#I really don't want to tag everyone who's there since it's most of the ensemble lol

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

Soldier, Poet, King

Part 13

[Beginning] [Previous]

[AO3] [Masterpost]

Time for Jin Guangyao's POV, and it's even longer than Nie Mingjue's so I'm very glad that y'all voted to split this current portion into three separate chapters lol.

Warning for Jin Guangyao having a Not Great Time (flashbacks, PTSD, etc.) related to his trauma from Jin Guangshan using him for Kaiju bait as well as a brief mention of the way he was abused by the Wen family when he worked for them in Tokyo.

--//--

Jin Guangyao wakes with a start, sitting upright and climbing out from between his partners in a tightly controlled rush without thinking about it, only realizing why a few seconds into stumbling into his trousers.

Nie Mingjue is even faster than him — he’d come back to their quarters late last night after a visit to research and so he’d just fallen asleep in his trousers and undershirt like he used to do more regularly, which means that he’s up and out the door into the pulsing red lights in the hallway while Jin Guangyao (and Lan Xichen behind him) are still hurrying to dress.

“JIN ONE, LET’S GO!” he barks in the direction of the room Jin Guangyao’s brother and cousin share. Jin Guangyao shares a glance with Lan Xichen before they hurry to join their partner out in the hallway, the doors along the corridor clanging open under the wailing sirens in an uneven cacophony as the pilots and the technicians further down the hall finish their own preparations nearly in tandem.

The technicians all run past them, a flurry of hurried jostling and the pounding of boots up the corridor, but the pilots cluster there in the hall, all bright-eyed, if a little confused. Jin Guangyao doesn’t blame them — the countdown clocks scattered throughout the ‘dome report they still have weeks to go before their next attack. But just because Mo Xuanyu’s predictions are frighteningly accurate doesn’t mean they’re incontrovertible fact, and they all know the unpredictability of their opponents too well to be truly shocked.

Jin Zixuan is the first into the hallway, already suited up in his stupid gold and mother-of-pearl getup, but it’s Jiang Yanli at his side, not Jin Zixun. Jin Guangyao feels a faint tickle of something a bit too nebulous to name ‘dread’, though it’s close.

The sirens, their purpose served, shut off abruptly between one wail and the next.

“Where is he?” Nie Mingjue snaps at his normal (still loud) volume.

“I haven’t seen him in over 24 hours, Chifeng-zun, I don’t know,” Jin Zixuan reports steadily enough despite how pale he looks in the lights that are still dropped down to flashing red. Jin Guangyao makes some quick calculations and grips Nie Mingjue’s forearm so tightly his knuckles ache.

“No one else can go,” he says and he’s relieved his voice stays steady as well. “Lotus Spider and Jade Dragon are both stripped down for weapons upgrades, Golden Thunder and Immortal Mountain are docked for maintenance repairs. It has to be Sparks.”

There’s only one way that Sparks Amidst Snow can make the drop, and before his partner has even opened his mouth to give the order Jiang Yanli is turning to dart down the hallway quick as a minnow to the room she shares with Wen Qing.

“Wait! You can’t send jie out like this! Hey–!”

Jin Guangyao ignores Jiang Wanyin — as does Nie Mingjue, who simply turns to begin striding down the hallway. Jin Guangyao falls in at his partner’s left, Lan Xichen at Nie Mingjue’s right, and the remaining pilots, save Jin Zixuan, hurry to fall in behind them, their little group eerily silent as they hurry through the boiling shatterdome up to the comms tower.

“A-Su, go find Xuanyu,” Nie Mingjue orders when they reach the branching hub that leads down to the basements. “Bring him up to comms, I want him in the tower for all drops from now on. Wuxian, Wangji – go give the orders to evacuate the harbor neighborhoods and supervise it. I want everyone who can to take shelter in the nearest bunkers they can access.”

Qin Su, Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji peel off to their assigned tasks without missing a beat. Jin Guangyao has to jog to keep up with Nie Mingjue’s loping stride.

