#I don't want to force it either - if he comes to me. he comes
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kim dokja and yoo joonghyuk are both so fucking lonely at the beginning of orv it's actually driving me a little crazy. they both see themselves as the only real people in the world in a way that is so incredibly isolating and so clearly bad for them. it makes me want to hit them with hammers.
kim dokja is already such lonely person when we first meet him. like he pretty clearly already had a barrier up between himself and the rest of the world. he sees himself as a 'reader' aka an outside observer whos unable to truly interact with the 'characters' of the world (e.g. yoo sangah). and then that dynamic gets turned literal as twsa comes to life (and suddenly kim dokjas survival depends on his ability to disassociate from others). the dehumanization he hits yoo sangah with ('oh what a perfect protagonist, so distant from me') suddenly extends to like, the entire world, as everyone becomes characters. forget it being just a coping mechanim now hes grappling with real questions about the personhood of everyone around him in a way that is so isolating. combine that with the way his future knowledge keeps him apart from everyone, putting him in a position of power that only increases the distance between him and his companions as he manipulates them like pieces on a chessboard rather than like, friends and you get this overwhelming feeling that kim dokja is the only real person in the world, yknow? the 'reader' has become the 'only son' as the world becomes a novel. and now hes stuck questioning the personhood of everyone around them, forced into situations that either allow or encourage him to discard it - to think of them as characters and little more. which is so isolating!!!
and yoo joonghyuk is in almost the exact same boat! yoo joonghyuk's loneliness comes from his status as a regressor - this is the third turn, and he's starting to realise just how lonely it is to stay the same and keep his memories as everything else regresses and everyone else forgets. life becomes an optimized speedrun rather than, yknow, a life, and everyone is either an obstacle or something to be used. he stops bothering to save people anymore because thanks to the regressions he's losing the ability to even see them as people, in a way that parallels kim dokja's similar inability to see them as more than characters. he's settling uncomfortably into the role of lone pilgrim of the apocalypse, and everyone around him becomes less real as a result. this sense of isolation is compounded, just like with kim dokja, by his knowledge of the future and the lonely position it puts him in, although tbh kim dokja fucks up his plans so bad it's significantly less severe.
so both of them have this incredibly desolate feeling of being the one real person in the world - and they don't know each other well enough to help each other combat that. instead they both move through the world - making plans, manipulating others, even working with each other - as though theyre the only ones in it. which culminates in giving early orv this very lonely feeling, where the two main characters are both incredibly isolated and actively perpetuating that very isolation by centering their identities on being the only real person in the world. and it gives early orv this very eery feeling which i am both discomfited by and enjoying.
#i think han sooyoung also works to combat this feeling of isolation in some very interesting ways as befitting her status as author#but thats a whole nother post#orv#omniscient reader's viewpoint#victor's liveblog two: electric boogaloo
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AU where Edwin knows he's gay from the start would be fire me thinks.
Imagine if he thinks he deserved Hell but still wants to escape and feel so wrong and selfish for it. So he never tells Charles what actually happened between 1916-1989, Charles only knows whatever happened was very bad no good. Edwin would be horribly, painfully aware that he was falling for Charles. But that's wrong, isn't it? Boys can't like boys.
So he tries so hard to ignore it, tamp it down. He can't let Charles know. If he knows then he'll know why he's avoiding the afterlife, that he deserves to go to Hell.
Charles knows Edwin is scared of Death and the afterlife, he assumes that something happened from 1916-1989 that convinced Edwin he was damned but there's just no damn way someone as good as Edwin deserves Hell. But, selfishly, he never tries to convince Edwin to go. To leave for his beautiful afterlife.
Then Port Townsend happens.
Crystal is no idiot, she can tell Edwin's jealous from the start. She can tell Charles thinks it's because they're best friends, she can tell it's because Edwin's in love. That doesn't stop her though, she deserves one good thing after everything, doesn't she?
(I think Cat King would go very similar to canon, but it's less of "I'm not gay" and more of "I know what I am but these urges aren't okay".)
Niko loves love, she can tell Edwin loves Charles. She can tell Edwin doesn't know it's okay. Niko helps him through it, becomes his confidant, the first person he confesses everything to. I think they would have a huge conversation that ends in them both crying -- Edwin bemoaning his unrequited love, Niko mourning for him -- and cuddled up watching Scooby-Doo. (The sprites get teary eyed too but still mock them, Niko calls them out and they deny it. "It's dusty as shit in this old ass glass!" "Yeah, we're getting fucking pick eye in here!" "When's the last time you even washed this shit-ass jar?")
It all comes to a head with the Night Nurse. We all know her spiel, "I'm taking Edwin back to Hell and Charles to get processed." But Charles doesn't know Edwin's been processed. Charles doesn't know Edwin's assigned to Hell.
Niko is empathetic, not forcing Edwin to explain but not once thinking he did anything to deserve it. Crystal is up in arms, demanding to know what he did to deserve Hell, demanding to know why he hid it from Charles. Charles is confused, conflicted. Edwin's his best mate! There's no way he deserves Hell! But... but why didn't he tell Charles? Edwin is overwhelmed and panicked and no, no, no! Charles was never supposed to know!
Now, listen. Niko isn't one for confrontation, she doesn't like to fight. But hearing Crystal rip into an unresponsive Edwin while Charles lingers unsure on the back has her heart breaking, has her head hurting. So she steps in, shouts at them to stop, that they'll talk tomorrow when they've cooled off. And drags Edwin off to her room for the night. She doesn't demand answers and he doesn't give them.
The next day, everyone's off. The tension is high and only building. Crystal keeps sending Edwin pointed comments and Edwin is actively ignoring her existence. Charles is conflicted, caught between Crystal and Edwin; taking both their sides without taking either. And Niko doesn't know how to soothe any of it, so she sticks close to Edwin.
Eventually the four are leaving the graveyard, Crystal and Charles arguing when she rounds on Edwin. "And you! Don't think I forgot about you!" Niko tries to step in and stop it like she did last time but Edwin's tired, he's had enough, he breaks. "I was sacrificed! I was sacrificed and spent seventy-three gruelling years fighting to escape! There, happy? Might we please move on now?"
He storms past them all and for the first time since this dispute started, Niko is angry. She tells Crystal that wasn't okay, that it was cruel. And takes off after Edwin, leaving Charles and Crystal standing uselessly.
"I didn't know..." Neither remember who said that.
#tetris belies it’s wisdom upon thee#dbda#dead boy detectives#edwin payne#charles rowland#crystal palace surname von hoverkraft#niko sasaki#night nurse#cat king#no resolution for you😌😌#btw i love Crystal#but part of her character arc was her selfishness#she also pushes way too hard sometimes#this is not a safe space for Crystal haters and this is not Craytal bashing
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first responders arcane AU.
they get a call about a man about to jump off a bridge.
The paramedics arrived first Viktor immediately gets on the ledge with him and tries to talk to him about his mental state. Jayce is shitting his pants with fear, what if Viktor falls, what if this guy pushes Viktor off. The rest of the first responders don't know what to do and are just preparing possible rescue if he jumps but he gets mad when anyone else tries to come close.
After a bit of talking the man still decides he wants to die and Viktor offers his hand saying "you wouldn't want to die alone, would you?". Jayce is running in circles trying to find something to do to stop this.
The man looks at Viktor and asks "why would you do that?", "nobody should be forced to go through these troubles alone". He finally turns around and begins to climb back onto the bridge.
Jayce runs to Viktor full sprint and lifts him over the railing, "oh my god, never do that again. There are procedures. You could have died", "eh, this method has never failed me before" "...what do you mean before?"
Jayce finds Viktor later that night smoking, "you shouldn't be doing that, you know with your lungs and all"
"eh cancer would take at least 5 years to develop then another year for it to kill me and by that time... I'd already be gone"
Jayce pauses and looks deep into Viktor's eyes, staring off into the night.
Viktor continues "I... yeah... don't tell Heimderdinger. He only let me take this job because I told him my health was improving"
"god, I'm so sorry. I had no idea"
Viktor puts out the cigarette on the pavement "no point ruining your lungs too... I wasn't worried today because I knew it didn't matter. I die on some bridge or I die in a hospital, either way i died without making any impact on this world, nothing for people to remember me by"
"Viktor, what you do every day matters. All those people will remember you"
"I spend half of my time assessing colds and checking in on old people"
"And the other half you spend being there for people on their worst days. They might not remember your name but they'll remember seeing your face and knowing that someone was fighting for them to live. And I'll... I'll make sure your name is remembered" Jayce places a hand on Viktor's cheek, "I'll never forget your name Viktor"
"Thank you, Jayce" Viktor closes his eyes softly as he sees Jayce begin to lean into his face. The kiss they share is soft and gentle in a way that makes Viktor forget the dread of his diagnosis and want to stay in that moment forever
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hi op feel free to ignore everything under - all you need to know is i love your writing *shakes head vigorously*
there are several things i think were immaculately done, but that'd require me to churn out an entire research paper, which i don't have the brain cells for anymore post-finals. so here are some scattered thoughts yep and yap
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i don't gravitate towards mysterious or reserved characters because my personality simply doesn't mesh well with them. in fact, when i was watching wbk, i was always so wary of suo, and felt lowkey a lil uncomfortable with him LMFAO
but strangely enough, i think this discomfort became a very integral and driving force throughout my reading experience. of course, this was already the case due to the violent and dark nature of yakuzas, underground sex work, etc., but emphasizing suo's yandere-ness and how he doesn't shy away from it really completed the tone of the story. also, i feel like i came to terms with suo's character, which i rarely ever experience in general. really, this is all to say that it makes total logical sense in my brain to imagine a route where suo evolves into a yandere, and part of me strongly believes his real background in the wbk manga/anime won't be too happy-go-lucky either (otherwise the alternative would be like him wearing an eyepatch for the shtick bc he's a chuuni??? idrk????).
anyway, the reoccurring theme of redirection in suo's tactics really sealed the deal for me, and i think it was a good way to tie in references to his relationship to his master, the martial arts that we know he's especially good at, and how all of these things he's kinda exploited and sullied to "become a worse person for you." suo being very knowing and intentional is so snakey and creepy but also, i get a lil fucked up when it comes to men who are obsessed, so also incredibly erotic LMFAO i also just want someone to buy me a luxury penthouse out of concern for my safety *sad fist bump*
one thing i did find unexpected is suo's leadership within the yakuza. yes, necessary for the plot, otherwise he wouldn't be able to pull any strings. but because source material heavily emphasizes leaders as individuals like umemiya or sakura or even hiiragi, it's interesting to place suo in juxtaposition with them. not sure if it's bc i don't find suo particularly reliable in general, but i think this fic made me realize that he's still wise beyond his years and very, very ruthless. it's def very telling that, throughout the story, suo resorts to fear to assert power. anyway, i j think it was a particularly interesting detail to add in his role in the succession conflict.
btw, i do like how suo's change and transition isn't fully told or revealed. it's not a story meant for us, as it's a truth really for suo and reader. but even reader can't really keep up with him at times, and i find that dynamic really charming, as sadistic as that sounds. i like that reader is so vulnerable. i like that reader is not afraid to be vulnerable around him in the ways that matter, even when she's aware that he's fucking insane. and i really like that reader is aware of how much it takes to be vulnerable, so she doesn't push him. i think reader restrains herself (un)knowingly, and that's her way of loving him. obv less romantic in real life lol (don't try to fix anyone, been there, done that, lost myself, and still finding myself), but i do like how reader is suo's salvation :,,, even if she doesn't think she's particularly patient, she really is - like girl, Fuck Him Already!!!!!!
(could go on and on about how juicy the friction and tension is between suo and reader but that's for pt 2 hehehe)
this is kinda my half-assed transition into talking about reader, and honestly, my thoughts from earlier encapsulate the general thesis i have about her: she's really a lot like suo, way more than she thinks. i think she operates in very similar ways, just goes about it differently.
i think reader is way more reckless. she's very self-sacrificing. she's very good at putting up a front, even when she's internally low in confidence and self-respect. i think she just wants to be happy with suo, and hopefully, with their other friends as well.
and truly, i think suo has very similar end goals. i just think, with how things turned out, suo made the very calculated yet risky (also aggressive?) decision to do the things that he did. making their underlying principals and values and reactions so oddly similar, from my perspective, is sooooo neat, and it adds more depth to why they go so well together.
also, reader is so brilliantly the comedic relief in this whole thing. usually, in storytelling, it's someone else and is used as fodder. i really like how reader is a lil awkward and bad with timing and everything else, cause it makes the reading experience flow so much better. really helped with the pacing of the story, gave it the character + breathing space needed to process everything. i also just like my readers a little fucking hilarious.
anyway, op, so beautifully written - see you in pt 2 gg
TOKYO VICE | part 1
You knew that if you agreed to move in with Suo, you'd be setting yourself up for a life without autonomy. You also knew that these alarming behaviours were all signs that he desperately needed therapy to process his master’s untimely death. Living with a man in constant grief, who refused to talk about his trauma unless he was making up a lie related to the nation of China, was probably not a good decision. Doubly so when this man was clearly paranoid about losing you, and triply so when he was a high-ranking member of a violent syndicate. Unfortunately for you, you rarely made good decisions. (Or: After joining the yakuza, Suo develops the concerning habit of controlling every facet of your life. This is somehow less worrying to you than your uncontrollable lust around him.)
8.7k words. suo x fem reader. deeply unserious yakuza au. yandere suo (not abusive and reader is into it), dark comedy, a little angst, smut. warnings: borderline sex work, off-screen criminal violence. nsft – no actual smut in this chapter, but there are still graphic discussions of sex. mdni. thank you to @sleepyqinfei for beta reading and to @/cafekitsune for the banner!
sequel to sincerity and this sakura/reader wip
part 2 here
You’re not exactly sure why you and Suo have never fucked.
It’s certainly strange, given that you're pretty sure that Suo has expressed at least passing interest in you over the years, and you have felt a lot of interest in him. (By ‘interest’, you mean that you feel an insatiable lust around him that you fight to ignore on a daily basis.) You can't exactly pinpoint why nothing has ever happened despite this mutual attraction, especially given your profession and indifferent feelings toward casual sex.
You can think of a number of probable reasons, which are separate from those you classify as stupid reasons. The latter class comprises silly concerns like a fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of not being pretty enough, fear of not being good enough, et cetera. All very juvenile feelings—insecurities that you had in your teenage years, the days in which Suo ran around Makochi as a delinquent while you worked an honest job at a bar. (It was a girls’ bar in the red light district, but that's neither here nor there.) Your circumstances have since changed, and those anxieties have since faded. None of them have any material consequence for your current life, so you don't see any point in thinking about them.
The stupid reasons, then, definitely don't have anything to do with why you've never fucked Suo. But you can think of a few, more concrete reasons that may explain it. For one, Suo has been your friend since childhood and it’s generally a bad idea to have sex with your long-time friends. He was also your roommate for a while and it’s an even messier idea to have sex with your roommates. And now, in your adulthood, he’s your landlord in addition to being your boss, which makes him the worst possible person you could have sex with. You could lose both your home and your livelihood if things go south—both severe, material consequences that should theoretically keep your lust at bay.
Also, he's also a member of the yakuza.
Now, strictly speaking—you're not really opposed to having sex with violent criminals. It’s definitely not a good idea, but you don't usually have good ideas anyway. But for the past several years, you’ve been pissed at Suo for joining the yakuza in the first place, which actually does keep your blatant attraction to him in check. You simply dry up when you think too hard about all the feelings of betrayal.
When Suo was on the cusp of graduating from Furin and thinking about his future, you’d grabbed him by the collar and made him promise not to join the yakuza. They constantly tried to recruit from Bofurin, and they especially wanted Sakura, Suo, and Sugishita. You were adamant about chasing them off from Suo and Sakura whenever they approached—you had no need to worry about Sugishita, as Umemiya had already said he shouldn't talk to them, so there was no chance he was going to—and you begged Suo over and over not to join. Delinquency was fine, but a crime syndicate was something else altogether.
Suo seemed serious about it when he said he'd listen to you. He even applied to colleges, talked about maybe becoming a teacher and eventually supporting you so you could stop working in the mizu shobai industry. Back then, he often teased you by saying that you should marry him and be his housewife (or he could be your trophy husband, if you so wished). You thought he was joking, but with the way he always talked about his life after his degree, you wondered if he would seriously suggest it.
Of course, it was most likely just teasing, and you were fine with that. You were simply excited that he'd found a career that would make him happy. Nirei had also been accepted to university at that point, and even Sakura had an honest job lined up on Keisei Street. The future had looked bright for everyone.
Then Suo’s master died, and he lost his fucking mind.
The two of you buried Suo’s master in a Chinese funeral. He had never had children of his own, having satisfied his paternal instincts by picking up strays, and he didn't have much in the way of family in Japan either, so you and Suo performed the shou ling yourselves. One person kept a constant vigil over his body while the other searched on Google for what arrangements should be made next. After all, while Suo’s master had immersed his foremost disciple in his culture, he had never taught Suo any funerary customs. He hadn't thought there would be a need.
Suo didn't cry nearly as much as you, but he was probably in more pain. Your master had trained you a little bit when you were a kid, and he'd taken you in for a while after your parents kicked you out, so of course you were gutted. But he had practically raised Suo, so it was naturally worse for him. More shattering.
You often think about the first night you decided you'd sleep with him in the same futon because he was crying so much. He insisted he was fine, but he didn't complain when you got under the sheets with him and started thumbing away his tears. When you took off his eyepatch, you found, to your astonishment, that he was crying from his missing eye as well. Both of you thought the tear ducts had been destroyed in either the accident or the enucleation, but it appeared that not even that prior trauma could mask his grief over this one.
Nevertheless, by the time of the funeral procession, Suo had stopped crying.
“Master supported us and taught us to stand on our own two feet,” he said as the joss paper burned. He took your hand in his and smiled. “So it'll be fine. We’ll be okay on our own. I'll make sure of it.”
At the time, you had found this very comforting. You didn’t think too much of it, as you had a bad habit of relying on Suo for your emotional stability. His master had raised him to be an emotionally intelligent person, so it had been fine, even though you had a track record of reckless decisions. He’d still exercised endless patience with you. He never once got angry with you, nor did he ever force you to do what he felt was the right thing. Instead, he gently redirected your self-damaging behaviours—not so different from the martial art that he practised.
