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#I really do want to be active on here though as I really missed tumblr
soapycocacola · 2 years
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I’m not dead, baby
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rotationalsymmetry · 1 year
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I don’t know if this is what you are looking for exactly, but I enjoy writing for Postcards to Voters because they focus on non-presidential races. I am currently writing postcards against an anti-choice constitutional amendment proposition in Ohio.
I wish more people would do things like that, instead of making posts that guilt trip people for not being excited enough about voting for the Blue sexual harasser instead of the Red one.
Thank you for your highly sensible response.
I guess there's a thing where "just because someone takes 15 seconds to shoot their mouth off online about something that's annoying them doesn't mean they have the time/energy to do anything actually constructive, even more so for the people who took .5 seconds to hit reblog now on someone else's shooting their mouth of post" but I think it would be strictly better for people to spend that .5 second exerting a smidgen of self control and going "either it's actual GOTV or it's not, and if it's not I'm going to not reblog it."
And as the election is over a year away...I don't think "vote blue no matter who" is actually a Get Out The Vote action at this point in time. It's annoying enough when people do it in person but at least then there's occasionally some chance of having a reasonable discussion about it, but on social media between people who don't really know each other? Ha snowball's chance in hell.
(I haven't done Postcards to Voters the last couple years, but I did around 2019-2020 or so and they are fairly low barrier to entry as long as you have stamp money, super introvert friendly, you can be as creative or non-creative as you want to be, and as you can do it from your home on your own schedule pretty darn spoonie friendly as well. As well as covid-safe. And yes, there's a big focus on local/state campaigns, which warms my participatory democracy loving little heart.) (ughh sounds like an important campaign maybe I should pick this thing up again.)
#I did big posts arguing about this in 2000 but I felt crummy afterwards so I'd really rather not rehash all that#it's theoretically and pragmatically wrong on multiple levels#this is the internet you don't get unity#you get two splinter groups arguing the two most extreme ends of the position possible each side convinced that they are 100% right#someone who's a little bit in favor of voting blue no matter who will get downright dogmatic about it#someone who's a little bit against will end up surrounded by anarchists who think voting is a waste of time#which wouldn't be the worst outcome ever#except that as far as I can tell most of the most vocal anarchists on tumblr don't do shit except tear down democratic politicians#like ok glad you think you're right I don't want to have anything to do with you though#there's like 2-3 anarchist posters on here who actually talk about direct action and organizing and stuff -- about things people can do#I guess with the abundance of time freed up by not spending a couple hours doing research and half an hour filling out a ballot#or much much less time than that if they're voting just for the president#yup congrats you sure saved a lot of time there now you have more time to convince other people to not vote either AWESOME GOOD JOB (sarcas#on an unrelated note I really need to work on a following the local news habit#and finding some way to learn more about oakland's history since I live here now#and I know how annoying it can be when someone's trying to be active in local politics but is missing highly important context
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callilouv · 11 months
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i can’t believei can go a whole day without posting anything on tumblr now
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pepprs · 2 years
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idk how to reconcile my new self with my old self. also i fucking hate waiting. GRAGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
#delete later#im getting a taste of my own medicine bc when im overwhelmed depressed etc i don’t even open emails or dms or whatever and then ifeel guilty#and let them build up and run away from them and literally do not reply for years. but ive been waiting for like 5 different but related#replies for 3ish days at this point and im soooooo impatient omg i want to bash my head into the wall.. and afaik no one i messaged has#opened the message despite being active online elsewhere which is EXACTLY what i do so i have no right to complain at all. but still. omggg#i just have a simple question (me and the ps5 voice) reply to my message boy#purrs#also.. ok yeah im gonna be honest about it even if there are consequences lol. idk why im on such a mission to get back all my old#characters but if i don’t i can and will go crazy. i don’t even do that kind of thing anymore and d*viantart is an irreversibly warped#landscape due in part to capitalism and in part to own mistakes and selfish actions. and i truly feel like my tumblr mutuals are the only#ones who understand me and feel safe and cozy on here. but i miss my old internet home. and i really miss my old internet friends and seeing#all the jokes we had and how we were all like interconnected w the same adopt groups and stuff and now we don’t even talk… it makes me so#sad and i feel weird messaging them just for the purpose of asking if they can give me back characters i gave them 4 years ago like a) you j#just don’t do that kind of thing i don’t think but b) it feels so transactional and would make the part of saying hey our friendship was#important to me when i was a teenager and even though we don’t talk anymore i think of you fondly and wish you well. like lollllll. and i#feel cringe even tracking them down / messaging them bc we are all jn our 20s now… embarrassing. but i am so mad at myself for letting those#friendships wither (not that i have the spoons to sustain them these days anyway but still) and for not keeping bettr track of my characters#when i sold them and for giving them up in the first place and for letting my old internet life just fall apart due to neglect bc it puts me#in a bind to try to piece it together again no matter how i try it and i shouldn’t try anyway. but i am so tempted to rn. lol#* itd make saying stuff abt appreciating friendship weird bc there’s a transaction tied in (source: i did this and feel weird and bad)#like the way i want to SCREAM seeing that dA ate all of the journals i made when i was a 14 year old and turned them into glitched polls. th#the way the wayback machine has terrible unreliable records of everything and i can never get some stuff back / track some stuff down. pain#anyways it’s stupid bc i feel cozy and listened to and as connected as i have the energy to be to all of u guys so why am i doing this. but#i miss the dA stuff too and i wish it wasn’t cringe and i wish i could have everything that’s ever been part of me all in one place. lol#also this doesn’t even take into account my poetry community on dA on my other account who i also felt so safe and cozy with and i abandoned#that too and lost touch with basically everyone even though we all knew each others deepest secrets for years.. the heartsickness of it all#anyways mutuals who knew me on deviantart i am clutching both your hands with impassioned urgency and kissing u on the cheeks. that’s all
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Misfortune Teller
tldr: An older Danny, apprentice to Clockwork, does a lot of field work across dimensions, resetting the timeline, queuing future events, and who knows what else. Occasionally, he warns people about such upcoming possibilities, to set them on the right path. How, you might ask? Well in this case... as a wandering fortune teller.
Crack-fic (oh god, it's getting long and my logic brain won't let it remain as crack) where Danny becomes Clockwork's apprentice after getting his GED. Living his infinite afterlife to the fullest. Inspired by this tumblr post.
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Working for Clockwork had been... interesting so far. At first, Danny got frustrated by how vague and cryptic Clockwork was. He'd just shunt Danny off to some ancient time with a few words, his own time medallion (Danny carried it everywhere with him now), and then pop back into the portal, leaving Danny with only the faintest idea of where to go.
Eventually, after enough time (ha!) spent around Clockwork, Danny figured out that it just basically meant that he had free reign and to do whatever he wanted. Because if he went on the wrong path, (like that one time in Pompeii when he had almost caused the volcano to explode a few years too early), Clockwork would just pop on by, say another few cryptic words, and then it'd all be fine and dandy, or as he liked to say, "All is as it should be... Now stop practicing your wail by an active volcano."
After telling Jazz about that (it was supposed to be funny, not concerning), she just sighed and shook her head, with a forlorn "think before you act, Danny!" but hey, it'd turned out fine so far, so who cares how he does what Clockwork asks him to do, as long as it gets done, right? Even if it's with a liiiiitle more mischief than strictly required.
Besides. Danny was the one who had been doing time shenanigans across millennia, not Jazz. And he thought he'd been getting pretty good at it too! He'd actually started giving himself a different made-up background for each universe he visited. Sam and Tucker were helping him keep up with the identities on a spreadsheet, so if he had to go back to one he'd already visited, he'd remember who he'd said he was supposed to be.
---
He was on a call with them one evening while haunting Jazz's apartment, doing just that, when he felt a familiar tingle in the back of his throat, as well as a heightened awareness of the seconds passing by, that always accompanied his mentor's appearance.
Sam was talking about his past stint posing as a god of death when he cut in. "Hey- sorry to interrupt, Sam- Clocky's here, guys, I gotta dip."
"Aw, come on! We hardly talked any this past week since you passed your certifications, man," Tucker complained.
Danny rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "Yeah, yeah. Partly on you too though, you've been caught up outside of class, and Sam's schedule is nearly the opposite of yours."
Sam hummed in agreement despiter Tucker's scoff.
Danny missed hanging out with them as much as they had in high school, but hey, life goes on. Or at least, theirs did, to college. After finally flunking out of Casper High, he'd taken some time to get used to his responsibilities in the ghost zone, and when he had, he realized that he didn't really have much enthusiasm or timeleft for his human life.
And he didn't really want to go back home either.
But Jazz had made him tie up any loose ends before he noped-off to god knows where, which frankly, he had to thank her for. Getting his GED took a few years, but it was an accomplishment that could be attributed to Danny Fenton, no ghostliness required. Then he was able to let that tether go free.
Pulled out of his musings by a few more grumbles from Tucker, Danny said his goodbyes, promising to call the next time they were all available.
After hanging up, Danny swiveled around, anticipation already lighting up his eyes an ethereal green.
Clockwork, for his part, had been waiting patiently through Danny's lengthy goodbyes. Although he supposed that it tracked for the watcher of time to be patient. With his job, it'd be a nightmare if he wasn't.
"Phantom," Clockwork spoke, calm as always. "I have some tasks I need you to complete as my apprentice."
And Danny, always ready for adventure, didn't need him to explain any further. "Sure! When do you need me to be?"
Clockwork smiled at that. "I am fortunate you are eager. Follow me."
---
Danny popped into existence in this universe with a burst of cold air and static electricity. He found himself hovering by a clocktower above a sprawling, gothic city. Smog and light pollution obscured the stars above him, to his disappointment. He comforted himself with the fact that he'd probably have all the time he wanted to fly someplace less populated to see them later.
He started off by familiarizing himself with the city. As he flew, he followed the trail of power and met the resident city-spirit, a spooky- but kind underneath- woman draped in black lace, who told him her name was Gotham. He spoke in length with her about this universe, its heroes, and her knights. On that, she was very enthusiastic... or at least Danny thought she was, her projected emotions belaying much more than her gloomy exterior. She told him how her knights had been through a lot and would need some guidance fighting the darkness that pooled in her deepest corners, smiling with too much glee, filling lungs with fear, and terrorizing with cold hard bullets.
Danny could sense that the dangers she spoke of were growing in power, ever slowly. The longer they shadowed people's minds and hearts, an intangible thing grew that lent them more otherworldly pull than their physical forms had right to hold.
That must be what he was sent here for.
But... they were weak, pitifully so for him, infinite king as he was. And besides, he wasn't here in that sense. He was a messenger, a simple apprentice. And he could do this however he wanted.
Cue his talk with Lady Gotham, and subsequent idea to arm her knights. With what? Well, he figured knowledge would be a start. Flying high above the city invisibly, Danny noticed a sea of colors and lights by what appeared to be the city's pier. He flew down, noting that it appeared to be the setup spot for a travelling circus or carnival of some kind.
He considered what to do. One of Lady Gotham's troubles was a madman clown, right? Well maybe he'd be attracted to his ilk here... and with the danger came the knights. Maybe he could catch one of them here?
Danny was floating around at the entrance and beginning to formulate a plan when a flyer caught his eye. Looking for a mystic to read fortunes. URGENT!
Hadn't Clockwork said something about fortunes? And he hadn't made an identity in this universe yet...
A mischievous smile crept across Danny's face, splitting it in two with far too many teeth.
---
Half a city away, a man in all black, perched on the very same clocktower that Phantom had Appeared by, shivered as he felt an ominous premonition about his sanity in the near future...
Said man quickly opened his comms to check in with his many, many kids. Yet even after hearing back from each, he still felt apprehensive.
Somewhere even further, Clockwork laughed.
---
And that's how Danny found himself seated at a fortune teller's booth at a pier in Gotham, two days later, for the Tricksy Traveling Circus's grand opening.
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yanderecrazysie · 8 months
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Twisted Zoo: Chapter One
This is based on the stories of a keeper reader with the octotrio by @ashensgrotto and @merakiui .
Also @twistedcece @ursinaw  @thisisafish123 and @cenatour wanted to be tagged! Let me know if anyone else wants to be tagged for future chapters. If you no longer want to be tagged, please tell me!
Summary: You’re a brand new zookeeper at The Halfling Zoo- a place where half-animals live in captivity. Your job is simple- feed them and study them. Your main worry is that one of the more dangerous halflings might kill you. 
Unfortunately, that may become the least of your worries.
WARNINGS: none for now
Note: All characters are aged up, since there will be mature themes in future parts.
Also, I can’t promise I’ll finish this. I suck at finishing stories.
Thank you for everyone on Tumblr and Quotev for guessing! A lot of you have gotten ones right but there no one's gotten all of Heartslaybul (which makes me worry I did badly there)
Now, onto the Hyenas, Lions, and Wolves!
Prologue here
Next chapter here
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Since the wolves were right across from the lions and hyenas, you would be expected to divide your time equally between the two for your first official day at The Halfling Zoo. That was a pain, since all three of those species were more active at night. 
“You’ll be doing today’s morning feedings, right?” a woman in the zoo’s uniform asked you.
“Yes, for the lions, hyenas, and wolves,” you replied cheerfully.
The woman gave a sigh of relief, “Thank goodness- the lions always look like they’re about to kill you if you make the wrong move. Good luck!”
You stared blankly at her retreating figure. You really wish she hadn’t said that, because now you were absolutely terrified to step foot in that enclosure. Mr. Crowley had said to you yesterday, among all the other welcoming ramblings, that you had to go into each exhibit and give the food directly to the halflings, as opposed to leaving the food near the door and waiting for them to come and grab it.
After the zoo keeper’s “encouraging” words, you decided to give food to the hyenas first.
The hyena halflings were easy to spot- the group of seven or so male halflings sat in a group, talking and laughing loudly. There was one boy in the center of the crowd, waving his hands emphatically as he conversed with his peers.
As soon as you approached the hyena halflings, the mood immediately shifted. The halflings took several steps back, the conversation ceasing at once, all of them staring at you through weary, distrustful eyes.
That’s right- male hyenas are submissive toward females since they are usually aggressive and stronger.
“It’s alright!” you tried to speak as soothingly as possible, putting down the bucket of steaks so you could raise your palms in a non-threatening manner. They watched you carefully, still distrustful.
Finally, the boy from the center of the crowd put his hands behind his head and strolled up nonchalantly, grabbing a steak from the bucket. Although he acted like it was no big deal, you didn’t miss the way he eyed you with a fearful gaze and skirted around you as though you might explode at any moment. 
The other hyena halflings caught on and, walking around you with extreme caution, they managed to fish their meals out of the bucket. The hyena from before came back for a second steak and, not long after, for a third. 
“What’s your name?” you asked him as he fished around for the best steak left in the bucket.
He stopped searching and turned his gaze on you once more. He seemed to size you up for a moment before saying something softly. “What was that?” you asked.
“Ruggie,” he said softly, his ears turning inwards and an annoyed pout making its way to his face.
“I like that name!” you said cheerily. Ruggie eyed you dubiously and finally pulled a steak from the bucket, racing back to the other hyenas. On his way, he looked over his shoulder at you, his gaze uncertain.
You felt like you had made progress.
Now it was time to feed the lions, and the thought made your feet feel like lead. You were not looking forward to a lion halfling murdering you over a steak. 
A part of you wondered if some of the halflings really did prefer this life- or at least, the food. You had learned in class that halflings preferred to eat human food, although they could stomach their animal counterpart’s diet. Halflings, no doubt, preferred these still-warm cooked steaks over raw meat.
You picked up the bucket of steaks and began your journey across the faux savannah. It really was hot in the exhibit and the heavy bucket seemed to weigh you down considerably. Sweat beaded on your forehead and you found it even harder to push yourself across the distance to the lions.
When you finally arrived in front of them, you could feel yourself trembling in fear. In a shaky voice, you called out, “Who wants steaks?”
All of the lions’ eyes turned immediately to the lion halfling lounging across the rock above them. Ah, I get it. They won’t eat until he eats.
Slowly you approached him. You weren’t sure if he was awake until one green eye cracked open and lazily regarded you. You gulped and reached into the bucket, closing your hands around a steak and holding it out to him. He remained lying there, but his eye closed once more.
You began to set the steak next to him when blinding pain shot up your arm, causing you to promptly drop it on the rock. You looked down and saw that the back of your hand was bleeding from four long streaks. The king of the lions was now sitting up, glaring at you, blood dripping from the claws of his right hand.
“How dare you approach me so casually?” he snarled.
You weren’t sure what to do, so you sank into a bow, and murmured, “I’m so sorry.”
The lion gazed down at you, a mixture of surprise and amusement in his eyes. He laid back down, closing his eyes, “Whatever. The rest of you can eat.”
Lions rushed forward, clamoring around the bucket to get the best steaks. The lion on the rock did not reach for his own steak, choosing instead to go back to sleep. You were sorry you disturbed him, and not only because you were now nursing a heavily bleeding hand. The wound was surprisingly deep and you hoped that they had a first aid kit in the office.
A very small lion cub halfling with red hair bounced up to you. Your heart instantly melted at the sight of such an adorable little thing grabbing a steak and smiling up at you. So cute!
“Uncle Leona! Uncle Leona! Are you going to eat your steak or can I have it?” the little halfling asked the lion on the rock.
The lion- Leona, you guessed- glared down at the cub and snatched the steak out of the his reach with a warning growl. While the guttural sound was enough to make you shake in your boots, the cub merely giggled and took a bite of his own steak.
The bucket was empty by the time every lion had taken one. They were big steaks, but you weren’t sure it would be enough to keep them full. You headed back to the keeper’s door with sweat rolling down your cheeks. The heat and dryness may be perfect for the lions and hyenas, but you could barely stand it.
As soon as you were back in the keeper area, you made a beeline for the water cooler. You poured yourself a cup and downed it in a couple seconds. Panting, you filled your cup a second time. You sipped the water a little slower this time, feeling its cooling effects soothe you.
You headed for the nearest first aid kit, conveniently hanging on the wall near the exhibit’s exit. You had a feeling you weren’t the first to need it. You took some bandages from the case and wrapped them around your hand, hissing a little at the pain the pressure caused.
You were ready to face the wolves now. And, as you made your way into their enclosure, you noted with relief that the warm was crisp and cool- the exact opposite of the previous enclosure.
Goosebumps rose on your skin, but you knew that, by the time you had made the trip with the heavy steaks, you’d probably be sweating again. Sure enough, the labor took its toll on your body, your arm aching as you switched the bucket to your other hand.
Deep in the forest now, you could sense eyes on you. Relieved that you had finally found the wolves, you collapsed to the ground. Unprofessional, maybe, but greatly needed. You sat on the soft grass as the wolf halflings began to approach you.
A few had their lips drawn up in a snarl, and one of them called out, “Who are you? You’re not our regular keeper.”
Another wolf was quick to say, “But she’s brought food. Isn’t that all that matters?”
You raised your hands in a peaceful gesture, “I’m a researcher and I’m the one dropping off your food for this morning.”
That seemed to satisfy the wolves. Some of them still glared at you, but they all took their steaks. You looked around at the pack and was surprised to see, among all the gray hair, a head of pure white.
The wolf wasn’t glaring at you, but his expression didn’t give away how he felt at all. He seemed to be eyeing you warily, much like the hyenas. You fished out a steak and held it out to him. His eyes widened a little and he approached you.
“Thank you,” he said in a gruff voice, taking the steak from you. Before you could ask him his name, he disappeared into the crowd of wolves. You weren’t sure why your mind had picked him out from the others, except that his hair was a different color. A little embarrassed by your reaction to him, you held out a steak to another passing wolf, who growled at you in response.
As soon as the enclosure door shut behind you, you sank to the ground, exhausted. That was only the morning feeding- you had a full day (and part of the night) of studying and documenting behavior ahead of you.
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omegastation · 2 months
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Hi. I haven’t used Tumblr in such a long time. It's kinda weird. Last time was two years ago...
I went to Valencia in Spain a few months later. Some parts of it reminded me of the Citadel. I wanted to write about it here, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t really come back here because I couldn’t play the game. I couldn’t concentrate at all, couldn’t finish a simple mission, couldn’t just “play”. I’m still in my first Legendary playthrough if you can believe it. I was losing something that brought me joy and didn’t really know what to do.
