#Because I still haven't seen everything the game has to offer

[s1m0nth3swag]

Could you write “How would Viktor does when reader has depression”.

Of course! Thanks for the ask pookie :)

These r a little short because I am still ill (and my head is literally killing me as I type this) but Viktor is more important than getting well!! (Also bawling my eyes out after act 3, even though I'd still love Viktor nonetheless, machine or not, he's getting it)

WARNINGS/ CONTENT INFO: Mentions of Depression (obviously), GN!Reader, sweet Fluff, Viktor has no clue what he's doing in all honesty, he tries (and succeeds) to be sweet

2 Stories - One more casual/not yet dating and the other is established relationship

You've been off lately, Viktor had noticed. Isolating yourself bit by bit, looking more tired and overall acting just weird. You've had your phases before, but this one was too long. It wasn't like you at all. You've barely even spoken to him or Jayce, when usually you'd yap both their ears off about whatever topic you had learned about the previous night. Now, the lab was silent. Jayce was away on some Council party, and god knows Viktor would never start a conversation on his own while working. Though, he couldn't focus tonight. He mindlessly tinkered with small parts that laid around his desk, his thoughts clouded with the question of what was bothering you. Whatever it was, it bothered him as well. He'd never say, but he missed the cheery and chipper way you'd usually be.

"Are you... alright?" He questions after a while, clearing his throat slightly. This was already too awkward for him, but he did care. Totally just because the atmosphere of the lab would suffer if you weren't your usual self. He noticed the way you shifted uncomfortably as he glanced over to where you were sitting, like you were pondering how to answer. He wondered why you'd need so long to think of an answer, as if you couldn't tell him the truth. "I'm fine. Just a little tired, I just haven't been sleeping well." You answer, a soft, akward chuckle slipping from your lips. Viktor doesn't like that answer. You're different from how you are when you're just tired - not that he actually paid attention to that, but you weren't on your fifth cup of coffee yet. Actually, you hadn't had coffee at all today, another unusual happening. He sighs softly, and you immediatly know that he's gotten into questioning mode - he was a scientist after all. He really couldn't help it. "You can talk to me, you know? We don't have to be lab partners and nothing else, we can be friends." He speaks, his voice softer than before. "What's bothering you, hm?" Viktor adds, turning his chair around to look at you properly. It's your turn to sigh, letting your head hang slightly. "I've just been... feeling off. Like, actually tired but in a mental way? I don't know how to explain." You mutter, awkwardly averting your gaze from him. "We should take a day off, then. Do whatever you want instead of working." Viktor answers casually. "I don't want to miss important stuff in the lab Viktor, I can't take a day off." You throw back at him. He huffs, a slight chuckle filling the room. "Not you. Us. Maybe all three, if Jayce is willing." He clarifies, already noting it down in his notebook to make sure that day off actually happens.

Viktor noticed the moment he woke up next to you. You'd fallen into another slump. He could tell just by the way you didn't just not want to get up - it was a physical challenge for you. He's seen you like this before, though usually it didn't last too long, at least not that he's noticed, maybe only a day or two at most. But by now, it's been almost a week, and you haven't spoken to him about it. You've been more abrasive, have started caring less about your personal hygiene, and while Viktor doesn't mind, he always hated when you didn't take proper care of yourself. He wanted you to feel good, not fall into a depressive hole. He offered to take a shower or bath with you, to make a game out of brushing your teeth, but you had shut everything down. It wasn't because you didn't think the ideas were sweet, but more because you didn't think you even deserved that much effort. Viktor had to helplessly watch you get worse, and he couldn't even do anything to properly help. It was absolute hell to him.

He'd had enough, wanted to be mad at you, even, but he couldn't blame you for it. He could, however, force you to stay cuddled up in bed with him. You liked staying in bed anyway, and cuddling with him was always one of your favourites. So, here you two were, snuggled into the covers of Viktors way too confortable bed. "You know that I love you, right?" Viktor mumbled, his accent more heavy with sleep. He didn't say it enough, at least that's what he thought. "I do know..." you answered, just as sleepily. "I know you can't control this.. but let me help you, please? I know it's hard, trust me I do, but I hate having to watch from the sidelines as you get worse..." He sighs, pressing a kiss against your forehead. "Let me just be there for you, yeah, my dear?" Viktor adds, pulling away slightly to look at you. "Alright.. I'll... I'll try, I promise." You answer, scooting back towards him so you could press your face into the crook of his neck, basking in his warmth for a little longer.

[exeggcute]

the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators;  reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

I harp a lot on how I don't think the current episodic release structure for Arknights does it many favors in how it wants to tell its stories, and how it's story manifests for us, but there are some benefits to this type of long form structure, and it's moments that get better with hindsight. It's not impossible to do this in a more contained medium, as this is often a staple of the mystery genre of literature and film, but it is uncommonly employed in video games to great effect, with their contained stories often being played much more straight.

One of the benefits of releasing longer-form content is the ability to both make callbacks and to give additional details that change the meaning in earlier scenes. The most famous in Arknights, at least for me, is the scene in Wei's office in Chapter 2.

In it's original context, this is Wei Yenwu being aloof to the threat of Reunion, not even bothering to properly remember their leader's name. Once you learn though that Talulah is not just Reunion's leader but Wei Yenwu's niece, and suddenly the scene has new context. This is the scene I point to when I want to talk about how much of a slimeball Wei Yenwu is at this point in the story. This isn't him being aloof, this is Wei deliberately holding back information in order to manipulate for himself a better position. By not revealing his stakes, he wants to hold more power at the negotiation tables with Rhodes Island for Lungmen.

Of course he knows the name of the leader of Reunion, how could he not? How could he not remember letting Kaschey go and take her away, prioritizing Lungmen over the safety of his dead brother's daughter? But he's not going to show that to Rhodes Island, a bunch of strangers he intends to use in poor faith.

Now let's talk about a conversation in Chapter 10 you likely haven't thought about in quite some time!

That's right! We're here to talk about Nezzsalem's confrontation with Kal'tsit when she docks with Londinium. This is a really interesting scene that primarily serves initially to offer even more mystique to Kal'tsit and Theresa's assassination. After all, Kal'tsit and Nezzsalem knew each other, they even fought together at least once. The King of the Nachzehrer! He was there when Theresa was assassinated, and here he is now, inquiring about the death of the last pure Wendigo. None of this seems out of the question, but with some more time, it's possible to find this scene strange.

How did he know? Sure, the Nachzehrer thrives off of life and death, but they're more focused on war. The passing of lives to the Myriad Souls is the concern of the Banshees, not the Nachzehrer. Patriot is also not a Sarkaz hero, at least not directly, since he was a Patriot for Ursus, not Kazdel, and he was a supporter of Theresa at that. Given everything we know now, it's pretty unlikely that Patriot would have followed Theresis to Londinium. But it's still not completely out of the question. Babel reveals that the Military Council in its fledgling state knew about where he was.

This is a pretty small aside after Nezzsalem defeats Logos, but it managed to hit me like a brick, because the first thing I remembered was Nezzsalem confronting Kal'tsit about the death of Patriot. Patriot was not just a Wendigo to Nezzsalem, he was something of a son to him. Sure, he might not have been Nezzsalem's only student, but the Nachzehrer are not shown to be a particularly sentimental bunch pretty much ever, so the Sudaram going "Yeah. Your kid" is impactful here. Nezzsalem stands, having beaten Laqueramaline's son in combat, after Aefanyl had proven himself worthy of respect, as an old man thinking about his own son.

This reframes the conversation in Chapter 10. Nezzsalem knows Kal'tsit, it's implied he's known her for a very long time, and it's likely he's seen the different lives of Kal'tsit and likely knew of her involvement in the invasion of Kazdel a couple hundred years ago. So it's now also got that added element of the King of the Nachzehrer coming up to the landship and shaking Kal'tsit by the shoulders going "WHAT DID YOU DO". It provides new context for his anger. Kal'tsit was directly involved in the death of his foster son, just as she was directly involved previously in the destruction of Kazdel and one of the figures behind Babel.

It also adds some depth to Nezzsalem's acceptance. He died a warrior, maybe against one of the most fitting opponents upon all of Terra, and knowing that Patriot chose Kal'tsit quells that anger.

It's all neat. There's more that can be extrapolated from this, such as this providing something of an explanation for Patriot's military ability and potentially even his witchcraft, but those aren't as important or interesting to me. Chapter 14 is a story in a number of ways about the burden and threads of individuals who have lived an immensely long period of time, individuals who have found immortality in one way or another, and the ways that these lives ultimately intersect and weave with one another, and Patriot is another one of those patterns weaved through time.

[wileys-russo]

Could you write something for Alessia where reader is her sister and gets her first england call up. I feel like less would be such a good older sister, slightly protective and over bearing but also just making sure reader is fitting in and has no trouble.

the call up II a.russo x sister!reader

the call up II a.russo x sister!reader

you'd been sat with a few of your club team mates watching a movie together at beths house when you'd gotten the call, shock written all over your face as you glanced down and saw the contact name.