He disapproved of the run-down and lonely conditions of your apartment, so he spent a great deal of time there and helped make it into a proper home. He didn't like how dangerous your job at the girls’ bar was, so he walked you to and from work every night until you never left without him. He worried when you started having sex with your customers, especially when you began having nervous breakdowns over it (you were, after all, still a teenager and really only interested in having romantic vanilla sex with Suo), so he staged an intervention with Nirei and Sakura. In this way, Suo convinced you that you were loved and protected and didn't need to do something you hated so much. They would get you out if you felt trapped. And you didn't feel trapped, per se, so you left on your own—but it was still only because of them. You promised them afterwards that you'd never do it again.
This was Suo’s brand of kindness as a teenager. He always taught people, guided them away from harm rather than steering them—a behaviour he’d mimicked from your master. Your master, in general, had defined all of Suo’s values and his way of living, which was honest and gentle and conscientious. It was one where he used his abilities to protect the weak and care for his friends. He even kept his spiteful and alarmingly violent tendencies under control, though sometimes he slipped when fighting genuine assholes. But he still tried. He tried because he strived to be as kind as his master—who represented everything that Suo wanted to be in his adult life.
Thus, the death of Suo’s master meant the death of his principles. It changed the kind of man that Suo wanted to be. You don't want to say that he became a worse person, but he absolutely became a worse person.
He especially became a worse person with you.
As it turned out, Suo’s idea of making sure that the two of you would be fine on your own was, well, not really fine. It wasn’t that he became cruel to you, per se. It was more that whenever he saw a problem with your behaviour, his approaches to redirecting it became—put as nicely as possible—heavy-handed.
After your master’s death, you got a job at a high end, yakuza-owned club. Two weeks later, Suo broke his promise to you and joined the yakuza. So I can stay close to you, he explained gently, wiping away your tears as you cried hysterically, but you're convinced to this day that he did it partly out of spite. So a few years later, when you started having sex with your customers again and he tried to stop you, you decided to spite him back. I need to stay on top of the rankings, you'd explained dispassionately. The mamasan said it's fine, and the manager doesn't care. He even thinks it's good for business.
Suo’s response was to simply become the owner of your club.
This move was very extreme, but also very effective. Any customer who so much as brushed against you on the premises was instantly thrown out, and the mamasan started watching you like a hawk to make sure you weren’t going to any love hotels after work. Douhan were off-limits. For the first time since your teens, you became completely celibate—not only because of your new workplace circumstances, but because you simply didn't want to find out what Suo would do if you got together with a man he despised (and he despised every man you dated).
His most absurd play was when he became concerned about your living conditions again. Your latest apartment was too plain, too small, and the area was too dangerous. It didn't even have a shower, and the other tenants behaved concerningly toward you when you went to the bathhouse at night. But the rent was cheap, and it was still an upgrade from your last place, so you shrugged it off when Suo suggested that you move. Even when someone tried to accost you at night, you were nonchalant about it. You kicked the shit out of them in a fight and continued your routine unbothered.
The next month, Suo bought a luxury penthouse and suggested you move in with him.
His offer (command) came with conditions. One of the bigger ones was that you'd let him accompany you out at night if you ever needed to run errands in dangerous places. Or—nevermind, actually. He should really just accompany you everywhere at night. Maybe during the day too. And—ah, there was no way you'd be going to work alone, nor coming back by yourself—you were now always to be driven by someone in his organisation, if he wasn't available himself. Rent was a point of contention, when you asked about it: you wanted to pay at market rate, and he insisted that there was no need to pay at all. He ended up proposing a highly discounted price, which would give you ample financial freedom, but questionable financial independence.
These were insane terms. You knew that if you agreed, you'd be setting yourself up for a life without autonomy. You also knew that these behaviours were all signs that Suo desperately needed therapy to process his master’s untimely death. Living with a man in constant grief, who refused to talk about his trauma unless he was making up a lie related to the nation of China, was probably not a good idea. Doubly so when this man was clearly paranoid about losing you, and triply so when he was a high-ranking member of a violent syndicate. Case in point—he was likely connected to the brutal accident that later befell the man who tried to assault you.
“I'm not sure what you're implying, but at least he didn't die,” Suo said cheerfully when you confronted him about it. Which really meant: At least I decided not to kill him. This was a flag bigger and redder than any other you've ever known, and you consider yourself an expert in red flags. You knew you should run in the other direction.
So naturally, you put your arms around him, tenderly said, I'm sorry I've been worrying you, and then you moved in the next day.
While Suo treats you with endless patience, you have personal limits to the patience that you exercise with him. Specifically, your patience with how he treats you.
You don't mind the lack of social freedom, nor the lack of personal freedom, nor the lack of freedom of movement. You also don't mind living with a man full of intractable trauma surrounding the death of every parental figure in his life; in fact, you'd rather be by his side than not, if he needs to cope with something so painful. And anyway, your friendship is otherwise unchanged if you ignore the heavy restrictions he's imposed on every facet of your life. So that's all fine.
But the celibate lifestyle that he's cornered you into? You simply aren't built for it. Holy shit, do you need to get laid.
Nearly two years without sex has brought you close to another nervous breakdown (there have been few better sources of entertainment or validation in your life), and worst of all, it has made your profound lust for Suo incredibly hard to ignore. Waking up every morning to him in a towel, his hair still wet from the shower and his broad silhouette exposed, tests the absolute limits of your self-control. The contours of his lean and muscled form are distracting enough; coupled with the vivid colours and lines of his irezumi, the sight of him becomes maddening. It is a horrible thing to be exposed to when you haven't gotten any dick nor strap in over a year. It gives you thoughts about him that are overtly sexual, which is bad, as you have materially consequential reasons for not wanting to fuck Suo.
Things with him must absolutely stay platonic. But with sexual frustration like yours, being platonic with him means that you need to get erotic with someone else. A boyfriend or girlfriend is out of the question; you don't want to be responsible for yet another brutal accident. So you instead decide to quit your job at his club and start working on Keisei Street. At least this way, you can start fucking your customers again.
It’s a perfect plan. Suo’s oyabun is very indulgent toward him, and everyone else in the family respects him too. He consequently has a tight grip on his organisation and the territory they control, despite his relatively young age. Not a single person is ever to touch Keisei Street—largely because Sakura is part of Roppo-Ichiza, and Suo is nearly as weird about Sakura as he is about you. Plus, many of his other fellow Furin alumni are in the gang as well. If Suo’s men ever started fucking with people on Keisei Street, it would not only have grave implications for gang relations—it would be personally upsetting for Suo. This means you can fuck all the Keisei Street customers you want, and not get a single one of them threatened or killed.
A pretty brilliant idea, if you do say so yourself.
Suo’s expression doesn't change when you break the news to him. He delicately places his teacup—custom-made from Yixing, just like the matching clay teapot—down on the mahogany tabletop, and he looks at you with a calm smile.
“Come again?”
“I'm quitting my job at Red Dragon,” you repeat. “I already gave the mamasan my resignation.”
“And she accepted it?” Suo asks, in a tone that is so carefully nonchalant that you know it means he is actually furious with her. “How interesting,” he muses. “What brought this on?”
“I've found a better paying opportunity on Keisei Street.”
“I'll give you a raise,” he says easily.
“A raise?” You cock a brow. “The pay is mostly commission-based at Red Dragon. You know that.”
“Then it would be unwise to leave. You have a loyal customer base at Red Dragon. All very rich, and”—his smile grows sharp—“very polite.”
Polite. An interesting word. It actually means: None of them will ever proposition or harass you because they know they'll be maimed if they do. An easy thought to use to your advantage.
“It's loyal but it's small. Everyone who's anyone in this part of town thinks that we’re married. Do you know how hard it is to pull new customers in when they're scared shitless of my yakuza husband? And anyway”—you frown, trying to look as pathetic as possible—“I'm lonely.”
Suo stares. He looks surprised, possibly because you absorb every minute of his free time with silly conversation, new restaurants, and skiing trips. (He likes snow, so you ask for these trips more for him to relax than anything else.) You also text him frequently on days he's working, and he very diligently replies, even if he's in the middle of something like a raid or a hit or brokering a massive deal. Suo still very strictly keeps to his rule of never touching his phone when in conversation with other people—unless he needs to text you.
So his suspicion is fair. Suo is very attentive and doesn't allow you much opportunity for loneliness. In turn, you’ve always been very happy spending time with him, even when it's only him.
“Lonely?” he repeats. “Are you, now?”
“Yes. You work so much,” you complain, which is not a lie, “and I don't have any friends to spend time with when you're gone.”
“You have friends from work.”
“No, I have competition at work. The hostesses are so cutthroat about rankings, they hate me. And each other.”
“You like Shuuhei and Hanzo,” he points out, referring to his men who most frequently chauffeur you.
“Yeah, they're friendly, and they're very funny. I like them, but I can't be their friend.” Suo stares at you, nonplussed, so you spell it out: “They're too scared of you to get close to me. What if it looks like they're trying to fuck the boss’ wife?”
“Hm…” Suo studies you, looking thoughtful. Perhaps for the first time, he's contemplating the consequences of restricting your freedoms and marking you as his. That is to say—maybe he's finally realising that you have no friends and no life.
The beads of his earrings glimmer as he tilts his head at you and frowns. Suo almost looks innocent with that confused face of his. “And how would working on Keisei Street help?” he asks.
“Because all our old friends are there!” you exclaim. “Sakura’s in Roppo-Ichiza now so he’ll definitely be coming by all the clubs. Tsubaki too. And Nirei and Kiryu visit them quite often—and even Tsugeura does sometimes, even though clubbing isn't one of his virtues.” You grab onto his arm, pull yourself close, and give him your most disarming, pleading expression. “Please, Suo?”
“Hm.” He strokes your cheek and looks at you fondly, in the way that one would do with an adorable and slightly annoying kitten. “I don’t think so. It’s not very safe there.”
He isn't wrong. Not only are you untouchable on his turf because of your association to him, Suo has also just crushed all the han-gure and petty criminals in his territory with brutal efficiency. His part of the red light district is, quite ironically, one of the safest places in the city, and certainly safer than Keisei Street.
But undeterred, you point out, “Shuuhei and Hanzo can still drive me there and back if you want. But I don't think it's necessary. Do you really think Sakura would let anything happen to me?”
This is the true brilliance of your plan: capitalising on the fact that Suo is as nearly as weird about Sakura as he is about you. He pauses as soon as you bring up the point, and you can practically see the gears turning. “Well, if it's him…”
“I even texted him about it. Look—here!” You whip out your phone, receipts ready. The corner of Suo's mouth lifts at your obviously rehearsed pitch. “He says he'd make sure I'm taken care of. And he says it'd be nice because he misses seeing us. Can you believe it—Sakura actually admitted that he misses us! Typed it with his own two hands and pressed send! I bet he was super embarrassed about it.”
“Huh. He even used a sticker. I've never seen him do that.” Suo smiles as he reads through the chat. He looks like his old self. You suddenly feel a little wistful, and also a lot bad. This started as a ploy to get laid, but it’s made you realise that you really do miss your friends—and Suo probably does too.
“If I worked on Keisei Street, then you would have plenty of reason to visit,” you point out, feeling somewhat tender.
“I guess that's true,” Suo says. Your heart aches a little bit at the look he gives you. It's a platonic ache, of course. Or at the very least, it isn't an erotic one. It doesn't really make you want to have sex with him anyway. But if you could lean forward and press your lips to his—platonically—then you definitely would.
Suo's civilian friendships are complicated by his double life. Quite unusually for yakuza, Suo’s syndicate insists on using pseudonyms and false histories to avoid anti-yakuza laws, on the off-chance that the police decide to do their jobs and actually enforce those laws someday. Lying for comedy is one of Suo’s greatest passions, so he was happy to manufacture an absurd backstory: his name is Yanzhao, and he learned kung fu in a Shaolin Temple before moving to Hong Kong and working for the triads. He wears the eyepatch because he lost his eye in an altercation with the cops, which he won. By the way, you're his criminally beautiful wife who he met in Macau. The two of you had to leave for Japan since he killed a police officer and now he's wanted by the governments of both China and Hong Kong. Also, he's a very devoted husband, so if anyone lays a hand on you, he’ll kill them too.
Somehow, everyone has bought into this story. Every criminal organisation in the red light district now fears a high-ranking yakuza known as Yanzhao, who is easily recognizable by his eyepatch and tassel earrings, and who is also homicidally obsessed with his beautiful wife.
In some ways, his infamy is convenient. No one wants to fuck with Suo, or with you by extension. But it also poses some issues: Suo has to keep a low profile in areas controlled by rival organisations, or else he might be ambushed. It also means he cannot easily go out and see his old friends. Even though he always masquerades as a civvie when he does, wearing stud earrings and a glass eye, it's still a little risky—especially since he likes to visit the strongest member of Roppo-Ichiza. While Roppo-Ichiza aren’t yakuza, they're still han-gure, so some of its more criminally entangled members might recognize him anyway.
But Sakura himself, bless him, has not put two and two together and figured out that Suo Hayato and Gui Yanzhao are the same person. This is partly because Suo lies very convincingly about his fictional career in the tea industry, but you think it's also because Sakura is so gullible it's endearing.
I use the glass eye now because it's better for networking, Suo had explained before Sakura could interrogate him too much, his voice too smooth and too quick for the other man to get in a word edgewise. My business partners find the eyepatch too silly. The tassel earrings too. By the way, would you like some Baimudan tea? I thought of you when I smelled it—I know you like fragrant things—so I picked some up for you on my last visit to China. I was there for business a couple of weeks ago.
He, of course, neglected to mention that said business involved meeting with the 14K triad.
Despite the enormity of Suo's omission (lie), Sakura is none the wiser whenever he meets with you. He thinks you're just a regular hostess who has freedom of movement and various other human rights, and that Suo’s just a regular guy who isn’t homicidally obsessed with you (a detail of Suo's fabricated life story that is unfortunately grounded in reality). All this to say, Sakura doesn't think twice about mentioning the fact that you have a routine of going to love hotels after work.
Suo, as always, remains calm in the face of unsettling information. He sets down his tea (just tea, without shochu), and politely says, “Pardon?” He's once again using the nonchalant kind of tone that suggests mortal danger.
“She's always going to love hotels after her shifts.” Sakura is frowning at you, pink but scowling. “I thought you said you were done with that stuff. You promised us you wouldn't do it anymore. Suo—are you really okay with this?”
On the one hand, you find it exceptionally sweet that Sakura, after all this time, remembers your promise and wishes to hold you to it. He was so worried about you when you started having those nervous breakdowns as a teenager, and he probably still is. On the other hand, you're shitting bricks at the fact that Suo is now aware of your activities. Because sure, he likely won't fuck with Keisei Street—but you realise, as he stares at you, that you can't be certain of this. After all, your fake yakuza husband has very real homicidal urges.
“Um,” you say. “It's just business.”
“Business,” Suo repeats.
“You don't have to do that stuff to keep good business,” Sakura grouses, unaware of Suo’s carefully suppressed rage. “You're real popular already.”
“Are you?” Suo asks, looking right at you.
“I mean—I told you the pay would be better, right?” you reply, voice oddly high and nervous, and this is when Sakura notices that something is wrong.
“Oh,” Sakura says, looking between the two of you. “Suo, you didn't know?”
“I didn't,” he says. “Actually, she told me specifically that she wasn't going to do that if she worked here.” He turns to you, still smiling. “That's the only reason why I allowed this at all, remember?”
A chill travels down your spine. You did, in fact, commit to a perpetually sexless lifestyle in order to be granted some semblance of freedom: Of course I won't sleep with any customers, you'd said. You know I don't really like doing that anyway. I promise I'll behave! I’ll be out of the clubs and right back home. Sakura said he’d make sure I’ll get to a cab safely after the bar closes and everything!
“Um,” you say again, but this time you have no follow-up.
“Wait,” Sakura demands, “what do you mean by ‘allowed her’? What, do you need to give her permission to work now or something?”
Suo smiles disarmingly at Sakura. Without missing a beat, he says, “Generally no. But we’re dating now, which complicates what she’s allowed to do with other men at her job.”
Sakura spits out his drink. You choke on your spit.
“I… um?!” Sakura’s staring at you, so you quickly recover. This is a mortifying lie, but it's better than Sakura finding out just how batshit Suo has become since his school days. “I thought we were going to keep that a secret, dear?”
“Ah, you're right. Sorry, I got too excited.” Suo gives you an endeared look before turning to Sakura. “We were going to keep it to ourselves unless we got serious about it. But we've been talking about marriage lately, so I thought it was fine to mention.”
“...”
You’re going to have an aneurysm. Why does every cover that Suo comes up with involve a marital relationship between the two of you?!
“Oh… holy shit.” Sakura’s expression is complicated—somehow, more complicated than yours, even though you’re the one getting cornered into a fake engagement. It's unbelievable how shy he still is about this kind of thing. Maybe it’s just particularly embarrassing since he's known you two for so long, you reason. Regardless, he remembers his social cues enough to say, “Congrats, guys. That's great. That's really great.”
Suo gazes fondly at you across the table. “We were thinking you could be our best man,” he adds, and you consider violently kicking his leg.
“O-oh. Uh, yeah! Sure! But what about Nirei?”
“Rather than having a maid of honour,” you say reflexively, used to lying through your teeth for Suo, “we’d like him to be our best man as well.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” Thrown off guard, Sakura completely forgets about the love hotel business. He whips out his phone. “When were you thinking of having your wedding? I'll put it in my calendar.”
“I’m not sure.” Suo turns to you. “What were we thinking again, dear?”
You're going to die. You're going to die and it's a good thing because if you survive this embarrassment, your future will be bleak. As soon as Nirei finds out about this, he’ll want to start helping you with wedding planning, and then it would just be too awkward to cancel things. You’ll have to enter a fake marriage with Suo, which will be completely sexless, because even with a vow of everlasting love, there are still too many concrete and materially consequential reasons for not sleeping with him.
Condemning yourself to a lifetime of sexual frustration, you reply, “I think we were talking about a summer wedding.”
The drive home is awkward.
Hanzo and Shuuhei pick the two of you up. Suo mentioned that he wanted to talk to you and you alone, so they bring the Rolls Royce with the privacy suite. The two of them are entirely cut off from you thanks to the soundproofing, which traps you with Suo, who’s drinking a bottle of oolong tea as the two of you sit in complete silence. You think he's waiting for you to squirm—which you do.