And the long story short about my time away: I got a Master’s degree while still working (evening & weekend classes). It’s fairly recent, I learned in June that I got a "Grande Distinction" (with great distinction? idk how to translate it well in English, it's just one of the highest marks). So that was nice :)
Less nice: I got a severe pulmonary embolism in November. My lungs are okay but I have to deal with daily hyperventilation now, which means I’m quite tired and need to make an appointment soon for respiratory physiotherapy. If you’re wondering, I don’t smoke and I’m fairly active. What else? I’m about to self-publish (finally!!!) my collection of short stories in French. Mom helped me yesterday, we ordered printed books. So I'm still writing. Reading and knitting all the time. And I’m still working at the same job I was working at, and I’m happy there, though it can be demanding and I have to be careful not to overwork myself.
In the end, I did manage to come back to the game and finish a mission. Not only that, but I played more missions, and that was a real "omg I can do it" moment. And the more I play, the more I want to talk about it. So there you have it, I hope I can come back and just try to enjoy myself in a chill way. I don't know how long, we'll see. I think time has helped me, at least, to look at things differently. I don't want to feel any type of obligation. I want to do things for fun because it's fun, and let that be enough.
It’s been so long, the fandom has probably changed a lot. Some people might be gone. I’ll reintroduce myself one way or another, but right now I’ll just find stuff I like to reblog and talk about all the ideas that come to mind. Bear with me if it has been said recently or so many times before. I just feel like starting all over again and I missed a lot of posts. My memory isn't what it's used to be either tbh...
Finally, I hope you’re all doing well. Thank you to the people who sent me messages. One person wrote that they missed me. I don’t know who they are, it was anon, but that really moved me, because I really did miss this community and all the discussions we had. I also miss, as always, Dustie who has been gone for a while now.
Anyway. Thank you.
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ms-demeanor · 1 year
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since twitter has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, and reddit has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, what do we do now that tumblr is becoming (more) actively hostile to its users? i’ve been here for over a decade so i know tumblr users are the type to cling on despite everything and revel in undoing every change, but i’m so tired of the way this website breaks the way it fundamentally works in order to appeal to new users. the twitterfication of the site seems so much worse than when people jumped ship after the porn ban, and even then, only small communities (and twitter) cropped up as solutions. you might not be the person to ask for a definitive answer, but i figured a tech blog might be interested in considering - what do we do when there’s nowhere left to go?
Okay so, I mean this very seriously: how has tumblr meaningfully become like twitter?
I don't personally find the sidebar view obnoxious and it seems to me like just another layout change that's pretty typical to tumblr. New users are getting signed up with a bit more emphasis on algorithmic feeds, but that is still very easy to change (MUCH easier than on any other social platform) and the algorithm has been there for everyone for quite a while, we just typically don't notice it because a lot of long-term tumblr users don't go into the "for you" feed.
I don't think that tumblr *has* fundamentally broken the way that it works to appeal to new users. My dash now is still very much like my dash in 2019, and still very much like my dash in 2018 (though much less pornographic). Reblogs are still reblogs, likes are still likes. Replies, for all that they seem like they've been around forever, are new and good and I think they work well. I'm irritated that the notes menu doesn't have a "view all" option but I think that's a worthwhile tradeoff for an easy way to see tags.
I *do not* understand why tumblr has broken linking back to previous reblogs but I don't think that's out of an effort to act like twitter; it is a bizarre choice that I dislike and don't understand but I also don't think that it has fundamentally changed the way the site works and i mean you've been around long enough that I'm sure you've had the same experience I have of going into the notes of a post and randomly clicking until you found a version that you wanted to reblog without a bunch of bullshit at the bottom. Tumblr has always kind of sucked, this change DOES suck but it doesn't suck in a way that is particularly novel or insurmountable. (For instance, I think this change sucks MUCH LESS than when they made posts with links invisible to the search, that is something that is genuinely bad that has been long lasting but doesn't get brought up much in lists of the ways that tumblr has gone wrong)
Tumblr *is* changing, but I think it is changing more incrementally and less terribly than other parts of the internet. I also hate the floating clown, the login walls, the dash-only view for blogs (you can't archive it and I HATE that), and - to an extent - the new lightbox on mobile. And I dislike that less than I thought I would but I don't think it's a fundamental change that necessarily impacts my interactions with the site - it *adds* a feature that I don't care for but it doesn't *break* anything that I require to have a good time on tumblr - in that way I think of it very much like Live. People hate Live so much and I find that perplexing because it is so easy to simply ignore it.
But that's not really your question; that's just some stuff I want people to think about because as much as tumblr has changed in the last two years it is nowhere near as fucked up as the recent things that twitter and reddit have pulled.
So, as to your question: where do we go?
Well. Not to be an extremely old person on the internet, but damned if I don't miss email lists. And forums. God I miss forums. Neither of those things has all the bonuses of platforms like twitter or reddit or tumblr or facebook, but they were great ways to hang out with people you liked on the internet.
The internet is changing. I can feel it, you can feel it, I'm pretty sure we're all like cattle in a field lifting our noses and hearing some distant rumbling and becoming slowly aware that it's almost time to run. There's a coming stampede and it isn't here yet but you know it's on its way. You're not imagining that, that's how things feel right now and there are a shitload of things contributing to it.
Things like SESTA/FOSTA and KOSA (which has not passed yet but is a big red flag waving on the horizon) have been eroding away the way that users on various platforms can function. Some platforms have consolidated in ways that harm users; some new platforms have popped up and shaken up the map of the internet; some platforms are being torn apart brick by brick by owners who don't care about the users. It kind of seems like people are actually looking up and realizing that advertising is A) bad and B) doesn't actually work and I think we're running straight toward another advertising-based crash like we saw in 2017. It feels like all the desperate things that tumblr is doing is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic as the internet as a whole starts to sink into the ocean.
Honestly, I don't think it's that bad. I think it *feels* bad, but I think we're looking at a slow whimpering death of the platforms, not a bang. I think tumblr is going to hang on at least for a few years and I think it's going to end up like livejournal and myspace, which both still exist as websites that are recognizable as updated versions of the sites they were in 2004-2010. The thing that I think would really, honestly hurt tumblr in a fundamental way is if it moved to a more algorithmic and data-sales based model of advertising, and I think that's still pretty distant. I think Automattic is aware that killing the chronological feed would be the one unforgivable sin that would cause a mass exodus and a final crash, and I think when we see that, when we can't just scroll through the feed and see what our friends did that day in order of when they did it, that's when the party is over here.
But that's still not answering your question.
So, where do we go? What do we do? Well, for now, I'd say it's a good time to get contact info for your friends across various platforms. Get email addresses, get phone numbers.
Now is also the time for you to set up a personal website. NeoCities is currently the best place to do this, though it takes a lot more effort than just starting a blog on tumblr. I think that various oldschool blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger/Blogspot/whatever the hell the google one is are a better place to have your emergency backup than a more platform-y platform if you aren't up to doing something with NeoCities.
If you've got the ability to do so and a group of people who are interested in the same core subject, set up a forum. There's a decent amount of off-the-shelf forum software out there and a text-and-small-images forum isn't prohibitively expensive, but it's never going to be huge and you're never going to have the kind of spread and virality and random connections that you would on a platform with millions or billions of users.
If you can't set up a forum, setting up or joining a discord server for your friends is a decent enough option at the moment, and may be a very good option for people who are looking to keep their interactions more private.
But yeah i think right now is a great time for people to start setting up their own personal websites, to start visiting actual webpages again, to start bookmarking their friends' websites, and to start collecting contact info that isn't tied to platforms.
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whiskehorange · 1 month
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Its been a very, very, long time.
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I don't even really know where to even begin, thats how long it's been since I've a) posted and b) logged onto my Tumblr. It's been close to a year, even 2 since I've actively posted anything on here before taking that sudden break without any warning. It was much unexpected to me as I'm sure it was for those of you who were actively keeping up with me, but I do want to assure you guys that its nothing too devastating.
I've noticed I've only seemed to gain followers and interactions on all of my posts in the year and some I've been gone, and I not only want to thank you guys immensely, as I usually do, for that but also for such a warmer welcome than I thought I was going to see, and that eases my nerves a bit. I guess to jump right into it, aside from spending this entire post apologizing even though that's what I want to do, I'll start you guys off with a little update: I've moved! I'm in a much more positive and helpful environment than before. It's come with its very high ups and very low downs, but I've been able to accomplish more where I am right now that stuck in the depressive hole and mental health crisis's I was having a year ago.
That being said, I've gotten a stable job as well after a few months of very combative mental health issues and many doctors visits later! It's certainly a start but its decent income for me in the situations I'm in now.
On the sillier/less important side, I am still with my boyfriend, @horrormomshoe (although he hasn't touched his tumblr longer than I had) and as many of you remember my guinea pigs, I am sad to say that my poor Elon has passed away late of last year right before I moved. I do still have Eddie and he's just a silly as ever.
Other than that I can't really think of too much else that has happened besides really small things that honestly just wouldn't be fun for you guys to sit here and read, but the TLDR: I'm happy (debatable HAHA), healthy (also debatable), and in a much better position than I was before. And you know I can't end this off without another apology for such a sudden departure, and it's been stuck in the back of my mind and has harbored a lot of guilt for how I left. Now while I certainly can't guarantee I'll be spending as much time on here as I used to now that I have a full time job, but there will definitely be frequent check ins, posts, and whatnot like before. I've certainly got enough in my inbox to keep my occupied and I've really missed being on here as much as I used to. I really look forward to getting back into this a little bit at a time, I've been dying to get my energy out somehow <3
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dashielldeveron · 1 year
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soulmate trope | aizawa, part one.
Aizawa's route of soulmate trope.
Part one bc tumblr formatting weird. Part two here.
Warnings: BTS mention. Reader is explicitly a kissless virgin to make Aizawa feel Worse. Part one: reader gets a mild hand injury. Threat of dub-con. Claustrophobia. Sexual content, with virgin-y themes. Part two: alcohol consumption (not by reader). Sexual content, with virgin-y themes. Fem reader.
Remember that U.A., for the purposes of this fic, is a university. Lore dropped carries over to previous and subsequent chapters.
~38k overall. ~20k for part one.
You didn’t have a soulmate, and that was just how you liked it.
Because instead of being hooked to one of your weird-ass classmates, you were free to continue to harbour your crush for your weird-ass homeroom teacher, and you nurtured your crush like a stray kitten brought out of the rain. A creature comfort, really, this affection for Aizawa Shouta—a creature no one knew you kept hidden in the back laundry room and sneaked scraps.
You’re not stupid. The man has to stay your homeroom teacher for the rest of the year, until graduation. Besides, you did have a sneaky little goal with your crush, though it will probably never come to fruition. It’s not an immediate plan in which you corner him after class to beg for sexual extra credit, no, but it’s a long, onerous, masochistic plot of delayed gratification: sometime down the road after graduation, you’ll casually run into him on a patrol, casually suggest you two share a drink to catch up, and then casually I-miss-you-terribly-sensei-you-deserve-to-sleep-more-oh-wow-your-hands-are-really-big-what-if-I-place-them-right-between-my-legs your way into his heart.
For now, the most you can do is be the best student you can. Yes, Yaoyorozu is most likely always going to beat you in chemistry and some maths, since her quirk relies on her knowledge of those subjects, but you’re positively gruntled and satisfied with your place at the top for humanities, along with trading top spots in other subjects with the same three or four people.
But mostly, you tried to be 1) resourceful and 2) not annoying, because Aizawa dealt with a lot of teacher bullshit, probably.
So, while you knew about stories in which students would seduce their teachers by favours (sexual or not), lingering innuendo, or flashing lacy underwear from their seats, you weren’t going to do that shit. 1) How dumb, 2) how embarrassing, and 3) you didn’t want your (hopefully future!) relationship founded on cliches for student/teacher relationships. How a relationship starts shouldn’t have to be a secret, either, or be something to be ashamed of.
(Because you could just picture your family’s faces at Christmas if you said something like, “Hey, this is my boyfriend, Aizawa; he used to be my teacher, and we started dating after I sucked him off under his desk while he was giving a lesson.”
Although, admittedly, there’s probably no good way to introduce a former teacher as your boyfriend.)
You figured, for now, it was enough to stand out in a quiet way, never outright begging for his attention, yet somehow landing in situations in which you got it. You liked to think that Aizawa appreciated that you read when you finished your classwork early instead of talking to your friends (guiltily activating your cringey not-like-other-girls complex that you tried to suppress), along with being attentive in class in general, and you landed an unexpected advantage in Midnight.
Since your first year’s sports festival, you’ve been her sidekick. Well, first you were her intern, and then you signed on the next school year. It was mostly academic work instead of hero work at this point in her career, but you found you liked it and her. You tagged along to record events and complete evals and rubrics, and running her errands allowed you into the staff room, where Aizawa was often curled up in his office chair or on the couch. And hopefully, Aizawa heard good things about you from Midnight.
Midnight’s current project when not teaching or on active missions was rehabbing female villains. She was easy to trust. They tended to let down their guards around her, eventually, and it fascinated you the way the system treated male and female villains differently—
“Hey,” whispered Mina, hunching forward in her desk to tap you on the shoulder, “You got back from Sakura Grove Rehab with Midnight really late last night. Did something happen with Tainted Love?”
You shot a look towards the front of the classroom, where Aizawa was gripping the podium intensely in an effort to stay standing, and once you garnered he wasn’t paying attention to you (big sigh), you turned slightly in your seat to whisper back. “False alarm,” you said, shaking your head, “She used her emergency buzzer because she heard that BTS released a music video, and she wanted to see it.”
Grinning, Mina nodded. “Normal BTS fan stuff. Is a member her soulmate, or something?”
“Don’t you think she’d be dead by now if she were? Ito said—sorry, Tainted Love said that they’re all simply very easy on the eyes and that she’s a connoisseur of human beauty. But her ass is in trouble right now, because the staff’s pissed they had to break out the emergency procedures for that.”
“I don’t know,” said Mina, fiddling with her earring, “I think that’s completely fair. It’s, uh—girlboss, gaslight, get-to-see-BTS.”
You snorted, covering your nose with the back of your hand. “That’s the wrong order, and you know it—”
“Since you have the energy to talk during a lesson—” Aizawa called towards you, his voice sharp, and your head snapped towards the front of the classroom. “—then I expect you’ll be capable of a higher calibre of effort and example for the class in your stealth presentation today.”
“Absolutely,” you said, recovering and folding your hands on your desk, “I’m ready when everyone else is.”
Aizawa gave a dismissive wave and allowed the class to leave the four minutes early to change and head towards ground beta. You’d already triple-checked that all of your support gear was ready, because it was your day in the rotation to serve as a combat example to the rest of your peers. Your focus for the past month had been on stealth, so you were presenting on your findings—presenting through whatever challenge was posed to you at the hands of one of the faculty.
 Giddy, you headed towards ground beta much more quickly than your friends, who were still getting dressed. Since you’d be presenting on stealth, you had a good idea of which teacher you’d be facing.
Aizawa was waiting at the entrance, himself clad in full gear. You shot him a cheerful wave, which he lazily returned, and you retreated to one of the benches nearby and opened the book you’d brought along.
(You don’t want to aggravate him, and what’s more, if you talk to him before your challenge, you’re going to be thinking about your conversation during it. Aizawa will be more impressed with your performance if you don’t fuck it up due to daydreaming about his cock.)
Making yourself comfortable, you lay down on the bench, holding the book above you to block out the sun.
Aizawa pushed his goggles back into his hair. “You have a book,” he said (asked?) flatly as he trailed towards you.
“You have a sleeping bag,” you said, jerking your head towards the yellow bundle wadded up by the door, “We must both be relaxed about this presentation.”
Crossing his arms, Aizawa carefully leant against the door and squinted down at you. “Do you not see me as a threat?”
You tore your gaze away from your book to look up at him, tilting your head backwards to smile into his scowl. “Should I?”
Kirishima and Tokoyami burst in and broke up the conversation before it turned into something that got you off for weeks.
Once the rest of the class clambered towards ground beta, Aizawa cleared his throat and addressed the class about the challenge; he spoke with his back to you (and a couple of others), since most of the class clumped in one spot.
“Sero’s melee close-combat presentation yesterday will be a tough act to follow, but today is our first presentation on stealth. Bakugou, Aoyama—your stealth presentations won’t be following the same format, but take inspiration from it.” Aizawa stowed his hands in the deep pockets of his jumpsuit and shifted his weight forward slightly, his broad shoulders lost under his capture weapon. “Hagakure and Tokoyami, I specifically want your critique of your peer’s performance today. Be ready to give her advice. I will be the faculty member she is up against, and—” Frowning, Aizawa cut himself off, did a quick head count, and spun in your direction, his hair whipping at the movement.
Seeing you reading over on the bench (which you were still doing in what was hopefully a sexy devil-may-care, fuck-the-police way), Aizawa pinched the bridge of his nose before spreading his palm over both of his eyes, heaving a sigh, and dragging his hand down his face. He then held it out in from of him and curled his fingers to beckon you closer. “C’mon; I know you said you weren’t threatened, but now you’re pushing it.”
You were sunshine; you were ease, and you were pushing it, for some reason. But you were feeling it, so you cheerfully trotted up to Aizawa, in front of whom you halted expectantly and bounced on the balls of your feet, hands holding your book behind your back as you waited for further instruction.
He cleared his throat and snapped, holding out his hand farther to confiscate your book. You shunted it towards him, and when Aizawa took it, your fingers grazed his—your pinkie and ring fingers just barely brushing against his thumb.
And.
And it’s a rickety, staticky, lightning-type thing, this wave of thunder that rushes through you, branching from where you touched him—a two-second, core-shaking rumble that only you can feel.And there’s an electric jolt.
Vibrant pink blossomed from the points of contact, staining the skin like watery ink.
Two seconds. Two seconds compressing what must be years and years of salient moments yet to come, and they—they all had him, Aizawa, in flashes of memories (?) integrating him more and more into your life. And you knew, in that shock and subsequent ooze, how it felt to be pulled into his arms and held like you’re something precious—wrapping around you while he’s half-asleep and acting on instinct, hunching and curling over your back to shield you from a backdrop of  a battlefield—the feeling of you two lying together bare. You heard the crack of his voice in the morning as he nuzzled closer to you in bed, the rumbling vibration when he growled against your skin. Felt a ghost of his fingers digging into your hips as you arched beneath him (rocking, writhing), sucking a small spot on your neck, kissing down your shoulders, your back. A shiver as he trailed his hand down the inside of your thigh. A prolonged kiss to your collarbone. The passage of thunder left your body sore, like live-or-death level adrenaline had just faded. For a moment, your knees were in danger of buckling.
Aizawa must have seen—felt—the same phantom sensations, because once a noise from the class snapped him out of it, he grimaced, tucking your book and the pink-marked hand under his opposite arm.
Ducking your head to stare at your shoes, you took a step back, overheated and too aware that the class was watching.
“Recovery Girl’s office,” Aizawa said, his voice rasping, “Now.”
You bolted.
***
You slumped in the sky-blue plastic chair in the patient area of Recovery Girl’s office, unable to shake the sensation of his arms around you. You shuddered and hunkered over, a wave of misery washing over you as the last vestiges of his warmth (?) faded. Fucking figures that the only time in your life you’ve ever been in someone’s arms is in a goddamn vision and not reality.
On the other hand.
The pads of the two fingers that touched Aizawa were blemished with the same bright pink as that dust you’d inhaled the day Tainted Love’s team had invaded, and the colour wouldn’t rub off on your hero costume when you tried. An evil sort of smile spread across your face.
You jolted in your seat when the door slammed open, the knob banging into the wall, and Aizawa stormed in, shoving one of two clipboards into your lap.
“Quirk incident form,” he spat, a plastic chair scraping against the tile as he yanked it next to (but not too closely to) yours.
You slid the pen out from underneath the clip. “This says it’s a soulmate registry form.”