"go! answer it." beth whispered with an encouraging nod as you hurried to your feet and raced out of the living room, hyper aware of the eyes watching as you did so.

accepting sarina's call the dutch woman got straight to the point. you'd seen her in the crowd at a few of the home games you'd started in, and sure enough she advised she'd been impressed with what she'd seen, offering you a spot at the next camp with the senior team.

she was honest in the chances of you getting minutes in the game against scotland were slim, but the opportunity to train with the senior team and absorb and learn was there and waiting as you eagerly accepted, sarina advising she would see you at camp before ending the call.

your first call was to your parents who were over the moon, promising they'd keep it quiet until the squad for camp was officially announced, though within a few seconds your phone lit up with a flurry of notifications as the news was put into the family group chat making you roll your eyes with a fond smile.

you stood to return back to your team mates but your phone lit up with another call, your sisters name and contact photo she despised flashing across the screen making you snicker with amusement at the unflattering 0.5 angle of her with bed hair and a scowl in high definition.

"hi less." you greeted with a chuckle. "you still haven't changed my contact photo have you?" the blonde sighed knowingly as you laughed properly looking at it again.

"of course not, and i won't be anytime soon unless i take an uglier photo." you teased as she mocked you under your breath. "you're such a little shit. but anyway, why the hell did i have to find out about your call up from luca?" alessia scoffed accusingly and you didn't need to be on facetime to imagine the stern frown which would be plastered across her features.

"because no one in this family knows how to keep anything to themselves, you especially." you rolled your eyes, sending a smile and a thumbs up to beth who poked her head in to check on you, the older girl sending you a warm smile back and retreating to the living room.

"i should have been your first call, i'm your only sister and i'll be at camp too. your first call up to the senior squad is a huge deal!" alessia lectured before dropping tone and congratulating you, the two of you having imagined for years what it would be like if you ever made the senior team together.

you were disappointed not to make the world cup roster but having the extra time to focus on football with your club had benefited you immensely in other ways, and you just needed to consistently remind yourself that everything happened for a reason.

you'd started off your professional career with a short term contract at bristol city, and after a year of starting and a semi successful season you were offered a three year contract with manchester united which had always been your goal.

alessia had already known of the offer before you did of course, ella and mary having to practically hold her down to stop her calling to pressure you into accepting the moment she found out.

but none the less it was an offer too good to decline for any club, let alone your childhood dreams of one day playing for united coming true and to get the opportunity to play alongside and see alessia every day.

the two of you fought tooth and nail growing up as sisters did and always over the most ridiculous of things.

but regardless of that and the near five year age gap you were always close, your relationship only strengthening once alessia went away to college and you weren't living on top of one another anymore.

you'd only played a single season with united, most of it spent on the bench or as an impact sub, but you loved the girls and found yourself falling hard for manchesters charm.

which is why the loan had been quite the shock, no real warning given when the club accepted an offer from spurs on your behalf, both you and grace traded with the hopes of gaining proper game time and starting minutes under your belts.

alessia had kicked off the moment it went public, first at you for not telling her and then at everyone else who would listen to her frustrations which you knew mostly stemmed from a worry of how you would go moving to a different place and a different team all on your own.

only, you weren't alone. with grace by your side you adjusted easily into this new challenge in your life, you and the midfielder growing even closer than you were when you were at united, and now you both found no trouble calling each other a best friend, attached at the hip and practically inseparable.

"-i'll come and pick you up friday for dinner for mums birthday. i love you!" alessia confirmed, clearing pausing waiting for you to say it back. "don't you dare hang up and not say it back you little shit." your sister scoffed as you grinned, forever finding it all too easy to get under her skin.

"love you lessi, see you friday!" with that you hung up, hearing the girls in the other room start to argue over what to order for dinner as you took a moment to let it all sink in.

you'd finally done it.

~

"you've got your kits yeah? and the tracksuits, and the training ones, and your socks, and your cleats, and you need to be careful you're not wearing anything that isn't adidas branded if you're being filmed or there's pictures taken by the social media team-" your sister lectured over the phone as you rolled your eyes and flicked her to speaker.

"-then you'll get the schedule when you arrive but i'll show you where everything is anyway. if we're not roomed near each other i'll still come and find you every morning and we can have breakfast before training and i'll run you through the daily schedules-" you started to tune her out as you flicked through your closet, humming every now and then to appease her.

"-are you even listening to me?" you only hummed again, completely checked out of the conversation now as you wrestled to get your suitcase closed. "oh my god you've got me on speaker and you've left the room again like last time. OI!" you winced and zoned back in as she shouted loudly.

"no! i'm right here idiot. but i know you love the sound of your own voice so who was i to interrupt?" you chuckled, grunting as you sat on top of your case and finally got it closed.

“ha ha ha, very funny. what the hell are you doing anyway? why are you grunting and groaning are you working out right now?” your sister questioned. “no! im trying to close my case, which i now have!” you sighed victoriously zipping it up.

“you haven’t finished packing?” alessia shouted as you rolled your eyes. “less.” you warned, muting her momentarily as she ignored you and started to rant and rave about how you needed to step up and be an adult.

returning a few moments later you unmuted her, catching her mid story of something you really weren’t all that interested in.

“oh no less you’re breaking up I can’t hear you!” you spoke in a monotone, voice dripping with sarcasm as you scrunched a piece of paper and made glitchy noises with your mouth.

“seriously? you can’t even just say you don’t want to talk anymore? you have to make up some bullshit excuse and-“ her words fell short as you clicked the red end call button with a chuckle, tossing the ball of paper over your shoulder.

you watched the texts fly in from her, unhappy with your attitude and warning you needed to be mature on camp which you silenced with a roll of your eyes, interrupted by your security buzzer going.

“sorry don’t want any.” you grinned as grace’s head appeared in the security camera, the girl pulling a face and flipping you off as you buzzed her in. “cars here! im not comin up, you’re comin down. hurry!” the brunette warned as your eyes widened and you rushed about making sure you had everything.

you jolted in surprise as a knock sounded on your door, flinging it open and frowning when grace stood there with a grin. “aih ya dickhead the car isn’t here yet it’s not even ten, too easy!” your best friend laughed pushing past you as she dumped her own bags by the door.

“you are such a wind up.”

~

“you nervous?” you asked grace, tapping her knee to gain her attention as the car turned into st georges park and she pulled her headphones down around her neck.

“nah not really. you shouldn’t be either! we wouldn’t have been called up if they didn’t think we wasn’t ready, and your sister is here anyway to look after ya.” grace reminded with a smile, pushing your head with a wink as the two of you rough housed for a bit before the car parked up.

“cameras rollin. how’d i look then?” grace fluttered her eyelashes making you grin. “ugly as ever. come on hillary!” you slid out of the car before she could retaliate, groaning at the nickname.

you knew from the way your phone had been blowing up that your sister was already here, having arrived earlier this morning with lotte and beth.

so it wasn’t any real surprise when you’d hardly stepped a foot out of the car and she appeared, hovering at the top of the stairs with ella plastered to her side who sent you and grace a grin and a wave.

both of you grabbing your bags you flashed a smile and fist bumped the media staff who were filming entrances as you and grace ascended the stairs.

“ready for your first camp girls?” you and grace both echoed back a yes, grinning at the camera before someone wiggled their way in between you both and slung their arms over your shoulders.

"big sister gonna look out for you then?" the staff laughed as alessia beamed and squeezed both you and grace tightly. "well she's got big shoes to follow, we've been working on her backheel." alessia joked, the camera crew moving toward the next van which pulled up which was full of the city girls.

"less get off." you huffed, grace wiggling away and tackling ella in a hug, the taller of the two dragging them inside in a headlock as your sister only gripped you tighter.

"absolutely not, roomie." the older girl grinned smugly as your face fell. "oh you've gotta be kidding me!" you groaned throwing your head back in annoyance.

"she's messin with you, we don't share rooms anymore on camp." a new voice sounded behind you as you managed to throw off alessia's arm and charge toward them. "mazza!" you cheered happily, launching at her as she caught you with a grunt.

"baby russo!" the girl cheered in the same tone before dropping you back to your feet. "just my actual name is fine thank you." you shoved her playfully with a roll of your eyes. "not this camp or any camp after, that is your name now. or we could go with B.R for short?" mary teased tugging on your ears.

"i'm quite fond of her childhood nickname." alessia chimed in with a smirk as you sent her a murderous glare. "don't you dare, or i'll spill one of your secrets. and we both know that i have plenty of them to choose from!" you smirked back as her face fell.

"rat." alessia muttered, nodding for you to follow her as she grabbed your bags and headed for the elevator to show you to your room.

"we'll talk later. you spill some of those secrets and theres more where this came from kid." mary whispered, sliding a tenner into your pocket with a pat and a wink.

