange eyes meeting your own.

“I was just- you looked annoyed about your hair being in your eyes,” you explain. Your face burns under the indecipherable look that Cyno gives you.

“It did not bother me,” he says as he unravels a spool of bandages from the box. His fingers are nimble, deftly wrapping the white strips of cloth around your wounds in tidy loops. “I was concerned about your injuries; they’re worse than I thought they would be. You are skilled at your work, but please take care. If this happens again, tell me. I will bandage your wounds for you.”

Butterflies dance in your stomach. “O-okay, Cyno. You did take care of my cuts better than I could.” Looking down at your fingers, neat knots tie the two ends of each bandage together, ensuring that the cloth will not loosen as you work tomorrow. “Thank you,” you tell him softly. Then, because you don’t know if your heart can take any more of this—of being so close to him and tended to like something precious—you stand. “I should head home now.”

Cyno dips his head in acknowledgement and releases your hand. You immediately feel colder. He stands as well, tilting his head toward the door. “It’s late. Let me escort you home.”

Your eyes widen. “Oh, you don’t have to do that! It’s only a bit after seven, and others are still here, after all.”

He shakes his head, grabbing his cloak from the back of his chair and sweeping it over his shoulders. “I insist. I will return later for my cards.”

Cyno, abandoning his Genius Invokation cards to walk you home? That is something you never dreamed of. Yet it makes you indescribably happy for reasons you are not quite ready to admit to yourself, so all you do is smile helplessly at his adamance. 

“Alright then,” you say as Cyno opens the front door, falling in beside you as you step out on the lamp-lit streets of Sumeru City. “Thank you for walking me home.”

Cyno acknowledges your thanks with a nod of his head. He stays by your side all the way to your home, where he waits to hear the lock turn behind you in your front door before he returns to Alhaitham’s home. As he walks alone, all he can think of is the feeling of your hand in his own.

He’d like to feel that again.

requested by @auraxins for my camping event. reblogs and comments are much appreciated!

[applestorms]

i love near so goddamn much. i finally read the c-kira and a-kira post-canon one shots all the way through last night and AAAAAAAAA my heart. nate river 🫵🫵🫵

c-kira in particular hits me hard bc you can really see that he's still reeling from the events of the main story. it’s a very specific era of near that’s so horribly awkward and insecure about his place in the world, about his role as L, and has so very few people left behind to support him-- really just lidner, rester, and gevanni. so much of that story is about near struggling to figure out who he is and who he wants to be in the wake of Everything, scrambling around in the shadows of all these false gods and blown up egos, trying to grow up and be a Person in the smoking remains of all these people who killed themselves with their own hubris. i mean, just look at this page:

LOOK AT THIS. near is almost shockingly expressive in this story, his grief and regret is fucking Palpable in a way that you very rarely see with a guy like him. it really gets to me that this is the story where near actually opens up about his mixed feelings surrounding the original L, about the interview he held where he picked near & mello out to be his two successors, and all while hiding himself within these massive card towers that you only see to be these giant L's at the end-- a kid barely out of his teens already getting dwarfed by the enormity of the history he is expected to continue and represent. the winner of the game who's only prize is the legacy he now holds on his shoulders, the grief he is cursed with as the only one left behind. this kid barely has anyone now, never even got the chance to truly, fully know what he lost in the first place, these all-powerful figures that have dictated every inch of his life from the moment he stepped foot in that damn house.

and i mean, goodness. what did we expect? i can talk all i want about the cinematic parallels of light & L as opposites, but look at near & mello in literally every piece of official art-- near truly loses his other half when mello dies, and you can just Feel the discomfort, the deep-seated, underlying imbalance in his soul through this shit.

a-kira near, on the other hand, has had the time to grow a bit more at ease with himself, but he still gets to me in a slightly different way. i cannot emphasize enough how utterly fucking perfect the decision to make his hair longer is-- for so simple of a detail, it really sums up so much about his character. this version of an older near feels like a guy who's been stuck outside of time for ages, barely even noticing the constant shifts of the outer world as he holes himself up in his room, hardly aware of the way that his own body stretches and grows and changes with each passing day. doing his job, all just for a bit of entertainment. there is still that distinctly privileged, childish part of him that hides in his forts of toys and makes whatever demands he pleases, but it's more smoothed over, more exhausted, more Done.