Aizawa glanced up at you, already a few strokes into writing his name in the first blank. “Tainted Love’s team had utilised her quirk enough before attacking U.A. that a specific form had to be made. Nevertheless,” he said, finishing the kanji for sho with so much pressure that the paper ripped slightly, “it’s a subset of the Quirk Incident Registrar.”
Huh. You supposed you should’ve known about the paperwork, since you’re working with her, but then, you’re dealing with personal rehabilitation, not the bureaucratical aftermath.
Following his lead, you quietly began to fill out your form. Basic stuff, really: name, home address, current address (dorms), quirk, soulmate’s name and quirk…
“How would you describe our inciting soulmate incident? Are you only putting first physical contact, or are you mentioning something about the, uh,” you said, leaning over to see his paper, but he flipped his clipboard up against his chest to hide it from view.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Aizawa, finally looking you in the eye. His tight grip on his pen didn’t dilute the saturation of the pink on his thumb. “And we’re not going to talk about it. You’re not going to tell anyone about this, and I’m not going to tell anyone.”
Oh, he’s repressed repressed. “Not even my mother?”
He shook his head. “Nothing important happened today, and nothing’s going to happen.”
“That’s a shame,” you said, moving onto the next section of the form, “I was already picking out China patterns.”
He flipped his clipboard out enough to continue writing. “Don’t even joke.”
“Hey, it says I need your phone number.”
“Leave that part blank. I’ll fill it out once before turning both of them in.”
That little sneak. “Wow. You really are intent on having nothing to do with me,” you said, sighing, which he echoed.
“Listen,” said Aizawa, running his hand back through his hair to sweep it out of his face, “if you genuinely require an explanation, you don’t deserve to be in school at U.A.”
You crossed your arms. “Try me, sensei.”
Aizawa winced, scrunching his eyes shut. “Don’t call me that. Listen. What I’m about to say does not apply only to me but to teachers in general. No one wants to fu—pursue a romantic relationship with a student because we are tired. Teaching is our job. No one wants to take work home when you don’t have to. You want to have a life outside teaching, and in addition to that, I have hero work.”
“There are lots of books and stuff about teacher-student relationships,” you said.
“Written by deranged maniacs who haven’t been teachers. Sometimes, it’s difficult to see your students as people, let alone the horrific romantic par—God.” Aizawa pinched the bridge of his nose again, his fingers moving the press into his eyes, almost like he wanted to gouge them out. “The only reason a student may be brought up in conversation in a non-school setting would be if that student did something particularly moronic that day. At the end of the individual day, teachers are tired of their students and want to slip back into being an individual instead of an educator.”
You pursed your lips. “I have yet to hear that you personally are tired of specifically me.”
“Let me attempt another approach,” said Aizawa, hunching over to rest his elbows on his knees, steepling his fingers together, “As your teacher, I would have an unfair power over you in a relationship.”
“Hell, yeah, you would,” you said, grinning.
Aizawa turned his head away, pressing his mouth into his shoulder. “I’m not going to engage with you if you keep making comments like that.”
You nodded even though he couldn’t see you, aware you were getting yourself in deeper shit the more you opened your mouth. “I wouldn’t want you to propose in Recovery Girl’s office, anyway.”
It took him a moment, while you waited by scribbling a doodle of your cat onto the bottom margin of your form, but Aizawa genuinely let out a hiss as he snapped towards you, his teeth gritted as his eyes flashed scarlet, hair flying upwards in an instant.
“You can’t make those sorts of quips around anyone else—at all. Nothing is going to—” He seemed to notice that you’d shrunken in your seat, away from him, your hands held up while you let the clipboard fall to the ground, and he released his quirk, mildly startled that he’d activated it on impulse. He settled back into his own cold, plastic chair and sank his chin into his capture weapon.
“I’m sorry,” you said, quiet and subdued, “Joking about stuff is how I handle it.”
“No,” he said evenly, stooping to pick up your clipboard and pen, “I knew that already. That’s how you show you understand the material in class discussions. I should’ve taken that into account.”
He held out the clipboard, pinching it by the edge. You won’t touch each other, this way.
You took it and clicked your pen, scanning down the document to where you left off. “There’s this checkbox I wanted to ask you about.”
“What checkbox—oh,” Aizawa said, his voice faltering.
Near the bottom. A single, small line and box, for the weight it held: do you want this form to double as your marriage registration?
You crossed your legs to prop one ankle over your knee and tilted your clipboard away from his line of vision. You checked it before he even answered.
“Yeah,” you said, proceeding to shade in the entire box, “Do you—”
His scowl cut you off. “Leave that blank, too.”
“Of course,” you said, drawing a couple of hearts around the inked-in box before moving on.
You finished filling it out before he did, and when he set his pen aside, he pushed on his knees to stand with a soft grunt, taking your clipboard underneath his without caring to glance over it.
“All right. The rest of class has been joined the training session that All Might was monitoring for Class B, and given the circumstances—” His eyes fell to your stained fingers. “—you’ll have to make up your stealth presentation at a later date with a different faculty member. I’ll have someone else grade your work from now on, so you won’t have to worry about my grading you more harshly because of this.”
Aizawa waited for you to nod, and after, he took a step towards the door. He ducked his head for a moment before turning back to you, saying your name under his breath. “I’m serious when I say that you can neither tell anyone about our soulmate bond nor do anything about it.”
Swallowing, you slowly stood up from your seat. “I don’t know how well I can do that, Aizawa-sensei, but I can promise that I’ll do my best not to trouble you. I haven’t been troubling you for the past three years, have I?”
“Not exactly.” Aizawa narrowed his eyes, his shoulders tensing enough that his mouth disappeared underneath his capture weapon. “Why do you ask?”
Okay. You can do this. You’re fine. You’re normal about it. You held up your hands, as if gesturing that he should brace himself. “Because that’s, uh, how long I’ve—” Been in love with you—no! Stop that. “—had feelings for you.”
Grimacing, Aizawa pinched the bridge of his nose. He’s done that more in the past hour than you’ve seen in the past semester. “Holy shit.”
“Please don’t—please don’t feel any fucking pressure whatsoever,” you said quickly, trying to backtrack, “I’ve been dealing with this by myself for so long that I’m good at it, so please don’t, uh. I mean, I—I live in my head; I live in my books and stories, so it’s fine and good and tolerable that I’ve never been in a relationship or kissed or anything; I’m used to it, so you don’t have to worry; I’ve been handling this by—”
Aizawa exhaled very carefully, his chest heaving in a controlled way as he dug his fist into his eye, rubbing it. “Are you telling me you’re a virgin?”
“Ah, ha. Ha,” you said, scratching the back of your neck, “Sorry if that’s too much information; that wasn’t the point—”
“You’re transferring to Class B,” said Aizawa, and he spun on his heel and sped out of Recovery Girl’s office.
Huffing, you seized the clipboards and ran after him. “Wait up,” you said, shoving the door to the stairs open after he nearly closed it on your face, “I was just trying to let you know I am open to a relationship if you want it, but I’m more than fine—” Liar, spat the voice in your head as you scrambled down the staircase after him, your footsteps reverberating against the grey-cinderblocked walls. “—if you don’t want anything to happen, but if you—”
Aizawa turned sharply to glare in your direction as you caught up to him, and when you skibbled to a stop on the same stair, he said under his breath, “Quiet.” His gaze followed how your hair fluttered with each of his harsh syllables, so he took another stair down to distance you. “Anyone on the stairs could hear you,” he said, resigned.
He crossed his arms, and you slanted the clipboards away from your chest for him to take them.
“You really didn’t know I’ve liked you?” you asked as he took them, “All this time?”
“It’s never crossed my mind,” he said, and he continued down the stairs at fast pace but one you could keep up with, “Like I said, students are a different category of person once you’re a teacher.”
Biting your lip, you followed closely enough to keep your voice down. “You never knew. That’s comforting,” you said, and after a few more stairs, you grinned. “Could that count as my stealth presentation?”
***
You would think that more was supposed to happen, now that you’re soulmates. More conversation, at least. Perhaps a conversation.
Instead, a lingering, bruising feeling branded your chest, as if you’d been kicked the night before, and often a stifling, smothering pressure weighed down on your shoulders until you could be in the same room as Aizawa again. Sometimes, it felt like steel marbles were playing pinball in your chest, the aches where they hit gnawing and settling into your bones.
(Your cat, your chocolate-point baby Dango, has been upset with the hours you’ve been sleeping away the pain instead of playing with her. Luckily, Kouda has been borrowing her some afternoons. You don’t know what he does with her, but you do appreciate very much being able to tell Dango, via Kouda, that you love her very much.
Kouda also has the advantage of being subtle when you lend him your cat, because cats aren’t allowed in the dorms. You’ve been secretly caring for Dango for over a year now, so it’s as if you, Kouda, and Shinsou, who brought Dango catnip treats, were partners in crime.)
In class, Aizawa interacted with you as little as possible, usually asking Present Mic to grade your assignments in his stead. He didn’t act any different towards you from the perspective of the rest of the class, you supposed, except you made fewer jokes and he fewer retorts. Instead, you kept your head down, reading or working on your Sakura Grove data for Midnight, and you were skimming by.
But sometimes you’d be doing Midnight’s paperwork after finishing an assignment early, hunched over your desk, when your skin prickles and the emptiness in your chest wavers for a moment, and you’d look towards Aizawa—either slumping over his desk with his chin on his palm or almost concealed inside his sleeping bag behind the podium—eyes half-lidded and boring into you.
When you look away, it’s as if he’s the one kicking you in the chest.
***
The Saturday after a particularly painful school day for you (aside from your fucking up in a combat exercise, Aizawa had been going down the line of those who’d participated to give individual feedback, and he skipped over you without hesitation), you’d planned to spend all day huddled underneath layers and layers of covers and throw blankets in bed as yet another snowstorm swept across Mustafu, but you jerked awake, completely fucking frigid, before the sun had truly risen. You blindly fumbled over the edge of the bed for any or all of your six billion blankets and felt none of them, and, making a miserable whimper as you cracked open an eye, you peered over the side of the bed.
No blankets on floor.
No…no little bedside rug.
Jesus, did you somehow kick your bed away from the wall during the night? Wait, where’s all the shit you have all over your walls this isn’t your room.
Something was pressed against your back.
Your life was over. You’re totally getting expelled from U.A. for sneaking into your teacher’s room. It’s got to be his—holding your breath, you slowly peeked over your shoulder before snapping back towards the bare wall. A flash of that yellow sleeping bag, even in bed—it’s Aizawa’s room, all right, and his back was pressed against yours, with only your sleepshirt and his sleeping bag keeping your skin from touching (unless he’s wearing a shirt, which, in that case, get sluttier, Aizawa).
In the case that somehow appearing in his bed overnight made him detest you, you elected to slither out of his living space without his ever knowing. You wouldn’t have any answers for him, even if he caught you, really, at least not this early in the morning.
In the vexingly slow process of getting out of bed without waking him up, you had the time to look around, not that there was that much to see; it was all greyish and sparse and didn’t really feel like a home at all or that he spent much time here, with the most significant pieces in his bedroom being the shoddily painted radiator (in heaven, everything is fine) and a desk with both a PC and a propped-up tablet on it, with some papers spread in front of them. But the layout of his flat appeared to mirror another part of the dormitory, so you bet the door to leave his area entirely was through the next room, and you’d be home-free.
What caught your attention, though, was a well-loved cat tower, with one of the dangling mice for the cat to bat at torn off the string and resting on the middle level. Aizawa must have a cat. Funny, since that’s illegal in the dorms. As you finally slinked off the bed entirely, you resolved to locate the cat to kiss its little forehead before slipping out of his room entirely. Cat detours are allowed.
Walking out of his bedroom, you first were hit by the pungent scent of brewing coffee and then by a cold wave of defeat. Across the kitchen counter, Aizawa’s back was towards you while he fossicked through different brands of sugar packets.
You could’ve punted that empty sleeping bag out the window.
You took one step towards the exit before he spoke, his voice gravelly from sleep: “Do you want to offer me an explanation before I write you up?”
Fucking stealth heroes. “I don’t have one,” you said, shoulders falling slack while trudging into his kitchenette—with an ulterior motive of seeing more of his place before being removed permanently. “I’m—I don’t know how I got here. You didn’t—?”
“Of course not,” said Aizawa, ripping open two differently branded packets and upturning them into his coffee. He turned to face you as he took the first sip, and you wished you could say that his eyes drank you in hungrily, or whatever, but you supposed that you have to get sluttier, too: you were just as completely and unalluringly covered as he was in his Purple Revolution sweatshirt and pants. “You don’t have any ideas from working at Sakura Grove?”
“Uh, no,” you said, “I’m not encouraged to talk to I—Tainted Love. It’s more like bringing her food and filling out paperwork for her craft requests. I am very much the middleman. I can—”
“Don’t.” Aizawa held out his free hand. “I’ll ask Nemuri.”
Nemuri. You’ve known, you supposed, that he was on a given-name basis with Midnight. You resolved to get him to call you by your first name, too. And then the thought came that you might be ruining something romantic between them? Based on every interaction you’ve had with either of them, you had no indication of romance, but Aizawa had said that teachers aim to have very private lives. Yikes. You elected to slough it off for now, because introducing feeling jealous of your mentor whom you admired very much would only complicate the situation more. You could linger on jealousy once you figured out what the hell was happening.
“Right,” you said, pulling at a hangnail, “What if this happens again?”
“We’ll put a stop to it. Simple as that.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “We’ll be able to prevent this once we have more information. Until then, just handle it maturely and without fuss.”
“And here I was hoping we could cuddle,” you said, heaving a huge, fake sigh as Aizawa narrowed his eyes, and you pushed yourself up to sit on the counter, swinging your legs. “This is the part where you offer me coffee.”
“Get out of my apartment.”
“C’mon, Aizawa. Or I’ll spread that you have an illegal cat in the dorms.”
Aizawa hesitated just as he brought the lip of his mug to his mouth. “I don’t have a cat,” he said before taking another drink.
“Come off of it; I saw the cat tower.”
“I don’t have—”
You nearly jumped out of your skin when something prodded your thigh; a lanky, tuxedo-patterned cat had sneaked up to headbutt you before you could notice, and it climbed onto your lap to loaf. It’d be nice if your own cat were this friendly.
“You need to be more aware of your surroundings,” grumbled Aizawa as he poured your coffee.
You flipped over the cat’s tag, the light catching on the rose-gold heart. “You named your cat Konpeito?”
“Eri named it.” Aizawa set the mug next to you instead of giving it to you directly—stubborn bastard, not wanting to touch you again. “Don’t make a scene when you return the mug.”
“You’re kicking me out before I even start drinking?” You tentatively gripped the handle and maneuvered the cat off your lap.
“You keep asking these questions that have obvious answers.” He gave a dismissive wave. “Don’t make too much noise on the way out; Eri’s in the next dorm over, and I don’t want you to wake her.”
***
You woke up in Aizawa’s bed again less than a week later. You’d had a dream that you’d been freezing, and the reason had been, once again, you were, since apparently Aizawa depended on his sleeping bag instead of blankets. You allowed yourself a moment of savouring the sensation of his back against yours (for real, this time, since the sleeping bag was snoring) before slipping out.
The third time, you left him a note to tell him to get a damn blanket, or else you’ll bring one of your own to keep there.
You idly took notes in Present Mic’s class, words coming slowly on paper while he prattled on. How come it was always you who was showing up in his bed? How come you always went to Aizawa, and he never came to you?
Your eyes flicked up to what Present Mic was writing on the board in skewed, thin handwriting. Had Aizawa told him the specifics? Present Mic had to know something, since he was grading your work, but Mic was also Aizawa’s friend—a luxury you didn’t have in this soulmate situation. Midnight would also be a strategic person to tell, from Aizawa’s perspective, but she hadn’t given any hint she was aware.
You drew a heart in the margins, and then you gave it legs. You made it walk off the page and onto the desk, colouring it in by crosshatching. If only you could get up and leave. Class without Aizawa dragged nowadays; where did he spend his time during school on break? Probably huddled in his sleeping bag in a slant of sunlight like a damn cat, maybe out on the grounds where he couldn’t be found. Or maybe he fucked off to a gym closet where the mats were; they’d be cosier than sleeping directly on the floor. And you could cosy up next to him, pressed up against each other in that snug—
You slammed into a wall of solid muscle, papers flying and tea spilling over the tile to seep into the rug in the teachers’ lounge, and you sprawled on your knees in the midst of it in your haste to get the fuck off of Aizawa before he could say anything, hissing as you tentatively raised your hand from the wet, broken cup. Despite the slivers of pottery in your palm, you one-handedly fumbled for the papers that had been dropped—third year evals, now crimped and tinted a yellow-green.
Aizawa took the papers, tapped the bottom to align them, and gave them a firm shake to flick off excess tea, and when you started to sweep the broken cup into your hands, he stopped you.
“Go to the faculty bathroom,” he said, pointing to the connecting lavatory, “I’ll be there in a minute with a first-aid kit.”
You had a moment to yourself in the clean, warmly-lit bathroom, so you pushed yourself up on the green marble by the farthest sink and crossed your legs, ensuring your shoes didn’t dirty anything. The pain’s setting in, but you won’t cry, not in front of him, and you’re crying, but just a bit, right? Fuck.
At the sound of the door, you hastily wiped your nose with your sleeve and did your best to look stoic, like pottery in your hand happened every day. But your eyes were too watery to even see the tweezers as he dug them out of the kit.
Standing in front of the sink, Aizawa clicked the tweezers twice (carcinisation, baby!) and held out his other hand.
You looked at it. “What do you want me to do with that?”
He said your name through a sort of scoff, which would’ve been way hotter if it had been your given name and also in bed. “Just give me your hand.”
Tears ran down your face in an overflow. “You wanna touch me?” you asked, sniffing.
“Fucking hell,” Aizawa said under his breath, “At least I know you’re all right if you’re still joking.” He shifted his jaw, scanning your palm. “If you’d rather have it at an uncomfortable angle over the sink—”
“No! No, I wanna—I wanna touch you,” you said, and you lifted your shaky, injured hand for Aizawa to hold steady. The instant his fingers cradled the back of your hand, everything fell into place: touching him was like breathing in cool, crisp air on a clear night or the smoky kindling of a fire that never goes out, like feeling sunshine on bare shoulders on a spring day with freshly cut grass, like walking into your childhood home’s kitchen when someone’s baked chocolate-chip cookies, like breathing in, like breathing, and—
You lifted your hand just a hair from his hand.
You have a stopped-up nose.
You glanced at Aizawa, whose lips were parted, his chest visibly heaving underneath his baggy jumpsuit. “Did you…?”
He ran his tongue over his lower lip. “I need to get the pottery out of your hand as soon as possible.”
Bracing yourself, you rested your hand in his again, and that irresistible warmth swept over you again. He’s got to be feeling it, too, so why isn’t he reacting? You’re embarrassing yourself, so why can’t he?
“Were you trying to teleport to me earlier?” he asked (distracting you from the sensation of each shard being plucked from your skin), head bent over the sink and your hand.
“No, I never—I don’t intend anything. But now that we’ve seen it, we at least know it’s not a gradual thing. Instantaneous and painless. Well,” you said, nodding towards your hand.
“Nor, I see, is it limited to my bed,” he said, shifting over when you uncrossed your legs, “What were you doing before the jump?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. I was in class.” You dangled your legs off the side to get closer to him (for medical purposes of course), and wow, Aizawa smelled incredible—probably; your stuffy nose wasn’t doing you any favours—what the hell kind of soap did he use?
 “Were you thinking of anything in particular? The bond?”
That’s got to be pine, and there’s something earthy mixed in. You really needed to blow your nose (Can you even name earthy scents? [Dirt?] You’re not up-to-date with masculine scents; you’ll have to find his deodorant next time you wake up in his room). “I was—” You cut yourself off with a hiss as he pulled the largest shard out. “I’m fine. It’s not that bad, really. Keep going. I don’t really remember the specifics of what I was thinking about, but I—” You cut yourself off again, this time with heavy realisation. “Goddammit. I was feeling the acute loneliness hollow out my chest again, and I was wanting to—be near you. Which explains why I’ve been teleporting to you instead of you coming to me.”