~

you were mid dream when you first heard it, the repeated thudding which seemed to leak into your subconscious as suddenly you realized you weren't dreaming anymore and someone was knocking furiously on your door.

raising your head from your pillow you blinked groggily and rubbed your eyes so hard you saw stars, stumbling out of bed and tripping over the corner of the duvet where your foot got stuck in bed.

hitting the ground with a thud and a grunt the knocking stopped for a moment and you paused, unsure if you'd imagined it.

"for god sakes hurry up!" nope, didn't imagine it.

"what?" you retorted grumpily, mornings your least favourite time of day as you rubbed your face and your sister barreled in past you without so much as a greeting.

"go away alessia its too early!" you groaned, shutting the door and trudging back toward your bed. "you haven't even hung anything up? for god sakes this is a hotel this isn't your bedroom at home you can't just fling shit around and leave your mess everywhere like a tornado!" your sister lectured with a click of her tongue, busying herself picking things up and putting them away.

"i've not even been here for twenty four hours yet less surely that stick up your ass is gonna sting something terrible by the end of the week?" you grumbled, sliding back into bed as your sister shot you a filthy look at her shoulder.

"hilarious. but you have to be professional here and set a good reputation for yourself, especially your first camp. that means up on time, early for breakfast, one of the first to the pitch, extra reps in the gym-" you tuned her out, quite the expert at it by now, eyes slipping closed again.

"urgh get off!" you moaned as a weight settled on top of you, wheezing slightly as alessia made herself comfortable sitting on your back. "you have...forty six seconds to get up yourself before i drag you out of this bed by your ankles and we both know i will!" your sister threatened seriously, checking her watch.

"you're so fucking annoying. this is worse than when we both lived at home, at least then you also used to hate mornings!" you exhaled deeply, star fishing out on the bed as she wriggled and purposefully bore more of her taller form into you.

"twenty nine, twenty eight, twenty seven..." the blonde counted down ignoring your statements. "can hardly get up myself with you on top of me can i bigfoot?" you snapped, alessia rolling off of you and squealing as your leg kicked out to push her off the bed.

"right! three, two, one." and with that she flung the covers off, grabbing your ankles and true to her word yanking you out of bed, your body hitting the carpeted floor with a thump as she loomed over you.

"get dressed. if theres no pancakes when we get to breakfast i will be holding you personally responsible and you will pay for it!" your older sister warned, grabbing your top in hand and hauling you up to your feet, shoving a pile of clothes into your hand and pushing you toward the bathroom.

"stop manhandling me hagrid!" you snapped as alessia chose to ignore you, making your bed up and getting herself comfortable on top of it, scrolling through her phone as you snatched yours from the nightstand.

"hurry up!" you were trying to brush your hair back into something more presentable, face still puffy from your half asleep state as her fist thumped loudly against the door.

with a roll of your eyes you gave up, flipping your head and tying your hair up into a messy bun. poking at the bags under your eyes with a sigh, the impatient knocking continuing as you quickly covered them up with a few dabs of concealer.

"i hope you break your hand." you spoke in a monotone as you flung the door open, barely having ten seconds to step outside before her hands grabbed the collar of your jumper and dragged you out of the room.

"let go less! i'm not four years old trying to run away in a shopping centre for god sakes i don't need you to hold my hand i am an adult." you huffed, ripping your hand away from hers and storming off ahead to the elevator as alessia hung back for a second to wait for ella to catch up.

"might need this though? and everyone says you're the genius in the family." alessia held up your key card which was the only thing that allowed you to enter and exit the elevator, holding it out of your reach.

"say sorry for being so grumpy." alessia demanded with a smug smile as you tried to stretch for the card without luck, your sister always having had a head or two of height on you with her ridiculously long limbs.

"no! didn't you make a big song and dance about not being late for breakfast? because the only one making us late is you!" the older girl groaned as you punched her half heartedly in the stomach, snatching the key as she doubled over.

"mary she's tryna kill me!" you hid behind the taller keeper using her body as a shield as she joined you with grace in tow, alessia sending you daggers from across the elevator as mary chuckled but remained a nice protective barrier between the two of you anyway.

"alessia!" you protested as your sister snatched your plate, dumping what you'd already chosen and picking your food for you, pushing you away every few seconds with her spare hand as you tried to intervene.

"why are you such a mum? i can pick my own food!" you demanded which was dismissed with a flick of her hand, too busy chattering away to ella to pay you and your whinging any attention.

"you have to fuel your body properly and that means a balanced breakfast." the blonde lectured, holding your plate hostage in her hands as she walked off.

with your food held captive you were forced you to follow her as you sent grace a pleading look who only smirked and shook her head, sat at a different table than the one your sister sat down at.

"baby russo! where have you been hiding then? i missed you." lucy pulled you into a hug as you took your seat beside her and across from alessia who finally slid your plate over to you. "hiding from her!" you grumbled, stabbing your eggs and shooting alessia a glare who smiled and wiggled her fingers at you in a sarcastic wave.

you sighed and glanced down at your plate which granted was loaded, but not with everything you'd have put on it thanks to your sisters apparent new nutritionist qualifications.

your face lit up as mary joined the table, subtly dumping two hashbrowns and an extra piece of bacon onto your plate with a wink as she sat on your other side squishing you between her and lucy as the three of you fell into conversation.

"oi baby russo, sarina wants to see ya." you'd finished eating as millie suddenly appeared, nodding for you to follow her as your face paled a little, head swirling with a hundred worries of why she might want to see you, all of them negative.

"i can take her mills." your sister stepped in with a reassuring smile as millie headed off to grab breakfast. "come on." she stood with a flick of her head as mary squeezed your shoulder and stacked your empty plate on top of hers.

following after your sister you didn't speak a single word, holding your breath until you stepped out of the cafeteria and the noise and chatter of the team ceased, exhaling shakily.

"come here." your sister spoke softly and opened her arms as you settled into them, your own wrapping around her torso as she embraced you, chin resting on the top of your head.

"i know all you can think of is bad reasons why she wants to see you, but if you freak out and focus on all of the what ifs then you're going to ruin this opportunity for yourself before we even start." alessia murmured, rubbing your back comfortingly.

"she probably just wants to check how you're settling in and go through the motions with you. so stop overthinking because i can hear your tiny little brain going into a meltdown." she teased lightly as you cracked a smile.

she let you go but her arm slipped over your shoulder drawing you into her side as she walked you down to the office, pausing a couple doors down and turning you to face her.

"i love you, sarina loves you, the girls loves you. this is your moment, grab it with two hands and make the most of it yeah? show them why you got called up and why you've earned a place on this team." her hands settled on your shoulders as if trying to charge you up with confidence as you nodded.

she might be overbearing, overprotective and over dramatic at the best of times. but alessia would always be your big sister and secretly, you'd never tell her this, without her you wouldn't be half the human let alone the footballer you were, and it flooded you with relief to take the plunge into this next step of your career with her by your side.

again you didn't dare to tell her that for fear of the relentless teasing that would follow. but you didn't need to anyway, she already knew, because sisters always know.

[dana-chan-the-control-brain]

Things from the ruin dlc that keep me up at night.

Spoilers under the cut.

SERIOUSLY DO NOT READ IF YOU'RE AVOIDING SPOILERS.

Disclaimer: I wrote this before I had seen Everything the DLC has to offer or all the endings yet. I was on the wrong track, but I think my cooking before I knew everything was good cooking. I have more concrete theories now under #danachan's rants

Something that I was 100% right about that I was going to write into Lofi eventually.... But I guess I'll talk about it now since the dlc confirmed it.

But Balloon Boy world was literally Eclipses cage as I suspected. It was suppressing them. It wasn't an evil arcade or Eclipse was living in there. Eclipse's AI was being suppressed in the arcade cabinet.

Eclipse is how they talk to eachother, and Eclipse was asleep and completely blocked off from the Virus. So Sun and Moon had no communication with eachother anymore. Which is why they were both so stressed and lost.

I was astounded I got that completely correct in regards to what Eclipse is, and what the balloon boy game is.

(the dlc does not explain the Dcas weird connection to Vanessa and why the arcade cabinet was in Afton's boss fight room though)

Bonus points Moon talks exactly how I write him when speaking about the Sun and the Moon.

Another thing that has been mind-blowing me that all the comic book endings are scenarios that GREGORY DREW.

And according to the dlc....

The Afton Burntrap Blob ending is another one of those endings that he drew.

Which means Peepaw Afton and the Blob were never real in the first place.

Which is why no one could really figure out what the blob is.

It doesn't exist.

Princess Quest ending was the canon ending.

Vanessa leaving the Pizzaplex with Gregory is the canon ending.

The ending where you fight Afton in the basement.... Never happened and was just Gregory attempting to make sense of the FNAF lore that Vanessa probably explained to him. Since in the DLC, we do find a book about Fazbear History in Vanny's room.

I honestly don't know if Steel Wool retroactively made Burntrap non-canon due to everyone making fun of him, not taking him seriously and hating the blob, or if this was always the case. Because despite the Afton ending being the hardest to get.... It's still a two star ending.