he's packed away the grief by this point. dealt with it properly? not necessarily. but the wound isn't as raw now so he can set it aside to be ignored or looked over more easily, focus on the things that he wants to. blow up his toys when they don't meet his standards.

i strikes me as important that near's view on the new kira's shifts so much over the course of even just these two little stories. in the c-kira story, near is so Quick to shit on the new guy as fast as possible, literally snarking him into submission with the fear of his presence alone until he writes his own name down. we never see this "cheap" kira, this pathetic fake that couldn't possibly stand up to the original. (projecting a little there, nate?) he's barely more than a panel or two of hands, and then he disappears from the story forever.

in a-kira though, you get something a little more desperate, a little more hungry-- near really fucking wants to meet this new guy, purely for the sake of talking to him, and is a lot quicker to respect him & the depth of how well he's thought through this plan. at first it seems like he's intrigued by the idea of finally finding yet another equal, someone to match his freak after years of standing on his own, and knowing DN you're inclined to trust that the mind games will eventually happen. but, in the end...

he loses. and doesn't he seem so happy about it?

minoru really is the perfect match for near in a way-- a new, passive kira, uninterested in the bullshittery of killing and shinigami and evil murder diaries, to reflect and match the tired, new L who was done with his job before he even started doing it. RIP minoru dying due to shinigami bullshit, but i'm genuinely happy that this is the ending near gets, the chance to finally lose at something without having to pay the price of human lives for it. winning has almost never been a truly positive thing for near-- his winning wammy's house only gave him the many pressures & stresses of a job as L, his winning against light only gave him a dead mello and a notebook to quietly burn, hell, all of this shit happening at all is what made mello resent him so much in the first place.

but now he can lose. and i think he's all the better for it.

near is immature, yes, he bossy and snarky and blows up his toys without giving a fuck what anyone else has to say-- but he doesn't get ahead of himself in the way that light and L and the others did, a trait which ultimately lets him win but also leaves him behind to shoulder the grief of a generation. but now he can lose, he can let the fate of the world fall of his shoulders for just a moment, and everything is still going to be okay. it's good to see him getting older. it's good to see that you can still move on and grow, even when it seems like the legacies of the past are locking you away in a cage. i'm glad these manga exist, and i'm glad near can still make it out alive.

[mysewingadventures]

Making the ✨Lioncourt Gown✨ (Part 1/?)

Shoot, it's been like two years since I last posted, apologies! I’ve been incredibly busy with uni and life in general, taking care of my mental health, it’s just been a very stressful time lately. I haven't really worked on anything worthy of posting in the meantime, only minor things and one dress I rushed and it didn't turn out well anyway. But, since Halloween is coming up and I don’t feel like wearing the same thing for the third time in a row, I thought it was the perfect excuse to try and make something new and the other day at 2am I fell down a rabbit hole and came up with an idea I’m completely obsessed with.

So recently, (in case you couldn't tell by the title haha) I’ve been really into Interview with the Vampire (the TV show), and there’s this one costume that’s so iconic it immediately caught my attention: This Lestat outfit.

I feel like since this blog isn't fandom related I need to explain myself to those of you who are just semi-familiar with IWTV. Maybe you know Lestat as essentially the villain of the story and are wondering why on earth I'd want to make an outfit inspired by him. The answer is quite simple and not actually deep at all: I just thought it'd be a fun project. I'm very well aware of his personality and would not want to be in the same room as him in real life haha. But he's such an interesting character to watch on screen (they all are, in my opinion). Anyways-

This outfit is from a scene that takes place in the 1790s and now, I’m unfortunately not too versed in men’s fashion so I can’t quite comment on its historical accuracy (and also it’s worn in the context of a theater performance so it’s bound to be more flashy than what people would have worn on the streets), but the way the lapel is shaped just screams redingote to me, and since I've always wanted to make a redingote I'm going to make a redingote version of the costume!