“It explains nothing,” said Aizawa, and he set the tweezers next to the shards on the edge of the sink and flipped on the faucet, guiding your hand under the water and reaching for the gauze.
“Yes, it does,” you said, openly wiping your nose on the back of your sleeve, because fuck it, this man didn’t care about you, so be gross around him. “If the teleporting is triggered by intense longing to be close to the other person, then it makes total sense that I’d be the only one teleporting, since I’m the only one who has feelings.”
“It explains nothing,” he said again, drying off your hand, “It’s only a possible contributing factor to the teleportation. Maybe it has to do with location, or timing, or action. It’s highly improbable that this physical action was caused by thought alone.” Aizawa ripped off a long strip of gauze and began to wrap it around your palm. “Don’t feel like this is a weakness on your part. I’ll probably teleport to you before the month is out.”
You let your fingers relax, your pinkie falling enough to graze his own hands as he bandaged yours. The more skin-to-skin contact you had, the more serene you felt—or maybe it was the injury adrenaline wearing off. Either way, you might fall asleep on the bathroom counter. “My bed isn’t big enough for two people.”
“That’s okay,” said Aizawa, and he slowed at the final wrap-around, holding it in place until he found the metal clips in the first aid box. “I’ve gotten very used to sleeping in odd places.”
When he stepped away to pack up the kit, you fucking whimpered on impulse at the loss of physical contact, and he froze, stuck in the motion of clicking the box shut.
“Sorry,” you said, sniffing.
His jaw tensing, Aizawa shook his head. “You should go to bed early tonight. Don’t overexert yourself.”
***
Yeah, except it’s Friday, and Jirou has been arranging this girls’ night for two weeks now.
Apparently, the karaoke bar you’re going to overheats really easily, since it’s in a refurbished building that used to be something-or-other; you’re not really listening to the explanation but were more concerned with having to wear summer clothes while it’s snowing out. The past two weeks have been strategic outfit layering plans from the lot of you, most of which have devolved into being silly and impractical (ranging from “I’ll just take off my skin and hang around in my bones when we get there” to “I will walk out of this dorm in a sleeping bag over my underwear” [the latter reminding you of Aizawa, in a pleasing, warm thought that you had to keep to yourself]).
Either way. Twisting over your shoulder, you strained to tuck in your bra so that it wouldn’t show from a mostly backless spaghetti-strap that you ended up borrowing from Uraraka, and once it was kind of hidden, you stuck your tongue into your cheek. It didn’t really sit right with you to be going out in this shit in this icy weather. You’d be a lot warmer and probably a lot more content if you peeled off these Best Jeanist jean shorts (from the Moulded to Your Ass line, unofficially titled) and crawled into your pyjamas and bed.
In the corner of your eye, your bed beckoned, with all of its blankets and stuffed animals (for when you just need to hold a little guy). What if you ditched the outing and—no. Stop that. You’ll be warm soon enough.
But with an abrupt lurch towards your bed, you found yourself spluttering into the scalding spray of a showerhead, water dribbling into your mouth between gasps and sloshing down your body. Blindly, you took a step backwards out of the cascade, but a flattened palm on the bare skin of your back stopped you before you could move farther.
“Don’t.”
The water still gushed and flowed over you, eyes scrunched tight and heart pounding. The hand on your back maximised the space between the two of you, but with the pathetic size of the shower stall, his body heat still seeped into your skin, complemented by rising steam. There’s a quiet grunt when he knocked against the frosted glass door; his shoulders must be wide enough for that to happen frequently (you swallow against a dry throat, because the man could hold all of you). If he wanted to, Aizawa, the way he has you now, could press his lips to the crown of your head, keeping his mouth there as his eyes flutter shut.
Instead, Aizawa was reaching up to tilt the showerhead away, giving you a good face-full of his bicep, and your eyes followed its movement (his jumpsuit did an excellent job of concealing a fucking powerfully built form), straining as he twisted the showerhead and relaxing as it fell back into place at his side—
“Eyes up,” said Aizawa, using his first two fingers to guide your chin back to face your front, where they lingered for a moment to tap against your jaw to ensure you’d stay there.
(With the shock of getting wet and the heat of his hand flat against your back [still there, still flooding you with an intoxicating headiness], you’d been entirely too overwhelmed to even consider catching a glimpse of his dick.)
“Aizawa-sensei—”
“Cut that out,” he said, huffing, “You’re doing this on purpose.”
For once, you’re out of the loop. But since you’re in his shower, you could take a moment to locate his soap to put a name to what he smells like and perhaps get a look at his cock along the way. Only his washcloth hung over the faucet in front of you, so you moved to turn slightly as you spoke, ducking your head to scan for shampoo bottles: “Earlier today you were saying it wasn’t my—”
Hissing, Aizawa slid two fingers through one of your belt loops and yanked, jerking you backwards into his hips for an instant before establishing that space between you again—pulling you by the belt loop blocked your view of his cock, and his hand on your back kept you from touching him in any meaningful way. But he was still as close as he could be without touching you otherwise, his breath as searing as the steam as he grumbled into your ear: “Bad girl.”
The water splashing at your feet wasn’t so hot anymore.
Aizawa tugged at your belt loop again (for a moment, when a swish of cool air washed down your ass, you worried that he’d look) and kept you in front of himself as he turned sideways to face the shower door, which he (fuck!) lifted his hand from your back to prod open.
Light flushed into the stall, and he scoffed. “I knew it,” Aizawa said, bitterness creeping into his voice, and he unlooped his finger from your belt loop to tap the fabric firmly, nudging you forward.
“Knew what?” you asked, spinning on your heel the moment you were out of the shower, water flying, and Aizawa ducked behind the frosted glass with a defeated expression. “Right,” you said, grabbing the thick towel on the toilet and tossing it to him.
“Check your fingertips.”
Tearing your gaze from his frosted-glass impression of wrapping the towel around his waist, you held up your hands. “They look fine. My bandages are soaked, though, so I’ll have to redo—oh, okay, fuck. My soulmark is gone.” You’re not going to cry in front of him, and definitely not twice in one day, because that’d be—
“Sensei,” you said, choking up and curling your shaky fingers into an even shakier fist, “Sensei, my soulmark is—I don’t want my soulmark to be gone, fucking, I—” On accident, you slammed your elbow into the glass door when you were trying to—please get closer (so goddammit, if your eyes water, it’s from hitting your funny bone). “I don’t want my soulmark to disappear; I adore you and want—”
“It hasn’t disappeared,” Aizawa said softly as he stepped out of the shower, gripping his towel in addition to the firm knot, and he pointed behind you towards the mirror.
While Aizawa eased down onto the closed toilet to towel-dry his hair, you took the four, wet steps to the sink and wiped off the clouded steam. No difference in your reflection.
When you shot a baffled look towards Aizawa, he gently raised his eyebrows and his finger to twirl it once. So, you turned around to look over your shoulder at your back, where his pink handprint put all body glitter to shame in how well it reflected the overhead light and in how quickly it was spreading (ink leaking outside of the handprint in watery bursts before slowing, never detracting from the shape of his hand, though the ink seemed to rise more than fall, especially near his middle and ring fingers between your shoulder blades).
He was holding up his newly pink palm, wiggling his fingers in your direction.
You returned to him (really to stand on the bathmat, since you’re drenching his floor) and raised your hand to touch him, first glancing at him for his approval. Aizawa looked at your hand and back at you, and after he wetted his lips, he nodded and got back to towel-drying his hair.
You hesitated. Is this really so nonchalant, so trivial to him? It’s everything to you.
You dropped your hand to your side, mouth twitching. “What shampoo do you fucking use.”
“Hm?” He didn’t even look at you.
“You smell fucking good all the time. What’s. What scent is your soap,” you were saying, in the same, flat tone you’d use to argue with your landlord about finally fixing your leaky roof after two years.
Aizawa squeezed water out of the last of his hair and spoke in that infuriatingly gravelly, just-woke-up voice of his. “It’s sandalwood.”
Sandalwood. That’s earthy, you guessed. “Then where’s the pine come from?”
“That would be the aftershave,” he said, folding the hair towel in half twice and setting it aside, “You were going to touch me, but now you’re upset. Care to explain?”
You plucked at your wet shirt before crossing your arms over it. “Does this matter to you? The soulmate thing.”
“You matter to me,” he said, standing with a quiet grunt, “Let’s get you reasonably dry before going back to your dorm.”
“Oh, shut up with that teacher bullshit,” you said, following him to a cabinet, “You care about me through the lens of a student, because everyone in this fucking dorm is your—fuck, I’m. You’re insufferable.”
“I can’t lend you clothes, but I should have enough large towels to keep you warm.” Aizawa reached for the top shelf, with beach towels. “However, I recommend against going out tonight with the rest of your friends.” He handed you a new-looking, blue-pineappled towel.
You angrily wrapped it around you, pissed that you instantly felt better. “Oh, is it because you’ve gotten me wet—” Aizawa draped another towel around your shoulders, tucking it in a little to secure it. “—and going out into this fucking ass iceberg weather would get me sick—” Another towel, this one with Present Mic’s radio show logo on it. “—and then I’d have to miss one of your precious days of class—”
“Is that what you want me to say?” He arranged two more towels around you at once, tying the outermost one in a knot. “Or are you waiting to hear that I want you to hide away while you bear my mark?” He tugged your drapery down a smidge so that you could use your arms a bit—at the least, use your key to your room. “When in reality,” he said, taking a step backward and appraising his handiwork, “I want you to be comfortable and content. And I don’t think you’d be either if you went out after this, even if you got ready again.”
Goddammit.
“And you’ve had a long day with strange revelations. You have a new injury. Going to bed for the night will facilitate healing. Your body will have more time to process the day.”
Groaning, you said, “Fuck you for being right.”
“Thanks.”
Since you hadn’t touched him earlier, you took the opportunity to clonk your forehead against his chest (dense muscle was evidently comfy). The soulmark warmth blossomed throughout your body from the spot, and you took your time to appreciate it, taking a couple of unhurried breaths against his skin, dry save for some stray running droplets.
Aizawa sighed, the planes of his chest rising and falling under your close and thirsty scrutiny. “This counts, y’know. As staying up late.” If you hadn’t seen him put his hand on your arm, you wouldn’t’ve known, due to the thickness of the towels. “I told you to go to bed.”
You blearily looked up at him. “Take me there, then.”
After a moment, Aizawa said, “I have to feed my cat,” and he opened the bathroom door to escape. Before he left, he spun back around, and you would’ve sworn he was fighting a smile, if you hadn’t known how he felt about you.
“But first,” he said, “let me fix that forehead situation of yours.”
***
Picking up the folders from the office mailbox, you flipped out the flag for read/empty and trailed back to the office space that you and Midnight shared at Sakura Grove, idly waving to some co-workers as you flipped through the files. Pushing the door open with your foot, you dropped the folders onto Midnight’s desk and hurried over to lift the shaking electric kettle from the heat, since Midnight was too absorbed into her patient evaluation at which she was typing away.
You poured the boiling water the round teabag, watched it rise to the top of Midnight’s teacup, and bit back a cry—you clutched the chilled windowsill to stay standing, struck by an overwhelming dizziness that blacked out the edges of your vision and crept to darken it entirely; a bowling ball has just hit your chest and dropped to your toes, the ache reverberating through your veins as you caved and doubled over, nausea settling into your gut.
Through the dots clouding your vision, you barely make out Midnight stretching her arms over her head.
These attacks have been happening more and more. If Aizawa can have a friend in the know, so can you.
“Kayama-sensei,” you managed to croak, but she didn’t hear you.
You tried again, and she turned, her expression drooping when she saw you. “Is the tea that bad?”
Eventually, Midnight helped you into your seat across from hers with your own cup of tea, the pain draining away in the process of vague explanation.
“So, you genuinely think you’re starting to die because your soulmate won’t acknowledge you romantically. Easy solution in sight,” she said, picking her teacup up by her fingertips to breathe in the steam, “Just pick out some nice lingerie—you can use my sponsor discount for Wacoal—and arch your back when you lie in his bed for him to find. I can give you some tips on how to suck—”
“Kayama-sensei,” you said, your vision finally back to normal, “You do not understand how much I can’t do that.”
Her tongue flicked into her cup, testing the heat. “I’ll bite. Why not?”
“My soulmate is, um.” You frowned into your tea. “I’ve liked my soulmate for a long, long time. Before the soulmate stuff existed.”
Midnight ran her tongue over her lips, the corners quirking upwards. “So? All the more reason to make your feelings known and emphasised, now that you have an excuse for a legitimate relationship. Since he already knows about how you feel, you should keep trying to seduce him. All men crack eventually.”
“He won’t accept a lousy attempt at seduction, because—aside from I have no clue how to do that, I don’t—he’s, uh…” You trailed off, took a swig of tea instead of finishing, and ended up choking a bit at the heat.
“Yes? What’s the juicy detail you’re reluctant to share? Is he married? Is he a public figure? Is he too much older or younger than you?”
Narrowing your eyes, you asked, “Do you already know? Are you just making me say it?”
Tight-lipped, Midnight made a loose, dismissive gesture and moved to get back to her patient file.
“Fine. Fine! If anyone can help me with this, it’s you, because it’s—goddamn,” you said, deflating and sinking down into your seat, “It’s fucking Aizawa-sensei, okay? My soulmate is my stupid homeroom teacher.”
“Congratulations,” said Midnight, saving the document and shutting down the computer, “You have earned the right to call me by my given name for being so honest.” She spun in her chair to give you her full attention. “So. Shouta.”
“Did you know already? Were you just—”
“I had my suspicions but no concrete evidence,” she said, holding up her hand, “Just some observations from watching you for the past three years.” Tilting her head, she adjusted her glasses before lifting her cup to her mouth again. “Now, the reason why you can’t just seduce him is crystal clear now. I submit that you could start going to bed in skimpier clothes in the event you teleport to his apartment again, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Shouta’s got a steel will. He’s not going to violate that student-teacher professional relationship.”
“I know,” you said, slumping so far down in your seat that your ass was falling off of it, your chin touching your chest, “but if I’m in pain from not being with him, he probably is, too. And if he won’t acknowledge me romantically, I wanna know if there’s something I can do to alleviate the pain that we’re both feeling. He shouldn’t be distracted from his work because of it.”
“That’s exactly what I want to hear.” Midnight jabbed a finger in your direction. “Starting today, you’re promoted. You’re going to be Tainted Love’s primary monitor.”
“What?” You shot up in your seat. “But I haven’t—I haven’t even had a proper conversation with her before—”
“But she’s used to having you around,” Midnight said evenly, opening her top desk drawer, “To her, you’re in a position of authority but not a threat. You’ve seen how she likes to talk, anyway, and you’re in a perfect position to find out more schematics of how her quirk works on the individual level.” Midnight smiled and handed you Ito’s folder. “Plus, she can’t do anything more to you, right? You’ve already got a hell of a soulmate.”
“Okay,” you said, hesitantly taking her file to clutch it to your chest, “So, you just want me to talk to her? Try to solve my problems?”
“Yeah. And anything you find out about her quirk that she hasn’t shared so far—because she hasn’t exactly shared much past the first interrogation—is welcome intelligence. Record anything new. Keep Ito happy. You’ll be golden. I know you’re more than capable.”
“Funny,” you said, flipping through the file and joining Midnight as she stood, “This feels planned. Got anything else motivating you?”
“Besides a perverse desire to see my friend and my sidekick get together?” Midnight grabbed her whip from the hook on the side of her desk. “I was going to assign you this, anyway. Ito isn’t a threat anymore, and I need to focus on preparing for Serendipity’s arrival next week from St. Philomena’s. Even the airline we finally convinced to transport her has backed out, so I’m scrambling to bribe another.”
That had slipped your mind—Serendipity was being transferred to Sakura Grove for rehabilitation, mostly because no one else wanted to house the most potently dangerous female villain in the Americas. “Understandable,” you said, holding open the door for Midnight to follow closely behind, “When do I start?”
***
Fifteen minutes later, you were setting a tray with tea and powdered thumbprint-cookies in front of Ito at her desk in her room. She raised a sharp, white eyebrow at how the dishes clattered at your shaky handling, but she nodded in thanks and turned back to her book. You guessed you were lingering awkwardly by the door a bit too obviously, so she rolled her eyes and set her book upside-down on the desk.
“You’re my new handler, right?” she asked, scratching under her eye.
“That’s me,” you said, hands folded tightly in front of you, “Midnight says you cleared stage five, so you’re safe to be delegated off to me. I have your stage six schedule printed out—”
“But why are you still here? Everyone usually leaves as soon as possible.”
“I’m the only staff member immune to your quirk,” you said, sliding her schedule out of her file.
“Immune.” Ito grinned and crossed her legs. “That’s interesting. How do you know that?”
Well, Midnight said to be honest in order to get honesty from Ito. You sucked in through your teeth. “I’m only immune because you’ve already given me a soulmate. I was the, uh, student you landed on when you attacked U.A.”
Scrunching up her face, Ito scanned you from head to foot, and when she finally stopped at your chest, she nodded. “Ah. I remember you. You’ve got good tits, kiddo,” she said, reaching for her tea, “Be proud of ‘em. You allowed to tell me how it’s going?”
You glanced behind you at the door, pretending to be considering the trouble of talking to her, and when you prodded it shut with your foot, Ito’s grin stretched all the way across her face, her teeth cutting into her lower lip.
“I’ve been desperate to talk to you,” you said, dragging the extra chair closer to hers, “My soulmate is being a little bitch.”
“I like you better than Doc Kim already,” said Ito, and she took a noisy slurp of her tea. “Spill it.”
“I need your advice on what to do about the pain.”
“You found your soulmate already? Then you shouldn’t be feeling any,” she said, shrugging.
“No, I need you to tell me about what to do about the pain. I don’t know if he’s feeling it, but it’s fucking killing me, and he won’t do anything about the soulmate stuff because he doesn’t like me—”
“Back up.” Ito slammed her cup on the tray, spilling tea. “You’re not making any sense. Start over. Tell me about your soulmate.”
Groaning, you buried your face in your hands, leaning back in your chair until your back popped. “He’s my professor, and I’ve liked him for years. Since I met him, pretty much.”
“Hot. He got a sensei kink?” She shoved two thumbprint cookies in her mouth at once, and she nudged the plate in your direction.
“Eh,” you said, weighing your options, “It’s possible. But he doesn’t—”
“Nice. So, he says he’s not gonna do anything while you’re his student, which means he’s burning with shame and sexy, sexy doubts about how good of a man he is. Always sexy to bring a man to his moral and literal knees. Are you wearing fun things to class?”
“We have a uniform.”
“Shame,” she said, gulping down more tea, and then she cocked her head. “Unless.”
“No.”
“Spoilsport,” said Ito, gesturing towards the cookies again. This time you took one, pinching it absentmindedly in your lap. “I think I want to go on my daily walk around the courtyard. Is there room for that in my new schedule?”
You checked it. “I’ll make it work.”
Minutes later, you and Ito were bundled up and strolling the perimeter of Sakura Grove’s courtyard, full of other in-patients in team recreation in the middle and in private conversation on some of the benches.
“I’m still not with you,” Ito was saying as she stared up into the bare limbs of a sakura tree, “I don’t understand why you’re feeling the soulmate pain. It shouldn’t be affecting you, since you know and have met your soulmate.”
You huffed, breath visible. “Well, if you don’t know, then I’m lost. But if he’s not going to complain about the pain, then I suppose I’ll just have to deal with it. I like him too much to bitch about it to him, I guess.”
Ito shoved more of her long, white hair underneath her pom-pom hat. “Then it’s probably the same for him, with him liking you too much to bother you about it.”
“Nah.” You stepped into one of her footprints, the snow crunching under your weight. “He doesn’t like me, and I don’t think he ever will, since once a student, always a stu—”
Ito’s head snapped towards you, cheeks rosy from the cold. “What did you say?”
“My soulmate doesn’t like me, because—”
“You said that earlier, too,” said Ito, and she looked around for other monitors before jerking her head for you to follow her. She guided you in a casual-but-not trail away from any doors or eavesdroppers, and she said in a hushed voice, “You do know that my quirk doesn’t assign soulmates randomly, right?”