You stay like that for five, agonising minutes before Suo finally says, “So you're sleeping with your customers.”
You swallow. “Yes.”
“For business?”
“Yes.”
“How much do you make?”
You blink. “Huh?”
“How much do you get paid for a single night of work, including gifts that your customers give you in exchange for sleeping with them?”
You're halfway through citing your earnings when you realise where he's going with this.
“So you make less than you did at Red Dragon,” Suo concludes, “and you're very smart with your money, so I know you know that, and you probably went into this knowing that you'd end up at a net loss.” He turns to you, gives you a look so sharp that it almost scares you. All made worse by his civilian disguise, which makes him feel unfamiliar. His glass eye shines strangely in the light, and his scar tissue is hidden by the makeup you helped apply. You wish he'd taken it all off before having this conversation.
“So,” he says, “what’s the real reason you changed jobs?”
Already knowing that he’ll figure you out sooner or later, you admit, “I just wanted to start having sex again.”
Suo blinks. “You… what?”
“I wanted to have sex with people,” you repeat. “I hadn't been touched for nearly two years, okay? I needed to get laid or else I'd go insane.” You cross your arms and look away, suddenly feeling petulant. “I'm sure you've noticed that our arrangement makes it impossible for me to see people.”
He doesn't answer, because of course he's noticed. He’d designed his house rules with precisely this intent. If he accompanies you everywhere you go, then you can't exactly go on dates, and you definitely can't meet people for sex. Not unless you feel like having Suo watch as some anonymous guy fucks you, and you don't. As hot as the idea is, it’s definitely not platonic behaviour, and it would probably trigger the whole homicidal obsession thing.
“Do you like it?” Suo asks, startling you. You look at him, confused.
“What?”
“Do you enjoy having sex with your customers?” he asks. His voice and gaze are even. Unrelenting. “Does it make you happy?”
You stare at him, a deer caught in headlights. You didn't expect Suo to actually care about whether you enjoyed it or not, and you didn't really expect to care yourself either. But truthfully, you hated it. You simply weren't feeling it with most of your customers and avoided intercourse with all but one. Then in that one case you let someone earnestly fuck you, it was a complete letdown. Possibly the worst sex you'd ever had. You spent the whole time watching the clock, wondering how long it would take, and it turned out that your hookup had remarkable stamina but absolutely no technique. To pass the time, and in an attempt to feel something, you tried to imagine it was someone else who was inside you. You cycled through a whole list of people, including all of your exes, a few of your past customers, every single member of BTS, and then—finally, inevitably—your long-time friend, roommate, and landlord.
To your complete horror, when you imagined that it was Suo who had you folded in half, his cock so deep inside you that you could feel it in your throat, you came so hard that you drenched the sheets.
You lay there afterward as your customer showered, alone in the bed. Normally you'd be getting dressed at that point, but you were too distracted. You kept thinking about what it would feel like to be held by Suo after having your guts rearranged by him—embraced tenderly like you know he would do with you, kissing him platonically like you've always wanted to do with him—and you realised that you didn’t actually want to have sex with anyone else. Despite all your life experience, sexual experience, and job experience—in that moment, you felt like a lonely nineteen year old girl who wanted nothing more than to have romantic, vanilla sex with her best friend, but who was instead having impersonal, disappointing sex with various salarymen.
This was a feeling so disgusting that you’ve decided to never tell anyone at any cost.
“Yeah, it's fine. I guess I like it.” You pretend to study your nails. “Sometimes I cum, which is all I really want.”
Suo keeps staring at you. “That’s it?” he asks, voice measured and careful. You raise a brow, playing dumb.
“What do you mean?”
“That's all you want? Just to get off?”
You gaze out the window, trying not to look at his lips.
“Yes, that's all.”
No matter how batshit Suo gets, he always maintains a certain kindness and maturity in how he handles conflict with you. It's a lesson that he learned from his master, which has perhaps been distorted over time, but remains important to him nevertheless.
If you do something upsetting, Suo is never forceful about getting you to act differently. Sure, he has fucked up ways of either getting you to behave or making you understand the consequences of your actions, and perhaps he has his manipulative moments. It was probably not a good thing that he coaxed you into indefinite house arrest, for instance. But he never threatens you, and he never hits you, and he never disrespects you. In fact, more than anything, he makes it a point to never let you feel like you aren't loved.
So when Suo abandons you after that conversation in the Rolls Royce, you lose your fucking mind.
Suo doesn’t come home in the days following that evening, without any note nor explanation. For the first time in years, he stops replying to your texts. Your immediate thought is that he's been gravely injured or perhaps even killed, which sends you into a panicked spiral. But every one of his men who's come by to check on you has implied otherwise—but I'm not allowed to tell you anything else, anesan, I’m sorry, they all say. And when you realise that Suo is actually fine and he's just playing a fucked up mind game with you, one that makes you feel distinctly unloved, you feel simultaneously heartbroken and apoplectic. The man is not allowed to corner you into de facto imprisonment and then just fucking leave. In fact, if he tries, you might imprison him.
You spend a few days sitting at home and crying over this, as well as torturing yourself by thinking about useless things (fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, et cetera). But eventually, you get tired of wallowing in self-inflicted misery, and you decide to just track your fake husband down. His men have been adamant about not letting you out of their sight—presumably so you don’t fuck any more of your customers, because Suo can be spiteful like that—so you have to be strategic about your plan to find him.
You decide to do it during work. You tap out in the middle of a shift, feigning illness, so nobody bats an eye when you put on the most shapeless hoodie you own and throw on a face mask. Your chauffeurs (handlers) don't notice as you sneak off—and for the first time in years, you walk through the red light district all alone.
It feels strange not to be protected, and even stranger not to be surveilled. You marvel at the unfamiliar experience of complete freedom, and at the possibility of being able to run off and disappear if you so wished. But you don't, of course. Not only do you care too deeply for Suo to abandon him, you're also pretty sure he has your driver’s licence and ID card locked up somewhere. At least you haven't been able to find them, and Suo was oddly evasive about it when you asked. (I haven't seen them, he'd said, but I don't think you’d need either of those things immediately, anyway, do you? And you nodded in response, because it was true that you liked being his passenger princess too much to care about your licence.)
So rather than bolting for the subway, you head straight to your old workplace. The gleaming doors of Red Dragon welcome you as you cross its threshold, and you're greeted immediately by the scent of luxury colognes and expensive cigars—both evoking a strange nostalgia in you. Even the click of your heels against the marble floor feels familiar. You realise that you've missed the place despite its cutthroat culture and its owner’s authoritarian control over you, which you suppose isn't surprising. This club was more or less your home for years and, thanks to said owner, was the safest place you've ever worked.
And being that you feel you've returned to your very safe home, you don't expect it when you're abruptly stopped by the bouncer.
“Can I help you?” he asks, his arm in your way. You don't recognize him, but you see the edges of his irezumi peeking out from the rolled-up cuffs of his shirt.
“Yeah, actually,” you say. “I'm looking for Gui Yanzhao. Is he here right now?”
The bouncer—or chinpira, you guess—bristles.
“You're looking for who?”
“Yanzhao?” you say impatiently. “Eyepatch, tassel earrings? Owner of the club? Probably your boss?”
The bouncer steps forward and reaches for something in his pocket, which makes you suddenly nervous, and also makes you realise that in a hoodie and a face mask, you ordinarily wouldn't be allowed in this club, let alone into the room of its yakuza owner. You're so used to VIP treatment here that you simply forgot.
You take a step back. “Um. I think there's been a misunderstanding.” You lower your face mask, which doesn't help as you've never met this man, and he must be new. You’ll need to complain to Suo about his onboarding process later, if you aren't killed before you can find him.
It turns out that this yakuza rookie has a knife in his pocket, which is not the worst thing he could have been carrying, but is also not the best. You're getting ready to run in the other direction when a more senior member of the gang comes by. He gives you a startled look, which then turns alarmed when he sees his younger brother’s knife.
“Anesan!” he yells hurriedly, and he snatches the chinpira’s knife straight from his hand. His lunge for the weapon turns into a hurried bow. He pulls his colleague—whose face has turned very white in a very short amount of time—into an even deeper one. They look on the verge of prostrating.
“Oh, Yamashita. Hi! Is this guy new?”
“Yes! My sincerest apologies for my younger brother’s idiocy, and his insolence in raising a weapon at you.” There's a sheen of sweat on the back of his neck. “If you would like him to atone, then he would be more than happy to—”
“No, that's fine. I'd really like him to keep all his fingers.” If you have to see a rookie cut off his pinkie today, you think you might actually change your mind on running away. Fuck your documents—Suo can keep them. Surely life without proof of identity can't be that hard. “By the way,” you say, trying to change the topic before Yamashita can suggest alternative acts of atonement, “have you seen my husband?”
Yamashita hesitates at your question, looks conflicted. You feel a little bad for him, and for every other gang member who needs to worry about accidentally offending Suo. You watch him sweat for a full ten seconds before he says, “You can follow me. But anesan, you might find it unpleasant upstairs. I can find someone to drive you home instead, if you'd like.”
You give him a funny look. This was your workplace for a very long time—you can’t think of many things that would happen here that might seriously upset you. “What, is he cheating on me?” you guess.
“What? No! Aniki would never!” Yamashita seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. “He's crazy about you!”
“Then I'm sure he’ll be happy to see me,” you say, although given that he's ignored your texts for four days straight, you aren't so sure. Regardless, this seems to be good enough reasoning for Yamashita, and you’re taken to the top floor of Red Dragon. You ponder the whole time, on the elevator ride up, just what exactly Suo’s been up to that's made Yamashita this nervous about letting you see him.
Then the door opens, and you’re given your answer in the form of several body bags—all cleanly zipped up and conscientiously laid out in front of the elevators in a single, neat row. A sight that is significantly worse than a rookie cutting off his pinkie finger.
“Oh,” you say faintly. You try not to throw up. “So this is why he hasn't been home.”
“Exactly!” Yamashita replies, beaming. “See, anesan, I told you. He'd never cheat on you!”
Suo is in the lounge of the top floor, which has been cleared of both civilians and corpses for the night. He's sitting on one of the couches, leaning back with his one eye closed, as if asleep. The golden tassels of his earrings are draped over the expensive leather of his seat, intertwined with his dark hair. A cup of tea sits in front of him, steaming. Even this far away, you recognize it by the scent alone: jasmine, probably from Longjing. One of the most expensive blends he has, and that which he saves for days he’s stressed, though he never admits it when he is.
The sight of him would almost look tranquil, except for all the blood on his knuckles and his cuffs.
Off to the side, two of his younger brothers are chatting away. One is pouring cups of some doubtlessly expensive liquor, and the other is smoking a cigar. There's karaage on the table too. You recognize all of this as part of a ritual that some of the guys like to do after a hit or a shootout, not dissimilar to getting ramen or McDonald’s after going to a club.
You catch a bit of their conversation as you approach. One of them holds up the liquor bottle (Isojiman sake, you now recognise from your girls’ bar days, one of the rarer bottles costing around nine million yen) and asks Suo if he wants to join. “No thanks,” he says predictably, “I'm on a diet.” Then he turns and looks right at you—startling you, because you had thought you were being fairly quiet—and gives you a smile so genuine that it reminds you of his Furin days. “Would my beautiful wife like to drink for me, though?”
“No thanks,” you reply, “but your beautiful wife would like to talk to you.”
The two guys clear out to give you some privacy. You’re left alone with Suo, feeling awkward after several days of resenting him for no reason. (You’d rather die than go to therapy, but the whole fear of abandonment thing is probably something you should start addressing.) You don't even know where you want to sit. Eventually, you settle for placing yourself next to him, which is a decision that Suo quickly overturns by pulling you into his lap.
A flutter erupts in your stomach as he settles you on top of him. This physiological reaction is absurd, as not even ten minutes ago, you were trying not to throw up at the line of corpses in front of the elevator. It should also scare you somewhat that Suo’s hands—delicately adjusting your body—are still covered in blood. But truthfully, you can't help but be happy when he makes you feel so loved.
You take one of the napkins on the table and start wiping at his knuckles. Tenderly, in case they're bruised or skinned.
“You didn't call or come home,” you start.
“I thought it would be too dangerous.”
You frown, thinking of all the bodies outside. “Was this a rival organisation?”
“No. They were ours.” He sighs. “A succession conflict. There are a few people who don't like how I'll run things if I take over.”
You nod. Suo is very old-fashioned in his ideals about the yakuza, which you think is an imprint of his master’s influence, and something that appeals to his current ‘father’. He values chivalry. He likes protecting the weak. His filial devotion to his deceased master has now extended to every member of his yakuza family, especially his oyassan. He’s almost certainly the top candidate for taking over after the oyabun dies, but being that part of his old-fashioned principles excludes lucrative projects such as sex trafficking, you suppose it’s natural that some people in his organisation would prefer him dead rather than in charge.
“You’ve never ghosted me during violent conflicts before though,” you say. “I was worried that something happened to you. Or that you were upset with me.”
Suo’s hand drops to your waist, pulling you a little closer.
“They knew where we live. They tried to get to you, you know.” Your eyes widen in alarm, so he cups your face with a palm. His thumb glides along your cheek, and your response is almost Pavlovian: your heart rate immediately slows at the comfort of his touch. “It’s fine. They won't bother you ever again.” The cheerful smile returns. “And if anyone else ever does, I'll handle them too.”
Your heart swells. Enthusiastic pledges of murder are not a healthy sign of affection, but after so much loneliness—whether from the past several days, or the years before that, you aren't sure—you can't find it in yourself to be disturbed. You feel and sound painfully fond when you reply, “I know.”
Suo’s expression dims a little then. “I thought you'd like the space anyway.”
“What?” You give him a confused look. You have never once given him any indication that you want even an inch of space from him. You'd crawl into his ribcage if you could. “Why would you think that?”
“I thought you felt suffocated. You left my club just so you could have sex with other people.” You blink, lingering on his wording. Other people. He continues before you can ask about it, sighing, “You didn't even ask me who I'd give permission to touch you. You just went ahead and decided on your own.”
“...”
You try not to look disturbed. Suo’s apparent wish to control your sexual decisions is news to you, and somehow more alarming than the murder pledge. And even worse—you immediately clench in response to his words. The thought of Suo dictating who does and doesn't get to touch your cunt is… well, your mind is heading in a distinctly non-platonic direction.
Trying to ignore the heat in between your thighs (but at the same time encouraging it), you ask: “Who would you have been, um, okay with touching me?”
“Sakura or Nirei,” he says immediately. “Though only Sakura would be interested.”
“What.” You gape at him, all arousal forgotten. “Bullshit. He would never.”
“Yes, he would.” Suo tilts his head. “Haven't you noticed?”
“I don't think there's anything to notice? And also—he’s so shy, I don't think he'd ever agree even if he were interested!” You give him a bewildered look. “He couldn't even look at us when we said we were getting married, he was so embarrassed!”
“Embarrassed?” Suo stares at you, an amused glint in his eye. “Is that what you thought was going on?”
“Was there anything else?”
He studies you for a moment, clearly entertained but not explaining why. “Well—it’s fine,” he says. “It doesn't matter for now. Especially since he's helping us plan a wedding and all.”
You make a face. “I still can't believe that's the cover you went for.”
“Are you upset with it?” he asks smoothly, and you huff and say yes, but from his sly look, you think he knows it's a lie.
Naturally, you deflect before he can further interrogate you. “So, given that you are now my fiancé, am I no longer allowed to work on Keisei Street and see customers after my shifts?”
You don’t expect it when Suo says, “No, you can.”
You stare. “What?”
“You can keep seeing customers if you'd like. You said it makes you happy, so why would I stop you?” Suo’s brow furrows, his usual calm replaced with concern. “Do you really think I do the things I do to make you miserable?”
Guilt gnaws at your heart. He looks so disappointed. “No,” you tell him. “I just thought it'd make you miserable that I was sleeping with people without your permission.” It is partly why you hid it from him in the first place, after all. You don't like to see him sad—you’re still haunted by the deep grief he was in, after your master died—and also, his misery tends to bring bodily harm to other people these days.
Cognizant of both concerns, you ask, “You’re really okay with me sleeping with my customers? I can stop, if you want.”
“No, it’s fine. I still don't like it, but you can continue for now if you want.”
Suo’s mouth curls—not in a gentle way, as has been his expression since seeing you walk in, but in a way that sets off your flight or fight response.
“I'm sure we’ll reach a mutual understanding soon enough.”
END PART 1
thank you genuinely if you read all that because this is a deranged au and I still can't believe I wrote it sldfkjsldfkj. please do let me know if you enjoyed my yandere suo delusions. sorry there was no smut in this chapter. I promise there is a ton in the next one (probably too much... lol. it's a 10k chapter and literally half of those words are about orgasm denial sldfkjalskdjdf). it's completely written and I hope to edit and have it up by next week!
also here is glossary of terms and world building notes if you are interested!
tagging @kweenkatsuki-fics !! <3
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Eddie Munson's royal wedding
Written for the @steddieholidaydrabbles, day 21
Prompt: Formal
Rated: M
Tags: Modern AU; Rock star Eddie; Royal Steve; Established relationship; Sexually explicit language
Notes: Previous part | Part 1
“Okay,” Eddie says. The crowd outside the toned windows of the limousine has been getting thicker, which means they must be there soon. “Lemme get this straight again.”
Steve, seated opposite him and looking both stupidly at ease and infuriatingly handsome in his tailored suit, chuckles.
“You’re talking about your tie, right? Because you’ve been tugging on it again.”
Eddie groans and attempts to right the dreaded thing. It feels like trying to strangle himself.
“Very funny, you asshole,” he grouses, but Steve doesn’t rise to the insult, just continues to observe his struggle with fond amusement. “I'm talking about this wedding. Why do we need to- … I mean, how are you related to these people again?”
“Here, let me,” Steve mutters, leaning over and swatting Eddie’s hands away so that he can straighten the tie for him. “You know my cousin?”
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “The Duchess of What’s Her Face. Met her at a fundraiser once. Major bitch, please don’t tell me it's her getting married.”
“No, that’s my father’s niece,” Steve laughs, markedly not correcting him on the major bitch part. “This is my mother’s side of the family.”
