#I had to continue it

[zaebeecee]

To Sever a Loveless Bond

••RadioDust Soulmate AU••

Part 2/?

First chapter | Next chapter

Read on AO3

Chapter Two art by @fletchingbrilliant

•••

Dawn broke dim and distantly cold the following morning, red sunlight weakly filtering through a thick cover of clouds that promised a storm before the end of the day. Angel Dust watched the light slowly creep along his carpet from his bed, stomach down on the mattress and his face half mushed into the blankets that gathered around him in a nest of pink and white fabric that had accumulated from hours of tossing and turning. Angel drew a long breath and let it out in a groan as he closed his eyes, feeling as though his entire body had manifested a massive stress headache from the night before.

He wasn’t used to being awake this early. Despite his best efforts to comply with Charlie’s plan for redemption, some habits were harder to break than others, and that meant Angel was usually awake until four or five in the morning. Because of that, he was lucky if he was out of bed before two in the afternoon, and nobody usually saw him until at least four. But the events of the previous night had sent Angel to bed a few hours before midnight, and the subsequent hours of tossing and turning punctuated with fifteen minutes of sleep here and there had apparently led to Angel seeing the first sunrise he could ever remember seeing in Hell. It was creepier than the sunset, somehow.

Angel turned his face into the blankets and groaned again, begging the darkness to just take him into a second death already. The moment he did, however, he regretted it; he could see dilated pupils in garnet-flecked red eyes, he could hear soft and staticky white noise pitch and whine like someone was turning the knob on a radio to search the channels, and he could smell dead flesh and blood and clove cigarettes.

And above it all, a single word that echoed dull and hollow, tainted by a thick layer of radio filter that distanced the speaker from the listener in every way possible: no.

Cringing, Angel sat up and rubbed at his face until he saw spots behind his closed eyes. He then lowered his hands, blinking colors from his vision and looking down at Fat Nuggets as he burrowed further into the nest Angel had made. “At least someone’s having no trouble sleepin’,” he grumbled, but smiled just a little when his words were punctuated with a tiny grunting snore.

Sleeping wasn’t going to happen. Angel didn’t need to be a genius to figure that out. Leaving his room was out of the question, too, because the last thing he needed was Charlie getting all excited over the idea of him being up ‘bright and early’, or worse, asking him a bunch of questions about why the hell he was awake. Angel imagined the delicate ways she would try to ask, all while Vaggie hovered at her elbow with accusatory and suspicious looks, and decided that staying in his room all day was looking very appealing.

It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Alastor was out there somewhere. Why would it? People were lucky if they saw the Radio Demon twice in the same week, even living in the same building as him. Angel wasn’t worried about running into him. That would be dumb.

Fat Nuggets blinked sleepily when Angel retrieved him from the blankets, and soon he was snuffling and wiggling with excitement at being faced with a new day all for him. “Come on, baby. Bath time,” Angel said, carrying the little hellpig into the bathroom to give him a good scrubbing.

Even with Angel taking his time to thoroughly pamper his pig, as well as letting Nuggets play with the bubbles in the tub for a while, he realized that the whole ordeal had only eaten up about an hour. Angel dried Fat Nuggets and sent him back into the room to explore, then began preparing a sand bath for himself. He closed off the drain of the tub, dried it thoroughly, and filled the bottom with coarse white sand before finally stripping his clothes off to face the part that he knew was inevitable but had been dreading for hours. Angel folded his clothes, sat on the edge of the tub, and looked down at his knee.

For many years, the mark on his leg had been completely ignorable. It blended well enough into his markings that most people didn’t even realize what it was, and Angel himself only knew because of how well he knew his own body and that these shapes were decidedly not him. But in the very least, it had always been pink, soft, and easy to hide.

That was absolutely no longer the case.

Nothing about the shape had changed, but the color was deeper, angrier, the pink of his striping fading into the reddish color of the burst blood vessels in a new bruise that now dominated the shape of the stag’s head. Angel’s fingers touched the mark and he gasped gently, sensation traveling up his thigh and straight into his pelvis with a sudden sharpness that made him snap his hand back. It wasn’t just supremely sensitive, but it felt slightly raised, almost like a welt, before the color bled back to pink and his usual striping continued.