“What the hell? Say more right now,” you said, taking smaller steps to stay closer to her.
“Oh, well, that’s news for me. I figured they’d captured my team’s notes on my quirk by now. Okay, well, report this, or not,” said Ito, jabbing a finger towards you, “How much do you know about probability? Yeah, yeah, more math—yes, soulmates usually to inhale the same cloud of my quirk to be considered soulmates, but there are other factors, too. See, you were making sense until you said your soulmate doesn’t like you back.”
“Okay, I’m not following—hey, let’s walk more towards the centre; I think those two by the door are watching us.” You steered the two of you back onto the typical path but stayed close to speak quietly.
“In addition to breathing from the same cloud, two people have to have had a moment of genuine, mutual attraction between each other. Not, like, you pass someone hot on the street and think you’d suck the soul out of their dick before dissuading yourself from the impulse, because they’d clearly ruin your life, but a moment of true, lingering affection for someone that you don’t talk yourself out of. A moment worth thinking about later. Hey, Rika,” Ito said loudly as you passed another patient on the path, “Good to see you today. How’s your cult? You don’t know? Great! Healthy! See you later!” Ito and you sped-walked past her, and once Rika was out of earshot, Ito lowered her voice again. “You don’t have to know the person, but maybe a stranger shared a moment of kindness with you. Maybe an old friend laughed in a new way. It’s a moment where you’re attracted to something past the surface level in a person, even for a brief second. I don’t give out soulmates with absolutely no attraction, even if it may seem that way.”
You, fuming, kicked snow out of your path. “That bitch likes me!”
Ito nodded. “And not just for your tits.”
“Shit,” you said, pushing hair out of your face and pulling your scarf to be snugger, “Nothing I do is gonna—”
“I can help,” said Ito, glancing over her shoulders again for eavesdroppers.
You stopped in your tracks. “But why would you do that? I’m just some weirdo.”
“Because when I have employed the help I’m about to offer you, it has been very, very funny to me,” she said, “and I don’t get outside news except through fucking letters.”
You joined her on the path again. “How many times have you done this?”
Ito looked up as she bit the pad of her thumb, trudging through the snow. “You’ll be the twelfth time. It’s like a part two to my quirk, but I usually don’t come across victims again to offer this sort of thing—and people usually don’t need it. Step one: we’ll need an airtight container.”
***
Cut to that evening in your dorm room, with you hunched over a ziploc bag sealed to the brim with her quirk’s pink dust.
Door locked. Lights down. Cosy pyjamas. Already under the covers in bed.
An increased probability of cliches, Ito had said.
You flipped on the flashlight on your phone to shine through the dust, pink light scattering on the ceiling like a home-planetarium.
Inhaling her quirk for the second time would still affect you, but it wouldn’t assign you another soulmate. Rather, it would dramatically increase your chances for romance tropes to occur in your real life. Stuff that only happens in rom-coms and fanfic could start to happen to you and your soulmate.
(“Like sharing a bed when there’s only one of them,” Ito had said, swirling her finger through the leftover powdered sugar and licking it.
“We’ve already got that covered with the teleporting,” you’d said.
“Shifting is what I’ve been calling the teleports, babe.” Ito had smacked her lips. “And maybe you’ll wake up grinding on his hard-on, now. Do you know how big his dick is?” she’d asked, and then she’d clicked her tongue. “Never mind; I wanna know about his thighs.”
“I can—”
“Or maybe he’ll spill coffee on your shirt and have to pat you dry, accidentally making your shirt see-through and getting flustered at your tits. Or maybe he’ll have to pick you up in the rain, and oh, no, the weather’s too bad for you to go home, and you have to wear his clothes, and—”
You’d snorted at the thought of wearing one of his jumpsuits. He didn’t seem to have much else.)
Either way, you had your ziploc bag of soulmate trope dust, and you had a soulmate reluctant to acknowledge you—even though you knew now that he liked you, that bitch. You’d prepared accordingly, already in bed, since Ito had said you’d likely pass out again. It sat a bit unpleasantly in your stomach that you were going to rely on cliches to jumpstart your relationship with Aizawa, since you hadn’t wanted to do that in the first place with teacher-student relationship cliches. But you could avoid that the best you could, you supposed.
You lay down in bed, adjusting your hair on your pillow, and with the bag on your chest, you popped it like bubble wrap, the dust surging into your face in a rosy burst.
***
Popping it Tuesday night led to a cruelly dull Wednesday, since, as seniors, Wednesdays were off-days for the hero course to spend more time in the field. You weren’t needed at Sakura Grove, as you remotely typed up your reports and sent them their way, and since all your friends were with their mentors, the hours crawled. You puttered around online for a while, before cracking open a book whose plot couldn’t hold you. Since no one was around to witness, you plodded downstairs to the kitchen in your pyjamas, stole one of Aoyama’s green tea popsicles for an early start to lunch, and booted up the console Kaminari kept in the commons.
While the screen loaded, you plopped onto the couch, licking the last of the tea off the wooden stick. What does Aizawa do on Wednesdays now that his class is loose? He frequents a cat café; the punch-card was poking out of his wallet on his bedside table last time you shifted to his room. But there are the mundanities—grocery shopping, catching up on sleep, grading, caring for Eri. And hell, how you’d like to share those moments with him—perhaps scrunching his nose at a change of ingredients of his favourite chip, stroking the neck of his cat in a beam of sunlight, braiding Eri’s hair with ribbon at the start of a school day.
Fuuuuuck, when will Aizawa let you in?
The next moment, you’re suffocating. Pitch black softness, swaddling and falling around you, sweltering within seconds, sweat beading at your hairline. You took a desperate, gasping breath—relieved in the slim moment a slant of light puckered in front you, until the hand shoved onto your face, palm feeling for your mouth and shutting your jaw for you. Within the cocoon, the frame on either side of you tensed, and—the hand fumbled, once you’d quieted, in the crack of light to clumsily cup your cheek, patting it abruptly before rubbing the thumb over your cheekbone.
From that touch and the peace it swept over you, you knew where you’d shifted: kneeling right between Aizawa’s legs in his sleeping bag. But he’s sitting upright in a chair and needed to silence you, so where was he right now?
You settled, leaning against the hard muscle of his calf and into his palm, nosing at it to signal you knew it’s him.
“You have twenty-seven minutes to finish your tests,” called Aizawa, and for the first time, you picked up on pens clicking, paper shuffling, and chairs scuffing against polished tile. “Don’t ask me when they’ll be graded; Kuranosuke-sensei isn’t set to return until Saturday.”
Bless him.
But okay. You’ve got about half an hour stuck between his legs under this desk in front of what’s likely a bunch of younger business students.
Huh, if you only inched your chin forward on his chair, you’d be perfectly positioned to nuzzle against his cock, maybe suck it if you maneuvered your arms out of the sleeping bag’s constrictions. But, you supposed, it would be very mean to tease him in that way in front of students who haven’t built that respect for him, and you’d prefer your first blowjob to be where Aizawa could throw his head back, face flushed, groaning loudly with a gentle, guiding hand on the back of your head—hey, now’s not the time.
You didn’t want him to feel the shame of having an erection in front of who were essentially strangers. It’d…you don’t want to humiliate your soulmate. You love that idiot.
But Aizawa was shifting his hips, to your horror, the thick fabric of his jumpsuit brushing your face in the moment his hand retracted, and the sleeping bag was shuffled down past the top of your head, which grazed the underside of a desk drawer.
You rested your chin towards the edge of his chair—yes, mere inches between your face and his clothed cock, but your breath probably wasn’t even hitting it. From this angle, you and Aizawa could share that suspicious glare he shot you, so you backed up the half-inch for your chin to rest of the very brink of the chair—he closed his eyes, his shoulders losing their stiffness—and you leant your head against his thigh, just on the inside of his knee. He heaved a silent sigh, giving a subtle roll of his eyes, and minutely nodded—an act so slight that if you hadn’t been looking for it, you would’ve missed it.
Aizawa’s hand came to rest atop your head, scratching his fingers gently against your scalp. Part of it’s the soulmate bond; part of it’s being touch-starved, but his gentle scratch was so fucking soothing that a hazy, relaxed sleepiness came over you. Your head sagged, nose pressing towards the underside of his thigh, while your eyes crossed. Maybe it’s the magic of his sleeping bag, but you’re so drowsy that the scratch of his short nails almost drowned out clicking footsteps approach the desk.
Aizawa froze, his hand stilling in your hair.
“What are we supposed to do with our tests?” came the whisper of a business student.
Aizawa made a grunt and moved as if he were stretching and reaching for something on the desk. “Whatever you normally do. Is there not a routine?”
“The basket we turn papers in to is missing.” The shadow of the student’s feet grew closer to the desk.
“Not my problem. Just leave them on the corner of the desk—” A tinny clink echoed through the teacher desk when Aizawa tapped it—his thumb swiping over your forehead to calm you.
“Gotcha,” said the business student, and you thought you were in the clear before she asked, “What—what are you doing under…?”
“Oh?” Aizawa jolted the chair forward to hide you, but with the jolt came his clothed cock pressed against your face; even through the thick fabric you could tell it’s his shaft pressed against the length of your nose and corner of mouth and balls nestled against your chin and cheek. “I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to text under my desk, the same as all of you do when you think I can’t see.” A metallic-sounding object scraped across the desktop, followed by an impulsively-large-sounding gulp.
“Your phone’s on your desk, sir,” said the business student.
His fingers now curled into your hair in a vain attempt to pull you away from his cock, but he couldn’t, with the scant room under the desk and bulk of his sleeping bag. Trying to be polite, you opted to avert your gaze from his crotch (even though it was right there), which shuddered so hard that you saw and felt it.
“It’s a common practise for pro-heroes to have secondary phones purely for work,” said Aizawa, taking another loud swallow of his drink. “You may want to invest in one.”
“Gotcha,” said the business student again, just as another shadow joined her at the desk and whispered for her to hurry up.
When they both retreated, Aizawa stealthily scooted back to gain some space in a move that looked like he was simply leaning back in his chair to drain the tea out of his cup—and you savoured the unshielded view of the tender skin of his neck, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed—and hey, that’s—Aizawa relaxed enough to glance down at you, elbow on the arm of the chair, holding in the air the teacup you gifted him to replace the one you broke (nowhere nearly as nice as the pottery one you smashed presumably was, but its deep crimson glaze had reminded you of his quirk-activated eyes).
You were strangely moved that he was using your gift so quickly after he received it, in public, and not where you were supposed to see it being used.
Your eyes darted between the cup and his eyes until he noticed, and he raised the teacup just a hair in a toast. Nodding with a tired smile, you wormed your arm around to unwind his hand from its grip in your hair, unintentionally still tight, and held his gaze as you kissed the pad of each finger, starting with his little finger, the pink flashing from each tip until you pressed your lips against his thumb.
Aizawa never looked away, but he narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. You wondered for a moment if he liked the thumbprint bisecting the centre of your lips, the rounded edge aligning with the dip in your cupid’s bow. But his expression betrayed nothing, and instead, he raised the teacup to his own mouth, his hand returning to your hair for the rest of the period.
After the last student had petered out of the classroom and Aizawa had given an uncharacteristic little wave as the last one close the door behind her, Aizawa held out a groan as he kicked away from the desk, his hands flying to adjust his lower jumpsuit and then raking his fingers back through his own hair.
“How are you holding up?”
You balked. “How am I?” You shoved at his knees so that you had room to stand, and you sat on the desk.
Aizawa pointedly nudged your legs together (you hadn’t even thought of it that way). “Nice pyjamas.”
“You’re lucky I don’t sleep naked,” you said, plucking at your shirt.
“Am I?”
Was that…was he flirting?
Your surprise must have shown on your face, because he continued. “You shouldn’t walk back to the dorms like that. I don’t have anything at the school besides a spare jumpsuit, but Hizashi should have his jacket draped on his chair in the faculty lounge.”
“How romantic,” you said, flicking the side of his teacup for the hell of it.
“I don’t have another class to sub until the period after this one,” he said, pocketing his phone and other personals on the desk before handing the teacup to you, “Let’s go.”
Present Mic was gloriously absent from the faculty lounge, so there was no one to stop Aizawa from laying his stuff on his desk and swiping the jacket off the back of Mic’s chair. You set the teacup on the cat coaster and had just barely turned his way before he was sweeping the open jacket around your shoulders. Aizawa lifted the leather while you slipped your arms inside, and he zipped you up, stopping the zipper just above the curve of your boobs. You looked down, and he flicked the zipper up at you with a smirk.
“Are we married yet?”
His hand dropped from your zipper. “I saw what you did with the registration form. You’re not funny.”
“I happen to be hilarious,” you said, “I assume to want to adjust the mark?”
Nodding, Aizawa waited for you to tilt your head up and to the side. “I am not marrying you. You’re my student.” He grazed the usual spot behind your ear with his ring finger.
“And someday I won’t be.” You shivered as the frisson of his touch rolled through you. “You’d rather have even more paperwork, bureaucratical hoops, and possibly a ceremony at a later, inevitable date than one simple checkmark on a sheet? Not very logical, sensei.”
He frowned. “Stop that.”
A beat. “No otherwise rebuttal?” you asked, grinning, “You agree, then, that we’re going to end up together? That we’ll be—”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Funny,” you said, biting the inside of your cheek, eyeing Snipe in the far corner of the room, “Then, hey. Compromise. What if we just hang out with no romantic or sexual connotations whatsoever? I wanna get to know you better. You’re cool.”
Aizawa crossed his arms and followed your gaze to Snipe, who was bent over in his seat, cleaning one of his guns. “Think about it. Would you trust a teacher who spends time outside of school with a student?”
“How’s the training with Shinsou going?”
“You are not funny.”
“And everybody knows you’re training Shinsou, and they’re fine with it. You could say you’re training me,” you said, stepping closer to him, looking him in the eyes despise his hunkering down into his scarf, “Please say you’re training me. I want to spend time with you. Hell, actually train me. You could make me strong enough that you don’t have to worry about me, or any bullshit. C’mon, Aizawa. Please.”
“That,” he said, “I can easily deny you. Now, get back to the dorms. I’d like to—”
“What? Why,” you said with a whine, “How can you say that so quickly? You didn’t even think about it.”
“Yeah?” Aizawa turned to his desk to boot up the computer. “It’s because you’re already strong enough to take care of yourself. I don’t have to worry about you in a fight,” he said, just barely crinkling his eyes, so you figured that he’s smiling beneath his capture weapon, “Keeping you from being a fool—now, that’s something I’ll have to watch for.”
You groaned. Loudly. And for way too long. “Whatever. May I sit on your lap while you grade?”
“No,” said Aizawa, not missing a beat, “Go back to the dorm.”
“You want me to check on Eri?”
“Sure. That’d be—really nice. Let me know—”
“Yeah?” Grinning, you bounced on the balls of your feet. “How am I supposed to do that? Sounds like I might need a certain phone number.”
Aizawa collapsed in his cracked, leather lounge chair and spun it towards his cubicle desk. “No need. If you don’t shift to me in the next half hour, I’ll assume everything’s fine.”
“Oh, come on. I feel like I deserve some sort of treat for not mentioning your half-chub while it was in my face earlier.”
Aizawa rubbed at his temple, his eyes strained. “I’m busy grading and don’t have time to talk.”
He was staring into a blank screen.
“Fine, you big baby. I’ll concede to you this time,” you said, and before you could lose your nerve, you leant over to kiss the top of his head.
You’d bolted for the door before he could even turn around.
***
It was supposed to be a routine field exercise.
The hero course had been split into teams, each under the leadership of a faculty member, for a field assessment as twenty percent of your grade for your final semester. As an extension of the personal study starting with the student presentations from earlier, you were in the group focusing on stealth headed by Aizawa, along with Bakugou, Aoyama, and Todoroki (who swopped into your group last minute, since Midnight declared that he needed to get away from her group working on public relations). Bummed that no other girls were in the group, you resolved to make it work by being better than the boys. Not to mention that the three included would, hopefully, be dense enough to miss the subtler interactions between Aizawa and you that betrayed something else going on.
The four of you were to know as little as possible about the assignment as possible before going in, so you all spent the week leading up to it making contingency plans (you’d been told not to go out otherwise that week, so Midnight had to do her own work, for once, at Sakura Grove), with maps of the city and subway splayed out on the floor in the common room, along with bowls of trail mix Bakugou had thrown together, claiming that Aoyama’s stuff was bullshit (though you had enjoyed it very much when you ate it in secret that morning). All you’d been told was that you’d be making an escort in secret, without the target even knowing you were there.
No contingency plan could account for this.
A thunderstorm popped up on the radar out of nowhere, delaying the plane’s arrival, and the airport radio signal had been scrambled, fed into a different language, and back again. If you’d been allowed more details during preparation, you’d have more of the story, but all you could piece together now was excruciatingly obvious: the airport’s east wing exploded and caved before the plane even hit it, and now you were trapped underground under wet, crumbly tonnes of rubble, confined to a pocket of space barely tall enough to stand in, with the only structure keeping half of an airport bathroom’s mirrored wall from collapsing and crushing you being the charred, lower third of a column from the airport courtyard.
“You can’t blow our way out,” you hissed at Bakugou, who was climbing his way up the column to prod at the ceiling, “The column’s load-bearing.”
“I know that,” Bakugou said, contorting his upper body and neck as he gawped with his mouth open at the debris above him, “I’m just seein’ if there’s any light from the surface comin’ through, or if there’s anywhere rainwater’s drippin’ in.”
Hunching with his upper back grazing the rubble ceiling at the tallest point in the collapsed space, Aizawa frantically fussed with his work phone (which he genuinely had, after all) and his radio, unable to get a signal. “Be careful with your movements,” he said, mind barely in the conversation, “You could make the debris slip, or it could get weighed down with rain and further collapse. At worst, you want it to settle. Aoyama, are you getting anything?”
Tapping the AI filter on his sparkle shades away, Aoyama tore his gaze away from his handheld device’s screen. “Alas,” he said with a quivering frown. His ankle was being wrapped by Todoroki, who had been careful to refill the place in the concrete where Aoyama’s foot had been with ice, keeping the space intact.
“It’s fine; you’re doing well. Keep an eye on the signal. We want to know if we get one.” Aizawa handed his phone to you, giving you a short nod and the same job. “Todoroki, keep that cavity frozen. Keep an eye out for similar spot about to collapse and do the same.”
“I’m assuming this isn’t part of the assignment, since you’re taking charge,” you said under your breath to Aizawa, your back to the others as you stooped to stand yourself, arms crossed, “What relevant information can you share about the assignment that might get us out of here? Who were we escorting? If we know who they have for allies, then we can start to understand how the signals are scrambled and how to walk out of this situation.”
Aizawa stuck his tongue in his cheek. “None of it’s relevant. Our target has been isolated for well over four years and was being processed by professionals. She wouldn’t have had any opportunity to sabotage this procedure; St. Philomena’s has kept our target from having untracked outside communication.”
An uneasy stone dropped into the pit of your stomach. “St. Philomena’s,” you said slowly, biting your lip, “That’s a women’s penitentiary.”
Aizawa opened his mouth to answer but instead inhaled a mouthful of dust as the earth shook and clattered around you. Bakugou braced the column while you and Aizawa kept the bathroom wall steady, but the mirror shattered and fell with the wall, with Todoroki grabbing you out of the way of the sink from crushing your legs, icing the concrete shards into a makeshift support for the column, enough for Bakugou to twist out from underneath it. You gasped in deep breaths of powdery concrete yet dug into wet clods of silt and grime with the heels of your boots.
The ceiling had caved in by about two feet in height, and if Aoyama hadn’t skibbled away from his spot in the corner, he’d be buried under glass and tile. You experimentally knelt and stretched towards the ceiling—good for you, for having some room to move upwards, but Aizawa could only sit, now. Every heaving breath from your friends was too close for your liking, and the stone fell from your stomach right into your gut when you noticed the steady trickle of water between the rocks and down the column, cutting a clear, ivory path through the grey dust coating it. Bakugou scooted out of the ways of its dripping, letting it instead drain in a puddle next to him.