“Ah, the banker and entrepreneur side,” Eddie says. He tries to fiddle with his rings, but they’ve made him leave most of them at home. “Much better.”
“Hey,” Steve says. “Try to look at it from the positive side. You won’t have to remember any titles. There'll probably also be less cameras.”
Silence drops. The car slows down as they pass another security checkpoint.
“Hey,” Steve says. His hands settle on Eddie’s shoulders, featherlight and familiar. “Hey, look at me.”
Eddie does.
“You don't have to do this,” Steve says. His eyes are serious, his brow furrowed. “I can get out of this car alone and tell the driver to bring you home, and nobody will need to see you like this.”
“Wow,” Eddie scoffs. “You can tell you've been trained in diplomacy. That's the nicest way anyone has ever told me I looked like shit.”
Steve drops a chaste kiss to his lips, just as the car stops. “I never said that. I know it's not your favorite type of event, though. Or your favorite type of people. I don't ever want to force you into-”
“Hey,” Eddie interrupts him. “You're not forcing me. I chose this. I chose you. And for the record, I know I look fantastic in this thing.”
Steve hums, a low sound that settles heavy in Eddie’s abdomen. The driver’s door shuts and steps approach. An excited chorus of voices swells outside. The goddamn press, eager to catch a photo of him making a complete ass of himself on his first royal engagement.
“You know when you'll look even better?”
Eddie flinches back to attention. “Huh?”
The door swings open. A storm of flashing cameras breaks loose.
Steve smiles, bright and professional. His voice is so low Eddie needs to strain to catch it.
“When we get back to the hotel and I take it off you.”
*
“There he is!”
Eddie turns to see the bride swooshing towards him in a flurry of white skirts, her new husband trailing on her heel like an eager puppy. He casts a nervous glance over his left shoulder, then one over his right, but Steve is nowhere to be seen.
“Eddie Munson,” the bride says, coming to a stop in front of him and taking a generous sip of her champagne. “The rock star who bagged the crown prince. Every eligible person in this room either wants to be you or kill you, you know that?”
“Yeah well,” Eddie says, taking in the mean curl of her mouth and the sharp glint in her eyes. “Good thing you're not eligible anymore, I guess.”
Her face twitches and her hand grips the glass a little tighter.
“Carol,” says her husband, smile sharp. “Don't tease him. He must have it hard enough. The backlash from his fans, the media claiming that this is just a rebellious phase Steve is going to grow out of soon. I imagine it can't be easy.”
“Ah, you know how the press are,” Eddie says. “Better not to listen to them. Steve and I are in this for the long haul. We're planning on making it work.”
The bride quirks a brow. “Well, good luck with making that white dress work at your wedding.”
And Eddie wanted to behave, he really did, but what can he do when served a cue like this?
“Bold to assume I'll be the one wearing the dress.”
Silence drops. The bride and groom gape at him. A scandalized murmur runs through the assembled bystanders, and fuck, when did they gain an audience?
“Um,” Eddie says. “Listen, that was-”
“There you are!” Steve exclaims, materializing out of nowhere and taking him gently by the shoulder. “Tommy, Carol, I'm so sorry, but we need to get going. Early start tomorrow, you know how it is. Beautiful wedding, congrats again.”
And then Eddie’s being pulled out the doors and into the venue's lush garden, past a crowd of gawking wedding guests.
“I can't believe you said that.”
Eddie is already drawing a breath to apologize, but then it dawns on him that it's not rage that's making Steve’s voice shake. It's laughter. Steve's hand, against all rules of propriety and protocol, has slipped into his.
“Told you I'd be a disaster at this,” he shrugs, and Steve snorts.
“Ah, they deserved it. We can deal with the fallout tomorrow.”
“Oh?” Eddie smirks as the limousine rolls to a stop before them and the driver jumps out to open the door for them. “Is this the part where you take me to the hotel and-”
“Oh no,” Steve says, and pulls him inside. His eyes are sparkling. “Change of plans. You're fucking me in the car.”
And who's Eddie to disregard a royal order?
More holiday drabbles
#steddie#steve x eddie#steve harrington x eddie munson#steddie fanfic#steddie brainrot#fanfiction writer#fanfiction#fanfic#my writing#steddie holiday drabbles#hype's holiday drabbles 2024#the rock star and the royal
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Second Lesson
Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader
Word Count: 3.1k
Warnings: edging and overstimulation
Genre: smut
Summary: Some things are not self explanatory, and Steve has decided he's going to fill in the gaps by coming to you to ask his questions about sex and some of those questions have more involved answers than you'd expect
***
You hear a knock at your door while you're looking for something in your closet.
"Coming!" You call, taking a moment to contain the hurricane that you've created in there. You open the door to find Steve in the hall.
"Are you busy?" He asks.
"Not particularly, what's up?"
"I have another question."
"Shoot." You say, gesturing for him to walk into your room.
"Edging. What it is?"
"It is pleasuring yourself or someone else until the brink of orgasm without letting them actually have an orgasm."
"That sounds like torture." Steve frowns.
"Sometimes it is. It can be used as a punishment, some people enjoy it though, it can also be about increasing endurance- you know- training to last longer in bed, it also usually makes the orgasm more intense when you do eventually get to that point."
"Huh, have you done it before?"
"Been on both sides." You shrug. "Oh also I should mention that like most kink terms there is an equal yet opposite complementary term. For edging its complementary term is overstimulation."
"And that is?"
"If edging is about restraint when it comes to pleasure then overstimulation is a hedonistic indulgence in it. Orgasming again and again and again, sometimes to the point of pain this is where a safe word can be useful because you may say things like stop or I can't take it especially because post orgasm sensitivity can be a bitch but the whole point is to keep going and if you've already talked about exploring either edging or overstim, your partner will probably ignore you saying stop because again the point is to keep going even if you are sensitive, but if they're going to ignore you saying it's too much, you need to be able to stop them if it actually is too much."
"Are all aspects of sex so- severe?" He asks.
"No. Sex can be incredibly soft and gentle and sweet, it can be slow and tender in many ways. I mean, you saw some of that last time. You just- happen to have coincidentally questions about the other end of the spectrum today." You shrug.
"It just seems very, intense. Like maybe too intense? I don't get why you would want to put someone through that. It seems like a slippery slope, sex should be about love not some form of- torture."
"Well calm down, you sound panicked and it's not like I'm going to strap you down and force you to experience it. It's not for everyone Steve, different people have different preferences, this is why it's good to have those conversations before you sleep with someone so nobody gets put in a stressful situation they didn't sign up for. Plus there are a lot of ways to express love you know. If your person wants you to do these things then that absolutely shows that you love them, especially if you do them with the care you're meant to."
"I just don't understand it I guess." He shakes his head.
"That's fine Stevie, no one can force you to do it or enjoy it or even comprehend it really. Like I said, it's a personal preference. Just- be honest with your partner when the time comes." You shrug.
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"Do you... like this stuff?" Steve asks.
"I do. With the right person."
"Really?"
"You have your ideas about sex, I have mine." You shrug.
"What's that mean?"
"You said sex is about showing love and I agree with that to a point but to me it's also about pleasure. It's about exploring yourself, sometimes through someone else. It's about learning and adventure. The heat and intensity, passion that is borderline all consuming, sex can be many things. I like to experience all of them."
"Oh." He breathes.
"Of course that's just me. I'm not here to change your mind about anything." You hum.
"I have to try this edging thing."
"You don't. The hands on lessons are an option not an obligation, you don't seem interested in that and that's fine! You can just take the verbal explanation and proceed with your day as long as it makes sense to you, there's no reason to force yourself to try something that don't appeal to you." You shake your head.
"Well, it's hard to understand something if you're not open to experiencing it right?"
"I mean, I guess sometimes."
"So I want to experience it. That way I can understand it." He insists.
"As long as you're sure about this."
"I'm sure. Let's do it." He nods.
"What? Now?"
"Do you have time?"
"Depends on what time it is now."
"Three seventeen."
"I've got til six, I have another engagement later this evening."
"Is that enough time?"
"Plenty. Get comfortable, I would recommend getting naked, you do need to at least take off your pants or you'll likely stain them but it'll probably be more comfortable to take off everything because there's a chance you'll get hot. I know you run pretty warm already but I don't know how much you'd enjoy your shirt sticking to your back after twenty minutes." You say.
"Right, yeah." Steve hesitantly shuffles out of his pants and underwear and then, after seemingly debating in his head, he also pulls his shirt over his head and places all of them on your desk chair before sitting on the bed.
"Alright, I'm going to treat this like I would a real situation. Of course, the expectations are different, I know so don't worry about performing a certain way. Just like last time if at any point you have a question or something makes you feel uncomfortable you can simply say so assuming you can focus. If you can't focus use your stoplight. Yellow, or red, just like we discussed before." You tell him as you pull open the drawer by your bed and grab the bottle of lube.
"What's that for?" Steve asks when you squirt a generous amount into your hand.
"It's a lubricant. It might be a little cold at first, but I'm sure you'll appreciate it, especially the longer this goes." You say sitting beside him. "I'm going to touch you now, is that alright?" You ask.
"Yes." Steve nods with more conviction than you'd expect. You wrap your fingers around the base of his dick and he takes in a large breath. His exhale is shaky as you drag your hand up his length with a pressured grip. You circle his tip, slowly massaging it, watching his reactions, enjoying the way his abdomen seems to flex sporadically. His breathing is coming out harsher now and you begin to pump him. Last time you made a point not to stare at him since he was clearly rather nervous about the whole thing but not looking is rather impossible with this 'lesson' so you take the time to really get a look at his dick as you stroke him. The tip is a reddish pink and there are a couple veins running very noticeably along it. You already knew he was big, he's been inside you for fuck's sake, but looking at it unobstructed, boy was he... endowed.
"So how this works Stevie, usually, is that you'll tell me when you're close, ask me, beg me if I tell you to, ask me to cum and I'll tell you if you've earned it. Of course I won't demand all that from you, I'm rather good at reading people's bodies." You explain to him, stroking faster, holding a little bit tighter.
"W-what do you mean usually?" He asks wearily.
"When I do this with partners. There's a bit of power play that comes with this, if you hadn't noticed, having control of how much pleasure your person receives at any given moment. It's a very powerful feeling. But this is more about teaching you than my own enjoyment, so it's a bit different, I'm just offering you more details about the appeal of it all." You explain.
"A-and you- you like that? The p-power play?" He asks. You can tell he's really starting to struggle with his focus, his body is twitching, and he's gripping the sheets, blinking rapidly as he speaks. You watch his whole body tense up and take that as your cue to ease up. You slow your wrist to almost a stop, relishing in the groan Steve lets out.
"I find it can be intoxicating." You smirk.
"So that's how this works?" He pants.
"Pretty much." You nod, picking up speed again. Steve moans as his body jolts again. You can't help but imagine how nice he'd look with a couple of hickeys. You won't be giving him any of course but the idea does captivate you for a brief moment. It's clear that Steve is trying to control his reactions, but the shaky breaths and strained grunts give him away.
"My god." He whispers, tipping his head back. If it was anybody but Steve saying those words, you'd affirm that you are their god and they should worship you as such but it's not somebody else, it's Steve and you'd best keep it simple. When his body tenses up again, you slow your hand accordingly, and Steve lets out a strained groan.
"You know Stevie, you don't have to try so hard to keep quiet. I like your little noises. They're hot." You say.
"I'm not- r-really used to... making n-noises like that." He pants out.
"Well, a bit of advice, most girls like to hear that you're enjoying yourself."
"Really?"
"Yep." You say, stroking him faster, again. You continue your game with him, slowing down when his body tenses up and speeding up when his shuddering breaths quiet. With each denied orgasm his restraint on his vocalizations seems to slip, by the fith time you're slowing down he's an unending string of moans and grunts and even a few whimpers when you squeeze in just the right place.
"This is torture." Steve grits out. His entire body is flushed and his skin is glistening.
"I know but you're doing so well. Just a little longer and I promise I'll reward you. Don't you want that?" You ask with a mocking sweetness in your tone.
"Please." He says breathlessly.
"Oh that sounded nice." You smile. You're not even trying to break him like you would under usual circumstances but the sound him whimpering please to you almost makes you want to.
"Y/n- I feel, like I'm on fire. Please I need to cum." Steve huffs through clenched teeth and you start to wonder if he's reaching his limit. Gripping his chin you gently tilt his head to look at you.
"Checking in Stevie, gimme a color please." You say softly.
"G-green, this is insane." He says shakily.
"You haven't tapped out yet." You smile slightly.
"Is that the goal?"
"Not today." You wink at him. You decide it's probably best to stop here, so you pick up your speed again watching for the telltale signs of his orgasm but this time you finally let him peak and you can't decide if the sound or sight is more dazzling. Either way, you work him through it as evidence of his release spurts over your hand and his thighs in thick ropes. There's an impressive amount of it and you wonder if this is a super soldier thing or if he's just really pent up. When nothing else comes out and he hisses against your touch you let him go. "I'm gonna get a wash cloth, hang tight." You tell him standing from the bed and walking into your bathroom. You rinse your hand first and then soak a washcloth with room temperature water. When you pop back out his arm is draped over his eyes but he otherwise hasn't moved. You start with his neck, wiping the sweat that's probably made his skin sticky. You do a quick swipe across his chest too before moving on to cleaning the remenants of his orgasm from his thighs and recovering dick. "How are we feeling?" You ask him once he's clean. You toss the washcloth in your hamper and grab a water from your mini fridge before sitting beside him on the bed.
"That was- intense." He says.
"Yes but you knew that going in."
"I mean- when you finally let me, you know. It was intense- probably more so than I've ever felt." He says and you giggle at his avoidance of saying orgasm.
"We should really work on your comfortablilty with some of these terms. But yes that intensity is a high some people crave."
"Wow."
"Was it worth it?" You ask.
"What?"
"You said it was the most intense orgasm you've ever had, would you say the payoff was worth the buildup? After all you called it torture."
"You're not even nice about it."
"I was actually very nice, I didn't wait til you were crying to get you off which- is usually what I'll do."
"You make people cry?" He blinks surprised.
"Sometimes." You shrug.
"That's- further than I-"
"I know, that's why I didn't make you cry. Although crying is way more likely with overstimultion anyhow." You shrug.
"Is it?"
"Wanna see for yourself?" You ask opening your bedside drawer again.
"Well I'm not sure I can hand-"
"Here." You drop one of your toys in his hand.
"What's this?"
"A vibrator. I figure it's not fair if every lesson is just me doing things to you like some sort of lab rat so I thought you might want to try overstimulating me. The only other way for that to happen is for you to learn my body but who has time for that? This is efficient and pretty much idiot proof it'll get the job done regardless of your personal experience." You shrug.
"You- want me to use this on you?" He asks wide eyes watching you quickly take off your clothes.
"Yes I do. It's simple, I promise. It does most of the work for you. If you have the energy for it that is." You say.
"Depends on just how simple it is." He says. You sit on the bed next to him and grab his wrist, placing the vibrator in his hand against your clit. It's not on but your insides still clench in anticipation when it touches you.
"Put it here, small circles or wiggling it up and down is fine but keep it in this general area, start with light pressure and press harder as we go. I'll be using the same stoplight system, so here's a couple of preliminary warnings, if I squirm away follow me or hold me down, if I cry that's fine, if I scream let me, ignore me if I ask you to stop or say it's too much. In fact, no matter what, you keep this against me until I call red and I will call red. Sound simple enough?"
"You might cry and that's a good thing?" He frowns.
"It's not a bad thing. It probably won't happen anyway I'm just covering my bases no need to look so terrified." You chuckle.
"How do I turn this on?" He asks after a moment.
"The last button."
"What are the other two?"
"One controls the rhythym and the other controls the power, don't mess with those buttons. For the sake of this lesson they are off limits."
"Last one turns it on?"
"Yes." You nod. Steve stares at the buttons for a moment before a sharp click fills the silence and you jolt from the sudden stimulation. He moves the toy in tight circles, his face pinched in focus. Your hips grind against the vibrator and it doesn't take long for your first orgasm to hit you with a soft moan.
"Oh." Steve says, as if he's surprised.
"Keep going, add pressure." You huff out. Shuddering pants indicate that Steve's done what you asked, your muscles tensing from the continued pleasure post orgasm. The thing with this particular vibrator is that it works quick and you hardly manage to calm down before your second orgasm sneaks up on you. Steve trades the circles for little up and down motions that draw a couple sharp moans from you.
"Are you okay?" He asks.
"Fine Stevie, I'm fine." You say shakily. Your third orgasm comes with a cry through your closed mouth. You know it's impractical to be so mindful of your sounds but you've got to remain at least semi-composed to be of any help to Steve. More and more your body spasms as the stimulation continues, practically twitching from the pleasure. Small whimpers begin to escape with more frequency as you quickly approach orgasm four. On this one your eyes roll back and you allow an obscene sounding high pitched moan to fall from your lips. Steve makes a sound somewhere in his throat which you barely hear. You're starting to feel that bite of overstimulation layering under the pleasure and it makes you squirm. You jerk against the toy, hoping for a reprieve from the buzzing and Steve, the dilligent student that he is, places a hand across your stomach, holding you in place and all you can do is cry out as he presses the vibrator firmly against your clit. You grip the sheets tightly as he starts to make little circles around your too sensitive bundle of nerves, your whole body is shaking as another orgasm quickly creeps up on you with a squealing noise and string of curses. You can feel your brain getting fuzzy, that familiar hedonistic haze threatens to blanket your thoughts, you know if you don't stop Steve soon you'll be far too blissed out to do so and Steve is not equipped to handle that sort of headspace.
"Okay, red. That's enough Stevie." You say breathlessly but firm. Steve quickly moves the toy but struggles to turn it off so you take it from him and turn it off yourself. You take a couple of moments to recompose yourself, ignoring the phantom buzzing and overwhelming wetness between your legs when you sit up and pull your knees to your chest.
"Are you alright? Do you need water? Can I get you something?"
"I'm fine Stevie. How are you feeling?"
"Me? I wasn't the one-"
"The whole point of this was to see if you enjoyed either edging or overstim- having tried both, do you feel like you at least have a better understanding of them like you wanted?"
"I- guess I have a better understanding."
"Well what're you thinking?"