For reference, here's what a c. 1790 redingote looks like:

This one has a normal button closure but redingotes were also often double-breasted (which is what I'm going for), taking inspiration from men's fashion. These were often worn to ride in - hence the name, redingote - riding coat.

Maybe this is the point where I should mention that I'm not going for perfect historical accuracy for this project. It really is just a fun project to try to approximate something as seen on a show to an actual historical piece of clothing.

Here’s a super quick sketch I drew to check if the colors looked good together, and I have to say, I’m sold 1000%.

I am so excited to wear this when it’s done, but also a bit anxious because for starters, I’ve never made a redingote before, and the dresses that I have made all have issues with the sleeves because apparently, I can’t sew sleeves correctly. So this time, I really want to make sure it all fits properly before I sew it and take my time with it to make sure it ends up being something that I love as much as I love the idea of it.

This time, I tried something a little different with my mockup - usually, I’ll draft a pattern on paper, then cut out my mockup and sew it, but this time I decided to make the mockup by draping the fabric directly on the mannequin that I dressed in my stays and a bumroll, making sure I had the correct measurments, and it was a complete gamechanger. It fit right away with minimal adjustments, and I was also immediately able to check how the fabric falls, if it needed to be on the bias or not, etc. I ended up doing everything on straight grain which is technically not 100% correct as the front piece needs to be on a slight bias but it seems to work for this piece so let’s hope the fabric doesn’t wrinkle! I’ll also be adding boning so I’m hoping that’ll additionally keep it all straight and even in the front.

Once the mockup was completed, I went on the search for the right fabrics and got these (the skirt fabric, the buttons and the tape I ordered online and they've yet to arrive!):

The black base fabric and the blue one are cotton, as will be the skirt. The details are satin! I spent a long time at the fabric store trying to think of the best way to do this and it does look like the details on Lestat's outfit are maybe velvet, but I was afraid it would look a little too costume-y and cheap, so I ended up going with satin in the end.

I pinned the fabric mock-up onto the lining fabric (just a white Ikea bedsheet), added 1,5cm seam allowances where needed cut out the lining first, then placed the lining onto the black base fabric and cut that out as well.

I needed to lay the pieces down this way because I bought 2,5 meters, and I'll need 2m for the outer skirt alone so there's not a lot of space left, as I'll also have to cut out the sleeves from that fabric. I then sewed everything together.

And then I noticed I'd made a mistake - the lining for the front panel was supposed to be blue. Welp, now it's white, and I also realized I didn't have enough blue fabric to do the collar AND the lining, so I went for a fake lining for which I cut out two blue triangles to be slightly bigger than the lapel

and stitched them to the lining layer so the seams wouldn't be visible on the black outer layer. This was the result:

Pretty happy with it! Next up, even though I don't have the beige tape yet, I decided to cut out the color panels in the front and already pin them down. After some trial and error, I decided to go for 15x4,5cm triangles and calculated the size needed for the shorter ones (9x7,5cm), cut them out of the satin (which, let me tell you, was so finicky it ended up being the most difficult part of it all) laid them down and fastened with pins.

This is what I have so far:

Looking at it in the picture, I'm worried that the color panels take up too much space in the front. It looks like that in the original picture, but in my sketch I made everything a little narrower. But I was also scared of pulling on it too much because the panels are just pinned to the fabric. Some parts are sticking out over the black base layer which maybe also makes it look wider than it really is, I'll cut it to shape once I have the tape and have a better visual understanding of what it's going to look like.

Next up will be the collar/yoke and the dreaded sleeves and possibly the boning. I should do the boning before I attach the beige tape. I am realizing as I’m writing this that I should’ve done the boning before pinning down the colored panels as they’re supposed to cover it. Oh well. It’s fine. Either way, I think it already looks super cool and I can't wait to see the finished product!

[spade-deck]

*Sees a fictional character*

You know what, I like you

*plans out a fanfic/fanfics where they attempt suicide*

[charcarts]

gwitch asking real questions like: could a tanuki girl fall in love with a kitsune girl?