They’re nearly there when the lights drop blue, the siren resumes its wailing, and then they’re all breaking into a dead run, instinct guiding them to react to the emergency warning despite the fact that there’s nothing they can do except wait for Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli to drop.

“Chifeng-zun!” Jiang Wanyin shouts over the whooping alarm. “Jiejie isn’t a combat pilot!! You can’t send her out without backup!”

Jin Guangyao skids to a stop just in time to slam his hand down on the button for the lift up to communications as his partner rounds on Jiang Wanyin with an ugly snarl twisting his face.

“Then you make yourself useful and attempt to find Jin Zixun and another goddamn Jaeger within the next five minutes, but I have an invasion to get under control!”

“Nie Mingjue!!” Jiang Wanyin practically screams, spittle flying, and Jin Guangyao has to admire his balls of steel at least — just because Nie Mingjue is functional that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily well, especially not when there’s no doubt that he knows what they all do; the crux of the matter on both sides is that this will be a suicide mission, and they have to run it anyway. Jin Guangyao knows that it’s not a decision Nie Mingjue is making lightly, but it’s the reality they have to live with. It’s one of the nightmares that keeps his partner up at night, tormenting himself with what-ifs and should-haves, but he’s a good commander. He’ll do whatever it takes.

Even a suicide run.

Before it can become a murder as well, though, Lan Xichen steps between Nie Mingjue and Jiang Wanyin to bodily force Jiang Wanyin to stand down while Jin Guangyao ushers Nie Mingjue into the lift. 

“She’ll be alright,” Luo Qingyang attempts to comfort as they all clamber into the lift after them. “She’s stronger than she looks-“

“I know that!” Jiang Wanyin snaps. Jin Guangyao stays silent and steady at Nie Mingjue’s side, fingertips gently pressed to the inside of his wrist at his side to monitor his partner’s pulse and make sure he isn’t about to pass out from the unexpected stress. “I’m her co-pilot! Me! No one knows what she’s capable of better than I do, and this will kill her!!”

“Jiang Yanli is a world-class pilot,” Jin Guangyao says, his well-trained voice devoid of every emotion roiling through him. “She is aware, as we all are, that every day could bring death, and she chooses to remain a pilot. It’s a sacrifice we are all willing to make.”

“What do you know?” Jiang Wanyin turns to sneer at him, his eyes so wide the whites are visible all the way around. Jin Guangyao can’t really fault him, no matter how irritating this outburst is. “You’ve never even stepped foot out of a ‘dome during a battle, you have no idea what it’s like to face these things head-on —“

Jin Guangyao is too slow to stop Nie Mingjue punching Jiang Wanyin square in the nose so quickly his hand is a blur. Jiang Wanyin crumples to the floor like a sack of rice with a heavy thunk. It speaks volumes about their emotional states that neither Lan Xichen nor Luo Qingyang pass comment, instead merely lifting Jiang Wanyin’s unconscious form between them to carry him into the comms tower when the doors to the lift open again.

“Sparks?” Nie Mingjue barks at Nie Zonghui, mercifully already in his seat and frantically getting the Drift systems up and running. Jin Guangyao flings himself into his own seat to begin his half of the work monitoring the incoming Kaiju, reading miles of data as it pings in from their sensors out in the ocean to give him any information at all that will help them win.

“They just arrived, strapping in now,” Nie Zonghui reports, terse and businesslike.

“Kaiju?”

“It’s stealthy,” Jin Guangyao bites out, still scanning every piece of data that’s coming in with ever-increasing urgency. “I can’t get a read on it, but it’s fast. Not as fast as the last one maybe, but very close to it.”

Nie Mingjue just grunts his acknowledgement and turns to lean over Nie Zonghui so he can press the switch to talk to the pilots, announcing their Drift initiation and giving them their orders once the connection establishes and stabilizes. The orders are quite simple, nothing more than, “Keep it from landing, kill it as quickly as you can,” but Jin Guangyao knows that that’s much easier said than done.