"I thought I would- hate the edging thing but, as... intense as it was there was something, freeing about it? Like getting on a ride at Coney Island and the ending was, worth the build up."
"And overstimulation?"
"It's incredible watching the way your body reacts to such an onslaught. Plus the idea of bringing your lover imense pleasure like that is undeniably delicious, I can see how that kind of thing can be so thrilling."
"Well there you go. Questions answered. You're free to leave." You say.
"Are you sure you don't need anything?"
"I'm fine Steve I'm just going to hop in the shower you've got nothing to worry about really. I've got other things on my schedule of today remember?"
"Alright- if you're sure. I'll see you around. Enjoy your evening."
"Thanks. See ya." You say. Steve seems hesitant to leave but without a reason to stay, he has to shuffle his way out. You let out a sigh after your door closes. You've got a couple hours before your evening plans, good thing, you'll need it. Hopefully one of these days Steve will ask a simple question with a simple answer that doesn't a demonstration.
***
Tagged Users: @chososg1rl
#marvel#marvel fanfiction#steve rogers x reader#steve rogers#steve rogers fanfiction#steve rogers smut
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Just a little Emmrich fic based on @timethehobo's beautiful art here. Had me feeling angsty. 😅
Vae pushed open the heavy oak door to Emmrich's study, the hinges creaking slightly in protest. The room was as she expected: cluttered yet strangely orderly, filled with the faint scent of parchment and pipe smoke. Shelves packed with ancient tomes, scrolls, and artifacts lined the walls, and to the right of it all stood his desk, a chaotic mosaic of notes, quills, and half-finished experiments.
"Emmrich?" She glanced around but found no sign of him. "He must have stepped out."
The old book in her hands felt heavy as she crossed the room and carefully placed it on the desk, smoothing her fingers over its cracked leather binding. It had caught her eye in Dock Town, and she immediately remembered Emmrich's passing mention of wanting to read it.
Satisfied, she turned to leave, but a sudden, eerie green light flared behind her.
"Well, well," a snide, feminine voice drawled, its tone dripping with venom. "If it isn't Volkarin's little paramour."
Vae froze, a feeling of nausea churning in her gut. Slowly, she turned back to face Johanna's skull. The cursed object sat atop its ornate pedestal, its hollow eye sockets somehow teeming with malice.
"Hezenkoss," Vae said flatly, unwilling to give her any more attention than necessary.
"How cold," The skull cackled, the sound sharp and grating. "I was just starting to enjoy the quiet, then in comes the professor's pet. What did you bring him, hmm? Chocolates? Cheese? Some other fatuous notion of romance?"
Ignoring her jab, Vae headed for the door. "Just a book he wanted. Goodbye, Hezenkoss."
"How amusing. I can assure you, he's already read it," she scoffed. "That absentminded fool could never keep track of what he's consumed. He'd open a book, read the first page, then suddenly realise he'd read it years ago."
Vae paused, her hand lingering over the door knob. Against her better judgement, she sighed and walked to the desk, leaning against it and facing the skull.
"What was he like when he was younger?" she asked.
There was a brief silence, as if Hezenkoss hadn't expected the question. Then, her voice took on a grudging edge. "An idealist. A bleeding heart. A coward."
Vae frowned. "You were friends for years. You must have admired something about him."
"His intelligence," the half-lich admitted, begrudgingly. "And his magical prowess, but that's all. Both became the reason I despise him—he never utilized either one, wasting his potential. We could have ruled Nevarra, brought every neighbouring kingdom to their knees, but he preferred to play nanny to wayward spirits and shortsighted students. Pah!"
Vae's eyes narrowed. "I don't believe you. You don't stay friends with someone for decades without seeing something worthwhile in them."
"As I just said. He was a useful duck to bounce ideas off of, but he never did appreciate my vision."
"Your vision?" Vae crossed her arms, her brow furrowing. "Your vision killed innocent people. Turned spirits into abominations."
"Sacrifices are necessary to achieve greatness," she spat. "I'm no hypocrite. As you can see, I made the ultimate sacrifice. Volkarin will do the same, should he pursue lichdom."
"It's different if it's yourself," Vae argued. "But not when you force it on others. That's not a 'sacrifice', it's just murder."
"No difference, same outcome."
Vae flinched, disgust welling in her eyes. "I can't imagine Emmrich ever being friends with someone like you," she said, her tone ruthless. "Which means, at some point, you must've changed. I just can't help but wonder if it was before you became a lich or after."
"Lichdom doesn't change anyone's personality, morals, or thoughts. I'm the same person I always was," she asserted. "If you want the truth, the old man's too trusting. Too softhearted. He wants to befriend everyone, even if it means adjusting his own interests to suit their needs. I'm sure you've seen it."
Vae swallowed, thinking back to all the times Emmrich went out of his way to ensure his colleagues' comfort at the cost of his own. Hiding his skulls, refraining from discussing necromancy in front of Taash, choking down one of Harding's ham sandwiches, afraid he'd insult her if he didn't try it—and then all the times he fussed over Vae herself.
"He's kind," she countered, though she knew it was sometimes to a fault. "He said you were, too. Once."
"Pah! You mistake kindness for naivety. I was young, with no concept of reality." She groaned, as if cursing her former self. "I grew out of that. Volkarin didn't. Beneath his grey hair and wrinkled skin, he's still a child at heart, always seeing individuals over the collective."
Vae shook her head. "Do you feel any guilt at all for what you've done to him?"
The skull chuckled, a bitter, humourless sound. "Guilt? For what? He impeded my plans. I did nothing to him."
"You had him on a hit list."
"Yes, because I knew that bleeding heart would never stand for my glorious uprising. Better to crush him, and that ridiculous pile of bones he drags around, than risk his interference. It wasn't personal, you see? Just collateral."
Vae's jaw clenched, her hands balling into fists. "You have no idea how lucky you are to have that 'bleeding heart' in your life. The rest of the Mourn Watch wanted to seal your skull in a tomb, alone, for eternity. But he fought to become your caretaker, because he couldn't stand the thought of you rotting in solitude. Even after everything, he pitied you."
Silence fell over the study, save for the faint crackle of energy within the skull. Hezenkoss said nothing, but her glow dimmed slightly.
Vae huffed and rose to her feet. "He's taking your betrayal harder than he lets on. You should be grateful for his kindness."
The half-lich grumbled, a note of frustration in her voice. "I was never loyal to him. There was no betrayal.”
"Yes, there was," Vae's temper flared. "You could always go to him, always talk to him. You were friends. He cherished that, cherished you, but you threw it all away—and for what? A broken existence? Eternal imprisonment? Loss of all feeling? You'll never be able to walk again, smell again, enjoy someone's touch on your skin. You had it all, but now it's gone. Was it worth it?"
For a long while, Hezenkoss said nothing, Vae's eyes boring into her sockets. Then, with a soft, almost incredulous hiss, she said, "I will escape."
"Maybe," Vae nodded. "But if you do, know this: I will never let you hurt him again."
Hezenkoss' laughter rang out as Vae moved towards the door. "You won't have to worry about that, darling. The decrepit old fool probably only has a few years left anyway!"
Vae tensed but didn't look back. Gritting her teeth, she wrenched the door open—and froze. Emmrich stood in the hallway, his expression a mixture of shock and pain, the weight of the overheard conversation hanging heavy in the air.
"Emmrich," Vae whispered, stepping into the hall and closing the door behind her. "How long have you been—?"
"We were friends once," he whimpered, his eyes drifting to the floor, "...weren't we?"
Vae reached out, her fingers brushing against his cheek. He was so hurt, and it killed her to see. Without another word, she pulled him into a hug, her arms wrapping tightly around him. Almost immediately he melted in her embrace, burying his face in her shoulder, his hands trembling.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
He didn't respond, but the way he clung to her spoke volumes.
#emmrich volkarin#dragon age rook#rook x emmrich#emmrich x rook#dragon age emmrich#veilguard#da: the veilguard#dragon age the veilguard#dragon age
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❧ GLUE SONG pt6☙
warning: swearing, cheesy ass kissing scene, kind of implies doing more than kissing, she/her usage for reader.
summary: you hate the whole of your dads hockey team except his and your favourite player Luke Castellan.
evie’s notes: i haven’t written a kiss scene in a while so im sorry if it’s shit and cringey💔
pt5
You could hear your heartbeat in your head, your stomach churned with nerves. Luke Castellan, the boy you've despised since the day you met him because of how arrogant and cocky he is, is now making you feel so weak in the knees. The mere thought of him even laying a finger on you makes your whole world shake. But why?
Because he complimented you once? Or because his cockiness can be quite attractive at times? Maybe because the boy looks like he was hand made sculpted by the Gods. Either way, this feeling towards him was so unfamiliar yet it felt so natural.
You didn't even have time to fully get yourself together before he showed up at your door, the boy lived 20 minutes away yet got there 5 minutes after he texted you. Slowly, you peeked out your window to try and capture a glimpse of him before being face to face with that damn smirk of his that made you either want to punch his face or kiss his lips.
His dark, curly hair clung to his forehead, damp from the rain, spilling over just enough to shield his eyes. He was wearing a pair of baggy sweatpants and of course a compression shirt, it looked like he'd just come from the gym which really didn't help your screaming heart.
You barely gave him time to knock on the door before you threw it open and closed the door behind you, stupidly forgetting that it was currently pouring down. And there it was, that fucking smirk he wore like a crown.
"Hey, princess." Oh gods, was he trying to kill you? His eyes moved slowly over you, lingering on every curve, every line, as if he was studying a masterpiece—finding beauty in both what was perfectly in place and what was deemed imperfect. "The jersey really does look better on you."
You roll your eyes, unable to hide the smile creeping onto your face. "Oh, shut up," you say, crossing your arms, your voice sharp but your gaze betraying you. "You really think I'm going to fall for that?"
Luke grins, taking a slow step forward. "Fall for what? The truth? That jersey's practically made for you." His eyes flicker over you, deliberate and teasing, but there's a warmth in his gaze that he knows you can't ignore.
You scoff, turning away to hide the flush creeping up your neck. "Gods, you're unbearable."
He steps in your path, cornering you just enough to make you feel the tension between you. "Because you secretly love it," he says, voice lowering a touch. "You like it when I push your buttons."
Your eyes snap to his, and you force a scowl. "You have a ridiculous amount of confidence for someone who can't take a hint."
"Yeah?" Luke leans in a little closer, his smirk never faltering. "Funny. You've been giving me plenty of hints, princess. We gonna ignore that tweet you posted?"
You stare at him, lips parted, but you can't keep the smile from tugging at the corners of your mouth. "You're infuriating," you mutter, but it's half-hearted at best.
"And yet, here you are," he says, grinning even wider. "Outside in the rain with me."
You don't know what came over you at that moment because one minute you were shivering from the pouring rain and the next your body was suddenly filled with warmth when you pulled him into a tight embrace, your heart racing in your chest. Luke's eyes widened for a moment surprised by your bold action, but softened quickly into a look of tenderness as your lips met his in a soft, sweet kiss. He wrapped his strong arms around your waist, pulling you against his broad chest, as he returned the kiss with a gentle passion. Your bodies pressed close together, you could feel the warmth of his body against your own, chasing away the cold from the rain that still poured around you. Gods this was so cliche.
"What was that for?" Luke asked, his voice low and warm, a small smirk on his lips.
Your cheeks flushed with heat, and you averted your gaze from his intense stare, suddenly feeling shy and flustered. "I—I don't know," you managed to stammer out, your voice breathless. "It just felt right, in the moment..."
He chuckled softly, Luke's hands still wrapped around your waist, his thumbs rubbing slow, comforting circles against your skin. "Well, I'm not complaining," he said, his smirk widening. You tried to come up with a snarky reply, but your mind was a swirling mess of emotions.
He noticed the flush and teased you even further. "Wow, you're speechless for once, that's new."
You huffed in annoyance, trying to hide your growing embarrassment, but it was hard when he was so close, his eyes fixed on you with that infuriatingly charming smirk. "Can you not be so annoying for once," you muttered, your voice soft.
Luke smirked, moving a strand of your soaking her that was stuck to your face behind your ear making you feel like you were about to collapse. He let out a soft hum and pulled you tighter against his chest. His hands wandered under your shirt, and he began to toy with the bare skin of your hips. "Nah."
Luke didn't want to stop kissing you, not when he finally had the girl he'd been pining for since the day he met her. He dipped his head back down to pull you in for a deeper and longer kiss. His hands moved up your back, slowly lifting the fabric of your jersey as his hands roamed underneath it.
He continued to kiss you, now with even more eagerness than before. One of his hands came up and grabbed ahold of your face, his thumb gently caressing your cheek. He pulled you as close to him as he could, not wanting any space between your bodies.
The couple's moment was interrupted by the sound of the Stoll brothers laughing and cheering. Luke broke the kiss and let out a loud huff, clearly annoyed. "God damn it.." He muttered under his breath, before turning his head to glare at the two younger demigods.
"Finally!" Connor cheered phone in hand whilst Travis whooped behind him shaking his fist in the air.
"Do you mind?" Luke huffed, whilst you stood there embarrassed as hell.
"Nope! Enjoy yourselves love birds!" Travis cooed as Connor turned around and pretended to be making out with someone.
Well, the moment was ruined, but oh gods were the butterflies going absolutely crazy in your stomach when you looked back up at Luke and he was staring at you with such tenderness, his eyes soft but full of longing, as if he could see straight into your soul. The way he looked at you—like you were the only person on earth, the only person that mattered—made your heart skip a beat. His gaze was full of love, and for a moment, it felt like the world had disappeared, leaving only the two of you, wrapped in something unspoken but deeply felt. You let a cheesy grin take over your face "You coming in?"
travisstoll
♬the perfect pair • beabadoobee
Liked by yn.ln and others
travisstoll FINALLY omg took them long enough
connorstoll such a moving moment i cried
travisstoll i could feel their love
thelukecastellan and then you ruined it
travisstoll i think the fact that you replied to this an 2 hours late proves we in fact did not
seaweedbrain EW EW EW
yn.ln you guys are such creeps
travisstoll you just begged me to send this to you in the dms
yn.ln your point?
xo.silena AHHHH YES OMG my babies😭
clarlarue motherfucker stole my wife wtf
c.rodriguez your wife stole my man😔
clarlarue it’s okay because we have each other🥰
thelukecastellan you’re not allowed to be cute under a post of me and my girlfriend being cute
yn.ln girlfriend? hold on when was this discussed
thelukecastellan was you taking off my shirt not implying it?
wisegirl guys can you not discuss this in person you’re literally together right now
thelukecastellan mb
thelukecastellan
♬Glue Song • beabadoobee
Liked by yn.ln and others
thelukecastellan i love my girlfriend😍
c.rodriguez gang you just got together
thelukecastellan and? i love my girlfriend
yn.ln i love you too😽😽 but you’re forgetting my dad follows you
thelukecastellan oh shit
thebestcoachever happy for you both not liking that last picture
thelukecastellan sorry sir😔
seaweedbrain you tell him to keep it in his pants cap🫡
thelukecastellan stfu
wisegirl finally omg going back and forth between messaging you two about each other was exhausting
yn.ln now me and luke can double date with you and percy🥰
wisegirl okay there was no need😔
seaweedbrain why would we double date?
yn.ln sh sh percy it’s okay
thelukecastellan LMFAO
tags:
@s0urw00lf @lucylovesme @blairfox04 @kidkrowk @rafslytherin
#luke castellan#luke castellan x reader#luke castellan fanfic#luke castellan x you#percy jackon and the olympians#pjo#imagine#luke castellan fluff#charlie bushnell x reader#luke castellan enemies to lovers#luke castellan hockey smau#luke castellan smau#pjo smau
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what are your thoughts on the hyuga siblings and their relationship
OOF now thats one of my favorite naruto dynamics lmao. i think neji and hinata have a very interesting relationship and i say that as someone who really didn't (and tbh still doesn't) love how that relationship developed in canon
i really like the hyuga fight in the chunin exams because the way it's perceived is sooo interesting to me.. neji comes off as an outright bully and i don't even blame the kids for calling him an asshole after all of that, but from reader's perspective it's really obvious that his animosity only exists because of a larger issue...
neji shouldn't treat hinata the way he does, but he does so because of her unique position as a scorned heir. she still benefits from everything that makes his life awful - her life is still valued more than his - but hiashi hates her enough that he won't care if neji dishes out verbal abuse on her. it's an awful dynamic and definitely contributes to hinata's terrible self-worth, but it's a symptom of the life they have been forced into by the man who the manga is intent on letting escape all of the blame for this situation lmao
(hiashi himself can be a really fascinating case honestly. i think he fully means everything he says, which is what makes him so grating but fun to me LOL. his apology to neji is entirely sincere AND it completely misses the point of all of the issues, but neji is young and deprived of acknowledgement enough that he accepts it wholeheartedly. hiashi thinks he's the best uncle of all time.)
hinata herself has so little belief in her own worth that she just sits there and takes whatever abuse people throw at her... i don't actually think neji's anger towards her was a constant - i think some people interpret it that way - rather i feel like it was something that came up whenever he was pushed too far. in more normal circumstances where he's not being made to fight her directly, he was likely more detached than anything. he wanted nothing to do with her.
in one of the filler mini arcs ive mentioned before (i think. the one that focuses on hanabi and hinata) there's a scene that rang very true to me (and im gonna recount this without rewatching it atm so sorry if i get details wrong,): neji was being made to train with hinata, asked to be allowed to leave because he felt his time was being wasted and correctly noted that it doesn't have to be him here, was told no by hiashi and then he started getting vicious and violent. towards hinata, of course, not hiashi. he then got horribly punished for it LOL i think that's the general dynamic they were living in, neji reaches a limit of disrespect that he can take and explodes on the nearest most acceptable target (we loove a boy with no emotional regulation <3), goes too far and suffers the consequence of it while nothing else changes. to him interacting with hinata at all is just asking for pain, either emotional or straight up physical
But, for hinata, she saw herself and neji as similar (the black sheep of the family i suppose), and would have liked to bond over that fact; theyve known each other since they were very little and she outright refers to him as a brother. it's clear to me she's always cared a lot about neji and imo feels responsible for what happened to his father (something that hiashi doesn't help with. Dad of the year), so she saw their match in the exams as a chance to close the distance between them and get neji to see her as a person, an equal instead of a symbol to lash out on.