How the fuck am I gonna hide this from Val?

Angel banished the thought. He couldn’t do a damn thing about it now, and it was his day off, and he had too many things to worry about without also panicking over how his boss would respond to the knowledge that Angel knew who his soulmate was. Instead, he focused on his bath, sinking into the sand in the tub and scrubbing it through his fur to remove the strange feeling that being awake in an unpleasant way all night had given him. The scratchy sensation of the sand against his skin felt good, though he had to be very careful with his leg because he was pretty sure the sand against his raised mark would feel like utter garbage.

He took his time, relaxing as much as he could and half hoping he would doze off in the warm sand, but he had no such luck. Finally, he got out of the tub and grabbed his brush, slowly and carefully cleaning all traces of sand from his fur before he cleaned up and went back to his room to get dressed. All of that, and he’d only killed another hour and a half.

This was going to be a very, very long day.

Angel didn’t remember the last time he had sequestered himself in his room because he actually wanted to, and it was difficult to find things to do with himself. In order to avoid the temptation to just doom scroll all day, Angel rearranged his entire wardrobe, then his vanity, then got his supplies and gave every one of his sex toys a more thorough cleaning than he usually did. He tossed a couple of them that were getting too worn, ordered some replacements, reorganized them in the closet, then reorganized his bondage and had to reorganize the toys again because with the bondage in a different configuration everything looked weird.

Throughout his tasks, Charlie came by four times in total. The first was to see if he was awake, and each subsequent pass was to check on him, but the final one was weird even by Charlie’s standards.

Angel was oiling down and rubbing out some of his leather shackles when he heard the tentative, rhythmic knock on his door once more. “Hi, Charlie,” he called, a little resigned. “I’m still here.”

“Oh, hi, Angel,” Charlie said. She sounded off. “Just… coming to check on you! Making sure everything is okie-dokie and you… y’know… are fine?”

Angel lowered the leather to his lap and looked at the door, almost expecting to see Charlie through the wood. “I am both okie-dokie and fine,” he said suspiciously. “Is something wrong?”

“What? No! Nooooo,” Charlie said in her most convincing casual voice. “No no no. Nothing is wrong! I’m just seeing how you are… making sure nothing… happened?”

Angel frowned. “Nothin’ happened, sweetheart. I’m fine.”

“Okay, well… if you need anything, I’ll be right downstairs.”

“Noted.”

“Doing some inventory.”

“Good for you.”

“Just hanging out.”

“Charlie!”

“Okay okay I’m going, sorry,” she apologized, and Angel heard her scurry away from the door faster than she usually did.

Angel stared at the door for a few moments longer. “…that was weird,” he said to no one, but Fat Nuggets grunted at him anyway.

Despite Angel’s determination to stay up in his room all day, the one necessity he didn’t have access to was food. It was still evening, but his stomach was grumbling in irritation at him and he knew it would only get worse… plus, he really had run out of things to keep himself occupied. He left his room quietly, and he could hear the clouds had made good on their promise as violent gusts howled at the walls and rattled the windows all through the hotel. Angel shivered a little at the draft and hurried downstairs, heading straight for the kitchen.

He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved that he didn’t run into anyone. It meant no interrogation, sure, but the fact that he didn’t see anyone also kinda made him feel like he had wasted an entire day off for nothing. The kitchen was empty, but the idea of cooking was supremely unappealing after a restless night combined with the memory of the previous evening. The only premade food in the fridge was Alastor’s jambalaya, and the idea of eating that felt wrong, somehow. In the end, Angel just stood at the open fridge and ate individual sandwich ingredients without bothering to build anything.

The food sat heavily in his stomach but also, somehow, made him feel a lot less like he was going to throw up. The feeling of accomplishment that came from completing a basic task of self-care was fleeting, and Angel left the kitchen in something of a haze, debating between texting Cherri and bugging her into going out and just… going back to his room and trying to actually sleep. He pulled out his phone, caressing the dark screen with the pad of his thumb as he wandered, weighing the pros and cons of both until a decision was made for him.