Sparks Amidst Snow drops and they make a beeline straight for the open bay doors, disappearing into the night with the thundering boom of tens of thousands of gallons of displaced water, audible even all the way up in the tower. Inside the communications room, there’s grim silence once again as they watch the glowing dot that marks the Jaeger cross the radar at a quick clip that Jin Guangyao isn’t entirely sure will be quick enough. Not through any fault of Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli’s — they’re in a top of the line Jaeger that’s been further enhanced to be one of the absolute best in the world — but simply because it would seem the Kaiju have learned, yet again, how to best them.

“Cat 5,” Jin Guangyao yelps the moment his scanning attention catches on all the right data points. “Ge—“

“Nothing changes,” Nie Mingjue tells him through a deadly sort of calm, so different from his urgency on the way here. “They’ll get there, or they won’t. They’ll kill it, or they won’t. Our hands are tied.”

That’s remarkably bleak for Nie Mingjue but Jin Guangyao doesn’t have the time to glance at the others in the room to see how they’re taking it. The Kaiju is closing in fast, skimming along the shoreline like it knows it needs to come to the port to do the most damage — which he doesn’t doubt that it does. Thanks to Xue Yang’s experiments, Jin Guangyao has no doubt that the Kaijus they face from now on will be remarkably clever about their attacks in addition to being brutally strong. It’s nigh impossible to tuck that thought away where it can’t hurt anything rather than letting it convince him that they’re fighting a war they’ve already lost, but with a mental wrench he manages it.

Even if it’s a losing battle, a losing war, they still have no choice but to fight it.

“20 miles out, northward, speeding quickly along the shoreline,” Jin Guangyao reports directly to Sparks, clipped and businesslike. The camera feed ‘copters catch up with them just as they swing more directly north, adjusting to the collision coordinates Jin Guangyao is typing as quickly as he can into their navigation system to ping it up on their Jaeger’s map display. “My guess is the goal is to make landfall and cause as much destruction as possible here in Shanghai or else it would have already landed along the way.”

“They’re strategizing,” Jiang Yanli notes, her voice as calm and soft as ever. “Strategies can always be countered.”

“We still don’t know how they think after all this time,” Nie Mingjue leans in to say. “They won’t strategize the way we would.”

“They will likely employ the information that Xue Yang has given them,” she replies, blithe as ever. “And there are only so many ways to reach their goal anyway. Don’t worry, Chifeng-zun, it’ll be alright.”

“Jiang Yanli is a masterful strategist,” Lan Xichen murmurs. “We’ve sent out the best team capable of stopping it, Mingjue.”

Jin Guangyao keeps his certainty that it will still not be enough very firmly behind his teeth.

“Closing in,” he informs Sparks instead. “It’s evading the sensors so I can’t get a good read on its physiology, but you are facing the first ever Category 5 Kaiju. Be careful.”

“I’m here! Why is Jiang-xiong passed out on the floor?”

“Come here, A-Yu,” Jin Guangyao calls his brother away from investigating Jiang Wanyin’s prone form, bloody nose, and blackening eyes. “Category 5.” Those two words are enough to snap Mo Xuanyu out of his lighthearted curiosity and beckon him straight over to the bank of monitors, his expression tight. He sneaks a hand over the back of Jin Guangyao’s chair to clutch at the shoulder of his jumpsuit in a vice grip.

“Is that Zixuan-ge?” he whispers when he spots the flashes of gold in the spotlight beam from the helicopter.

“And Jiang Yanli. Yes.”

The lights in the ‘dome flicker up to their usual sallow yellow abruptly, the emergency alarm switching off now that it’s done its duty. A hush of bated breath and the fear of fish trapped in a barrel suffuses the room as they all turn to watch the video feed when the glowing radar dot that is Sparks Amidst Snow is fully overlapped with the collision coordinates Jin Guangyao had given them.

The battle begins where they can’t see it. A heave of black water and the sun-bright flash of a nuclear charge are their first indication that contact has been made. Mo Xuanyu’s hand tightens further in the thick canvas of JIn Guangyao’s uniform.