but, you know, she was 12 LMAO so she ended up pressing all of his buttons instead and it led to his famous outburst, which led to the famous moment of Every Single Jonin (other than asuma.) coming to stop him and further cementing his belief that her life is seen as special. i think (and this is a mix of Shit I Made up, and Me trying to make sense of the manga's insane mishandling of their plotline) that despite her trying her hardest to reach neji she didn't really grasp the horror of his situation. that's the tragedy of neji's life really LMAO, no one really tries to grapple with the severity of what having that curse mark does to a person. she thought of his fatalism as more of a psychological, metaphorical way of dealing with hurt and not like... "my life literally does not belong to me no matter how much i try to fight it"
this is loooooong take this readmore.
i think hiashi-hizashi were hoping that the cousins could have had a better relationship than they did... letting them hang out often and stuff, introducing them early, hizashi not discouraging neji from being friendly with her, to me it all reads as very "ok well this didn't work for Us, but what if it works out for them... even though literally nothing has changed". they were proper family once and hizashi wanted to die for his brother, not his leader, so that just makes sense to me.
i do nautttt like the naruto vs neji fight so to keep the post positive i will gloss over it <3 but hinata and neji's relationship post-chunin exams to me is peak like. God i wish this was done better because it could have been soooo good
neji realizes that his anger is consuming him and adjusts his behavior accordingly, getting a lot of his kindness back, and he becomes intent on fixing his relationship with hinata... i don't hate that premise at all, it's just the way it's executed that bothers me!
the impression i got (and i could be mistaken im in the process of rewatching the anime + rereading the manga) is that their relationship getting better is done exclusively through like. neji repenting for being mean to her. which, don't get me wrong, he SHOULD apologize (AND THAT WOULDVE BEEN A COOL THING TO SEE ONSCREEN, BTW) but you CANNOT divorce his behavior from the hyuga system in general. from the way they act after the exams you would think their issues were born solely from neji being a bully for no reason, and not, like... him lashing out on her because his uncle is literally the devil.
i don't think hinata has the power to change a lot in her clan on short notice (she did get disowned. did that un-happen offscreen? we will never know. Hiashi gets to be a grandfather to her children btw.) but i certainly would have liked to see her standing up for branch members and in the stuff i draw that's the story i have in mind LMAO. like, her gaining a deeper understanding of neji's situation and trying to work against her father trying to make her cousin's life better? i think that would have been really sweet and even show her gaining more confidence in herself and her beliefs. you can still have neji fussing over her and being protective because he feels bad for how they used to be, i actually really like that because neji IS a very sweet person, i just reject the idea that it's his sole Moral Obligation to put everything aside and make things better by the power of I Will Die For You Now, But This Time, For The Right Reasons
as for hanabi i wish she had more screentime soooo bad because i'm obsessed with how she gives off Haunted Child vibes lmfao. talking abt her requires me to expose myself a little bit and have to admit hiashi is kind of a blorbo to me because of how much he sucks ass, but like. Essentially his insane resentment of hinata was born when hizashi died, it doesnt matter it wasn't really her fault, he needed someone to blame and he would never blame himself, at least not outwardly lol. hiashi did genuinely love his brother, it just didn't stop him from being a monster to him, and he is certainly not gonna grapple with that now that he's dead!
(and, you know, the whole "sorry we sent a guy to kidnap an heir. you do need to die for killing him though" thing is really dumb but if we stop at every single stupid thing in naruto we will be here all day.)
with all that being said i think hiashi tries his best to make hanabi everything hinata isn't, and he has very little interest in having her and hinata have any bond at all. he just left neji and hinata to fester in that god-awful dynamic with no supervising, and took hanabi as the best direction for the clan to head towards. but, you know, father of the year is very demanding and doesn't seem to be very fatherly to her at all from the little we see of them. she's just like. a good soldier, and that's what he needs.
i think hanabi growing to resent her sister for the situation she's been put into (if hinata weren't 'weak' she wouldn't have so much responsibility) is very interesting! by the time we meet her i think she's learned that the best thing to do wrt her sister is to just ignore that she exists. as for neji he barely registers as a presence to her; neji has no reason to interact with her and hiashi has no reason to incentivize it. it's very fun to me!
in general i really like all of their dynamics can be used to explore how hurt and trauma drive people apart, i could talk about them for hourssss LMAO i love the suna family for the same reason!
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The Admin in TF2 comic 7 was so GLaDOS and Caroline coded. Her character has made me tear up multiple times, there's such complexity to her I'm so upset.
Anyways. I think it's Caro/GLaDOS coded because of keeping up this cold facade and then being the pettiest woman on the planet. GLaDOS' cut voice lines are so petty, I posted some earlier but like the way she tries to guilt Chell and makes stuff up... oh girl. Admin put up a big fake idea of what she was doing and then turns out she's trying to keep one single guy alive for an event she cannot even remember.
Pre-australium Helen was more Caroline in my mind, mainly in her appearance, but also the section about Zepheniah dying? The frame of Admins absolute apathy for life? She lost all her purpose now that he's dead and she feels like she didn't win.
^ Her appearance in these, like okay you look just like Caroline (similarish hair & nose shape).
^ The feelings that come from the panels of Admin are so strong, you can so easily read what state she's in. Caroline coded in my heart. The way the mansion is left uncared for while Admin sits depressed in bed was just. So emotional for me?
I don't think Caroline felt that way about Cave, the hatred Admin did for Zepheniah, as it was very implied they were besties at least for awhile. Though I feel she'd hold the grief that Admin did for Zepheniah in a different way. Admin is grieving because her purpose in life was lost, she has no one to focus revenge on anymore. Caroline lost her friend and was forced into a fate she didn't want, mistreated by employees, left angry and isolated forever. She lived to be the highest assistant of Aperture, working as one for 40 years prior. So in a sense, her purpose was lost as well. We don't hear anything from the Caroline CEO era so I'd like to think she took a step back as she awaited her fate. She probably was barely keeping things together from the stress (though not to undermine how good at her job she was, I just think she'd be depressed for at least some of her CEO time). That's more headcanon territory though, and I wish there was a way we could get more confirmation on how she acted then.
Both were fated to live basically forever and forgot the reasons why they feel the way they do.. GLaDOS didn't remember Caroline/her being a human while Admin forgot how her parents died/that Zepheniah likely killed them.
They are wasting their time forever. GLaDOS is testing and evolving science for NO ONE but herself. Forever. She's alone. Implied to feel lonely in the Lego Dimensions song + her VA thinks so too. Eventually she'd run out of materials and there's no people left to either help her or torture her. Admin admits herself that her plan was a waste of time and for a moment shes sad. Both characters are so focused on their goals, they were mistreated and became separated from humanity, there was no reason for either to be rational towards who they were hating. Such a big effort for something miniscule in the end!
While Admin initially didn't want to live, she got stuck in a cycle of trying to spite this guy forever and it was for nothing, she ruined people's lives in the process (Mainly Pauling, ohhh she was so betrayed, someone SAVE HER).
And both are voiced by Ellen McLain, nicest woman on the planet. Wow.
Really gives same character different universe, doesn't it.
#Do yall like my character analysis posts? I love writing and will definitely do more if these do well!#This post is really messy but I can expand on my thoughts differently later#Admin tf2#Tf2#Portal#Portal 2#Ellen mclain#Tf2 comic 7#Tf2 comic 7 spoilers#Valve games#Tf2 comics#Aperture Science#Caroline portal 2#Portal Caroline#Helen tf2#Elizabeth tf2#Glados#tf2 administrator
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i just came by this post and i had to address it.
wow. that is a controversial take. and an objectively incorrect one.
i'll just preface this by saying that i'm not satisfied with arcane's finale either. i think it completely went against its own message in the end, and a lot of the arcs were resolved poorly.
but this take is still wild. let me break it down one by one:
there's nothing wrong with the "power of love/friendship" trope. the only problem is that
1. spop entirely focuses on romantic relationships. fuck familial relationships, fuck platonic relationships, the only thing that matters is romance.
2. most of the ships are either forced with no prior buildup or straight-up toxic.
horde prime as a whole was a poorly written villain who was only introduced because catra and hordak were "redeemed". that alone makes the entire finale weak, because horde prime is not as much of a threat as catra was. he's just a placeholder.
i'm convinced that the only reason they introduced the failsafe and the heart of etheria was because horde prime wasn't intimidating enough to keep the audience captivated.
mara convincing adora to stay alive would have been a touching scene if the message wasn't that adora should date her abusive sister.
i'm sorry, did we watch the same show? because how the fuck can you say that catra is no longer abusive after her redemption after watching all of this???
oh yeah, catra pushing adora to the ground and guilt tripping her for trying to save the world wasn't abusive at all. catra constantly screaming at adora for the smallest reasons isn't abusive, that's just catra's little quirk! /s
you would have to be blind to watch all of these instances of catra continuing to abuse adora, and still think that she has changed.
caitlyn hit vi with her rifle, yes, and I'm not going to defend that at all. i agree that it was completely unwarranted, regardless of her reasons. but caitlyn's actions are nothing compared to catra's.
you can love or hate caitvi, i literally don't care. but you can't hate caitvi for being "toxic" while acting like c//a is a healthy ship.
“catra ceased all intentions of being enemies with adora & glimmer and learned to love & fight for etheria”
oh yeah, that's why she kept taking jabs at the princesses and bragging about how many times she has defeated them. that's why she never apologized to glimmer for killing her mother, or to mermista for colonizing her kingdom. oh wait, mermista was very conveniently chipped so that poor catra wouldn't have to deal with all that, right?
let's be real, the only reason catra sided with adora was because she literally had no other choice. she was backed into a corner. she wanted to work for horde prime but since he was willing to throw her out, and the original horde was in shambles, catra's only choice was to join the rebellion. she does not care for the princesses or for etheria.
“catradora never had a power imbalance and fought pretty equally”
this just made me laugh. did this person even watch the show? catra had power over adora 90% of the time.
there were very few instances where adora had power over catra and usually in those instances, catra would attack adora in some way to bring her beneath her.
again, i have my complaints with caitvi. i don't think it's a perfect ship and i'm not going to defend the shitty parts of it. but catra has literally used every single type of abuse on adora - physical violence, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, guilt tripping, kidnapping, attempted murder, victim blaming - and y'all still think that caitvi is worse? be fucking for real.
five seasons isn't enough screentime to wrap up arcs in a satisfactory manner? come on. spop had plenty of time, the writers just didn't plan everything out. they absolutely did not make the most of what they had to work with.
they had 5 whole seasons and still decided to shove catra's redemption arc into the final one, completely rushing it and for what? so that adora had someone to smooch?
the conflict between glimmer and adora could also have been handled better. it was a complex situation, especially considering how catra and shadow weaver was the ones driving them apart. it shouldn't have been solved with a simple “i'm sorry, everything was my fault” and “lol it's okay we good now” like???
again, i'm dissatisfied with arcane's ending. i think a lot of the character arcs were sabotaged and there was too much going on in general.
but i don't think anything can compare to the character assassination in s5 of spop. everyone magically forgot about catra's crimes and forgave her; capable characters were suddenly incompetent and foolish so that catra could shine; and adora, who had completely moved on from catra, was now once again catra's doormat.
you can criticize arcane if you want but this post was just stupid. spop's final season was just as bad, if not worse than arcane. at least arcane managed to write a believable redemption arc for jinx within those 9 episodes - something spop couldn't do with five whole seasons.
#spop critical#spop salt#spop#spop discourse#spop criticism#she ra#anti spop#anti catradora#anti c//a#anti catra#arcane#arcane spoilers#arcane season 2#arcane s2#anti stans
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🩷 Curly helps reader regress 🌻
Request by Anon: “How about Curly with a reader who wants to regress but struggles to due to responsibilities and stress, And Curly just, gently coaxing reader into relaxing and taking a break from all of that”
Features: CG! Curly x Little! Reader
Tags: Fluff, Female Reader, Age Regression, omg this is way longer than expected, my Curly bias is showing
Notes: I used Daddy, Papa/Papa Bear, Teddy/Teddy Bear as cg names for Curly (cause he's my f/o and that's what I would call him alskxndkslsnxhkz thanks for requesting this, it’s very self indulgent..!!!)
rbs appreciated !! ☆ ~
Curly begins to notice that you aren't regressing as often as you used to. You've been extra busy with work or school, just general life stuff, and it seems to be taking up a lot of your mental energy
Normally he could get at least a giggle out of you each night, getting you to either regress or just relax into a calmer state by tickling you or playing with your plushies or offering to read you a bedtime story- just anything that he knows you'll enjoy
But lately when you go to bed, you don't seem to smile as much. It's like your responsibilities are weighing you down, sucking all the joy from you :(
Teddy Curly cannot have his little princess be so gloomy..! It kills him to see you so clearly stressed, but he's not really sure what to do at first..
Until one day, you come home from work/school, and Curly insists you let him take care of you.
“I know you haven't been feeling well, Princess, so I was hoping maybe today could be a.. little day? I've seen how stressed you are and, I just really want to help you feel better.”
“I don't know, Curly, I haven't really been in the best mood lately...”
“That's what I'm talking about, just... let me help you, okay? And, if I'm being honest, I really miss my little girl, too.” He says the last part sheepishly, looking down at his shoes as he says it.
You think about it for a minute before reluctantly agreeing. He sighs a breath of relief before his lips crack into a shy smile.
“See, there's my good girl..” He wraps you in a hug, running his fingers thru your hair. “Now tell Daddy what's wrong. Please, bunny?”
You're already starting to melt a bit, feeling his strong arms around you, and hearing his handsome voice saying your special title for him.
You tell him what's been happening at work/school that has you so upset, he's resting his chin on your head as he adds “uh-huh, I hear you” or “I know, baby, that sounds hard” you can feel tears prick your eyes a bit as you near the end of your story, your speech sounding more and more like your little voice.
He cups your face in his hands, rubbing his calloused thumb against your cheek. “Thank you for telling me that, baby. It's all going to be okay now, though. Papa's got you.” He wipes away a stray tear from your cheek.
“C-can we start that little day now?” You say, the weight of grown up life was beginning to be too much.
He chuckles a bit, thinking of how cute you are looking up at him with big wet eyes. “Of course, baby.” And without warning he picks you up so that you're resting on his hip, arms around his neck. You start to feel even more little- He’s so strong that he can easily pick you up like you're a baby /)(\
“How does a nice warm bath sound, darling?” He says in his soft voice. He presses a kiss to your cheek, really rubbing it in so that his facial hair scratches against you. You giggle from his stubble tickling your cheek- he always knows how to make you smile ♡
You nod your head, and he goes to draw you a bath ~
I think I will do a part two for this since it's kinda long!! Part 2 will have Curly giving regressed reader a bubble bath and putting them to bed 😊 Thank you for reading! and leaving requests :) sorry if I don't get to all of them, I try to only write for fun and not force anything, but I love hearing other's ideas!
Please leave a comment letting me know what you think! I love talking to other people abt fanfic aaaa ♡ Thanks again!
🩷🌻🧸
Guys why is this so long. Why am I so cuckoo for coco puffs over a character from a horror game. This is deranged
#fandom#f/o#mine#curly x reader#mouthwashing agere#request#mouthwashing imagines#mouthwashing x reader#mouthwashing#agere imagines#f/o agere#agere f/o#agere imagine#sfw agere#age regressor#f/o imagines#its 2am and im losing my marbles#this is my Husband
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Passenger Princess
Genre: fluff
Pairing: idol Choi Jongho x fem named reader
Summary: Since your boyfriend has his own car, why don't he help you drive?
Word count: 1.5k
Jongho sat sprawled out on the couch, flipping through channels on the TV, while Minseo paced back and forth in front of him. Her arms were crossed, eyes narrowing as they landed on him.
She had been trying to convince him to give her driving lessons weeks ago, and now, she was determined to break him down.
"Jongho." She said, her tone edging on a whine. "You’ve had that car for months now, and you still haven’t let me drive or teach me more. What’s the deal?"
He glanced up at her, already knowing where this conversation was headed. “I told you. It’s brand new, and I want to keep it that way.”
"It’s a car, not a museum exhibit! Cars are meant to be driven, you know?" Minseo threw her hands up hands up in frustration.
Jongho sighed, shifting uncomfortably. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her—he trusted her with pretty much everything.
But his car? The one he had saved for and just recently purchased? The thought of something happening to it, even a tiny scratch, made his stomach churn.
“I trust you, but anything could happen." He said cautiously, trying not to provoke her further.
Minseo rolled her eyes, clearly unimpressed with his reasoning. "You’re being dramatic. You've seen how much effort I have made. What’s the worst that could happen? You don’t trust me to drive?"
“No, it’s not that—”
“Then what?” She interrupted, her hands on her hips. "Come on baby, how am I supposed to get better at driving if you never let me practice? You can sit right next to me and guide me when you think I'm doing something wrong but I’ll be careful, I promise."
She had a point, and Jongho knew it. For weeks, she’d been bringing it up, and for weeks, he had been putting her off, giving her the same excuses.
Minseo wasn’t the type to give up easily, and the way she was standing now, staring him down with a determined gleam in her eyes, made it clear that he was running out of time. He either had to give in or face her endless pestering.
"Although, if you don't want, I can't force you." She sighed, looking at him. "I can ask Wooyoung, Yunho, or Hongjoong if they can teach me in their cars. If you don't feel comfortable, you don't have to worry."
Jongho rubbed the back of his neck, knowing he was about to lose this battle. "Alright, that's enough." He sighed, defeated. "Fine. I’ll teach you how to drive thats what boyfriends are.”
Minseo’s face lit up instantly, her lips curving into a wide smile. “Really?”
“Yes." He muttered, standing up from the couch. “But if anything happens to my car, I’m holding you responsible.” Minseo laughed, already grabbing her jacket.
“Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen. I’ll be extra careful, you’ll see.”
Jongho grabbed the keys with a sigh, his heart already racing at the thought of Minseo behind the wheel of his beloved car. But the excitement in her eyes softened his worries just a bit. After all, he had promised to her girlfriend.
☆☆☆☆☆
The sun was low in the sky when they arrived at an empty parking lot, casting a warm, golden glow over the space. Minseo stood by the driver’s side door, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet as Jongho handed her the keys. His fingers lingered for a moment, and he cleared his throat, letting go reluctantly.