“Hey. Kid.”

Angel looked up and realized he’d wandered into one of the places he absolutely didn’t want to be: the bar area. Husk wasn’t looking at him, his focus on a drink he had just started prepping, but Angel knew he had the other sinner’s full attention otherwise.

“What?” Angel asked, a little more clipped than his voice usually got. Ever since they had severed the tension between them, Angel considered Husk to be his good friend—maybe even family, like an uncle he didn’t mind seeing on holidays—but that didn’t mean he wanted to put up with his pseudo-fatherly intense concern sage advice bullshit.

If Husk noticed his hesitation, he didn’t show it. His eyes raised to lock on Angel’s, and he nodded at one of the bar stools. “Sit.”

“I don’t feel like it,” Angel said, rather than just refusing or walking away.

“Too damn bad,” Husk answered, unbothered. “I got something I need to talk to you about.”

Angel groaned. There wasn’t anything stopping him from just leaving the bar and going back to his room, he knew that too well. Husk wouldn’t do shit about it, and while Angel would have to deal with this conversation attempt crap again, he could at least postpone it for a day when he didn’t feel like he’d been run over by a car. Instead, he stepped forward and flopped onto the stool, leaning his arms on the bar top and slumping forward so dramatically that he had to look up to see Husk’s face. “The fuck do you want?” he asked without heat.

At first, Husk didn’t answer. Instead, he placed his index finger on the rim of the lowball glass he had been making the drink in and slid it to Angel. It was an almost clear, gently yellow color, and it smelled like lemon. “Here.”

“I don’t got any points for alcohol,” Angel said, not moving to touch it.

“What Vaggie doesn’t know won’t hurt you,” the bartender said evenly. “And I’m guessing you need it. You look like shit warmed over.”

“Thanks, asshole,” Angel grumbled as he picked the glass up and took a sip. He had a brief second to appreciate the flavor—sharp, lightly sweet, bright, definitely lemon—before the alcohol kicked him in the back of the throat and he coughed. “Holy fuck…!”

Usually, any evidence of alcohol throwing Angel off got a laugh out of Husk, but his expression didn’t budge. He just waited for Angel to set the glass down, his hands on the bar top. He looked, if Angel had to guess, like he was trying to figure out what he wanted to say.

“Spit it out, Whiskers, I’m tired and I wanna go to bed,” Angel said as he leaned his cheek on his fist.

The nickname went ignored, and Angel knew then that whatever this was, it had to be serious. “Did you and Alastor get into a fight?”

“What?” Angel sat up. “Why?”

“Just answer the question, kid.”

“No,” Angel said. “It wasn’t a fight, it… it wasn’t… look, it wasn’t anything, now why?”

Husk’s frown was a little darker. “Because he was weird today. And I mean he was weird for Alastor. He asked about you.”

Angel froze. Something in his stomach felt like it was sinking. “…he did? What…” He cleared his throat, and Husk’s ear twitched. “What did he say?”

“Asked if anyone had seen you today,” the bartender said, his voice still steady and unreadable. “Charlie said you hadn’t left your room. He immediately went on some kinda rant about you missing a beautiful day, then said he needed to leave, all of it a single sentence. Don’t think he drew breath once. Then he just left.”

Angel frowned. “…and you think… we got into a fight?”

“Look, kid, I’m struggling to come up with another reason that he would be acting like that.”

Husk wasn’t saying everything he was thinking—Angel knew he never did—but something told him that the cat sinner was asking this out of genuine and actual concern. Maybe it was for Angel himself, but Angel thought it was for Alastor, too. Not that Husk would admit that or that Angel would dare suggest it, of course.

“…we talked for a while yesterday,” Angel said. “He was in the kitchen. I helped him cook. It didn’t end well. That’s all.”

Husk raised an eyebrow. “Something ending poorly with Alastor, in a kitchen, isn’t usually the kind of thing you tack ‘that’s all’ onto.”