When the Kaiju stands up out of the water, Jin Guangyao wonders if souls are real, as he’s pretty sure his has just left his body. The Kaiju towers over Sparks Amidst Snow, the bottom of its long-pincered face easily clearing the peak of the Jaeger’s helmet with an entire torso-length to spare. It’s broad as a building, a wall of black and blue and phosphorescent green in the dancing, jittering beam of the helicopter spotlight. Jin Guangyao counts at least four appendages that could be very loosely qualified as arms before the lamp stops its wandering to focus on one of the Kaiju’s iridescent violet eyes the size of a house, irritating it into screeching so loudly the camera shakes. Jin Guangyao is relieved they can’t actually hear it.

“Qingyang,” Nie Mingjue rasps.

“Sir?”

“Evacuate the ‘dome. I want everyone who doesn’t have to help with this battle down in the basement bunkers. Now.”

Jin Guangyao knows that Luo Qingyang most likely wants to be there in the tower with them where she can at least see what’s happening to her childhood best friend, but she leaves without a word of complaint. She takes Qin Su with her, it sounds like, and the remaining handful of them in the tower drop into a loaded silence again as the fight continues.

It takes roughly three rounds of earth-shaking blows traded back and forth before Jiang Yanli’s voice returns. “It’s pulling its attacks, Chifeng-zun. A Kaiju this size should not be this weak with its offense, I think it’s trying to keep us busy.”

“Tokyo’s reporting the attack,” Nie Zonghui suddenly pipes up at his right. Jin Guangyao tears his eyes away from the battle on the monitor to look at Nie Zonghui’s screen instead, where he’s got news coverage from Tokyo pulled up and muted, subtitles flying as the reporter speaks. “It hit there like Xuanyu predicted the next one would, but it broke off to head for us with no warning.” The playback switches from a reporter down in the evacuated streets to the footage of the fight itself, and sure enough there’s the Kaiju they’re currently dealing with towering even further over Wen Xu and Wen Chao’s mach 4 Eternal Sun than it is over Sparks Amidst Snow.

For the first time since his realization downstairs, Jin Guangyao starts to hope that this won’t be a suicide mission after all. If the Kaiju was already locked into a fight with Eternal Sun and gave them the slip, there’s no way two pilots as egotistical and proud as the Wen brothers will allow it to actually escape them. Their seabed sensors only go out so far, but now that they obviously know exactly where the Kaiju is he returns to monitoring the output from the fringes of their territory practically obsessively, hunting for the signs that will mean there’s something the size of another Jaeger entering their waters.

Backup from the Wen is in every way an absolute last resort, but they don’t exactly have the luxury of being picky at the moment, and there’s no way the Manila ‘dome will be able to get one of their pilots up here in time to help. It’s Tokyo, or it’s nobody.

From the corner, weak and fuzzy, Jiang Wanyin mumbles, “Jiejie?”

Jin Guangyao has no attention to spare for the continuation of Jiang Wanyin’s breakdown, but considering his own brother is out there too he can’t exactly fault the man for being so distraught. He’s trying very hard not to think about it.

“Jiang Wanyin, if you can keep control of yourself you may stay,” Nie Mingjue tells him with no room for argument. “If you’re going to continue questioning my leadership and disrespecting my partner then I will have you forcibly removed and shoved into a bunker with the rest of the ‘dome.”

Sparks Amidst Snow collapses like the world’s largest sack of potatoes into the water and the Kaiju pounces on it, battering it down beneath the waves for a heartstopping moment where all they can see is churning black water capped with foam, erratically lit by the helicopter spot.

“I’ll stay,” Jiang Wanyin whispers, agonized. “I…I have to know.”

The Kaiju erupts from beneath the waves again in a spray of water and bright blood as high as a skyscraper, a gaping hole punched straight through its hide the source of the acid-blue gore. Sparks Amidst Snow emerges a moment later, nuclear core in its chest still glowing from its latest discharge as Jin Zixuan engages the blasters attached to both forearms and sends another round of charges straight at the Kaiju’s face. It’s brutal and inelegant, but effective nonetheless as the Kaiju rears back and collapses down into the water with another shriek that they can’t hear but that must rattle the world for miles.