“Alright, first things first,” Jongho said, sliding into the passenger seat and buckling his seatbelt with a firm click. “Adjust your seat and mirrors. Make sure you’re comfortable and can reach everything easily.”
Minseo’s hands shook slightly as she adjusted the seat and mirrors. She glanced over at him, searching for reassurance.
“You’re doing great." He said softly. “Take your time.”
With a deep breath, Minseo placed her hands on the steering wheel, positioning them just as she had read in the manual.
“Like this?” She asked, glancing at Jongho.
“Exactly.” He said, his voice even and calm. “Now, remember to press the brake before you shift into drive.”
She did as instructed, and the car purred softly as it shifted into gear. The silence hung between them, and for a moment, Jongho’s grip on the edge of his seat tightened. Minseo noticed and smirked.
“Relax.” Minseo said with a grin as she chuckled at her boyfriend's face. “You look like you’re about to have a heart attack.”
“Maybe a little.” He admitted with a chuckle. “But I trust you. Just take it slow.”
Minseo nodded, focusing as she gently pressed the gas pedal. The car rolled forward smoothly, and her eyes lit up with excitement. They made slow laps around the lot, with Jongho giving pointers here and there—“Check your mirrors,” “Ease into the turn,” “Brake a little earlier next time.”
At one point, she miscalculated a turn and the car jolted slightly.
“Oh!” She gasped, her face immediately going red as she lifted her foot off the pedal. “I’m so sorry.” Jongho reached out, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, it’s okay. Mistakes happen. Just breathe and try again.” His tone was steady, warmth evident in his eyes.
Minseo took a shaky breath, her nerves calming as she felt the gentle weight of his hand.
“Thanks.” She whispered, regaining her composure. She took the turn again, this time more smoothly, and Jongho’s smile widened.
“See? You’re already improving.” He said, pride lacing his voice.
They spent the next hour driving around the lot, practicing turns, braking, and even a few parking attempts. Each small mistake was met with encouragement, and Jongho never once raised his voice or showed impatience.
If anything, he seemed to grow more relaxed as Minseo gained confidence, and by the end, he was sitting back with a content smile.
“Alright." He finally said as she parked the car and turned off the engine. “I think you’re ready for more than just parking lots.”
☆☆☆☆☆
The lessons continued over the next few weeks, moving to quiet neighborhood streets and eventually to more bustling areas. Jongho guided her through parallel parking, three-point turns, and navigating intersections.
There were moments of doubt, like when she stopped too suddenly at a light or hesitated before making a turn, but Jongho was always there to reassure her.
“Remember." He said say low and soothing. “You’ve got this. Trust yourself as much as I trust you.”
And slowly, Minseo did.
One afternoon, Jongho turned to her with a proud smile after she executed a flawless turn.
“You’re ready for your driving test.” Minseo’s eyes widened, her mouth falling open.
“Do you really think so?”
“I know so.” He replied, squeezing her hand.
The day of the test came, and Minseo was fidgeting as they waited for her turn. Jongho sat beside her, calm and confident, and gave her a playful nudge.
“Nervous?”
“A little." She admitted, eyes darting to the door where the instructor would appear any minute.
“Don’t be." He said, his voice a quiet anchor. “You’re ready.”
The test itself felt like an eternity, but when she returned with the instructor and a beaming smile, Jongho’s heart swelled with pride.
“I passed!” She shouted, running to him.
He laughed, catching her as she threw her arms around him.
“I knew you would,” he whispered, pressing a quick kiss to her lips.
☆☆☆☆☆
Months later, Jongho tossed his car keys to Minseo without a second thought. They were heading out to the KQ building, and he didn’t even blink as she caught the keys and slid into the driver’s seat.
“You’re letting me drive again?” Minseo asked with a smirk, starting the car. “You’ve really changed, Jongho.” He shrugged, getting comfortable in the passenger seat.
“You’re licensed now, aren’t you? Besides, you’re a better driver than I am.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.” Minseo grinned as she pulled out of the driveway. “I’m putting that on record.”
Whenever the other members of Ateez found out, they couldn’t help but tease Jongho.
“Minseo drives your car now?” Wooyoung had said one day, eyes wide with mock disbelief. “You don’t even let me drive it!”
“Looks like someone’s the passenger princess now.” San added, winking.
Minseo never let him live that down. Each time they set off, she’d grin and say. “Ready, passenger princess?”
Jongho would roll his eyes, but the playful banter made him smile. Sitting in the passenger seat and watching her laugh, with the wind blowing through her hair and that familiar look of confidence on her face, Jongho felt something deeper than pride.
It was happiness, pure and simple, seeing Minseo shine, feeling her joy, made every teasing comment worth it.
As they drove through the city that evening, with the glow of streetlights casting a warm hue over everything and quite music in the background.
“I like having you as my passenger.” She reached over and squeezed his hand as Jongho chuckled.
“As long as you’re happy, I’m happy.” He take his hand and kissed the back of it and laced with his.
And he really mean it.
#ateez#ateez imagines#choi jongho#jongho#ateez jongho#ateez x reader#ateez fanfic#jongho imagines#choi jongho x reader#choi jongho fanfic#choi jongho fluff
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i don’t think paige is lacking confidence. what we’re lacking is stability in our lineups.
i get this is Genos first time in a while to be able to play around with lineups because they actually have players available. but i don’t understand why he’s forcing playing into positions they don’t play.
like why is ice playing the 5 while our true center sits on the bench? same thing with kaitlyn, why’d he bring in another PG to force her to play like nika. if he wants someone to play like nika. put in morgan, it’s clear she can be aggressive — considering she’s fouled out twice already — goes after rebounds, and can knock down shots
he’s doing questionable things with the lineups and i just hope he solidifies it before the important matchups come.
but i personally think paige is performing well, but when she’s preforming well, the team follows, and if she’s not. the team isn’t either — or they’re struggling — and that’s not on paige. it’s on geno for not having a stable enough lineup to support moments like that.
yeah just wishy washy energy from geno. i had a feeling the lineups and decisions regarding line ups would be a little off this season bc we have the rare occasion of a bench to play. still, geno's been coaching long enough to know how to build a smooth line up and keep them in long enough to garner consistency.
regarding the switching positions thing i don't understand it either. clearly. it's all i talk about on my account 😭. i agree switching KC from doing what she did best at princeton to try to make her into a lock down defender like nika was definitely a choice. i mean cmon she's known for her shooting. u can say u miss nika it's okay gramps we won't jump u. he acts like he has no aggressive defenders on his team? kk, aubrey (when shes healthy), and morgan are right there. don't make KC do it...yeah ice playing the 5 fries me everytime. if only he had a 6'5 powerhouse center sitting on his bench. ice don't need to be playing at all i fear. geno is really hardheaded but i hope there some form of accountability and an effort to manage his roster more effectively.
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will you do platonic yandere alastor x teen reader for the “refusal/acceptance” prompt? like the teen reader was kidnapped by him and refused to accept him as their father but as time goes on he manipulates them into accepting him.
"refusal / acceptance" plantonic!yandere!alastor & teen!gn!reader ! !
[2024 christmas/holiday event, entry 3]
event post ! | event masterlist !
description; When you fell to hell, you hadn't expected yourself to make it this long. 5 years wasn't very much at all to most sinners, but to the younger ones-- it was a massive milestone, you included. However, your relatively peaceful (as peaceful as it could get in hell...) existence was abruptly interrupted by your own curiosity getting the better of you.
Really, you shouldn't have poked around the house you'd basically been squatting in for the past 5 years like you were, all it could lead to was trouble, and you should've known that.
additional notes; the first part is very focused on the reader themself/the mysteriously unoccupied and very nice house they found after first falling, but i promise you alastor does show up and is very much his usual overprotective self :D
warnings; Kidnapping, vague possessiveness, overprotectiveness, imprisonment, entrapment, Reader is convinced Alastor wants to kill them, brief/vague mentions of violence, murder, torture, etc etc, Reader has trust issues (for a good reason, it is alastor we're talking about), manipulation, and if i missed any others, please let me know!!!
w/c; 5.5k (oh lord)
You aren't sure how long you've been here, isolated with The Radio Demon in some messed-up pocket dimension(?).
In all honesty, you don't know what you did to deserve this. To catch his interest like this, and by god you don't know how the hell you've been keeping it.
Both in life and death, you knew many people like The Radio Demon-- you knew how they operated, the ins and outs of what their main goal was. For some, they prioritized wealth, and others prioritized power above all else--
You've come to the very clear conclusion that the Radio Demon prioritizes his own amusement above anything else in the world. Yes, he most definitely has a thing for power (as all Overlords do, it's practically a requirement for the position), but that's certainly not his intentions with you.
Being a younger sinner wasn't necessarily rare-- it was hard to come by them, yes, but that's because they're usually snuffed out before they could even get a look around the place.
It's a wonder you've made it this far, five years wasn't much in the eyes of Sinners like Alastor, but to you-- it was far beyond how long you'd expected yourself to make it.
The Exterminators that come down each year-- they target the younger ones, the vulnerable. On more than one occasion, people have claimed they heard Adam, the leader of the Exterminators, proclaim "Oh, I just love killing the small ones!"
Not very holy in your humble opinion, but that opinion was not asked of you; so you'd never shared it to anyone but yourself.
Dying at the hands of other sinners wasn't uncommon for the younger ones either, obviously-- which is why you were (understandably) a bit of a hermit.
This is, ironically, how you encountered and was promptly swiped up by no other but the Radio Demon himself. You never interacted with others much, but you'd still heard tales of him-- little snippets of conversations as you did your monthly grocery shopping. One of the few times you'd ever leave your little shoddy cottage on the outskirts of Pentagram City.
You were always a very curious person-- cautious, so you'd keep your curiousity to yourself. Let yourself silently mull over information, but forcing yourself from never seeking any more than you could passively pick up.
But this one time-- God, you really don't know why you did it. Perhaps you were getting bored with it all, with the monotony of your afterlife; always on edge, even in your own 'home'.
This cottage you lived in was abandoned once you found it, just a few days after you'd fallen into hell. It was close to the field you'd woken up in after dying, and you'd curled up on the cold, scratched up wooden floor and slept for the first time in Hell.
Ever since, you'd claimed the place as your own. The first few months-- scratch that, the first few years, you were always on edge, expecting its true owner to come crawling back-- and slaughter you, who by all means was a squatter, simple as that.
You didn't mess with the items much, and you stuck only to where you needed. The bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room-- where you'd set up shop, claiming it as your bedroom.
Only recently had you begun exploring the other rooms. The kitchen was simple, having an icebox and a gas stove; besides the archway was an apron hanging on a hook that read "Don't kiss the cook". You'd snickered when you first noticed it.
You never used it, you only used what you had to-- never rearranging, never touching what wasn't absolutely necessary to your survival. Forever in fear of if-- or when, the original owner returned.
A few months ago, after residing in this cottage for so long, you came to the conclusion that owner probably was never coming back. They'd most like died in an extermination-- when you'd first discovered the house, it already had a light covering of dust over all the objects.
And yet, nothing looked out of place. Nothing stolen, nothing broken. That's what put you on edge, making you certain for so long that the owner would come back and rip you to shreds.
You started small, looking and eventually locating an unassuming hall closet in search of cleaning supplies. You pulled a duster out, a wooden handle with a metal bit attaching the real feathers on the end-- it was ornate, in your eyes, because you were so used to having a duster made of synthetic fibers. It looked quite old, but that fit with the rest of the house.
You pulled it out and began dusting-- once you were done, you were surprised by how much nicer the place looked by then. You turned the feather duster back to its home in the closet, still careful about disturbing anything else.
A few days later, you took a mop and cleaned the floor of the living room and kitchen.
The next day, you cleaned and reorganized the bathroom, but didn't dare throw away anything.
Then, a week later, you finally removed those mounted heads of various cervines, stashing them in a corner of the living room. Out of sight and out of mind, no longer looming over you as you slept on the cushy sofa every night.
Your boldest move by that point-- but after that, it was like a gateway had been opened. No longer so nervous, you moved furniture around; inspected all the cabinets of the bathroom and kitchen, looked through the large oak armoire standing by the entrance.
In it, you found a few coats, an umbrella, a couple hats that hadn't been in style for decades, maybe even nearing a century-- and a few bits and bobs a like. One thing in particular caught your eye-- a coat made in beautiful earth-toned colors, with jewel-red accents as well.
You took it out, and began wearing it around your house.
In the following months, you'd branched out into a few other rooms-- no longer sleeping in the living room, you settled down in what you assume to have been a guest bedroom. It was plain, with a queen-sized mattress held up by a metal wire frame.
It was done up in blues, and it looked like it'd been rampaged through when you first entered. Slate blue covers ripped off the bed, drawers pulled from the dresser-- spilling its contents all over the floor; and a 1950s CRT TV on the floor, a hole running right through the screen and out the casing. The glass of it was still strewn about the floor.
You cleaned it up with careful hands, and took the broken TV to sit beside the mounted stag heads in the corner of the living room.
A few more changes-- you found a storage room, stacked high with neatly folded clothes; hunting gear, and various different items from a bygone eras, along with dozens and dozens of boxes-- most, if not all, were labelled in some shape or form. You placed the TV and mounts in there, not having the heart throw anything away. You'd even kept the glasses pieces, placing them in a Tupperware you'd discovered in a particularly dusty cabinet in the kitchen.
One night, you'd grown bored again-- a terrible thing to be in a place like this, something you both did and did not consider your own. But, you'd ventured into the storage room regardless; careful of the items piled high, you pulled out a random cardboard box from the top of one of the less precarious towers of stuff.
In neat, swooping cursive; it was cryptically labelled "Cherished Belongings". Against your better judgement, you pried the top open--
Inside were a few radios, far more modern than the rest of the cottage appeared to be. Deep gouges were in the side of some, but the marks didn't dig deep enough to make it unable to be used.
A stack of letters you didn't dare touch, feeling like it'd be going too far to look into the private affairs of your home's previous owner-- a couple small boxes, that once you opened revealed little knick knacks that reminded you of your great-grandmother.
She had a farmhouse out in the country, and every time you'd visit her when you were young and she was still alive, you were always so enamored by the little trinkets placed all over a wooden shelf hanging above a corner-countertop.
They were delicate, bisque porcelain and well maintained. Your grandmother had a thing for rabbits and birds, many of those trinkets being one of those two things;
In the box, wrapped oh-so delicately in bubble wrap, were three tiny bisque porcelain deers. By the looks of their make and paint job, you guessed they were from the 50s or 60s.
You set them aside, along with the other boxes like them (though, you didn't open those yet. you wanted to explore the big box in its entirety before delving into the details), and explored the box a little more.
You found a beautiful Cathedral radio, from the brand Philco-- it was at the bottom, obviously an antique model. It appeared to be a custom, made of red wood and brass accents; it was polished to perfection, obviously a treasured item to the person who lived here before you did.
You pulled it out, and then closed up the box. You didn't place it back on its tower, as there was still more you could dig through in the large box; you took your findings to the living room, and set them carefully down on the accent table near the sofa.
You opened the rest of the little boxes, and placed the little figurines all around the kitchen, a few in the living room as well. Once you were satisfied, you sat down on the couch and began fiddling with the radio.
When it buzzed to life, it was already on a station. It was playing... swing music, you think it is-- you weren't too sure, since you weren't incredibly familiar with that era of music.
You tried turning the knob, but it always managed to come back to the same exact station. A second or two of static as you moved the knob, a spark of hope-- before it was quickly dashed as you were redirected right back to the same station.
Still, some music was better than none-- you'd found yourself going stir crazy without much background noise, save for the woods outside and the occasional animal prancing around; so this find was actually quite nice, you'd thought.
Until the song ended abruptly-- you thought it might've been a technical error of some kind, interference on your end. Until, right as the song stopped midway through a word, a talking segment began.
The show host was directly addressing you. And in that moment, you knew that you were done for-- one you heard that voice, everything started to make so, so much sense.
"My oh my, it seems like we have a special listener!" He'd started out, and it felt like there was somebody watching you. Hair on the back of your neck stood immediately, skin crawling as you nearly dropped the radio in fear-- your hands having grown clammy and trembling.
Laughter, cruel and mocking-- as you fumbled with the radio "Ah ah ah, don't drop it! That is quite priceless to me, you little thief."
Your heart dropped to your stomach, and in a moment of haste, you haphazardly tossed the radio onto the sofa-- not doing it too hard, making sure not to damage it in the meanwhile-- and quickly stood, ready to get the hell out of dodge.
Something grabbed at your ankle, and you shrieked-- a shadowed, clawed hand was coming out from the ground. Its nails dug through the cheap material of your pajama pants, and you toppled over; wincing as you landed directly on your tailbone.
That was, by far, the least of your worries at that point of time.
"I apologize, loyal listeners! We'll have to go to intermission, but I assure I will be back-- a new guest in tow, if all goes accordingly!" More laughter-- cackling, before it cut to a soft, almost lulling sort of music.
It did little to calm your nerves-- in fact, it worsened them tenfold, knowing what was to come next. Who was to come next,
A wordless cry escaped you, frantically clawing at the hand around your ankle-- but it was almost... slippery, non-corporeal as well. You couldn't seem to get a grip on it, as it just--
Your fingers just moved right through it, and it tightened its death grip in warning. But you were too afraid by now, the realization that for the past five year you'd been staying in the Radio Demon's house came crashing down on you in an instant.
That's why it hadn't been ransacked already, why it had such nice things, why there was barely anything that exceeded the 1930s technology or aesthetically wise-- the mounted deer heads, the-- the everything!
You'd fallen after he took his 'sabbatical', but you still heard so much of him. In the past few years, the fear of him had died down-- but still,
You knew exactly what he meant by a 'new guest'.
In that moment, you had the stupid thought of I'm too young to die like this, which was ridiculous, because you were already dead. You were in Hell,
and yet, the truth lied in the 'like this' part of that statement. You didn't want to be tortured and eaten on air, you didn't want all of Hell (or at least a very, very large portion of it) tuning in to hear the first 'guest' The Radio Demon got on his show post-disappearance.
Stomach flipping, vision blurring from your tears, your ears rang as your heart worked overtime-- You're sure your face was red and blotchy, tears already making tracks down your cheeks.