You and Bakugou nearly jumped out of your skins at the skrrrt of Aizawa’s radio, but nothing came through except static.
“We’re okay,” said Aizawa, once Aoyama started to show signs of hyperventilation, “The static is a good sign. Even if we can’t communicate specifics, they have a location on us. They know we’re down here, and if it seems like they’re taking too long, remember that civilians are the priority. We’ll be all right.”
Claustrophobia.
Not your favourite.
But Aoyama was clearly having a worse time handling it, so it’s better to set an example for him—see how calm you are? See how much you’re not being selfish, curling into Aizawa’s arms for him to pet your hair until it’s over, keeping him all to yourself, even though it’d be really easy to pretend like it’s the size of the cavern instead of your own selfish desires that’s making you touch him. See how mature you’re being, not even touching Aizawa, even though he’s right next to you. You’re being rational about the whole thing.
Todoroki stared off, his bright eyes narrowed and brow furrowed, and he parted his lips, wetting them slightly before speaking. “You should move closer to Aoyama,” he said to Bakugou, “Someone’s hurt.”
“The hell d’you mean?” When Todoroki gestured, Bakugou followed his gaze.
The water’s white path through the dust congealed and blushed deep vermillion as it coursed down the column, falling in thick, steady plops next to Bakugou, the upsplash ticking his exposed skin with red.
“Holy shit.” Bakugou scrambled away the best he could, kicking away from the water and practically into your lap, but he shot you a sort-of apologetic look and shuffled into more of Todoroki’s personal space. “Do you think—it’s not blood,” he said, smearing it on his arm, still running a dark red even spread thinly.
Aoyama cringed. “It’s not going to—it won’t fill up the—”
“No,” Bakugou said quickly, “It’s drainin’ through the cracks. We’re fine, Aoyama.” Bakugou made a point of dragging his hard glare from Todoroki to you, as if to say that keeping Aoyama calm was essential to getting out.
You checked Aizawa’s phone again for any signal, and, sighing, you stowed it to keep from scratching the screen.
“Nothing?”
Shaking your head at Aizawa, you resisted the heavy urge to rest your forehead on his shoulder. You know what? Maybe you could. He’s right there, and if you did it in this situation, it could be read as a simply act of comfort that you could have easily shared with anyone, perhaps. The two of you could stare romantically into the dripping, red goop, talk about your lives together, about teaching your psychotic friends, about sidekicking at Sakura Grove—
“Hey, don’t touch that,” you said, jolting in your seat, to Todoroki, who stopped, wide-eyed, in his odd stretch over Bakugou’s lap before he could prod with his outstretched finger the congealed mass accumulating in the puddle, “I think I know what that is.”
Beside you, Aizawa sucked in through his teeth. “Just once, I wish your deduction skills weren’t so good.”
Without averting your gaze, you moved to elbow him in the chest, hard, but he caught your arm and held it deathly still: he only touched you by your sleeve, though, so no soulmark would bleed through. Odds were that the mark was still furtively hidden behind your ear. Frowning, you tried to wrest your arm away from him, eyes on the falling droplet heavy enough to break the surface tension of the gathered, congealed mass, making the whole thing burst upwards in a dense, ruby smoke.
“Get down, as close to the ground as you can,” you said in a rush, cut off when Aizawa shoved your head to the ground with his hand on the back of your neck, his face inches from yours and only moving closer as he made room for the others to join you, cheek smushed against a patch of intact bathroom tile.
“It’s aerosolising,” said Aizawa, eyes darting over the ceiling, where the mist was rising through cracks in the rubble, “Follow where it’s escaping; we might be able to use—”
“No, you fucker,” you hissed (Aizawa squeezed the back of your neck), “Not all of it’s going to escape. It’s going to condense into liquid again on any surface that blocks it and then drop back on us.”
“Someone tell me what the hell is going on,” spat Bakugou, voice muffled from behind you but strangely reverberating back through the curved metal of Aoyama’s armour.
“We’re only going to be safe on the ground if it doesn’t condense, which is un-fucking-likely the way the thunderstorm’s moistened and lowered atmospheric pressure,” you said, the sound of water rinsing through crannies in the rocks growing from the far side of the cavern, “Aoyama, try to breath evenly but shallowly; you don’t wanna inhale this.”
The knuckles of Bakugou’s heavy glove struck the centre of your upper back. “Dumbass. Just tell him to hyperventilate, why don’t you?”
A drop of red water fell onto Todoroki’s pale cheek, sizzling with the impact as it was absorbed into his skin, a miniature puff of smoke emitting from the spot.
After a moment of heavy silence, Aizawa shifted his jaw, his eyes dark as they focused on you. “Academic protocols are over. Time to share what you know about Serendipity’s quirk.”
You dropped your jaw, even with the grit digging into your skin and jaw. “Who’s the insane person who assigned a bunch of students to escort fucking Serendipity—”
“I am,” said Aizawa, grip on your neck tightening and eyes flaring scarlet so briefly that you would’ve missed it if you hadn’t been inches away, “Considering your high level of academic success, I thought you capable enough to complete a more difficult mission than your—”
“Someone just fuckin’ say what her quirk does!” Bakugou’s hand curled into a fist with the fabric of your hero costume taut between its fingers, his fist lay, overheated, between your shoulder blades.
You jerked your shoulder away from him, but there wasn’t any room to go, so his hand stayed on your back, putting distance between the two of you, though his knees and hips still touched the back of yours. “Okay,” you said after settling, glaring directly into Aizawa’s eyes, “Serendipity is the third most dangerous villain in the western hemisphere, evidently being transferred today to the place Midnight and I work, because fucking no one else wants to handle her. C’mon, Aizawa, is that why I wasn’t allowed at work for the past week? So I wouldn’t know? Fucking—” You tried to give a half-hearted kick to Aizawa, but his thumb curled enough around your neck to locate your pulse point, which he pressed down on in warning. “But yeah, her quirk is so volatile and dangerous because—because yes, it’s a sex pollen quirk, but it’s fast, and you can’t solve it by touching yourself, like other sex quirks we’ve seen used for villainy; you have to orgasm at someone else’s hands. And no one can figure out why your internal organs shrivel and die within four hours—”
You inhaled sharply through your teeth as two droplets sizzled into your skin in quick succession, but the squeeze on your neck told you to continue. “Or the brain damage, or—because her quirk’s been studied, but no one can tell if it requires the feed of dopamine to the body, or not getting enough oxygenated blood cells, or capillary damage, or—” Bakugou thumped your back again. “—but no one is immune to it, and it’s fucking terrifying,” you finished, scrunching your eyes shut at the sensation of more droplets searing into your skin and into those around you, each person inhaling more with each individual puff of smoke from the viscous drops.
Tongue too big for your mouth, you trailed off, eyesight blurring as you zoned out for a just a bit, but you lurched back into reality when a hot ache stung the back of your neck and swept through your body. Aizawa retracted his hand faster than a viper striking, his eyes briefly holding the same dread yours did.
Shaken, you pushed yourself up to sit, and to your horror, an enormous gush of arousal pooled between your legs—you snapped your legs shut at the sight of the wet spot on your hero costume (and worse, the dribbling into the gravel), and Aizawa saw, holding a steady, neutral expression despite your visible panic.
“Fuck, baby—”
It hadn’t come from Aizawa but Bakugou, whose hips you’d inadvertently ground against when you sat up. His large hand came to grip your waist, fingers digging in and pulling your ass back against him, and his other hand clamped over his nose and mouth as he pushed himself up. “I’ve always known you smelled good, but this is somethin’ else—”
“Absolutely not.” Aizawa yoinked you away from Bakugou and put himself between the you and the rest, cramping you into the corner with pointed rocks digging into your back, and he held up his hand, Bakugou glaring a hole into his palm, vermillion streaking down his face. “You’re drugged. She’s drugged. Even if you both say you want it, it’s not a reflection of reality.”
Bakugou clicked his tongue, but Todoroki tilted to the side to keep his tense gaze on you.
“No,” said Aizawa, using the scant room and the end of his capture weapon to snap in Todoroki’s face, “You’d be ruining the professional relationship you have. You’d be violating her. There’s no way she’d actually want you.”
Bakugou scoffed over Todoroki’s quiet how do you know that, already palming himself through his costume. “I’d rather risk it all blasting out of here than suck Icy-Hot’s dick.” His other hand crackled with the beginnings of an explosion.
“You can’t,” you said with effort, mouth and throat coated with dust as heat rose to your skin, sweat breaking out at your hairline, “If you’re not a heteromorph, Serendipity’s quirk suppresses yours. It—it overwhelms your entire system—”
“You couldn’t mention that before I got hard?” Bakugou scowled, thumb playing with his belt buckle in consideration. “I would’ve blasted us out of here earlier.”
Aizawa shook his head. “It wouldn’t’ve worked—”
Todoroki made a sort of horting noise in the back of his throat, drawing everyone’s attention, before hacking a thick glob of red mucus right onto a spot of white bathroom tile, large trails of saliva trailing from his mouth.
“Holy shit,” you said softly, your eyebrows shooting up, and Aizawa held you back before you could even move.
“Mon Dieu,” said Aoyama, and he removed his sparkle shades to see it without a red filter.
Aizawa’s radio crackled static again, but nobody moved a muscle.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Aizawa, his hand still up but hardly deterring an increasingly twitchy Bakugou, who kept staring at you over Aizawa’s shoulder, “Aoyama, you’re probably going to hurt yourself and others if you stay in your armour. If you think you can handle being more vulnerable, take it off. Prop it up between the three of you and us.” The radio hissed again. “We’re going to camp out here until help arrives. Waiting is the heroic path to take sometimes,” he said in Bakugou’s direction, “If you find yourself succumbing to the quirk, that’s okay. It’s not shameful. No one is immune to it. If you can work it out among yourselves, that’s fine. No one here is going to share any details you don’t want out.” But here his voice darkened, and though you couldn’t see his face, you knew Aizawa was shooting a hard, unmerciful look towards them. “But you’re not going to hurt anyone here, and you’re especially not going to take advantage of her because she’s the only woman. To get her, you’ll have to go through me, and I do not intend to be kind.”
“Fucking hell,” said Bakugou, unbuckling his belt and sliding it off.
You were feeling a similar way, but Aizawa had you so backed into the corner that there wasn’t room to take anything off. So, instead of tearing off the increasingly abrasive and scratchy fabric of your hero uniform, you hugged your knees to your chest, thighs clenching, and bit down on your arm to keep from crying out. A choked sound still escaped you as a leather strap on your upper thigh rubbed closer to a more sensitive spot.
You couldn’t even lift a hand to fan your face—but with how heavy your limbs felt, even the promise of cool air couldn’t bring you to attempt it, and instead, you tried to find relief in the cold press of busted bathroom tile at the back of your neck—and you turned your head to feel it against your cheek, too.
Your hips rocked, knocking your legs against Aizawa’s back, and when he turned over his shoulder to spare you a glance, you jolted as far back as you could away from him. Not that you could go anyway but barely half an inch backwards. “Sorry,” you said quickly, shaking your head, “Didn’t mean to. Really. I—” Your heart flipped at his concerned face (himself looking a little red), and a sharp cramp curdled into your lower stomach. “Oh, fuck,” you said, a hand shooting to your stomach and doubling over—but your forehead grazed him before you could, and you let out a quiet yelp before jerking back into place, tears welling at the pain. “Sorry about that.”
Aizawa grimaced at your weak smile and turned back towards the others. You hadn’t even heard what they’re doing, since the blood pumping in your ears apparently deafened you to anything besides your own half-smothered sobs into your arm. 
They were growing louder at their frustration, but they were, for the most part, not directing any of it at you. Hey, is—? Over Aoyama’s armour-wall, it looked like Bakugou might have gotten his cock out to start stroking it; maybe you could get a better look—
“Hey,” said Aizawa, blocking your view when he turned over his shoulder, “Stop all that squirming.” Were you? You hadn’t even noticed. “Remember what I’ve taught you. I know you can do better.”
“Oh, don’t say professor-y things like that,” you said with a whine while, yes, squirming in place, “It goes straight to my cunt.”
 Aizawa closed his eyes for a moment, but he soon opened them and continued, unaffected. “Focus. I’m holding you to a higher calibre than your peers, because I know you can do it. What have you been taught about remaining calm in crisis? Ground yourself.”
“But I—”
“Do it.”
You huffed and tried to settle down into your body, counted, and exhaled slowly as you shut your eyes, waiting for your other sense to sharpen. Body scan—focusing on flowing energy, starting at your head, down to your toes, and back up again. But you had trouble on the return to the top of your head, since every cell in your body screamed to zoom in on the throbbing in your lower half—hard to say what’s tremoring more: you, or the walls of the cavern.
But there’s an infinitesimal sound that drowns every other maddening, oversensitive sensation: from the back of Aizawa’s throat comes a quiet, breathy whimper.
And—
“Oh, my fucking God,” you said, noticing all of the surreptitious ways Aizawa was trying to hide how affected he was: his hand clasped in a knuckle-whitening fist covering his lap, eyes watering with frustration, jaw tensed, neck and hand veins pulsating, sweating through his undershirt, and you?
Wetting your lips, you strained forward to brush his hair aside to kiss the back of his neck, and Aizawa fucking shuddered, the thing passing through his whole body. Though it hadn’t been your intention, your legs spread as you did so, parting on either side of him, and his hair flew into your face as he took in your legs surrounding him.
“Hey, no,” he said, and he pushed back on your legs, willing you to scrunch up to hug them to your chest again.
“I’m not doing anything—”
“You fucking are,” Aizawa hissed over his shoulder, “You’re being a goddamn brat.”
That shut you up immediately. Feeling slick drip out of you, you curled in on yourself, tucking your legs up to your chest like he wanted.
“That’s what I thought.” He turned back to keep guard.
His shoulders seemed wider than before.
 Maybe it’s the heady, prickling excitement swarming in your chest at the unspoken threat of a punishment turned sexual, or maybe it’s the incoming brain damage, but you rounded up every nerve not currently on fire to keep pushing your luck. “Aizawa,” you said, soft enough for only him to hear over the squelching from the far side of the cavern, “If we were alone right now, what would you do to me?”
He didn’t respond.
An easy grin stretched across your face.
“Because I know there’s got to be stuff you wanna do to me, not with me, for how I behave sometimes. But I only want your attention,” you said, feeling a bit dizzy as heat flushed all over your feverish skin, “I know you can’t give it to me, because you wanna be all noble and stuff, but—”
Another cramp had you gasping and hacking up red-tinged spit. Aizawa started to turn his head, but you told him, totally deflated, “Don’t bother. I’m sorry—” You coughed up more red mucus. “I know I’m gross; I know you can’t look at me that way; I’m sorry I’ve been—I’m sorry.”
How can he be so calm? It’s not fucking fair that he can just sit there, cross-legged and sweating, with the scent of sex permeating the smoke-hazy air, and yes, he’s hard, but that’s just the stupid fucking quirk.
You’re dripping and clenching but still so, so empty, and the tears finally overflowed as Aizawa looked over his shoulder at you again. “I’m sorry,” you said again, eyes glazing over and breathing irregularly (for all the talk about Aoyama hyperventilating, you might be the one to actually do it). “I’ll—I’ll stop bothering you; I can handle this. I’ll, uh—” You cut yourself off at another cramp, seizing up at a stray spasm, releasing your hold on your legs and yanking at the roots of your hair. “Don’t worry about me; I’ll get—get Shinsou to make me come—sorry I tried to—I’m sorry; I should’ve left you alone—”
“Stop apologising.” Aizawa twisted to brush away your tears with his thumb, the skin that vibrant pink when he pulled away. “Christ, you’re burning up.” He hand returned to your face, this time against your forehead, and he frowned—yeah, he was frowning before you were pathetically raising yourself off the ground to nuzzle into his hand, to mouth voraciously at his palm, which flushed pink with every pass of your lips, and—
“Fuck,” said Aizawa, withdrawing his hand to press the heels of his palms into his eyes. You made a questioning noise, and to answer, he let his gaze drop to where the soaked patch between your legs dribbled into the rubble. He dragged his hands down the rest of his face. “You’re drenched,” he said, rasping.
A vehement moan from the other side of the space made both of you flinch, with Aizawa making a quick check to ensure their attention wasn’t on you.
You grabbed his capture weapon, pulling him close. “Please,” you said, panting, “Please, ‘Zawa, I’m not as capable as you think I am; I’m not good; I can’t take it. Please—”
His teeth dug into his lower lip as a grumbled scoff came from the back of this throat, and he shook his head. “God, not like this. It’s not supposed to be like this.”
Another loud moan and the sounds of skin on skin from the others brought another wince from the two of you, and Aizawa squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, he’d steeled himself, determined and set. “I can’t have you corrupting my protégé,” he said (it was a joke, right? Why isn’t he smiling?), “but I can’t offer you anything more.”
“Wha—?”
Aizawa was nudging your knees open, his eyebrows raised, and when he turned to face the others, he scooted backwards to sit between your spread legs, pinning you between the rock and his back, crowding you in, and oh, oh, my God, you should’ve been embarrassed at how wet the back of his jumpsuit got as he pushed himself back to sit right in front of your crotch, but the first, pulsing wave of relief as your clit rubbed against him washed everything else away.
Did this count? Did this count as coming at someone else’s hands? You found the problem less compelling the more you thrashed against him, grinding your clit against his back so hard that your vision blacked out at the edges, breathing in that terribly awful frustrating sexy combination of pine and sandalwood, desperately huffing it in in gasping breaths and curling your fingers into the back of his jumpsuit to bring him closer: you needed to kiss the back of his neck again, to see that pink mark on his skin.
But it’s as if he knew what you were going to do, because instead of letting you pull his hair aside, he reached back to grab your hand, and he (mercifully) allowed the grab to relax into a hold, letting you lace your fingers through his as he guided your arm around his waist (an evil part of you was disappointed that he didn’t place your hand over his cock, instead of resting your entwined hands on his leg [cute]).
And you were quiet: you didn’t moan, so the others wouldn’t know, unless they could somehow make out your laboured breathing behind the hand you cupped over your mouth. You’re grappling for pressure against your clit, but it’s your shiver when he stroked the back of your hand with his thumb that triggered your orgasm—pounding, rushing, and all at once, the throbbing of your clit taking you somewhere distant and piney, with you slowly coming back to reality by an abrupt pulsing, for some reason, in the roof of your mouth.
And the quirk had passed through you.
It counted.
But it kept you bound in a tired haze, sultry and lethargic and red, and lost in the lingering high of both the scarlet saliva you kept hacking up and that Aizawa let you grind against him until you came, you closed in on yourself and did your best to stay awake. Your brain tried to worry about Aizawa, but the quirk shushed you and forced you into a cloudy exhaustion.
You were out of it when Aizawa’s radio crackled to life, when the rescue unit exhumed your team, when the EMT on duty looked you over. You were still foggy when you were put in a passenger seat of a government vehicle, but the fog dissipated when Aizawa climbed in the driver’s seat and told you to call Midnight.
“I don’t know the number for Sakura Grove,” he said, turning on the windshield wipers, “and I need to warn Midnight that I’m asking her to help me with this quirk.”
Thunder rumbled through the sky and into your bones as he turned into downtown traffic, headlights blurring in the rain. Blankly, you wrestled his phone out of your pocket and began to dial her work number. “Okay, traitor.”
Aizawa’s expression darkened, his face glistening with sweat. “You know that I can’t—”
“So I can’t do the same for you?” you asked, putting his phone on speaker and letting it ring (cranking up the volume to hear it over the rain pelting the windows), “I can’t just, like, hold out my hand for you to grind against, or, God forbid, give you an actual fucking handjob—”
“Stop it,” he said, and he snatched his phone from you, switching off speaker, and you crossed your arms to fume, staring out into the miserably grey morning.
You smushed your forehead against the cool of the window, watching the raindrops chase each other down the glass, and you tried to focus on car horns blaring instead of the conversation regarding Aizawa’s sexual release that he and Midnight were currently having.
When he hung up, you sat up from your slouch against the window. “Is that all you need me for, then? You’ve got the number. You might as well drop me off at the next light.”