“A-Li is right, it’s pulling blows,” Jin Zixuan pants into the comms, sounding exhausted already. Mo Xuanyu’s free hand finds Jin Guangyao’s other shoulder as they both lean in, and Zonghui, thoughtful as ever, gets rid of the news from Tokyo to instead pull up the camera feed from inside the Jaeger for the two of them to see. Jiang Wanyin crowds in close as well, even though all that there is to see of their siblings is the light reflecting off the faceguards of their helmets and the obscuring bulk of their Jaeger armor, softly gleaming gold and violet nearly identical in the low light of the cockpit.

“Is A-Yu there?” Jin Zixuan asks next as he begins to go through the motions of charging up his next blaster round in the guns mounted on Sparks’ greaves, Jiang Yanli mirroring him automatically through their Drift. Jin Guangyao doesn’t quite understand how having a non-combat pilot works in a twosome with a combat pilot, but if it works for them then he doesn’t really need to know, at least not mid-battle.

“I’m here, Zixuan-ge!”

“Any idea what it might be waiting for? Reinforcements? Anything??”

“Reinforcements aren’t a thing, ge — the Breach closes behind each Kaiju that comes through, and it’s never opened back up quickly enough to allow a second one out so soon after the first.”

“Well it’s doing something! It feels like it’s..toying with us—“

“A-Xuan!!”

“FUCK!!!”

Jin Guangyao jumps at the sudden tension snapping through both of their voices and scrambles to figure out what it is that startled them so badly, but there’s nothing strange on the sensors, no sign of the Wens yet —

“Zonghui!” Nie Mingjue snaps, “Alert all areas of the city to evacuate into the bunkers immediately. It’s coming.”

Jin Guangyao’s entire body goes cold, understanding dawning. It was waiting for them to drop their guard. To pause. To get tired, as all humans do.

And then, against the aggressive patterns of all Kaiju before it, it left.

Sparks Amidst Snow races at top speed in the wake of the Kaiju. Jin Guangyao keeps anxiously watching the signals for any sign of the Wens giving chase even as his fingers fly over his keyboard, tapping out a furious request for help to be broadcast to every single shatterdome this side of the Pacific. It doesn’t matter anymore if they get here in time or not — if the Kaiju levels Shanghai it won’t stop there, and the others should at least be on alert if nothing else. Someone will have to stop it, even if they can’t.

He barely registers the sound of Zonghui giving the order into the military emergency channel to get the entire city to hunker down.

This deep in the ‘dome the warning sirens out in the city are a quiet, high-pitched whine, soft as a fly buzzing in the corner. He can imagine the panic on the streets, the mad rush to get to safety. The bunkers will hold everyone in Shanghai and then some, they were designed well, but that only works if everyone is where they’re expected to be.

And people so rarely are.

It’s the middle of the night. The pleasure districts will be stuffed full. The business districts, bare. The residential districts will be slow to respond as the inhabitants are roused from sleep and frightened into action.

There will be neighborhoods with half-empty shelters. There will be bunkers so full they physically cannot cram another body into them. There will be children separated from their parents, and partners terrified that they’ll never see each other again as they’re swept away from each other on the street, the panicking crowd dragging them in their current like leaves caught in a diverging stream.

Jin Guangyao cannot panic, he has no time or space to panic, but it grabs him by the throat anyway. It stills his fingers on the keys. His vision dims.

He could be on the street.

He could be laying in the rubble of a battlefield, unable to get up on his own, left to die while the fight rages on around him.

He could die.

The people he loves could die.

Nie Mingjue’s voice echoes from the bottom of a well when he calls a terse, “Xichen.”

Jin Guangyao’s final, faint tether to his surroundings disappears with his brother’s hands leaving his shoulders. His next exhale scrapes his throat raw.

There’s a flash of gold in front of his eyes and he’s staring up at Golden Thunder, her pilots unaware that he’s there, vulnerable, hurt, crying out for sympathy, for rescue, as he’s left behind to die.

“Shhhh A-Yao, it’s me. We’re here.”

“What’s going on with him?!”