So it's hard and too early for me to tell if I want to give them points for that soft retcon. I mean I don't blame them honestly.

But yeah. Skeleton man Afton in the basement and his best friend the Blob isn't actually real, and neither is Freddy's "I am not me" speech either.... Which honestly makes sense. Because it's all Gregory's comic book trying to make sense of FNAF Lore he doesn't understand.

Also, I can say definitively, and finally, Afton is not the Mimic. Glitchtrap exists as its own entity in this, and the Mimic seems to have its own agenda. It's unclear if Afton is possessing the Mimic via virus corruption, but for now, I believe the Mimic is acting of its own will.

And man oh man. I feel so sorry for people who haven't been keeping up with Tales of the Pizzaplex Books.

The ending of the dlc is just really "who's Henry???" From pizzasim all over again huh....

Anyways. Those are my thoughts. I will be streaming the dlc again tomorrow. Gonna try and get a better ending, but I have a suspicion they're all sad.

[misteria247]

1981 Journal Entry #2:

I've lost track of how long I've been plagued by the nightmare. All I know is that I get very little sleep, and it's starting to take its toll. I've been trying to research what I can about that Mystery Caller who had started this whole thing. There's very little I've been able to find. I'd gone through countless documents and books and everything that Gravity Falls has to offer. Yet it alludes me, the answer to this nightmarish game. I'm starting to turn to the more docile anomalies to try and find answers. And what I've been getting has been.......unsettling.

For example, the other day when me, Lee and F were on a field expedition. The Leprecorns (which I personally do not like) were talking to F and Lee. Seemingly enjoying their presence and conversation, while I took notes and drew rough sketches in my journal. When one of them approached me. He was an older Leprecorn, with a slightly weathered face and eyes that held the sheen of an older man. He was staring at me, not saying a word, to the point where it made me squirm from it. It felt like he was staring straight through me like the eyes that lurked in the shadows in my nightmare.

After what felt like eons he finally spoke.

"......You've been marked laddie."

I don't think I'd ever felt my stomach drop so fast at a simple sentence, that by all accounts had nothing to do with me. I glanced up to make sure that Lee and F were still distracted before I responded to him in a low tone.

"What do you mean by that? I don't-"

The Leprecorn interrupted me at that moment, his tone firm and damning.

"Ey, I recognize the look son. You haven't been sleeping have ya? It's because yer marked. By something foul, something dark. I've seen it before. Others who've been marked by the beast."

I couldn't breathe, because I knew somehow deep in my very bones that he was talking about that anomaly who had called into the station. The anomaly who had been haunting my dreams.

"The beast....? Who is this creature? What does it want with me?"

I'd inquired, perhaps a bit desperately, wanting to know what I was up against. Instead I was met with a grim, somber expression. Like.....like he was staring at a dead man.

"I don't know much myself lad. No one really knows about the beast. But......we do know that those who are marked do not meet a good end. Just.......be careful boy. He watches."

And then he'd left, seemingly done with the conversation. Leaving me shaken beyond belief. It took everything I had to not show it when F and Lee were finally done with their conversation and we'd packed up to head home. I don't think I was successful though, because my brother stuck to my side for the rest of the evening. As if he sensed that I wasn't okay at all. I don't know what being marked means, nor do I want to. I just want this to end, before someone else is dragged into this eldritch horror.

I'm going to try and get some sleep tonight. I can't let whatever this thing is win. I'd rather die than let him stand victorious over me. I'm going to do research on how to stop the calls as well. One encounter was enough.

Signing off

Stanford Pines

1981 Journal Entry #2 continued time 3AM:

I can't stop shaking.

I can't stop, my hands they're trembling from the nightmare. It was different, after so long with the same thing it changed.

The voices from the shadows they spoke to me. They said my name, surrounded by the static of that anomaly. His tone sounded cheerful but somehow I know that it was a rouse. He wasn't cheerful at all.

He was angry.

Like a lion in a cage, he had his fangs bared towards me. He....he'd said that if I keep digging, if I don't play his game........I was going to regret it.

I don't know what he means by that. But I can take whatever he throws at me, I'm not weak. I can handle any blows he's got for me. And yet.....

Why can I not shake the feeling that something awful is on the horizon?

Signing off

Stanford Pines

[youcouldmakealife]

KS Fill: Matt/Aaron; good first impression

For the prompt: Aaron and his mom come to see Matt play on the West Coast.

This was a fill for a Kickstarter supporter; they've generously allowed me to share this so everyone can enjoy.

It isn’t easy, getting his mother to go to a hockey game without telling her that the reason he wants her to go with him is because he’s dating one of the players. That things are serious. Serious enough that he’s trying to get a woman who gets cold in the shade on a summer day into an arena. A woman who changes the channel if any sport is on TV — except baseball, but he’s been assured that’s an exception she only makes when he’s around or if the game is one he’s playing in. A woman who makes sure to watch all the athlete profiles during the Olympics but never watches their actual events.

“I became a bit of a fan,” Aaron says, the first time she throws up her hands and asks him why he’s so intent on driving all the way to LA to see the Leafs play.

“You don’t have to drive hours and freeze your poor mother to death to watch them,” she says. “You can see them any time in Toronto, can’t you?”

Aaron would call her dramatic, but again: shade on a summer day.

“I’ve made a few friends on the team,” Aaron says, during his second attempt. “Thought I might catch up with them at the game.”

“That’s nice,” she says. “Maybe bring one of your cousins instead, go out after the game? I would just slow you down.”

The thing is, Aaron knows that if he told her that he was seeing Matt, that maybe seeing was an understatement, but he hadn’t actually seen him since the Jays season ended, and timezones and the unpredictability of Matt’s schedule means he’s barely even seen him on a screen since then, he knows that she’d be bundling up in her warmest coat and making Aaron tell her everything on the drive, listening avidly when she wasn’t scolding him for not telling her about Matt sooner or demanding that she meet Matt after the game.

But for some reason, Aaron can’t do it. It isn’t that he thinks Matt wouldn’t be okay with it, because he’s more chill about all this than Aaron is, and his family all knows about Aaron, even if they haven’t met him yet. It’s — he doesn’t know. He wants her to see Matt first, maybe. See him without knowing that he means something to Aaron, see him without any expectations, biases, even positive ones.

He wants her to take one look at him and go ‘that one seems nice’, even though he knows that wouldn’t happen, that they’ll be a hundred feet away, Matt just a number, a name too small to read without squinting. He wants her to like him.

It takes a bit of pleading and a night at a nice hotel, a reservation at a place he had to get a friend on the Angels to name drop for him, and offering to go shopping on Sunday, let her pick some things out for him, but when he drives up to LA Saturday afternoon, she’s in the passenger seat.

There’s a dramatic shiver when they do get down to ice level, but they just split a very nice bottle of wine and a good meal at an award-winning restaurant, so there’s some goodwill going on, and she keeps her phone in her purse, which is more than Aaron can say for a lot of the people around them.

Aaron’s still picking things up, but he knows enough by now to see the Leafs look a little slow, getting caught out easily, which probably isn’t a good sign. The Kings haven't manage to take advantage of it yet at least, though they’re pushing, and every whistle seems to happen in front of the Leafs’ net, the shoving matches getting a little more intense each time.

Aaron flinches as Matt starts to get into it with a guy who has some pounds on him, relieved when one of the linesmen intervenes before the gloves come off.

“Is one of your friends out there?” his mother asks. Maybe she saw the flinch. Maybe he’s got some other tell, one he doesn’t even know he’s showing. She’d probably just say it’s motherly intuition.

“You see the guy in the corner?” Aaron says. “The one with 22 on his back.”

“The one who just punched someone?” she says with a disapproving sniff.

“Uh,” Aaron says. “It was more of a roughing—“

“The one who just punched someone,” she repeats.

Matt and the King are both still wearing their gloves, so Matt would get a roughing call at most, but there may have been a punch thrown, gloved or not.

“That’s your friend?” she asks, after a moment.

Matt’s arguing as he gets escorted to the box. Aaron doesn’t know why. He really did punch someone. It may not be fighting, but it is a roughing call. But then he sees that only one penalty box door is open, and he understands entirely, indignant on his behalf. The King was just as involved as Matt was, and there were guys on the ice who dropped their gloves, should be in the box instead, or at least keeping him company in there.

“I—“ Aaron says. “Something like that.”

They’re both quiet. In the box, Matt’s fuming, and it’s hard not to fume himself, especially after the Kings finally break the stalemate with a power play goal. Aaron hopes they turn it around, and not just because if they don’t, Matt’s going to be annoyed all night. Apparently he's a fan.

“He seems nice,” his mother says. “Your friend.”

“Really?” Aaron says. “You seemed stuck on the punching, there."

“Well, they do that, don’t they,” she says. “In hockey.”

“Yeah,” Aaron says. “They do that.”

Not like he’s never been involved in a brawl himself, but in baseball they’re events. Hockey? Matt’s not even considered a fighter and Aaron’s handed over a few ice packs already.