Aizawa swore under his breath. “Stop being such a—” He cut himself off, his leg not working the pedals bouncing profusely. “I still need you to enter Sakura Grove.”
That was true. You had three number-codes to punch in for clearance, and there was a thumbprint scan at the building in which you and Midnight worked. Still, you scoffed. “Just get Nemuri to let you in. You evidently don’t need me.”
The hand on the steering wheel tensed, veins pulsing. “First name basis?”
“Some professors like me.”
“Forget I said anything,” he grumbled, and when you turned to the window again, he mashed on the car radio, volume loud over the rain.
After a babble of a drum solo and what sounded like shouting in English, you were able to translate the song in your head by the time it hit the chorus:
“Got it bad, so bad, I’m hot for teacher.”
Aizawa stared, baffled, at the radio instead of the road as the guitar picked up, and he changed stations.
Again, in English, but with a hypnotically alt-relaxed beat: “Can’t tell my friends, ‘cause they will laugh; I love a member of the staff.”
You sneaked a glance at the driver’s seat, where Aizawa was fighting traffic, his erection, and his incredulity at what he was hearing.
“I fight my way to the front of class to get the best view of her—”
Aizawa changed stations before the singer could finish the couplet, and he sank into his seat at the safe sounds of synth and guitar, but you sat up straight, eyes wide and biting back a laugh, because you knew what the fuck was coming:
“Don’t stand—don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me—”
Aizawa smashed the radio’s off button, seething. He ran his fingers back through his hair, and after a deep breath, he opened his mouth. “What’d you do,” he asked flatly.
“Me?” you said, pointing at yourself, doing your fucking best not to smile, “What makes you think I’ve done something?”
Aizawa was panting. Chest heaving. Sweat visibly dripping down his face. Free hand darting between a superfluous position on the wheel, resting on the car door, and bunching up his jumpsuit to hide his erection, which only drew attention to it. “You didn’t—you and Nemuri didn’t orchestrate all this, did you?” he asked, teeming with nervous energy, “It’s a little—it’s a little too perfect for you, to get to see me dishevelled and desperate, to nearly get me to cave into what you want.”
Several feelings flooded you at once: revulsion at the suggestion you made a criminal use her quirk on you, anger that he’d even consider it to be in your character when he’s known you for years (and more anger that he thought you would want to lose your virginity with three other guys in the room), a wretched, clawing desperation to prove him wrong and beg for forgiveness—and a creeping disgust and shame towards yourself, for having been so vulnerable in his presence when he didn’t want it or you.
Time to shut down. “C’mon, Aizawa. That’s not very logical in the grand scheme of things,” you said, scathingly using his favourite word, propping your chin on your fist, and leaning against the window again, “And if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t let it end with my fucking soulmate going to someone else to make him come, especially when I was similarly helpless.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you—”
“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” you said bitterly, “but I wouldn’t do that. To you or to me. I don’t do things that would humiliate or hurt you.” You scooted closer towards the car window, away from him and his stupid pine aftershave. “I guess I’m a brat, yeah, but I’m not mean.”
To have something to do instead of talk to him, you exhumed the car manual from the glove compartment and started to read it, and you read that dull fucking piece of crap until you were forced to punch in your clearance codes for Sakura Grove.
As soon as he was inside the main building and out of sight, you slammed the manual and the glove compartment shut, and you screamed. No one would’ve heard you over the thunderstorm, anyway. Comforting that the weather was as angry as you.
You unbuckled and cosied up in your seat, glaring at the curtain of mist blowing rain horizontal outside. Lightning illuminated a worker rushing from one building to another, and she had to double back to get her ballet flat, hopping slightly to put it back on.
You don’t have another work shift until Monday, but you kind of wanted to clock in, anyway. It’d be satisfying to bitch about the whole thing with Ito. She’d tear into Aizawa. He deserves it.
Slunking down into your seat, you were struck with new terror: what if Aizawa were right? What if you did, inadvertently, plan this out, by inhaling Ito’s quirk dust a second time? Sex pollen was…sex pollen was a trope. A pretty fucking common one.
Oh, my God.
You clamped a hand over your mouth and tried to work out the logistics. Serendipity was already scheduled to arrive in Japan regardless of you inhaling the dust again, and—fuck fuck fuck. You didn’t like this.
You swallowed thickly, turning it all over in your head, and as the variables overlapped and blurred in your mind, you started to cry.
“Goddammit,” you said aloud, sitting up and dabbing at your face with your sleeve. You’ve already cried a lot today, and it’s not even noon. You’re taking a nap when you get back to campus.
You know who else likes naps?
You fucking sobbed harder, even though you were laughing a bit, too. You decided that you were too worn out to make any sound judgments. Go to sleep once you get back, and think about it when you wake up.
You sniffed and looked towards the door to the main building. God, he’s taking a long time. You’d figure that he’d edged himself to oblivion and back during the car ride, but no—
The next instant, you tensed up, frazzled, because a half-dressed Aizawa’s straddling you, hips jerking, driving into your own and biting into his fist as he came on your shirt, cum spurting all the way up to your boobs.
The groan he released once the spill of his cum slowed to a slight dribble nearly wrecked your ears and stopped your breath. You’re hastily, desperately drinking up details, eyes flicking over them rapidly in case they’re snatched away before you could notice: the weeping, pink tip of his cock, the only part of his dick peeking out of his jumpsuit’s lower half—the trail of dark hair leading up to it from his naval, framed by an infuriating v on his lithely muscled abdomen—all of his exposed, corded muscles of his chest, tendons visibly stretching and contracting in his forearms—and when he wiped that final drop of cum off his cock, it was with the thumb stained with soulmark pink.
Of course, for how much relaxation coursed through his body, it all fled him the second he finally opened his eyes.
You expected that he’d scramble to cover himself up and off of you, but once that initial panic faded, all he was left with was resignation. He yanked up the elastic of his boxer-briefs to hide his cock, and, sighing, he said, “Please. Please don’t say anything. I can’t handle it right now.”
You nodded. His eyes travelled over your face, his expression cracking. “You’re crying,” he said, voice breaking.
“Not because of you,” you said, wiping at your tears, “It’s something I did.”
He wiped away the tear stains on your other cheek. “Let’s find something to clean you up.”
While he twisted to fossick through the console for tissues, you swiped two fingers through the stuff on your shirt. So, this was a man’s cum. Weird. Thick. (You’ve seen some before; you’re not an idiot, but this was your first time, uh, experiencing it. Honestly, it reminded you a bit of the congealed quirk stuff earlier.) You rubbed it between your fingers.
“Oh, what are you doing—no, stop that,” said Aizawa softly, swatting your hand away from your cum-stained shirt. When you eyed the bit on your fingers, Aizawa sighed again. “Don’t taste it.”
He took your hand and wiped it clean, pink ink seeping across skin with every brief touch. He gave you a tissue from the pack he found for your tears, and he used the rest to wipe off your shirt.
“Doesn’t look like there’s anything else for you to wear,” he said, checking the backseat.
“It’s okay,” you said, balling up the tissues and putting them in the centre console, “We’re going straight back to campus. I’ll just shower and go to bed.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Aizawa, and he lifted himself from your lap and moved to cross to the driver’s seat.
You grabbed his arm to stop him. “You should, too. Don’t run yourself dry.”
Aizawa froze, considering, and then he nodded, slowly sinking back onto your lap.
He braced his hands on his thighs. “I’ve been cruel to you.”
Too exhausted to argue, you shrugged. “You have your reasons.”
“I shouldn’t be so cold to you, though. It’s been wearing away at my conscience,” he said, patting his pockets on his thighs and moving down to his calves. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he said, “Give me your phone. You deserve my number, at least.”
You pulled yours out and opened a new contact before handing it over. “You’re sure you’re comfortable with that?”
“Yeah,” said Aizawa, tapping the screen, “So long as it doesn’t…lead to anything out of bounds. And…maybe you can stick around for a while next time you shift in your sleep.” He shot you a smirk as he returned your phone.
The contact name simply read Shouta. No surname or honorifics. Just Shouta.
Heat rose to your face, but it was much pleasanter than when it had earlier that day.
“Are you good to drive back to campus?”
Tilting your head, you pocketed your phone again. “Yeah, I’m up for it.”
“Good,” he said, climbing off of your lap and into the backseat, “I’m going the fuck to sleep.”
soulmate trope taglist: @bakugouspsycho, @pansexualproblemchild, @doonaandpjs, @sunsetevergreen, @the-coffee-is-on-fire, @liberace2, @ladymidnight77, @nonomesupposedto, @gooooomz, @kissmebakugou, @pachiibatt, @celestair
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sunny1927 · 5 months
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hello. I'm new to tumblr and i want to follow epic mickey or mickey mouse blogs in general, can you maybe recommend me a couple blogs?
Hello! Welcome to tumblr! (A very messy, confusing place that I love skckskdkck-)
And well I’ll admit, finding Epic Mickey blogs aren’t all that hard (but from me it was hard considering I was new to the fandom and didn’t know much about the Disney characters), but once you find more blogs that interest you just follow it y’know? Anyway here are some blogs I follow who do Disney/epic Mickey content.
@zenmom posts a lot of drawings about Epic Mickey and mostly Oswald in general (she’s real cool :D)
@skullsemi posts a lot of good stuff on Disney and Topolino characters (and as well as their AU @thebackupdetectives , even though it isn’t active as much. I still look at it every now and then).
@angelleplaytoonbeary makes really great drawings & edits of Disney movies and the Disney bros Mickey and Oswald, they’re always so adorable haha! ❤️💙
@bniebee draws a lot of Epic Mickey art and really smooth animations! (her artstyle is so soft and beautiful every time dkvsoakfoco-)🩵✨ (also she has a musketeer blog about Julius, Oswald and Mickey @musketeers-brothersinarms I recommend if you are interested)
Okay I’m just put some other blogs cause I can’t really explain them all- (because I don’t want this post to be so long as it is already)
@jestierabbit , @graytoons , @mr-pgeon , @waci-illstr , @misscloudiedays , @mickedy , @mice-ducks-and-blots , @obwald , @mafik-sun , @alioks-blog , @rockhousejai , @mushysposts @the-bravest-tailor @hotcat-lol @hatred-n-hav0c are all great artists to follow if you are interested in their content of epic Mickey/Mickey Mouse AUs (or even their original content or other fandoms cause they’re all really cool)
@memelordotherblog , @sweettjrose & @local-meme-lord post a lot memes of topolino comics (which are all hilarious) and have really great takes/headcanons on each characters.
And there’s me (self promote haha-)! @sunny1927 I post a lot of epic Mickey/ Mickey Mouse and Friends content (and I also have an AU blog @disney-mystical-au if you wanna check it out, but it’s in a jamble rn-)
I think that’s all, (sorry if I missed everyone, so many people to remember). Hopefully you enjoy your time here in tumblr! ✨
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kafus · 1 month
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the epic conclusion to The Freakylocke™
recently i did a hardcore nuzlocke of pokemon firered but with an extra gimmick layered on top to keep me invested: naming all my encounters after my friends, randomly chosen by spinning a wheel of names whenever i get a new encounter. this is not the same as a "friendlocke" as popularized by saltydkdan if you're aware of that btw, my friend's don't roleplay the pokemon or pick what they do, i just livepost my playthrough with my friends and they get to feel like they're involved and it makes it a semi-social thing, which is fun for me. i did one of these in emerald last year with friends from a specific group chat with "club" in the name that i fittingly called the clublocke, and this time in firered i deemed the playthrough the "freakylocke", based off of a running gag in the group chat of friends i named my pokemon after this time (the likodot server!! hi guys!!) tbh if i keep doing these i should really think of a name for this Type of nuzlocke but i haven't figured one out yet... anyway
i did not actively livepost the freakylocke on tumblr because i already had my hands full liveposting it on discord to my friends in question! but the ending to the run ended up being so much fun that i wanted to do a retelling of the E4+champion here to memorialize this run lol
so! after NUMEROUS hours of grinding, i finally got the whole team to level 60, which is the level of lance's highest leveled pokemon, and was ready to take on the E4. my copy of firered is in japanese so for convenience's sake, i've edited these photos of my team taken before the E4 to have the move names in english
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a little more detail about the team: first off, they do all have hold items. frosty (frost in-game because frosty didn't fit the JPN character limit lol) the charizard has charcoal, bibi the golem has leftovers, zur the persian has a spell tag, motsu the jolteon has a magnet, mari the gengar has a twistedspoon, and vee the lapras has a mysticwater. multiple of these can be obtained easily, but i had to grind for the magnet, twistedspoon, and spell tag off of wild pokemon that only had a 5% chance of holding them, which was a bit of a nightmare lol. the spell tag had enabled zur to sweep sabrina (barring her venomoth which i swapped out for) by just clicking shadow ball, the twistedspoon was necessary for some damage ranges for koga with gengar's psychic, and i grinded for the magnet before the E4 because motsu's special attack was um... shit. i was making up for the minus special attack nature, careful lol
second, it's worth acknowledging that i half picked this team based on what encounters i thought i had that were strong, and half just because of emotional attachment, ESPECIALLY in the case of zur the persian - for some reason i got super attached to using persian during this playthrough and i was DETERMINED to get him to the end alive, even though persian was definitely not the most optimal pokemon for the job lol. i could go on about my move choices on these mons, but i'll spare you and let the upcoming fights speak for themselves, aside from quickly mentioning. Yes i put explosion on golem. ideally i wanted to go deathless but i figured it could be useful in a pinch if i was driven into a corner.
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the first three members of the e4 were uneventful and i made pretty quick work of them, even with motsu's terrible special attack missing some thunderbolt damage ranges on lorelei's water types, forcing me to send out vee, lol. but when things really got heated was during the lance fight. at this point i was playing on my ds capture card to share my screen to my friends, so i have clean photos! (the layout is leafgreen themed, it's something i made literal years ago, i was too lazy to make anything new lmao)
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one thing leads to another and i'm staring down lance's ace dragonite with frosty the charizard on half HP. my team at this point is incredibly healthy as i've maneuvered the battle well so far, but now i'm in a bit of a dilemma, because this dragonite has outrage AND hyper beam, both very powerful moves that will definitely get the KO on frosty if i leave him in, and to make matters worse, since both will KO, which one out of the two lance picks is random, so i can't accurately predict what he's going to do. i need to ideally get vee in to use ice beam, which should be a 1-shot, but it's risky... if i wanted to play fully optimally, i would scan my team for which member i would need least during the champion fight against blue and sacrifice them to get a clean swap into vee, but... i'm still dedicated to wanting to beat this E4 deathless at this point, so i decide, okay, vee is bulky, they can definitely live a hyper beam or two hits of outrage, i just need lance to not get a crit
and you won't believe what happens next when i hard swap into vee!
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lance uses hyper beam on the switch and GETS THE CRIT, FAINTING VEE IN ONE SHOT... the reaction in the discord chat speaks for itself LOL
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so at this point i'm kind of panicking since not only do i have to somehow make it out of this fight against lance's dragonite, i have to get out of it healthy enough to still handle the champion fight against blue, of which vee was my answer into his blastoise so that's. not good. and to make matters worse, while staring down my options and verbally reasoning out what i should do, i ACCIDENTALLY PREMATURELY SEND OUT FROSTY!! I LITERALLY JUST PRESSED THE WRONG BUTTONS BECAUSE MY HANDS WERE KIND OF SHAKY WHILE TRYING TO OPEN THE SUMMARY SCREEN SINCE I WAS INVESTIGATING WHETHER FROSTY (THE PERSON IN THE CHAT) WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE DRAGON CLAW 2HKO 😭
my one saving grace is that dragonite is now in hyper beam recharge, so now that i've accidentally sent out frosty i'm able to fire off a single dragon claw for free...
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and it's not even a two hit KO 😭!!! so the dream of just outspeeding dragonite and 2 shotting it with dragon claw is in the dust now and i have to make some tough choices.
ultimately, i decide frosty could potentially be too important for the champion fight to let them go down, and i decide to switch into bibi the golem... my thought process was, i definitely needed bibi the least for the fight against blue, so if dragonite picked outrage and bibi went down, i would be able to get a clean swap into something that could take on the last of dragonite's HP, or if dragonite picked hyper beam, bibi would tank that like a champ on account of resisting normal and having high physical defense, and be able to get a free hit in during the recharge turn.
i send out bibi holding my breath AND...
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LANCE CHOOSES HYPER BEAM!!! YES!!! and HILARIOUSLY it was ANOTHER CRIT, but bibi still shrugs it off like it's NOTHING
so now i'm in one last dilemma: i have two options here, taking the KO with a super effective rock slide, or taking the KO with an incredibly powerful explosion. rock slide seems like the obvious choice, but the issue is... it's only 90% accurate, and if it misses, bibi definitely dies next turn, and living the hyper beam would have been for nothing. on the other hand, explosion ensures the battle is won, but bibi definitely dies, in that case. i'm excessively indecisive on what to do so i ask my friends and their answer is pretty damn clear
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so i click rock slide. AND!!!!
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BIBI, THE ABSOLUTE CHAMP, LANDS IT!!!
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bibi clutching up against lance lets her not only live another day, but it means that i get to fight blue with a team of 5 instead of 4 or even worse! ...this does NOT mean the blue fight is going to be free, though.
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blue's team is actually pretty threatening at this point, especially without my lapras to tank blastoise's potentially rain-boosted hydro pumps. before jumping into the fight, i think very carefully about my options, but ultimately my prep work amounts to taking the charcoal off of frosty and giving them a chesto berry, just in case i have to hard swap into exeggutor and take a sleep powder, so i can one-shot it with flamethrower easily in that scenario.
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my lead is pretty straightforward, i just take out pidgeot immediately with thunderbolt from motsu.
next, blue sends out Rhydon. i debate on what to do for a moment, since obviously i need to swap out, but i'm unsure if rhydon will use earthquake or rock tomb - if EQ 1-shots motsu, it will definitely use EQ, but otherwise there's a huge chance it could use rock tomb since the gen 3 AI loves to use moves that lower speed if you currently outspeed them. ultimately i realize with a quick bit of thinking that there's no way EQ doesn't KO motsu, even from full, so i send out mari the gengar on it, who has levitate and takes no damage from it, letting her outspeed and fire off a massive psychic attack into rhydon's pitiful special defense
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unfortunately not pitiful enough for Mari to get even close to a 1 hit KO, forcing her to take a rock tomb in the process. but despite the speed drop, she still outspeeds and is able to take out rhydon with another psychic on the next turn.
out next comes alakazam and i decide alright, i can handle the rest of this fight without gengar, and i don't want anyone to swap in on the obvious upcoming psychic, i don't have any mons that can tank that... so i decide to sacrifice mari
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...but then blue just... goes for future sight??? LMFAO so the hail mary hypnosis that i clicked just in case something like this happened fires off and actually lands!
this massive luck plus some lucky sleep turns allow mari to take out alakazam with two consecutive thunderbolts, leaving her alive when blue sends out arcanine next... but she takes the future sight damage at this point and is left too low to survive a flamethrower from the arcanine, which outspeeds her because of the rock tomb speed drop from earlier... ultimately, mari is still sacrificed. but taking out alakazam was a MASSIVE help, she performed amazingly
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my next move is fairly straightforward - i send out bibi the golem who can survive any move arcanine tosses out and KO it with an earthquake (something i couldn't have done as easily if she fainted against lance!)
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unfortunately, this brings in the pokemon i was afraid of, Blastoise, and considering bibi is weak to and doesn't outspeed both of blue's remaining pokemon, blastoise and exeggutor, there's no reason to preserve her life over getting a clean swap into another pokemon, so i let her go down to a hydro pump.
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MASSIVE salutes to bibi though, her surviving hyper beam during the lance fight and landing the rock slide against his dragonite pretty much saved this run. coolest golem ever
at this point, i have just motsu the jolteon, frosty the charizard, and zur the persian remaining, and even though motsu cannot get the 1 hit KO on blastoise with a thunderbolt, even with the magnet item due to their pitiful special attack, it's still the most obvious choice to get guaranteed damage off, so i send in motsu and use thunderbolt. at this point, i'm pretty relieved because i've essentially won the fight - even if motsu faints from a hydro pump (i'm unsure if they can live one or not), the thunderbolt will get enough damage for zur and frosty to clean up the remainder of his HP, and then frosty can 1 shot exeggutor with flamethrower like planned. but, there's still a little more left to this story...