Lan Xichen’s voice, soft but urgent, immediately followed by Jiang Wanyin’s sharp bark (that’s absolutely worse than his bite) is enough to drag him clawing back towards reality. The chalky scent of crumbled concrete and the acrid tang of ocean brine and Kaiju blood is replaced with the stale nothingness of the ‘dome’s filtered air on his next rattling inhale. His hands aren’t scrabbling on shredded metal and broken glass, they’re clutched tightly in Lan Xichen’s strong grip and his partner is rubbing slow, firm circles into the undersides of his wrists right over his hammering pulse.

“Father used Yao-ge as Kaiju bait once,” Mo Xuanyu mumbles. Jin Guangyao can’t even find it in himself to care that his most hated secret is out. Lan Xichen is scared, he can see it in his eyes, and it drags Jin Guangyao another precious inch closer to him, away from the edge of crumbling back into the past he can never fully escape. “He snapped his ankle and left Yao-ge right in the path of a Cat 3, as an experiment.”

Jin Guangyao hears Jiang Wanyin say…well, something, anyway. His ears are ringing too much to catch whatever it is he breathes, and quite frankly he doesn’t really care what Jiang Wanyin thinks of him in the end. He can see Lan Xichen’s lips moving as well but he can’t hear him either, much though he wishes he could. His chest is too tight. It feels like every muscle in his body is clenched, attempting to curl in on himself but unable to do so.

The ringing in his ears grows louder and Lan Xichen must see something in his face because a blink of an eye later he’s shifted a bit to the side and Jin Guangyao is getting sick into the wastebin his partner is holding for him.

“Yu-didi, I don’t believe your recounting it is helping A-Yao stop reliving it.”

“Fuck, right, sorry. Sorry Yao-ge!”

“Pull it together, A-Yao,” Nie Mingjue says, quiet and rough and right in his ear, his familiar, heavy grip tight around the straining back of his neck. “I need you.”

Jin Guangyao squeezes his eyes shut and forces his breathing to even out — easier to do once Lan Xichen takes the bin away again and replaces it with himself, letting Jin Guangyao rest his head on his shoulder and breathe as he tries to do what Nie Mingjue needs. If he can’t do it for himself, or even for Lan Xichen, he can do it for Nie Mingjue.

“We have landfall,” Zonghui says. Jin Guangyao doesn’t even have time to shiver before Nie Mingjue is hauling him up from his chair, shoving the chair aside, and yanking Jin Guangyao to his chest to wrap his arms around him so tightly he can hardly breathe.

It tucks all the raw, bleeding parts of him back into the shape of his skin and he gasps as much as he can, hands clawing at his partner’s arms to ground himself as he’s finally wrenched fully back to the present. Sirens are blaring again, the distinctive, irregular, bass whooping that means the Kaiju has reached the shore. He opens his eyes to force them onto the helicopter’s feed again in time to see Sparks Amidst Snow come barrelling out of the water to collide with their foe at top speed, destroying a skyscraper and the cluster of lower buildings around it in one fell swoop.

“The harbor is empty,” Lan Xichen says like a mantra, calm even as he has to raise his voice over the sirens. “Wangji and Wuxian evacuated there first, right when Sparks deployed. They had time. Buildings can be replaced, and we’ll recover from this.”

Jin Guangyao’s heart pounds in his throat and he can’t let go of Nie Mingjue’s arms for fear of losing his way again in this moment when it’s vital, crucial, that he doesn’t. But he can watch his monitor from here; he can stare at lines of data, his familiar, bloodless job that can help him make sense of such a messy universe, and he can do everything in his power to ignore what’s happening in the city to keep watch for what will (hopefully) be the turning point of this battle.

For long minutes, there’s nothing but silence from every person in the room as the whooping siren makes itself background noise, as the lights drop to deep blue to make the ‘dome less of a visible target from the outside, as Jin Zixuan and Jiang Yanli stop talking even to each other in order to focus entirely on the fight at hand. Jin Guangyao watches his monitor and breathes in time with the pings from each seabed sensor, their dispersing signals guides for each inhale.

Exhale.

He breathes.

The fight rages on.