“I’m sure the other guy deserved it,” his mother says, then, “What was that for?” when Aaron ducks down to kiss the top of her head.

“Nothing,” he says. “We’ll make a hockey fan out of you yet, mami.”

“God forbid,” she says, with a shudder that may be for effect, or just from the cold, and leans into him when he wraps an arm around her shoulders.

[leafyaa]

Chapter 15

You woke up to the sound of your doorbell ringing continuously. Apparently it was already past 9 am and you slept through your alarm as well as several calls.

"Who could be at my door today out of all the other possible days you could disturb my peace." You groaned in annoyance as you quickly got out of bed to stop whoever was ringing the doorbell and ruining your mood.

You peeked through a window to see an all too familiar indigo haired guy with a bouquet of flowers.

"Kunikuzushi? What are you doing here?" You said as you open the door.

"I asked you to hang out today, remember?"

Oh right, you cried yourself to sleep when you were remembering Hikari. You forgot to text him back to say no.

"R-right.. Well come in I guess.." You rubbed your head as you let him in. He placed the bouquet on the counter and started to go through your fridge.

"What are you doing?" You suspiciously eyed him as he started to take out several eggs and a carton of milk.

"Making you dorayaki. Go freshen up and breakfast will be fresh and ready." Kunikuzushi offered you a smile of reassurance as he continued to search through the cabinets for ingredients.

Your suspicions dropped slowly as you realized he wasn't here to argue about going out, yet. 

"Oh uh.. Okay thanks?" You said and quickly hurried to your bedroom.

You were still in your kuromi pajamas so you really needed to change. Even though as an adult you still loved Sanrio stuff and no age could change that. Then you remembered your cat Maple who you haven't seen yet. 

"I probably should look for her after I change.." You mumbled as you grabbed some clothes to go to the bathroom. 

After 15 minutes you finally get out and walk towards the kitchen to see Maple hesitantly eating the food Kunikuzushi prepared for her. As she tried one little bit of seemingly tuna she immediately started to eat the food quickly as if it was her favorite meal. 

"Took you so long, I'm making some dorayaki. I'm also made some miso soup because you look like you need some." He nonchalantly said as if he was roasting your exhausted look from 15 minutes ago.

"Thank you I guess. " You sat down at the counter to eat the pancake Kunikuzushi placed onto your plate. Taking one bite your eyes immediately widens. The flavor... the texture... Everything tasted so perfect! 

The Kunikuzushi you remember didn't even know that you needed to add oil to a pan to bake an egg! But this.. Oh wait he has been cooking the whole time for you. You forgot. But besides that you remembered that you once were at his house which was ginormous by the way and that he tried making instant noodles for you and didn't add water to the pan for the noodles to boil. The egg incident was a week after that. 

"It tastes delicious.." You muttered and Kunikuzushi smirked with his back turned towards you. 

"Now finish up because I've the whole day planned out for you." And your pancake dropped from your mouth. He fucking tricked you with his seemingly innocent gesture to cook breakfast. Of course he did.

He took you to several places in the next coming hours. First it was watching a movie in a privately rented cinema with unlimited food (you forgot he was rich). However the movie was great, he picked your favorite one after all, and the food was amazing!

Then it was taking a short flight to Liyue- which you didn't even understand how he arranged that but putting that aside it was to go to a Kuromi themed café to eat lunch.

Then flying back to Inazuma to go to a kimono boutique to buy you a brand new kimono to wear which you wanted to refuse because it was 500.000 mora?? And he told you to not worry because it wasn't much. With that much money you could pay your bills for at least a couple of years!

After that he took you to an evening festival to eat some snacks and play some fun games- it ended up with you as the winner even though you swear Kunikuzushi purposely let you win. You did notice him being particularly great at aiming at moving objects which almost no one could win, not with ease at least. 

A couple games later the two of you ended up back in the restaurant where you ironically first ran away from him. Enjoying the food and unlimited service as you both started talking with each other about the old school days. Especially you teasing him about the adorable dumb stuff he used to do. 

And lastly ending up at the beach where it was rumored someone would be lighting up fireworks upon someone's request. The two of you ended up with two paper plates of taiyakis handed out by a familiar individual with strawberry blonde hair. 

Yoimiya’s birthday was today and you completely forgot. She used to be one of your closest friends when you got back from university. She was absolutely ecstatic to see you at the beach and kept talking about how she was going to set off fireworks even though you were pretty sure that was banned a while ago. But despite that you were happy to see she was doing well and embraced her happily back.

"The sky is beautiful.." You sighed as you ate the last bit of your Taiyaki. Kunikuzushi hadn't taken any bite to your surprise. You remembered him always eating the stuff you gave him. 

"I'm glad I picked a good day to take you out." He replied with a smile. His taiyaki was still untouched on a paper plate. 

"Why haven't you eaten yours yet?" You questioned out of curiosity. 

"Just don't like sweet things." This took you by surprise as you looked at him like he was crazy. 

"What about all the sweets I baked or cooked for you? You never complained about them! I-I didn't make you hate sweet foods right??" You stammered in slight guilt. Maybe you tired him out of eating so much sweet stuff.

He, in response, just chuckled and handed you his plate. 

"You can keep it to eat later. I was already pretty full after dinner." 

"Okay..." 

It was a bit awkward for a second. You lookes away to avoid the awkward tension and take a deep breath. Today had been a lot... And despite the overwhelming amount of activities you enjoyed today. 

"Hey Y/n, The fireworks are starting." Kunikuzushi nudged your shoulder, catching your attention as you looked up to see beautiful fireworks exploding. Yoimiya indeed set off fireworks as she had told you she was planning to do so.

"Wow..." Was all you could say as you admired the beautiful vibrant colors. Inazuman fireworks were truly the best kind in Teyvat, or maybe just Yoimiya’s fireworks. It was a long time ago since you’ve seen them but you just felt your eyes light up at the sight of them.

Festivals were almost non-existent since the Tenryou commission took over a decade ago, only the Yashiro commission could sometimes host them under strict rules from the Tenrou commission. You were pretty sure you would hear from Thoma how his boyfriend got in trouble because fireworks were set off.. but that was a problem for later.

As you were watching in awe you didn't notice you were getting closer to the water. Kunikuzushi, who was slightly worried, tried to gently pull you back, but that didn’t work of course. So he had to increase his strength to pull you back before you would wet your clothes and yourself. However he didn’t anticipate that you would fall over on his lap and that both of you would get so close to each others’ faces. Kunikuzushi blushed furiously while you bursted into laughter. Your laughter painted a faint smile on his face and he unconsciously pulled you into his arms, your face was buried into his neck and he was into yours. For a moment, time seemed to pause, the embrace you shared gave you a warm comforting feeling. Was it love?

As the firework show was coming to an end you stood up and dusted the sand off your kimono. You had your taiyaki in the folded plate and walked off the beach with Kunikuzushi. It was past midnight and he wanted to bring you home like the gentleman he was.

It was perfect as you were pretty tired already from all the traveling around.

"You sure you'll be fine? If you want you can stay the night in my house. I'll look for a spare mattress." You said as you got out of the car.

"It's fine, I just want to know you're safe inside your home. I don't need to stay over for the night." He said with a small smile as he locked the car. "Here's the plate by the way."

Oh yeah you completely forgot after taking a nap inside the car.

"Thank you. But if you do change your mind just say it and I'll figure something out for you!" You exclaimed while walking to your front door.

Kunikuzushi followed, making sure to look around for any suspicious people or animals lurking around the area.

Though you stoppes in your tracks, finding an envelope on your doorstep.

You bent down to pick it up and Kunikuzushi watched with curiosity, analyzing the appearance of the envelope. It was white, no post stamp, nor an address…

"Who would send me a letter today..? It's not like it's my birthday or whatever.." You said quietly as you carefully opened it with your nails.

Kunikuzushi widened his eyes as he noticed a well familiar stamp on the corner of the letter before you started reading.

"Wait Y/n I don't think-" But it was too late because you already read half of it.

You dropped the letter and envelope and almost fell over from the shock and disgust you are feeling at the moment.

You heard Kunikuzushi calling out your name but it was no use. Your brain was panicking and all you could do was pant as you dropped to your knees. You felt like you had to throw up. 

You immediately grabbed the envelope and found a single tooth inside. A small child's tooth..

"No.." A scream followed as you let out the most horrific scream as you clenched your fist with the teeth inside of it.

⇠ previous ⭒ masterlist ⭒ next ⇢

Notes:

:p

Summary:

You've dated Scaramouche in your high school and college years but just as you wanted to announce your pregnancy to him he broke up with you without any reason. He left you to be a single mom for 7 years. But now that your daughter has been missing and abducted for a year and you've not been doing well and out of a sudden he showed up into your life again trying to apologize for his past mistakes..?