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motsu actually does live a single non-crit hydro pump on the red, so they're able to finish off blastoise with another thunderbolt, leaving blue with only exeggutor. the answer is obvious - if i just swap into frosty right now, i can win the battle instantly, not even risking getting put to sleep because of the chesto berry i put on them before the fight began. BUT...
remember how i said i was really emotionally attached to my persian? i'm overjoyed that zur was going to live to the very end like i wanted, but they also didn't get to do anything in this fight and i thought that was lame. i knew they had spell tag boosted shadow balls which were super effective into exeggutor, so surely they might be able to take it out instead of frosty, right? and beating blue's final pokemon with a persian in a hardcore nuzlocke was HILARIOUS in my opinion.
this is in addition to zur using shadow ball being a running joke during this run; back when i fought sabrina, i mentioned this before but i was able to grind for the spell tag and 1-shot all of her psychic types with zur, making the fight super easy... and back when i was liveposting that to the discord server, my friend babs said this in response to me making a typo on shadow ball
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zur "blasting bals" became a running gag from here on out so it would be ACTUALLY poetic for me to finish this run with a shadow ball. i HAD to try.
issue: motsu's special attack was still GARBAGE and the bite i used (a special attack in gen 3 as a reminder, all dark type moves are special there) to get some damage on exeggutor first wasn't enough to ensure that zur could follow up with a clean shadow ball knockout. my friends were encouraging me to send out zur anyway, but i really didn't want to because it could go south so fast and if zur DIED in the champion fight i'd be REALLY UPSET. but THEN. i REMEMBERED.
ZUR! HAS! FAKE OUT! I JUST FORGOT!
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and so, with a combination of the free fake out chip and the spell tag boosting shadow ball's power, zur is just barely able to ensure a KO onto blue's exeggutor, winning the fight and the entire run, resulting in maybe one of the funniest nuzlocke end screens ever (to me at least)
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and that is how i managed to beat the freakylocke despite some terrible luck while taking a massive risk against lance LOL. this file is no longer in "nuzlocke mode" and i've been using it for other gen 3 shenanigans, which i will post about eventually...
special shoutouts to the four deaths other than vee the lapras of the run as well:
kris the kadabra, who fainted to an easily avoidable crit from a koffing because i was playing tilted and tired (oops)
serena the gyarados, who fainted to a crit from a random trainer's weezing (less easily avoidable but still sucked, i had put a lot of time into training her!!)
kay the paras, who was sacrificed nobly against sabrina's alakazam to allow a free swap back into zur for the shadow ball KO after the rest of my team handled her venomoth
babs the growlithe, who i was really excited to use because it's a version exclusive and i almost always play leafgreen instead, but who died to a random crit from ANOTHER koffing that i didn't think they'd faint to (the koffing line was enemy #1 of this run i guess)
oh and in speaking of babs, to commemorate the run, they drew this.
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it's incredible. i'm cherishing this art forever. you can see more of their art on their blog @vulturevanity LOL
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quibbs126 · 28 days
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“Perhaps now, a new dawn can finally approach…”
Here, have some of your dosage of Cookie Run art by me
The idea was basically of Dark Choco getting that Lava Sword, and then heading out to find a new lease on life
I want his Ovenbreak redemption really badly, or at least an update following him and that sort of story, as unlikely as that is. I mean, he seems to be pretty friendly at the Sun Tournament, so he’s not entirely unsaveable. But I also sort of see why he doesn’t get one, namely that he has one in Kingdom (sort of), and reappearing Ovenbreak characters generally get boiled down to their tropes, and a redemption would mean that they have to change his tropes
But yeah, at least in AUs/fanfiction
His shoulder pads are missing because the idea in my head was that he’s getting rid of his old outfit, to symbolize him starting anew, but then I also wanted the cape but was too lazy to add the shoulder pads back in, so now they’re the only thing missing from his design. I still don’t feel like putting them in though
Background’s still not great, but at least there’s an actual setting this time? I don’t really know how to improve on that front
I put the clouds in to sort of symbolize him leaving the control of the sword, as the clouds are now supposed to be dissipating. But I also don’t really know how to draw clouds, so they don’t look as great as I’d hoped
…All right, I’m gonna be honest, this drawing was cynically conceived. I made it because I was upset that this week’s drawings haven’t been doing so well, particularly last night’s drawing. I can acknowledge most haven’t been great, but I put a lot of effort into that last one and I think it turned out a bit better than usual, but it’s barely gotten any attention, outside of some mutuals and followers that’ll like my non-Cookie Run stuff as well. And it’s gotten nothing on Twitter, despite not having the tag excuse tumblr might have as to who sees it
This was made because I’m convinced that it’ll do better than yesterday’s drawing, as well as the art I’m posting on Sunday which I busted my ass over and have been waiting to post, just because it’s Cookie Run, Dark Choco, and what most of you signed up for
The above art isn’t horrible, and I do feel kind of bad for tying it into my own personal bitterness over what was probably inevitable, but this also is not my best work. I made it in 45 minutes while in class, it’s sort of just fine. But I guarantee you it’s going to do better than those other two pieces, things I put real passion and effort into (the latter piece more than the former though), just because of what it is
I would like to be proven wrong, and for that Sunday picture to actually do good and get the attention I want it to (which isn’t much, it’s mostly just double digit likes and at least one or two reblogs with someone’s thoughts), but I feel like that won’t be what happens, and that I’ll see more of this in my activity instead
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yooniesim · 9 months
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So, I may be a day late, but I still want to make a little post for Simblr Gratitude Day 💜
To start off, my memory is pretty bad, so I just know I'm gonna miss tagging people... and honestly, there's way more people on here I'm grateful for than tumblr's limit of 50! So I'm starting out addressing everyone.
To everybody that likes or reblogs my posts, sends comments or asks, shares their sims with me, or uses my cc: I love you. Yes, you! I may be bad at answering back sometimes, but I cherish every interaction I get- a lot of the times they have me kicking my feet and giggling, or sometimes I'm barking and scaring my cat. Asks really make my day and even when I don't reply so fast, they warm my heart. Asks I've gotten on here have genuinely helped me in my dark times, and renewed my faith in this community as a whole, because some of you are just so freaking amazing and kind. Especially now with everything I've been going through, sims and being here has remained a comfort for me because of you all. Even if there's speed bumps from time to time, I truly believe there's more good here than bad, and y'all should be proud of yourselves and your capacity for endless kindness. Thank you!
Now, I'm going to address a few specific precious people I'm grateful for.
@wastelandwhisperer - Moon, my precious mom friend, I adore you. The joy, comfort, and hilarious memories you give me can't be understated. You deserve all the love and light in the world.
@neverheresims - God's eepiest soldier, what would I do without you? Thank you for always being genuine, reliable, and a true friend.
Vi - Thank you my sheriff, my paggro detector, my master of copypastas, my right hand catboy. Even though you're untraceable, I couldn't leave you out. I love you!
@divinedionym - Thanks for always being straight with me and taking NO shit. I truly admire you and your attitude, friend.
@dyoreos - We may not both be active at the same time anymore, but I still think of you, friend! You've always had my back and I'll always have yours.
@nucrests - I'm so grateful to be your friend, and every time you share your beautiful content and gorgeous sims with me, it really makes my day. I adore you.
@cinamun - You probably don't know this, but in certain times when I was feeling low, your comments and kindness really lifted my spirits and made me feel like I belong. You're a lovely person and deserve all the love you receive, friend.
@woosteru - You won't see this bc you're retired so I can be sappy as I want, so there!!! I adore you, your sweet personality, and your sense of humor that matches just right with mine. (Nobody tell them)
@superflare - Lulu, you're an incredibly creative and intelligent person. I can tell you're going to go far in life and do great for the world. Be proud of yourself, always!
@fiftymilehighclub - Thank you for always being yourself, Manda! You're such a hardworking person that's kind but firm with your opinions and what matters to you. You're amazing.
@nicatnite88 - Tay, you're someone that's always empathetic, understanding and kind, yet hilarious at the same time. I look up to you as a person and admire your skills as a parent.
@pluto-sims - What do I say about Eli? Despite being unfortunately bri*ish, you've exceeded expectations in all other areas as a friend. I genuinely appreciate your presence and kindness in my life.
@bloody-soda - As one of my longest and dearest mutuals, peachy, my love for you can't be understated! I think of you whenever I see cute meme pics lol and you're so lovely as a person.
@wubblesgonefishin - Beautiful wubs, you're such a wonderful person with so much love to give! My day brightens every time I speak with you and I'm so glad you're back.
@toastie-sim - Meg! One of my few brain cells, I don't know what I'd do without you! You're so helpful all the time and unbelievably patient. I appreciate you.
...Phewph. Now that that's o- wait. You thought I was done??? Nuh uh, the king of long ass texts posts is not done that fast. Here's some more beautiful people I'm grateful for and love seeing grace my dash 💜
@simandy @void-imp @therichantsim @adelarsims @marsosims @shysimblr @1-800-cuupid @xldkx @xiuminuwu @hexcodesims @cassymblr @lotusplum @rebelangelsims @denzellion @strawberrylattesims @anachrosims @cowplant-snacks @fierce-trait @simanin @ghostwoohoo @llama-head @aghilasims @janjumjam @jellyfish-tea @bbdoll @puppycheesecake @mwvwv-sims
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bbcphile · 3 months
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In Memory of Kiah
cw/tw: death, medical assistance in dying
If you’re wondering why I kind of disappeared from the Mysterious Lotus Casebook tag and stopped posted WIP Wednesday things, here’s the explanation: One of my closest friends, who has been dying progressively and increasingly painfully over the last two years, told me about 3 weeks ago that they were going to pursue medical assistance in dying because it is legal where they live. It was originally scheduled for the end of July, then moved up to the end of June, and then on Monday, they moved it to Wednesday (yesterday), because their life was agony and they couldn’t wait any longer.
I’m lucky that I had enough advanced notice that I was able to say goodbye–both by sending them a message telling them in detail how much they’ve meant to me and thanking them for everything, and then in one last phone call the night before–so I’m glad they knew how much I loved them and that I could be there for them emotionally, even though I couldn’t physically be there for the end itself, because they live too far away. We met on Tumblr through the chronic illness community because we share the same genetic connective tissue disorder and many of its comorbidities, and I will always be so, so grateful to Tumblr for bringing us together.
I wanted to post about them here because it just felt wrong to keep going like nothing had happened, and because I wanted to do something to pay tribute to how good a person they were and how much I miss them. So, some words about Kiah: 
Kiah was one of the kindest, funniest, intellectually curious, loving, and fiercely protective people I have ever met. I loved that we could talk about anything, including the terror of living in a failing body or how to come to terms with being disabled when you were always an overcommitted overachiever who defined yourself on external metrics of success, analyze media together during watch parties, and laugh together about literally anything (including during our last conversation, where we were both bawling our eyes out, but also somehow laughing about how absurd it is that you can’t really cry hard and talk at the same time and how that seems like a real design flaw). We didn’t share any fandoms, but we still had fun sharing details about our blorbos and fandom activities: I loved hearing about their cosplay adventures, and they always wanted to keep up to date on the metas I was writing. Even once they went blind and couldn’t read my metas on tumblr anymore because it wouldn’t work with their screenreader, they had me send them Google doc versions so their computer could read my posts to them because they didn’t want to miss any of my analyses. And when they were too sick to listen to the full posts, they asked for summaries because they still wanted to keep up as much as they could. 
They were always so caring and compassionate: when they first called to tell me in January that they were going to do medical assistance in dying, and after I had told them I understood and supported them and we’d talked about how they felt about it, they asked me how I was. I had told them that while I was heartbroken, I would handle it, because I didn’t want to make them feel responsible for comforting me when they had their hands full with processing everything and feeling their own grief. They said that while they appreciated my not wanting to make it harder on them, they didn’t want me to feel like I had to be ok in front of them, because they wanted to comfort me and support me even in this if they could, since they didn’t have that much time left to be there for me and they wanted to make it count. (yeah, I’m sobbing right now.)
None of those descriptions could even begin to do justice to how much they meant to me, but I hope this anecdote will:
I couldn’t be with them at the end because I’m a country and an opposite coast away, but I hated the idea of not being able to say goodbye in person or hold their hand if they were scared during the injection. So I played piano and imagined they could hear it.
Most of you probably won’t know what that means or why it would be a big deal. Here’s why:
I used to be a musician. Music was my life and my most important means of self-expression, and was absolutely going to be my career. But in high school and college, an extensive series of very traumatic things happened that made me essentially have to give up performing. For the better part of the last 18 years, literally up until I sat down to play for Kiah, even just the idea of performing for someone or a neighbor overhearing me play was triggering enough that I would have a full-blown panic attack and dissociate so badly I would literally go from concert pianist level ability to mostly forgetting how to read music and having to count ledger lines. But my desire to do something so that maybe, just maybe, I could make Kiah’s final moments better apparently trumped my trauma, because I was able to do it. I had wanted to play some Rachmaninoff, Brahms, or Chopin, but apparently those are still too closely tied to Events and I started to have skill loss issues again (fucking dissociative amnesia), so I switched to a piece I had played long ago enough that it was reliably in my mind and fingers (and that I could sight-read if I forgot it partway through). 
And I played it.
I hope, somehow, they were able to hear it.
I also recorded it.
And I’m going to share it here.
It kind of feels like serving my heart up on a platter, but that feels kind of appropriate for this tribute to them. 
I think they’d be happy, knowing that I’m “doing it scared,” as Tumblr recommends, and that my attempt to give them the biggest gift of love and support I could think of, somehow, even if just temporarily, gave music back to me.
Also, I think they’d get a kick out of the fact that you can hear me giggle a little at one point in the recording when the sheet music falls on my hands, both because it’s a great middle finger to perfectionism, but also because laughing through the tears (and yeah, I was crying while playing this) is very much a chronic illness and disability thing, and feels like a good metaphor for much of the last few months.
So. All that to say:
Kiah, I love you. I miss you so much already.
Here’s Robert D. Vandall’s “Lakeside Retreat.”
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mumms-the-word · 8 days
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Love Letters
Alistair and Lucy Amell
These letters were written as a collaboration between @callmethebrightness and myself for the lovely @elspethdekarios's birthday. callmethebrightness wrote the AMAZING letter from Alistair (and I'm obsessed with it, she nailed his voice so well) while I wrote Lucy Amell's reply letter <3 This was so much fun to work on and I am in awe of the talent my friends have in this little corner of tumblr. Thank you @elspethdekarios for trusting us with your OC! I hope you have the happiest of birthdays and that you adore these love letters!
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Full text under the cut!
Alistair's Letter by @callmethebrightness
To Warden-Commander Lucy Amell, Hero of Ferelden: Lucy, I love you. I know, bad form to start a letter like that; without even a hello and how are you, but it's literally the only thing that comes to mind when I think of you, so I had to write it down first. I love you. There. Now to the rest. We're making strides looking into the Wardens and Corypheus, this "false Calling" he's managed, though it's not the sort of progress I'm particularly excited about. Every time I think I've figured out the worst of it, more bad news rears its ugly head. I'm a bit less skeptical now that we have some proper allies: not only the Champion of Kirkwall, but Inquisitor Sulah Lavellan, who has all her people putting their heads together to do something about all this. We should consider having an army at our disposal for all our problems, it's really marvelously convenient. Skyhold is an amazing place. Not just the fortress itself, where I've gotten into all sorts of places I shouldn't be ("Oh, I haven't seen this door before" -- surprise, it's a dungeon. No, thank you.) but the people and the activity here. It feels like everyone from the servants to the Inquisitor herself is committed to working together. I've met Fereldans, Orlesians, city elves, surface dwarves, ex-Templars, mages, farmers, nobles, Chantry sisters, Dalish spies, qunari, Tevinters...I could go on. If anything might be able to actually unite all of Thedas, the way the Chantry says it does, it's this thing. It's this place. Maker, I wish you could see it. Every time I see something incredible in my travels, I think that, you know. "Lucy would love this, I wish she could see it." And every time I see something horrible I think, "Maker, I wish Lucy was with me." You get the idea, don't you? You, with me, all the time, no matter what. Sometimes you're all I think about. But you knew that already. We're going to figure this thing out, Lucy. I'm going to make sure the Wardens have nothing more to fear from this Elder One, even if I have to fight him myself. And when you return, whether you've found what you're looking for or not, and I see you again -- I'm going to take you in my arms and never let you go. I mean it. That's not an exaggeration. I never want to be apart from you again, Lucy. Nothing is more important to me than that. What else? I love you. I miss you. Leliana is scarier than ever, but in a good way. I've eaten Orlesian cheese and do not care for it. I miss you. I told the Inquisition's ambassador I would include a small note in their missive to the Hero of Ferelden but my letter is now longer than the official one. I hope those creepy ravens of Leliana's can carry a little extra weight. When you see it, write her back and tell her it's creepy; she won't listen to me. There are less terrible birds, Leliana. Maker, I miss you so much I don't want to stop writing to you. Is that odd? Probably. But you wouldn't say odd. "Alistair, you're too sweet." That's what you always say when I'm being a fool, especially a lovestruck fool. Can't say I don't appreciate it, though. I'll write you again soon. There's talk of the fortress at Adamant, a potential siege. All sorts of military talk I do not care for. Whatever happens, you'll hear from me soon. I never can stand to wait long. Yours forever, Alistair
Lucy Amell's Letter (by me)
To Warden Alistair: [In a smaller script] Leliana, don’t be nosy! You’ve got your own letter! My darling, I love you. I don’t care if it’s bad form, just seeing those words at the start of your letter gave me so much joy and comfort that I couldn’t even read the rest of letter at first. I just wanted to linger there on those words and imagine them in your voice. I love you. I love you. I love you. And, Maker’s breath, I miss you, too. As my journey out west bring me farther and farther away from recognizable society, I find myself traveling alone more often than not. There are good people out here, and plenty of interesting distractions, and more than enough danger to keep my mind occupied, but again and again I wish you were at my side. I know taking down the Elder One is important, but these days I wish I had been more selfish and brought you along. But what’s done is done, and it’s good that you’re there, trying to shake some sense into our fellow Wardens. Someone has to.  What you’ve told me about the situation, and what little Inquisitor Lavellan has included in her letter, troubles me. It sounds like Corypheus is more dangerous than we thought…but if the Inquisition has the army and the resources that you say it does, then I trust them to succeed. And I trust you to survive whatever comes your way. We’ve gotten out of worse scrapes, the two of us, haven’t we? Regardless, I’ve asked Inquisitor Lavellan to look after you. I know, I know, you would say I’m fussing over you too much (but I know you love it). But if she’s your ally, then she’s my ally too, and I feel no shame in asking this much of her. I want you in one piece when we meet again, my love. Be good for me. Don’t wander into dungeons that you can’t wander out of. Avoid the Orlesian cheese if you hate it so much. Remind Leliana to eat every now and again. I know her work keeps her busy, and I can only imagine that the death of the Divine has shaken her more than she’s letting on. And take care of yourself, too.  Oh, and I’m not telling Leliana that her birds are creepy. Just be glad she’s not sending missives via nug, or we’d never get letters to one another. I’ll write soon, my darling. I love you. I miss you. Yours always, Lucy [below, in a messier scrawl, as if added to the end of the page in haste] Alistair, I’m glad I didn’t send this letter right away! I’ve got big news. I think I’ve found something, and if I’m right, it means the end of this journey is in sight. I don’t want to say what it is just yet, but…I have a really good feeling about this. This might be the cure we’ve been hoping for.  But if not, I don’t care. If it’s not this, then I’ve got nothing else to investigate out here. If this isn’t our cure, then the silver lining is this—I’m coming home, and nothing is going to stop me. Meet me in Redcliffe when all of this is said and done. Whether I’ve found the cure for our Callings or not, I will be there, in the place we first started to fall in love, at the start of the next summer. And once we are together again, my love, I swear that nothing will ever separate us again. With all my love, Lucy
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