Until —

:Incoming long-range message:

The cool, feminine AI cuts through the tension and the sirens that shut off in the comms tower alone to allow the message to be heard.

:Tokyo Wen Jaeger Eternal Sun requests flight clearance: the AI recites, the message punctuated by the signal from the sensors that Jin Guangyao has been looking for. There, from the northwesternmost point of their territory — a Jaeger entering Shanghai’s waters at top speed.

Nie Zonghui turns to their own long-range radio and leans in to say, crisp and clear as a mountain river, “Granted.”

The door to the comms tower clangs open and Jin Guangyao jerks in Nie Mingjue’s arms that tighten around him with his own tension.

“ ‘Dome’s empty, all in the bunkers,” Luo Qingyang reports as she and Qin Su step forward to crowd with the rest of them around the monitors. Nie Zonghui switches the camera feed to the interior of Sparks again and only then do the pair let out twin shaky sighs of relief.

“The Wen brothers are incoming, they’ll be here in minutes,” Lan Xichen informs them, calm despite it all. “And Sparks has so far managed to keep the Kaiju within the business district near the harbor — it’s most likely to be empty.”

“It’s the best we can hope for,” Qin Su replies. “They’re doing well.”

“Xuan-ge’s getting tired,” Luo Qingyang whispers. Jin Guangyao doesn’t allow himself to look at the monitor showing Sparks’ internal cam.

“Don’t worry about Zixuan.”

A beat of silence follows Jiang Wanyin’s terse statement.

Naturally, it’s Nie Mingjue who breaks it. “Explain.”

“It’s because of jie. She can’t be putting much of her energy into this fight yet, just enough to support him so that he doesn’t tear himself to shreds. They’re unevenly matched, that’s why he’s tiring out. That’ll change soon.”

“Your Drift!” Mo Xuanyu suddenly pipes up. Jin Guangyao had nearly forgotten he was here, but no, he’s there holding hands with Qin Su (their knuckles are white they’re clutching each other so hard; Jin Guangyao is privately, guiltily relieved that he doesn’t need to soothe his siblings and can instead continue to be comforted himself.)

“Sorry — your drift with your siblings I mean. I was studying it. The reason there has to be all three of you –”

“It has to balance,” Jiang Wanyin cuts in, sharp as a knife. “We’re all too strong for each other in different ways, but if all three of us are there it’s like…it’s like a game of rock paper scissors. We hold each other in check. Jie’s not fit for combat because she can’t commit the standard amount of energy from the start, she has to build up to it. It’s too much for most individual pilots to frontload and they burn out before she can support them, but if there are two pilots to share the load first before she’s needed, or if a single pilot is abnormally good at carrying all the weight of his Drifts because he’s been doing it this whole time without even realizing it…”

Jin Guangyao blinks at that and wonders abruptly if he’s been missing something..horribly wrong with the way his brother and his cousin Drift. He hadn’t ever thought to look into it too deeply (and it’s not like Jin Zixun would welcome his prying into their stats anyway), but if that’s the case, if Jin Zixuan is used to bearing the brunt of all of their fights and he hasn’t even breathed a word of complaint..

“So what’s going to happen when he wears out? Why don’t we have to worry about it?” Nie Mingjue bites, getting to the heart of the matter as they watch another skyscraper crash into uncountable billions of shards of glass, twisted steel raining down to the street as Sparks yanks a massive I-beam support free from the scaffolding to swing at the Kaiju like a baseball bat to the head.

“Jie can’t start out a drop like a standard pilot, but once she’s ready she’s like…she’s like a supernova. She’ll burn straight through him, but before they burn out they’ll be the strongest pilots in the world.”

She’s a furnace, Jin Guangyao thinks a little giddily, stress somehow managing to dredge up some ridiculous notion he once picked up from the trashy Wuxia romance novels he used to steal from Meng Shi when she was busy working. He wisely keeps the thought to himself as they all collectively process what they’re likely about to witness — it still changes nothing. This was a suicide mission from the moment it began, why should it matter that it still is, only instead of dying in the clumsy, mundane way of exhaustion and overwhelm they’ll instead go out in a blaze of glory? The result is miserable either way.