Taglist:

@swivy123 @kichiyosh1 @wwwrizchan @k1t0 @killumeow @pinkdreamerbailifflawyer-blog @samarill @xiaotopia @aqualesha @eattingshits @omoriaddict @mave-in @sketcheeee @xiaossocksniffer @elernity @ohmyfinggod @luvkvni @kunikissr @meadowofdarts @kaoriie @scaramochies @ekriis @rizakari @xxrexx @lovingveliona @magica-ren @lilybythevalley @theflatdoorkicker @lazy-sanns @reixtsu @fullw0rld @kunikuzushis-darling @childesgingerhair @kochothehoe @mercy-not-merci @ash1

[brucewaynehater101]

i'm not sure how much you know about fnaf but there are a couple au's relating to that i keep throwing around in my head involving tim.

tim, terrified of animatronics which he's seen get stuffed with dead bodies or used to actively murder children, gets caught by older cousins/friends/secret third option and put into an animatronic's mouth, which bites down and crushes his skull. he recovers with the help of the drake's friend william who owned the restaurant (and is the murderer killing children), but suffers night terrors. the drakes then offer to take him to the circus that's in town as per recommendation from their therapist and we all know how that goes.

now tim's triple traumatized and the drakes ask the help of william to take care of how tim's behaving, and he constructs the plot of fnaf 4, with giant haunting robots attacking him in his bedroom, to experiment around with tim while his parents are outside of the country, and any time he tries telling them the truth they chock it up to trauma.

eventually, william, as per fnaf lore, gets killed in a confrontation of the ghosts of the children he killed, stuffed in a golden bunny suit. without him the robots that haunt him are still active, but without william around there's nothing stopping him from leaving the house, encouraging his stalking habits and allowing him to see batman and robin in action. he becomes obsessed with them and he becomes robin and red robin and what not.

then he finds out that william is still alive in the suit, and is killing nightguards and experimenting with the other dead children, and he tries to stop him, first going to an underground storage facility to enact the plot of fnaf sister location, where at the end his internal organs get scooped out and his empty body used as a husk for the robots in the facility to escape.

eventually, tim's body decays and they leave, but tim is still alive somehow. now tim is undead, and is working on deconstructing the robots and ending the legacy of william, freeing the souls in the process. the entire time, the bats being ignorant to what he's doing until he kills himself in a fire with everything related to fazbear, william, and the robots.

i prefer the bats, and other heroes or villains, being there while the robots from the facility (ennard), leave red robin/tim drake's body. the cutscene from the game is 8 bit, but in essence he starts shaking, his eyes go black, his jaw unhinges and he falls flat to the floor as the entity leaves his body. he gets up eventually, but when could change the story alot.

i know some parts are vague but idk how much fnaf lore you know and it's an interesting idea even without full knowledge of the story of the fnaf games. just tim having an extreme traumatic experience as a child, viewing batman and robin's ability to overcome their experiences by working together and keeping gotham safe and thinking more highly of them because he associates them with freedom and nights of peace even though he doesn't sleep.

this is getting really long BUT every time bruce sends tim home tim has to face actual nightmare creatures trying to kill him with more broken or hurt limbs than he would have otherwise. and bruce just doesn't notice.

Fuck. I really don't know much about FNAF lore, so this was a bit of a wild ride (in a good way!). The only exposure I've had to FNAF is playing what I think was the first game (though I couldn't live past the second night) and one MHA fic. The fic was a very very interesting concept of Midoriya, before he went to UA, getting trapped in a virtual world by someone's quirk. He basically had to complete 7 horror games as if he was living through them. One of the games was FNAF (and the animatronics gain consciousness. It's freaky). I didn't finish the fic, but the concept was rad as hell.

I haven't read it, but there are also some FNAF fics with Tim and John Constantine.

I love how much your AU is torturing poor Tim. He doesn't get a break when he's done with Robin. He's got to continuously deal with all this shit and traumatize his family with the way he dies. I'm a little lost on the exact timeline here, but I'm vibing with the ideas

[applebinnie]

▶︎ˏˋ aye-aye, captain! >< ´ˎ˗

𖦹 part I ! 𖦹

ᯤ fishing boat operator!leehan ᯤ

→ Your neighbors back in your family province owned a really cool fishing boat. The sweet couple taught you how to use it so you could help with fishing duties during the summer. However you stumble upon the said boat, which is now (unfortunately) under the management of their oddball of a son. 

warnings: none! except for the fact that I'm vv mid at writing and it's my first time writing in eng so please reduce your expectations to ground level 😭

💭: I'm still experimenting with the whole y/n thingy, and I was thinking, should I name mc yuu or should I just keep it at y/n? lmk!

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

You woke up at the crack of dawn to get dressed and ready. It's the summer, and that means you'll be staying at the province! You looked forward to everything the place has to offer, from the fresh air to the salty fragrance of the beach. But one thing you always look forward to is the nice family next door and their cool fishing boat! You can't recall if you still know how to use it. The captain gave you a crash course on how to operate it last summer, but you weren't really able to give it a go yourself. You decided that the first thing that you wanted to do today was to fish!

You see the captain and his wife smiling upon your arrival. They always treated you like their own daughter, greeting you with a warm pot of your favorite soup and a kiss on the forehead. It was always like that, except now something is missing from the usual greetings. Aside from their dog, Connie, there had always been a third figure peeking from behind Mr. Captain, waiting for the right time to jump and chase you around the front porch.

Leehan, the couple's only son wasn't around to welcome you, which was odd, considering that he was always the first one to approach and show you his new fishes or brag about their cool boat. He always trailed closely behind Mr. Captain, carrying his adorable little Connie. You always thought he was a little weird, but that doesn't mean he isn't the sweetest boy you've met.

"I haven't seen him since this morning! that boy ran out the door as soon as he finished eating, I don't even know anymore," Mr. Captain sighed. You finished eating and went out to look for Leehan.

"Han?" you called out. You went out to the sand, but you couldn't find him anywhere! You then saw Riwoo, the kid who always carried around a camera and small packets of bird food to feed the gulls.

"Riwoo!" You waved at him. He wore a beach hat with a wide rim, covered in sand and seaweeds.

"Yuu!" He waved back. Usually, when Riwoo is around, a few steps behind him is Woonhak. You didn't even need to make an effort to see Woonhak, who was clearly behind the mango tree. No wonder he always lost during hide and seek games, because he thought that if he can't see you, then you can't see him either, and the constant peeking and giggling gave him away.

"Boo!" You tapped at Hak's shoulder. He scrambled to hide his phone, sliding it in the pockets of his shorts. "Hey Y/n, didn't see you there, ha...ha." He chuckled nervously. You were starting to think that he was hiding something. You looked behind him.

"Are you okay? Are you looking for something?"

"Nothing, thought you were hiding an insect of any kind to shove to my face. "

Woonhak laughed at your response. But it was true, he was indeed thinking of scaring you with a fake plastic lizard.

Still no sign of Leehan. You figured that he's probably with Taesan at their favourite usual spot: the docks.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

💭: "But val, you're a riize blog!" I had a little too much fun making this I had to restrain myself so I cld finish the other fics during the VERY little free time that I have 😭 also, I had no idea that it was saturday today I legitimately thought it was friday ?!?! anyways I hope you guys like it RAGHRAGHRAGH - val 🧸

[not-so-lost-after-all]

The episode in which he went to the brothel is the latest on his Youtube channel so you can go there and see that it's indeed true and no one is twisting anything he said like it happened with the AA comments. He also said he'll probably come back there later and that Astarion has been acting funny about the whole thing. xD His chat was unbearably horny anyways (just like it always is) so he'll probably do it, unless he forgets about it after Cazador. Well, it's his choice of course but yeah the sex positive crowd will be unbearable "oh look even he did it!!! it's clearly a good choice and important to his healing". Oh and he also accepted Halsin's poly proposal, because why not lmao. Still, even both he and his friend seemed to be a bit put off by the dialogue there when Astarion asks whether or not the fact that he's not putting out is the problem, but of course he chose the "right" option and not the "yeah I'm frustrated that you're not fucking me so I'm going to the big horny druid for sex" one so of course ultimately everything is fine because Astarion is very open minded about it

/sigh So Neil is doing the average "good" horny playthrough? Astarion staying a spawn, Tav doing the 5some, ending with fucking both Astarion and Halsin. I can see it from miles away. He's doing it for the horny audience but still - why was he uncomfortable with people sexualizing Astarion when he's making all the horny choices too? Where would Astarion's confidence in the poly situation come from according to him when Astarion has nothing to offer that Halsin can't offer too without the baggage, why is Halsin the side piece and not him?

I've seen through Larian's marketing and I'm well aware why Astarion is in the game. If it wasn't for the early access Astarion, Gale would probably be my favorite. This all makes me to dissociate from the game and the awful fandom and stick to my headcanons even more. I haven't checked the hell gondola that is Astarion tag in a long while and it'll get even worse.