“I got all my body parts, chill,” Angel said. “I don’t know if I should… …look, Husk.” As he changed tactic, he heard his own voice grow serious, and he could tell Husk heard it too by the way his ears twitched. “I’m serious. You don’t wanna know.”

Husk drummed his fingertips on the bar top for a second. “I know it’s none of my business,” he said at length. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. And that, whatever it is, it’s not going to come back and cause trouble.”

That was pointed. “Why would it cause trouble?”

“Because you have a tendency to avoid talking about things you need to talk about, and it doesn’t go well.”

Angel winced. “…that’s low.”

“Truth ain’t always harsh, but it ain’t always pretty.”

He couldn’t argue with that. Angel took another sip of his drink, and then a third, letting the sugar and alcohol fortify him. Husk waited with an alarming amount of patience for a sinner who usually couldn’t wait to get to the point. “…you got an activated mark, Husk?”

“An activated mark?” Husk asked, his eyes narrowed in confusion, before they widened a little. “Do you mean a… a soulmate mark?” His expression shifted again, his ears turning outwards and lying back just a little. “Angel. Please fucking tell me you’re completely changing the subject.”

Angel opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out. So, he closed it again, then shook his head.

“…are you trying to tell me that Alastor… activated your soulmate mark?”

Angel nodded.

“You need skin on skin contact to do that.”

“I know.”

Husk closed his eyes, then turned, grabbing one of his personal bottles of whiskey. He uncorked it and tossed the cork onto the bar top, taking a healthy swig before setting it down with a heavy thud and gesturing for Angel to continue.

“It… I was helpin’ him clean up,” Angel said, hesitating only a little at the false start. “We both lost track of where we were, and then I was kinda in his space, and he didn’t have his staff, so he…” He mimed pushing someone away. “…my shoulder, y’know? Like a reflex. And he wasn’t wearin’ his gloves, so…”

Angel trained off, and the silence settled over them like a thick blanket. “…fuck,” Husk said at length. “And he noticed?”

“Oh, yeah, he noticed,” Angel said with a soft and sarcastic laugh, a burning sensation rising behind his eyes. “He wasn’t happy. He left.”

“Fuck,” Husk repeated, the word still a soft declaration. He took another drink of the whiskey. “You’re not gonna do anything about it, are you?”

Angel stared at him. “What kinda anythin’ could I possibly do?” he asked, incredulous. “Al hates being touched. He’s made his views on any intimacy at all pretty fuckin’ clear. And if he actually did have a type, any type at all, it’s pretty obvious it wouldn’t be someone like me.”

Husk’s expression was complicated and Angel didn’t want to decipher it. “…yeah,” he said, and it didn’t sound like he was talking to Angel. “Good,” he added. Angel went back to his drink. “I just don’t want to see you do something you shouldn’t. Alastor’s made his opinion on soulmates pretty clear to me and Niff.”

“Oh, yeah?” Angel asked. “What, he threaten to eat his if he finds ‘em?”

“Something like that, just… he was way more graphic.” Husk shook his head and looked away. “He’s not a man who likes to deal with distractions. He toys with them and then he gets rid of them.”

“…right.” Angel suddenly had the very visceral feeling that Alastor wasn’t just talking about killing his own soulmate when he told them that. Why would he kill Husk and Niffty’s? Why would he care? …another piece of the puzzle that was the three of them, he supposed. “C’mon, Husk, even my stupid has limits. I ain’t gonna go askin’ the Radio Demon to go steady with me.”

“I know,” Husk said. “Just make sure you don’t start wanting to.”

Angel stared at him. Husk just picked up Angel’s empty glass and turned, starting to clean it. There were so many questions Angel could ask, and he realized… every single one of them had an answer he didn’t want to know. So, instead, he just knocked his knuckles on the bar top a couple of times as acknowledgment and slid off the stool, heading back towards his room.

I don’t want to.

…I don’t, do I?

Angel had no idea. He wasn’t sure he wanted to ever find out. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know why Husk was so positive it would be a problem.

It wasn’t until he was almost asleep, at long last, that Angel realized Husk hadn’t answered him about whether or not he had an activated soul mark. It was a personal question, but somehow, Angel didn’t think that was why he had dodged it.