Half-hysterical, you were saying "Please, please, please--" in such a desperate tone, directed to no one but yourself. begging yourself to just grab the hand and rip it off, to make it out of this in one piece--
You don't know why you fought so hard, and as you look back, you realize that might've been what made Alastor want to keep you (for the time being). Surely, he adored the fact that you-- teetering on the edge between child and adult, crying and begging-- fighting so hard for a life not worth living.
Really, you had nothing to fight for. No family down here, no friends or even acquaintances, nobody knew you; you were a hermit, one of the younger sinners that people assumed would be snuffed out quickly, and leave behind little to no impact.
Panic surged as you look to your right, a pool of shadows forming-- then, out came the tip of antlers. Then, fluffy ears-- a head, shoulders...
And soon enough, the shadows dissipated. Leaving behind what you assumed, what you were so sure would've been your killer.
He'd opened his mouth-- but as he looked at you, for a reason entirely unknown to you; he buffered. Looking down at you, sobbing and shaking-- lip wobbling, face red and soaked with tears.
You know you looked pathetic at that point.
Maybe that's why he did what he did, why his demeanor entirely changed as he crouched down. Antlers shrinking and the static surrounding him dying down (though never ceasing entirely) as he extended his arms your way. Like he was trying to beckon forward a scared child.
And maybe you did look like one-- but you hardly believe that he genuinely saw you as one.
You know men like Alastor, you know that they could never make room for anyone else in their hearts but themselves-- and a select few people who'd managed to worm their way into his close circle; one way or another.
You were not one of those people.
And yet, he did not harm you.
Even as an indeterminate amount of days, weeks-- maybe even months, passed; he still hasn't harmed you once. He clothes you, he gives you gifts upon gifts (nearly all of which go unopened, shoved in an ever growing pile in the very corner of your room)-- he set you up in a nice room, he feeds you; he claims that you can have all you ever wanted, as long as you ask.
You never did. It was a trap, and you knew it. He was-- was trying to lure you into trusting him. You don't know why he was doing this, maybe he got bored with every horrible act he did being a one-and-done thing.
He was fattening you up like a pig to the slaughter. Making your life all nice and cushy, only to pull the rug from under your feet and reveal what you knew all along.
No matter how many times he said something along the lines of "I won't hurt you, you're safe here, my fawn." or "I view you as my own, a child I never knew I wanted before you came along.", you knew how people like him went about life. People were stepping stones to their goals, his being entertainment; always getting the last laugh.
Once upon a time, you'd heard that his youngest 'guest' he had featured was an 11 year old-- early in his stay in Hell, right as he began to blossom into a fearful Overlord, that child had done something to upset him.
That was, allegedly, back in the mid '30s; and that after that, he never dipped lower than 19 year old. Now, you aren't entirely sure how true that could've been, either part of the claim--
But it was all you had.
You were curious, but not foolish enough to externalize that curiosity. Especially not to like Alastor.
He didn't keep you in the cottage you'd grown accustomed to-- he took you somewhere else. It looked like the cottage; all the way down to the knick-knacks you'd placed all around, right before you made the mistake of touching that radio,
It was always dark out, and when you look out the window-- it was not a forest, but a swamp-- bayou, what-have-you. It was a wetland, with fireflies buzzing around at all times,
There never was a moon, the only light outside came from what seeped out of the faux-cottage and the fireflies that were all over, but that hardly illuminated much.
You didn't leave your 'room'-- the room that looked like the one you'd claimed as your own in the real cottage. He tried coaxing you out of it a lot-- tried making you move rooms, saying he'd set up a room much more suited to your needs.
Every single time, you gave a quiet shake of your head-- that was the furthest those one-sided conversations ever got. Alastor didn't seem too pleased with it, but he laid off it. Didn't force it on you, and he'd then bring you food on a little bed-tray.
Today, you got a little too bold-- or perhaps you just wanted it over with, finally coming to terms with the only way out of here was... well, to force Alastor's hand and get him to snap-- then kill you.
It was obvious he wasn't going to let you go any other way.
You left the room for-- jesus, it must've been the first time you'd done so since the first couple days after you got stuck in this strange other-cottage. The living room didn't look very different.
Noticeably, the trinkets you'd placed before were right where you'd placed them. Not a centimeter out of place.
You tried to ignore it, and sat down on the sofa. You frowned at the Philco Cathedral radio beside you, sitting oh-so-innocently on the accent table near your head.
You glared at it, and while you knew that, realistically speaking, you were entirely to blame for getting in this situation-- not so much the radio, it was still a little cathartic to have something else to blame but yourself.
You turned around and laid on the couch, arms crossed as you pulled your legs to your chest-- back of your head resting against the arm of the couch, you closed your eyes and tried to sleep. Tried to pass time that way,
Predictably, your nerves refused to let that happen. But you retreated into your mind-- and soon enough, you heard Alastor shadow-warp in. You kept your eyes closed, tried to look as peaceful as possible. As vulnerable as you could, open and easy to atta--
A hand, a hand landed on your cheek. it was soft, caring, even. It confused you. Did he know you were awake? Was he trying to pull one over on you as well, because theres no way he'd do this if he didn't know you were witnessing it--
His hand pulled away, and you heard his footsteps pattering away; a door opening, fainter footsteps, the door closing-- and his footsteps getting closer.
Then, you felt something being thrown over you. It wasn't easy, resisting the urge to snap your eyes open-- obviously he knew you were awake, trying to trick you by being all sweet; reaching levels of deception you never thought possible before.
You realized he was trying to deceive you, because you were trying to deceive him-- and any such combination, made your head hurt if you thought about it too long.
Then, he leaned forward; you knew this because his hair brushed against your cheek in the process; both hands went to your face-- cupping your cheeks as he leaned forward and planted a little kiss on your forehead.
He began to tuck you in, and brushed some stray hair from your forehead. In a soft, almost reverent tone, he said "Sweet dreams, little fawn.", then ran his hand through your hair one last time--
Then he was gone. And nothing more came of it-- it was a little embarrassing to admit you'd really fallen asleep, so you reasoned with yourself that you hadn't. Just as you opened your eyes (which you'd totally just been resting, absolutely no sleep having found you. nope, nuh uh), you realized you hadn't been alone.
On the other side of the sofa, pressed as far against the other arm as possible-- almost like it was afraid of startling you if it got too close, was Alastor's weird Shadow creature. The same one that had restrained you that day you'd turned on the radio and spelled your own doom.
"...Hi?" You asked, trying to make yourself sound as groggy as possible (as if you needed to put any conscious effort into that in the first place); trying to sell the impression that'd you'd just been asleep, even though the Shadow probably knew otherwise (you hoped it believed that you hadn't actually fallen asleep, but you're pretty sure it did because nothing felt out of place-- obviously it hadn't attacked you while asleep).
It chirped, jolting up. It's face split in to a jagged grin(?), bright neon blue made up its mouth and eyes as it jumped from its seat and ran to the kitchen. You sat up, blanket falling into your lap; it was a nice, large quilt made up of reds and earth tones. Alastor's signature colors, and if you had to guess, he'd probably pulled it from the storage room.
You'd never been in his bedroom, but you doubt he'd sully a blanket he sleeps with by putting it on you. Even if the point of doing so was to manipulate you or whatever the hell he was playing at.
Around 30 seconds later, Alastor popped his head out of the archway leading into the kitchen. He found you rubbing your eyes with the back of your palm, just now awake enough to realize you smelled something cooking in the kitchen.
Oddly enough, he didn't speak until you pulled your hand from your eye and registered his presence. You looked up at him, eyes wide-- confused. His... his smile,
It looked so real, so genuine. It was soft, something you never thought a man like him could accomplish-- either in a genuine or otherwise manner. It reached his eyes, causing the skin around them to crinkle slightly.
And for a second, just one second, you believed that he actually did care for you.
When he spoke, he did it quietly. He sounded... different, and at first you couldn't quite place your finger on the difference.
"Mornin' fawn! Did you have a good rest?"
First off, he sounded way too... eh, cheery-- actually happy to see you, and like he actually wanted an answer to his question. And secondly, he sounded southern! With how much he talked about being from New Orleans, you should've made the connection that he had an actual accent underneath that transatlantic one; it was so jarring, hearing it gone completely like it was.
You sat in silence for a little bit, Alastor waiting for you to respond to pick up the conversation. Not rushing you, just standing there. God, if you didn't know any better, you'd say he was being patient with you!
In lieu of a verbal response, not trusting yourself to keep the bewilderment out of your voice; you gave a quick nod, and his smile grew by a fraction. He probably thinks he's caught you in his trap--
He gave you one last look, before turning around and heading back into the kitchen. You heard something boiling, and you didn't know what he was making-- it smelled good, though.
"That's good." He called from the kitchen, and it felt so terribly domestic that it had your stomach flipping. Him peacefully cooking, continuing to talk to you even as he did so.
You were beginning to feel nauseous, no longer liking this game he was playing (let's be honest, you never did-- but it was getting too real, blurring too many lines. you knew that, at some point, he would up the ante; but you really wish he hadn't),
(he's beginning to make you believe it, despite you knowing for a fact it was all a dirty trick to get your guard down.)
"I'm so happy you've started to warm up to me!" He started again, and you clenched your hands in the soft, probably expensive, quilt fabric. I'm not warming up to you, your mind supplied-- trying desperately to grasp at straws, and hide away from the fact that you were, you were starting to really believe his lies.
You suppose that it was inevitable, that being isolated with just Alastor (and his shadows, but they were extensions of him-- they didn't count much as another person) for long would get to your head.
You'd like to think that you were mature, hardened by living in Hell for 5 years beforehand-- but deep down, you knew you weren't. That little showcase you'd done when you two first met, cowering on the ground as you sobbed and shuddered and fruitlessly clawed at your restraint was more than enough to prove that.
After everything, you were still a child. You were still that scared little kid, who thinks they're so much better than all their classmates because one of your teachers said "You're so mature for your age!" as an offhanded comment.
There was some clanging and clattering coming from the kitchen, a cabinet opening and something being taken out. A pan, probably; it sounded like a large, flat metal thing. A baking sheet, actually; not just a regular pan.
What on earth was he making in there? A dangerous, curious part of you wondered. Urging you to stand up and go look, but you keep firmly rooted to you spot on the couch. You wouldn't walk right into a trap, you refused to be that unknowing fly that didn't see the spider-web right in front of their face.
You heard (what you assumed to be) the baking pan placed on the tile countertop, a drawer being pulled out, metal utensils clinking together--
"You know," He started off, a bit more rustling came from the kitchen before he continued his though. "I was starting to worry that you never would," He paused, and if you didn't know any better-- you'd say he sounded sad.
But as soon as it showed up, it was thrown right out the window-- Alastor exchanging what seemed to be genuine emotion for the upbeat, almost saccharine sweet tone he'd held moments prior.
"But, I'm so glad you decided to prove me wrong! It was torturous for me, my child refusing to so much as look my direction when not forced to..." Alastor trailed off, leaving you in relative silence-- the conversation went dead for a while, as you process his words.
When you realized what he'd called you, panic flooded you. He'd never called you that before-- or maybe he has, and you just tuned it out. He said so many things, all of which you had a very hard time believing were based in even an ounce of truth;
Maybe it was the tone that finally brought your attention to the title-- his child. You were not his child! You were some random squatter who just so happened to be a minor! You weren't a kid, and you certainly weren't his kid--!
"I'm not-" You tried to say, spine stiffening, hair on the back of your neck standing straight up at the realization. But, in true Alastor fashion, he quickly cut you off and diverted your attention-- out of the blue asking "Could you come and help, my dear? I think it's about time you start learning how to cook."
okay, rude, you thought. Alastor couldn't have known you for more than a few months; you're sure you would've realized if a year had passed (you hope you would, anyways), and never once had he asked if you could cook.
You had half a mind to try and push how far his patience could go, refuse to stand-- to follow his 'invitation' (demand) for you come help him in the kitchen.
A much more rational part of you screamed at you that no, no-- don't do that, you absolute idiot!
You wish you could say you didn't give in to him, that you stayed right where you were and tested how far he'd go with his promise of not hurting you. That would, however, be a lie.
It was almost like you were on autopilot, pulling the blanket off and making a half-assed effort to fold it before setting it on the couch. You felt a little numb as your feet seemed to move on their own, eventually leading you to the kitchen.
One hand of the edge of the entryway, you stood cautiously at the very edge between the living room's hardwood floor and the kitchen's black-and-white checkered tiles.
You're not sure how long you stood there-- not long at all, you think. Alastor turned around, offering a small, horribly soft smile and quietly beckoning you.
You took one step in, and Alastor laughed at that; he lifted his arm, gesturing to his right. Obviously, he was instructing you to come stand by his side.
It was out of fear, you told yourself-- that when you'd followed his orders, standing next to him; you didn't fight at all when he laid his arm over your shoulders, pulling you impossibly closer to him.
"Isn't this kind of impractical?" You asked, mumbling under your breath-- you were halfway between wanting Alastor to hear and not wanting him to, but of course, the former was the outcome.
Alastor's hand had settled on top of your head, absent-mindedly smoothing down your hair as his other hand whisked eggs into... something. He laughed, amused. Not entertained, not the joy he so obviously took in toying with others-
He sounded endeared.
That spelled the beginning of the end for you-- for your staunch position on the idea that Alastor was just messing with you, playing the long game and what not.
The realization of how... real he was being, with his actual accent out in the open... it opened the floodgates, and your grip started slipping on the idea that Alastor wanted to do you harm.
He was patient, more patient than you'd ever think he could be (from you'd heard previously, of course), he cares about your boundaries (somewhat, but that's way, way more than you ever thought you'd get with him), he fed you, he provided you with clothes and books-- claiming he'd give you anything if you'd just ask.
Your head felt full of cotton, ears ringing slightly-- drowning out Alastor response of "Mm, i suppose it is. But is it such a crime for a father to want to have his darling child close?"
Numbly, you shook your head, only have vaguely registered what he said. He gave a pleased hum, and went back to his cooking.
Really, he wasn't teaching you anything-- just doing his own thing while he kept you glued to his side.
You found yourself not minding it too much. You couldn't find it in yourself to care that you didn't mind it, actually.
#platonic yandere alastor#yandere alastor x reader#yandere hazbin hotel#platonic yandere x reader#yandere x reader#hazbin hotel#platonic yandere#alastor x reader#yandere alastor#alastor hazbin hotel#platonic alastor x reader#my writing#!! holiday catalogue event 2024 !!#requests open#reqs open
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#rarely will an adaptation even attempt to do the execution scene #the scene where all of Rome is gathered to see who's pardoned and who's executed #and the Count gets Albert and Franz to join him on the balcony he rented but then the scene of the execution is so horrifying and graphic #that the boys can't look. Franz literally tries to back away but the Count grabs him and FORCES him to look #meanwhile Albert is pale and has his eyes closed as they can hear the condemned man shouted and begging in the square #and the Count is like. flushed. pupils dilated. he's so worked up excited about this whole spectacle #lmao yeah like. not a scene people usually include in their adaptations! #Counts a little off the deep end!#not entirely sure what Dumas wanted us to get from this scene either because to me the Count really comes across as Out Of It #not a man fighting for justice #but i almost believe Dumas wanted us to interpret that scene as more 'haha look how weak these boys are' #hey sir? so sorry for the life you've lived but please understand that violence shouldn't be exciting or fun! #anyway. unhinged is the correct description #count of monte cristo
oooh okay prev I gotta react to those tags ! first of all the execution scene is exactly one of the scenes I was thinking about when I made that post, it's absolutely a scene that makes you go "oh okay something broke in him he is not normal anymore..." so im glad you're bringing it up
and secondly, because I spent the last two/three months slowly reading the book it's still very fresh in my mind so I feel the need to point out that I don't think it's fair to describe the Count as "excited". I think it's mostly two things : a profound indifference to the pain of others, and a sense of moral satisfaction at seeing people who have betrayed others meet a cruel and violent fate. but "excitement" seems a little much.
we already get a previous hint of his disturbing disregard for the pain of others in chapter XXII, right after Dantès' escape, when he's described as almost completely indifferent to the mortal injury of a custom agent ("He had, moreover, looked upon the customs officer wounded to death, and, whether from heat of blood produced by the encounter, or the chill of human sentiment, this sight had made but slight impression upon him. Dantès was on the way he desired to follow, and was moving towards the end he wished to achieve; his heart was in a fair way of petrifying in his bosom.").
then in chapter XXXV, Franz asks the Count if he takes pleasure in watching executions since he seems to have seen so many and he himself says that he first felt repulsion, then indifference then curiosity at the sight of them. I personally think he's being honest in that assessment, he doesn't "enjoy" the executions, but he's probably trying to actively make himself used to seeing people suffer since that's what he wants to do to the ones who betrayed him. still in that conversation with Franz he makes it clear that he's interested in methods of torture because he does not see death in itself as "atonement" enough for some crimes ("death may be a torture, but it is not an expiation."). he does get unhinged towards the end when he "laughs" but that's because the prisoner - who he explicitly identifies as someone who betrayed his benefactor - shows his selfish nature and goes against the "love thy neighbor" rule by being mad that the other prisoner won't die with him. It's not a laugh of excitement, because it's a laugh over humans' selfish nature, it's made to be a sinister one that indicates a painful past ("And the count burst into a laugh; but a terrible laugh that showed he must have suffered horribly to be able thus to laugh").
So yeah to me when he makes Franz and Albert watch, it's not out of excitement or enjoyment, it's because he wants to confront those rich sheltered young men to his moral reality : there are deeply cruel and selfish humans who allowed themselves to betray others and they don't deserve to be treated better than beasts (he literally compares the execution to that of a rabid dog right as he catches them). It's proof that he's a deeply broken person by that point, as suggested in chapter XXII, but it's more about indifference, a sense of moral - and divine - superiority, a deep-seated hatred for 'betrayers' and a need to watch justice be done.
the count is so much more unhinged in the book than in the 2024 movie adaptation... in the movie he's cold and determined, meanwhile in the book he's also cold and determined but also frankly a little insane
#btw just to be clear prev I wrote all this less as a “ugh you're wrong !!!”#and more as an opportunity to put my thoughts in order on the character while reacting to what you said#bc I recently finished the book and want to talk about it :-)#the count of monte cristo#le comte de monte cristo#lit#ugh i loved that book the count is soooo disturbing yet fascinating !!
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