[callsigndragon]

Everyone's favorite Fanboy | M.F.G

Pairing: Mickey "Fanboy" Garcia x fem!reader

word count: 1.3k

Request: “My teammates gets annoyed because I talk about you 24/7”. Tell me this doesn't scream Fanboy...cause that's his literally his callsign 🤣

A/N: It took me FOREVER to write this, I'm still working on the requests and I'll post them aLL I SWEAR

Warnings: all the fluuuuuuuuuuuffs

If you want to be added to my forever TGM tag list, let me know.

Mickey is a fan of many things. Hence, his call sign. He's a fan of Star Trek, Marvel, video games, and more. He's proud of being a Fanboy. But the thing he's more fan of? His girlfriend. 

He talks about her all the time. How many books she can read. The little things she writes. How she tries to cook his favorite dishes, and even though they don't end up exactly like the original, he's content with the fact that you took time to learn the recipe and tried to cook it yourself. Just because you wanted to give him a surprise. 

Mickey says he's a fan.

The squad calls him a simp. 

At this point, Mickey’s fellow aviators know you better than yourself. The thing is that they haven't seen you yet. 

Mickey just doesn't shut up about you. 

Today, Mickey and the rest of the Daggers are coming back from a mission, and he has invited you to the Hard Deck to finally meet his friends. He's excited about it, almost bouncing up and down in the chair while waiting for you to walk through the door. 

"Mickey, you look like a puppy waiting for his owner," Payback jokes, patting Mickey’s back. 

"I'm not a puppy?"

"You're a golden retriever, Mickey." Bob adds while getting more peanuts. 

"Does your girl know that you behave like that?" Hangman asks, sitting down with a new round of beers. 

"Oh yeah, she knows. That's why she loves me. Because, dude, she could be dating whoever she wants. Have I ever told you that this rich guy was–"

"Yeah, you told us." The rest of the Dagger respond in unison, remembering the story they have been told, at least three times. 

"Did I? I don't remember, though." Mickey frowns, taking a sip from his drink, and almost chokes when he sees your figure walking through the door. "There she is!" 

You smile when you see him, waving cutely in his direction. Hangman’s head moves from you to Mickey, and he is starting to understand why he is always talking about you. 

Mickey gets up, offers you his seat, and places his hands on your shoulders when you sit down. “Guys, this is y/n. Y/n, these are Jake, Nat, Bob, Reuben, Bradley, and Javy.”

You greet everyone, excited to finally meet all of them. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet Mickey’s second family.” 

“I’d say it’s a pleasure to finally meet you too, but we know everything about you already.” Nat jokes, offering you the beer that Hangman had brought for her a minute ago.  

You frown, looking at their faces. You lean in Mickey’s direction, whispering in his ear. “Why is everyone looking at me like that?” 

Mickey sighs, kissing your shoulder while whispering back. “My teammates get annoyed because I talk about you 24/7”

You laugh out loud, looking at them. “You don’t know he talks about you all the time?” 

Jake places his arms on the table, pointing at you. “Speak, child.”

“Okay so, Mickey loves you all so much… He won’t shut up about Phoenix and Bob being the best team out there? He keeps talking about Phoenix being a badass and Bob probably being the best WSO.” You tell them, making Bob look at Mickey while rolling his eyes. 

“You’re better than me, Garcia. Shut up.” 

“Javy,” you continue, wanting to let the rest of the team know how important they are to Mickey. “You are literally his role model? He says that you are such a good friend, and it doesn’t matter how many times you have to try something, you keep going until you get it done.” 

Javy musses Mickey’s hair, which is a few inches longer than he normally wears it. “I learned from the best, Mickey.” 

“Jake, Bradley… I can’t even put into words how proud he is of working with people like you. He knows that you, Jake, are probably the best pilot of this generation, and he’s honored to work with you. And Bradley, you have been through so much and still have energy to put on a smile and face the world. You’re incredible.” 

Jake and Bradley, men of few words, just raise their beers in Mickey’s direction and nod. There’s no need for them to say anything. 

You finally turn to Reuben, sitting next to you, and place a hand on his arm. “You’re his big brother; I don’t have to tell you that. He is so proud of everything you have achieved, and how I wish you could have heard him talk when you guys were chosen to fly the uranium mission.”

Reuben smirks, shaking his head, and lets out a loud laugh. “So you’re just everyone’s Fanboy, huh?” 

Mickey, whose ears are more red than Rooster’s helmet, hides his face behind your back, making you giggle. 

“It’s the first time I have seen this man getting all shy.” Jake comments, unlocking his phone to take a picture. 

“Now I want to know what things he told you about me.” You request, and everyone bombards you with information the next second. 

He tells them everything. About your new hobbies, your past ones, how good you’re at your job even if sometimes you hate it, how much he loves you, how much he wants to move in with you, but it’s difficult with your jobs being so incompatible… 

“Oh, and we know about the rich guy.” Rooster says, snapping his fingers as if he just remembered that tiny detail. 

“You told them that too?” You say, honestly surprised that he keeps talking about that. 

“Of course? You literally picked me over a guy that has millions of dollars?” He says, moving his hand up and down to signal his whole body, signaling how all that isn’t worth millions of  dollars and, nonetheless, you picked him. 

You place your hands on his face, peck his lips, and lock eyes with him. “Mickey, I don’t want a million dollars. I want the guy who can make me laugh a million times, the guy who’s always ready to compliment me and make me feel better about my insecurities. I don’t want money; I want love. And I won the lottery with you, love.”

Mickey kisses you softly, holding himself back from all the things that he wants to say. Some of them aren’t appropriate to say in public. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too, my fanboy.” You mumble, kissing his nose, and turn your body toward the table again, watching the aviators with dreamy expressions and soft smiles. 

“Okay, you are allowed to fanboy about her as much as you want,” Jake says, raising his beer. “Cheers for the cute couple!”

“And cheers for the best fanboy!” You add, making all of them chuckle while toasting. Mickey couldn’t be more proud of his family, even if he tried. 

@shrimping-for-all

@purplevortexx

@jynxmirage

@pono-pura-vida

@xoxabs88xox

[aita-blorbos]

Am I the a-hole for running away from home to avoid having to meet my relatives for Christmas?

I (12M) have never been able to smile naturally. I can force myself to with a bit of work, but it usually hurts a lot, so I'd rather not bother. Mom (40F) and Dad (38M) have always been understanding of that fact, as has my brother (12M), so normally it wouldn't be an issue. However, Mom comes from quite an esteemed family, which is accordingly very strict about our conduct. That I can't just plaster on a perfect, friendly face all the time, is a source of frustration for Mom's siblings, especially two of whom I will call Uncle G (42M) and Aunt K (45F).

The last time I saw them for Thanksgiving, G pulled me aside into the kitchen and threatened to carve my face up with the knives there if I didn't smile, because it was a celebration and we should be happy, and me not smiling brought down the mood. And then, when K caught me not smiling later (because I needed to rest my face), she threatened to pour boiling water on me so as to teach me a lesson about obeying elders.

I'm scared they'll actually go through with it for Christmas, because we were all supposed to stay in one big lodge together for a week, and I can't keep up a smile like that for such a long time. I never told Mom, Dad or my brother about it either, because according to our other uncle D (49M), who is the patriarch of the whole family and a super important politician so he's very wise, sibling relationships are really important. Telling Mom about it will make her argue with K and G, and maybe D as well, and it will ruin her relationship with all of them. And Dad and my brother would just tell Mom anyway.

So when I had just finished packing my bag, the night before we were to leave, a thought suddenly occurred to me. Everything I needed to survive the next few days was in the bag - my clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, water bottle, etc. I could just leave. I thought about Uncle G and Aunt K, and what they would do to me, and, in a moment of impulse, took my bag and left while everyone else was sleeping. I snuck onto a train and made my way to my best friend S's (11F) house. Her mother, Auntie C (older than Mom, F) let me stay at her house for as long as I needed, and offered to call CPS, but I told her not to because Mom's family is important enough that calling the cops on them would probably result in the caller getting arrested instead.

So, right now, I'm with S, we're both officially having our first sleepover (that could potentially last forever) and it's really fun! We had a movie night, and also got to play video games, and I even got to help them make traditional desserts for the solstice (which may or may not have devolved into S and I flinging flour at each other and having to clean the kitchen after that). I'm really thankful that I left and came here instead. But, my parents and brother have apparently been really worried - they even called Auntie C asking if she'd seen me, but I begged her not to tell them so she didn't. We haven't seen any missing child posters go up yet, though that's probably because my relatives don't want people knowing the family managed to lose a child and isn't quite so picture perfect.

I know I should be ashamed of myself for making my family panic so much, especially since I managed to overhear that my brother has been really depressed since I left, so much that he keeps refusing to eat. And I do feel guilty! But going back will just lead to me getting shuttled off to the lodge and getting punished even worse than before. It's selfish, but I don't want to go home. I'm happy here, I'm happy that I left, which is probably why I'm TA. It's been weighing on me, and while S insists I'm NTA, I think she's biased because spending time with friends is fun. So, if anyone out there might offer a more objective view of the situation - AITA?