[petalsandpurity]

It’s almost like those students were able to improve their skills because they studied a single subject that they were genuinely interested in and passionate about for three years

[karliahs]

going through my old bnha drafts and there's like 5k of bullying-related hurt/comfort that's maybe 80% finished? and I'm annoyed bc I want. To read the end. Who would be so cruel as to abandon this without a conclusion. 25 year old me you have a lot to answer for

[loving-jack-kelly]

it is Extremely funny that the whole watcher thing just ended after one weekend of people being like hey this was poorly thought out and a terrible idea. lmao. cringe fail financial decision.

[mutalune]

me when people hate on aos trek:

[dapperrokyuu]

Kudos to Link Click for introducing me to some of the most losershit characters Ive ever experienced, lol.

[blondiest]

With the way you write Mello's perspective more than Near, I bet on 1890$ that you are a variation of his female version.

being attacked in my own goddamn home rn. can't have shit in [LOCATION REDACTED]

[oflostinfound]

✨ I like your writing and I love learning more about your characters through my characters. Alius Orbus sounds fun- I'll be a reader of the comic when it starts for sure!

send ✨ if you like my writing and feel free to tell me why !! the rpc is in serious need of some positivity.

{ I'm glad you like them and their world!! I've been working on them for years and it always makes my day to know people like them!! 🥺🥺 }

[bleue-flora]

Read your discussion with elmhat and I have to add that c!Quackity was basically canonically abused by c!Schlatt. Like, on-screen. He gets threatened, insulted, sexually harassed, and even physically beaten into obedience at least once. It's a huge thing and it's taken as seriously as anything involving Schlatt can be.

It's not an excuse for Q later being abusive himself, but Schlatt mistreating him is a HUGE part of his motivations later, so I needed to correct/add that

I mean… ok that’s fair. I apologize. And I mean that. :) Let’s make sure the facts are straight for sure. So yeah you’re right that did happen but just not to the like extremes that some people portray I guess is what I was more referring to (as far as I remember). Though I am always down for some clips if you have any that come to mind. But I see what you are getting at… though as you said it doesn’t justify it really, but it is still important for making the audience sympathetic and understanding towards a character. (And perhaps take this with a grain of salt because I haven’t been in a real actual like romantic/sexual relationship… though I guess to be fair I do have experience with pretty severe sexual harassment and manipulation (minus the beating)..…but that’s really besides the point) I think in the scale of the dsmp it’s just kinda…. Meh….(don’t apply this to irl btw) for me perhaps the biggest thing is that it was ultimately his own fault and no one forced him to stay and he was already ruthless before c!Schlatt. And it may have been cruel and terrible and screwed him up but ultimately it never really changed his motivations and actions that much… like he ran in an election before c!Schlatt, he serves as an influential government official and forms countries after c!Schlatt. I mean the whole bet thing with c!Schlatt about getting the book ultimately could be taken out of lore and it wouldn’t change much… I don’t know. In the skewed world of the dsmp, abuse is a standard afternoon so it’s hardly that consequential in my opinion of course. That may make me sound cold hearted but… egh like in the same case as c!Tommy for exile. They faced the consequences of their own actions, consequences that on the scale of cruelty on the dsmp are just not on the same scale as what is considered note worthy abuse in the real world. And if we are saying that counts as his traumatic backstory that is both supposed to somewhat make the audience feel for him and make him understandable then it just… isn’t enough? Isn’t substantial?… I don’t know. Maybe that makes me heartless but I’m not saying c!c!Quackity is a one dimensional heartless, control freak, sadistic villain, he’s still a person however flawed and broken and misguided. But I don’t think we can blame c!Quackity’s behavior and cruel delusion as being from c!Schlatt nor do I think he did things because he has a deep care for other people… but then again maybe that says more about me then him, that perhaps my views are scuffed…I don’t know….

[akkivee]

the absolute comedic artistry that was iwasaki-san and takeuchi-san continuing to struggle with their rice planting as shinjuku style became prominent in the bg and hayami-san rolled up in that automatic planter LOL

[snowychicken]

Btw I made another!!!

[waugh-bao]