Angel was pretty sure he dodged it because the answer was yes, and if Alastor knew, whoever it was would be in danger of becoming a member of the radio chorus.

•••

[supertaliart]

More Skywalker Sibling time! Now with a sequel

Part 3

[pangur-and-grim]

look at that transformation! well done, Belphie, you’ve defeated death!

[skrs-cats]

post oots - bramblestar's storm

[hinamie]

oversaturate

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[egophiliac]

since Eng is getting 7.5 soon(?), I felt motivated to go back to my Meleanor rig and make her a couple of lesson animations! ...except for alchemy, because the cauldron bubbles proved too hard to photoshop around, whoops.

maybe she just got lost on her way to the classroom...?

(credit: backgrounds are from the game, I just put her on top of 'em)

(aside from the backgrounds, this is not an edit, I drew her from scratch! please do not tag or treat as an edit!)

[saragrosie]

Sketching while streaming s5...

Jonathan Sims I will learn to draw you (this is my doing. I could draw him however I want and I choose to stick with an image of him in my brain that is difficult for me to draw. Masochism.)

Not s5 Mahtins below I enjoyed drawing cuz hes neat:

(Edit: I yassified Martin in the do not separate cuz I wanted his hair fluffier)

[puppyeared]

renaissance dogys

characters belong to @canisalbus

[stuckinapril]

noticed a dip in posts about palestine on my dash, so i think it deserves to be said again: palestine is not a trend. caring about genocide is not a trend. there are still reports about humanitarian aid trucks intentionally blocked off from gaza, meaning so many fucking gazans, a big portion of them children, are just bleeding out with no help. it just came out recently that israelis disguised as women and medics infiltrated a west bank hospital, at which point they killed 3 palestinians (whom they claim were militants. right). these people are living day to day without even the most basic utilities. anyone who claims to have “activism fatigue” needs to question why they’re so severely lacking in the most basic forms of compassion. you don’t get to just grow bored of talking about palestine. please never stop calling attention to the genocide happening full force in front of us.

[beautysnake]

quick warmup since I dont have time for a full blown art fight attack today! Little cat things :>

[thatmightyheart]

an old silly salarymen royai wip i apparently abandoned lol

[maddie-grove]

As someone who’s living with a middle school social studies teacher, all the posts along the lines of “why did we never learn about this historical event in school” just make me go “because your teacher was supposed to cover all of US history in one year, and they didn’t get to the Revolutionary War until Halloween because they were urged to slow down the progression of the lessons because a more senior teacher was running behind, and they didn’t get to the Civil War until Valentine’s Day because the school kept scheduling every special event during social studies because there’s no end-of-grade testing for that subject, and they didn’t get to WWI until May because they were sick for a few days and the substitute couldn’t do much more than babysit, and now they’re having to do the entire Cold War in two days, so that’s why you didn’t hear about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut. They would have loved to tell you about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut!”

[garpen]

12 yrs old Jason having just been dropped off at Wayne Manor: Do you just take in every orphan you meet off the street?

Bruce: No, you're the first kid I picked up off the street. I picked up my last one at the circus.

Jason: Is that a joke? I can’t tell if that’s a joke.

Bruce: My son's name is Richard, but he insists on going by Dick.

Jason: And he’s…from the circus?

[cyborgrhodey]

regina spektor is a violent zionist, but i don't think it's constructive or honest at all for people to be like "well her art was always bad anyway." some terrible people have made great art. This idea that artists with unsavory morals can't make good art (1) only feeds into some people's mindset that if they dislike something, that MUST mean there is something ideologically wrong with it, and (2) some people then take longer to realize the true colors of their favorite artists because... good artists can't be ethically bad right?? and so they hang on to their faves and pretend they are so righteous and defend their every move when sometimes. sometimes you just gotta accept that your favorite art was made by somebody you don't agree with, and you have to identify how much you are willing to support someone like that and what lines you have that can't be crossed

[attyrocious]

like hiring a horse to dogsit