UPDATE: Basically I still got found anyway, but Auntie C and a few other family friends convinced me to tell my parents about what happened last time. I did, and now Mom has cut all contact with her family. And also G and K are actually getting arrested! Good riddance - I just found out that they had been really harsh to my brother too, and he also didn't tell anyone for the same reason as me. I'm honestly starting to wonder if D's emphasis on siblings might have messed up our entire family a bit...

[tinyletterz]

♡ flowers of our love— [ scarabia + pomefiore ]

: different flowers and their meanings that describe your relationships :

♡— contains: gn! reader, fluff, mention of bruises with epel

: heartslabyul. savanaclaw + octavinelle. scarabia + pomefiore. ignihyde + diasomnia :

— [ note: references can be found here and here ROOK finally the other loml let me take you out on a date and ill shower you in flowers ]

—kalim al-asim

sunshine in your smile — yellow tulip: running up to you in the hallways to engulf you in a warm hug. kalim tells you multiple times that he loves and cares about you throughout the day. helping him stay on task for the vice housewarden's sanity. taking trips into the night sky on his magic carpet. good morning and goodnight kisses everyday. gifting you jewels and gems from the treasury as a "just because" gift. the way kalim's eyes crinkle when he laughs or smiles. silly jokes and games created by the two of you to enjoy together. there is never a moment when kalim is next to you and he's not playing with your fingers. poking his face because its awfully soft and squish-able. always telling his family that he's lucky to be with you whenever he writes to home.

—jamil viper

i'll never forget you — pink carnation: jamil always treasures the moments he has where it's just you and him. walking past each other in the hallway and your fingers brush against his. helping him whenever he has a workload. arguing with him when it comes to him not relaxing enough. spelling i love you on his skin with just your fingertip always puts him at ease. waiting, even when it's late, for him to finish basketball practice. experienced cook or not, jamil will try everything you make and offer pointers to make it even better. mornings when the world is still seeping and you run your fingers lazily through his hair. he mentioned you once to his sister before formally introducing you two, and najma swears she has never seen jamil more embarrassed when she teases him about dating you.

—vil schoenheit

bonds of affection and you'll always be beautiful to me — stock: gentle kisses filled with care. he always asks if you're comfortable with him due to his popularity. styling his hair and watching his lips quirk at your playful antics. vil loves buying things for you and he asks that you don't be shy when it comes to something you want. quick kisses in between vil's sets while you watch him perform. he scolds you, lovingly yet harshly, if you haven't been taking care of yourself and will set a day aside to treat you. the way his heart flutters when you say i love you because even though his fans tell him that, he finds yours genuine. cupping his face while reminding him in a whisper that he's the one you love and you absolutely adore him when he begins to doubt.

—rook hunt

passion and declaration of love — red tulip: random declarations of love throughout the day. covering your faces with his hat so he can kiss you without prying eyes. rook knows when something is bothering you without you having to say a word. stealing rook's dorm robes to spin in them. eloquent poems in french, no doubt professing your beauty. please catch him off guard, it rarely happens, but when it does you will not regret the flustered look on his face. sharing secrets and stories, although rook does tend to add unneeded detail. rook has tried to serenade you, much to the dislike of the others trying to sleep. your eyes land on him in class and he's already looking back with a grin on his face. surprising him with a kiss only to find he was waiting for you to make the first move. self-care is done together so you both know the other is taken care of.

—epel felmier

let's take a chance and youthful innocence — white violet: a confession after hours when the sun has just begun to set. occasionally visiting the beach to watch the calmness of the waves. ruffling his hair, gently of course. joining him during his dorm yoga exercises. epel feels terrible when you patch his bruises after a fight, but he would rather hear your scolding over his housewarden's. shy kisses to your lips because epel's far too nervous to do anything more. sneaking out to lay in the grass and count the stars together. in the beginning of your relationship, epel sought rook's advice, though epel doesn't do nearly as much as rook suggested. calling him pretty and handsome to watch his smile grow. his grandmother already claims she loves you despite not having met her.

[mousmoula]

20, 27, + 29 for the ao3 ask thing! <3

thank youuu! <3

20 - which work of yours have you reread the most?

ooooh fun question, out of my published works it's definitely one eyed bastard (i'm that proud of it LMAO), but the real answer is probably one of my 15k words, amazingly self-indulgent wips that haven't seen the light of day (yet)

27 - what do you listen to while writing?

20% of the time i look for/make a playlist with the right vibes (e.g. the fhq i'm currently writing takes place in a forest so i just looped a hozier/lorde/florence playlist the entire time), the other 80% unfortunately i either listen to really bad wap mash-ups on youtube or 2000-2010s pop because my inspiration spurts need a LOT of energy in order to produce something 😭 very occasionally i go for gaming soundtracks (prison labor from persona 5 my beloved where would i be without you)

29 - favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

happy to announce i had a lot to say here LMAO

i could quote half of (interlude) here because the prose in that fic is just incomparable to everything else i've ever written like i just cannot top the writing of that fic ever. one of my favourite parts:

It was affliction of the cruellest kind, depriving himself of the gentleness that such a person was both able and willing to offer.

but there's also the ending of the first iwaoi fic i wrote which isn't anything special but for some reason lives rent-free in my head anyway:

“I’ll make you proud,” he whispers.

And Iwaizumi doesn’t think he needs to say this out loud, but he does anyway.

“You already have.”

(i just think it encapsulates their dynamic pretty well)

and now a couple of lines from my wips! out of context hq university au:

“Tell him he looks like someone who knows how to use a washing machine. I’m kind of disappointed that he doesn’t.”

and this from YET another iwaoi fic (fwb this time because i live and breathe for that trope) which i'm just really fond of for some reason:

“Would it be weird if I kissed you again?” Iwaizumi asks.

(Definitely still very drunk. He can’t imagine himself being this bold sober.)

Oikawa exhales, tension suddenly dissolving. “No clue. Maybe it is. I don’t really care. Kiss me all you want.”

that's all 😁 i've written a LOT this year, and i wouldn't say much of it has been quotable (mainly because i've been experimenting and i don't even know what i'm writing half the time) but i've enjoyed the process of writing a lot more than i have in a long time so!! cheers and here's to more

[crossyourheartspreparetodie]

Hey there brats, long time no see. Life has been pretty busy I think for most of us, still I haven't checked in for awhile and I'm sorry about that. I'm even more sorry I came back under not the greatest circumstances, but hey, no one is perfect.

I dont think I need to go into much explaining as to why the air feels heavy around us, or why everything and everyone feels more silent than usual. Especially true if you're living in the U.S. Unfortunately, I think many of us will be remembering that day for the rest of our lives, I know I will.

I'll always remember how the color drained out of both my brat's face when they heard the news. The realization. The fear. And the way they looked at me.

And I could say nothing.

What can someone say to try to explain why most a country would go against their own people just because they exist? How does one explain how such hatred and ignorance exists in the world?

All I know is...is that this is not the world I wanted my brats to grow up in.

And that there are two choices.

You can give up. Curse out everything and everyone. Build up walls so high nobody can come in. Believe everyone is out to get you and nobody gives a single shit about anyone else unless they benefit from it somehow.

Or you can keep walking.

Yes, it's ok and valid to be angry. It's valid to be sad and to be disappointed. It's valid to feel fear and to feel like everyone hates you. And you should sit and feel those feelings for awhile. Let them come and go.

But also know that just because you feel that way, in reality it's not true. There are other people out there that are hurting just like you are. There are people out there that love you just the way you are, even if the world didn't show you that. And if you didn't find those people yet, they're out there waiting for you, and just like you, they need you right now.

And if that isn't enough, well I've always been a man who enjoys living to spite other people. We can piss them off together. I mean how sad do you really have to be to be pissed off at someone's existence? Pathetic, honestly-

Anyways I digress...

The world looks cold and ugly out there and I'm not here to tell you it isn't. But there are some beautiful things still here and if you shut yourself away you're gonna miss it.

And if there isn't anything...then make it. I probably haven't seen everything the world is able to offer (who has) but I know over the few years of having this account, how talented and unique you all have been. Each of you has a voice, and I think the best thing we can all do right now is to channel our outrage and our disappointment through our talents (come on you know Tiedoll would be convincing you to do the same).

We can also, I dunno, TP some houses. What? I got a reputation to keep up. I can't go and keep sounding like Tiedoll, people will think I've grown too soft.

The point is...the world would be darker without you in it. So yeah...feel you feelings for a bit, kid. But I hope after you're done, you come back out, ready to kick some ass. Don't let the world take away your light. We all need to stick together.

I'll try to be around more often as well. (Mun has to adult as well ewww gross I know)

Remember to eat something today. Take your medications. Hydrate. Do something for yourself whether it's going for a walk, journaling, playing a game, etc. And get some sleep.

If you even manage to do maybe 3 of these things (I hope it's mostly eating and drinking water) then you did good today.

I'll see you soon brats, and remember my ask box is always open.