Jin Guangyao startles again at a sudden crackle of static, loud enough that he’d be tempted to clap his hands over his ears were he not still locked up in Nie Mingjue’s arms.

:Shanghai?:

“Nie Zonghui, Shanghai Shatterdome. Eternal Sun?”

:Yeah it’s us. Where is it? What’s happening?:

Jin Guangyao breathes slowly, silently in through his nose and out through his mouth. It’s Wen Xu on the comms, which means they can at least hope for a relatively civil conversation, but that voice still haunts his dreams. He’s heard that voice deliver impossible cruelty with barely a shift in inflection, bland and blithe as if talking about the weather. He’s done horrible things that Wen Xu ordered him to do, speaking on behalf of his father. He’s writhed in agony when Wen Xu ordered him to be tortured for failing to deliver on an impossible promise on at least six separate occasions before Jin Guangyao grew too high in Wen Ruohan’s favor to be so debased.

They need the Wen brothers for this, he knows that, and it’s a miracle that they’ve come in time to be of use. But he’d very much like to curl into a ball and never emerge again so long as they’re within speaking distance of Shanghai.

“Landfall in the harbor, Sparks Amidst Snow is currently keeping it contained to the business district but I don’t know how much longer it’ll stay put,” Nie Zonghui reports, blind to everything but his need to carry them all through this hellish night. At least someone here isn’t moments away from shattering into a thousand pieces. “Just fly straight in, you can’t really miss it.”

:It’s fucking huge, yeah: Wen Xu snorts. :Don’t worry, we’ll mop it up for you:

“Generous of them,” Nie Mingjue mutters mutinously in his ear, shocking Jin Guangyao into finally letting out that hysterical little giggle trapped in his chest. He buries his face in his hands and shakes apart, half-laughing half-sobbing in a way that he wishes could be cathartic.

“A-Yao,” Lan Xichen murmurs with a hand stroking through his hair. “It’s alright, shh.”

Jin Guangyao waves him off and squirms out of Nie Mingjue’s arms to return to his seat, manic giggles still escaping him in bursts as he finally clicks away from the long-range sensor software to instead see if there’s anything they can get from the short-range on the Kaiju’s biometrics now that they’re not also trying to track its position.

“Uh oh,” Mo Xuanyu whispers. “Yao-ge’s losing it.”

Jin Guangyao giggles again when Qin Su reaches up to smack the back of Mo Xuanyu’s head.

A tentative hope is creeping like sunlight through their pocket of artificial gloom. Sparks will be getting a second wind any minute now, if Jiang Wanyin is to be believed. The Wens will be arriving even quicker at the rate they’re running. The Kaiju, having made landfall, seems content to follow all previous patterns now and go for a pummeling offensive, barely a defensive maneuver or escape tactic to be seen. 

They can do this. They can fight like this.

Jin Guangyao doesn’t buy it for a fucking second, but the palpable relief in the room is nice while it lasts.

“Yao-didi?” Jin Zixuan pants into their comms, sounding absolutely ragged. It sobers Jin Guangyao up quickly, his horribly giggling dying down in the sudden swoop of realizing that this may still be the last chance he ever gets to talk to the brother he’s had a…complicated relationship with for so long, but that he still loves for what he is. What they can be.

“I’m here, Xuan-ge.”

“Did they get the pleasure district evacuated? Can you see?”

Jin Guangyao hurries to check the sensors — a delicate task when the kaiju’s signature is everywhere, overwhelming the delicate machinery and filling it with floods of data that muddle the signatures of anything smaller than a five story building.

Thankfully, the bunkers are big enough to register as their own independent signature when they’re full, and as Jin Guangyao seeks them out he finds each one full to capacity, burning bright with the lives of so many of Shanghai’s citizens.

“The bunkers in the pleasure district are full,” he says, because that’s the truth. He doesn’t know if the streets are fully evacuated, but he knows that the bunkers are full. He breathes through another brief flash of stragglers barred entry from safety scrambling for any cover they can find — he doesn’t know if that’s true, and if he torments himself with imagining it then he can’t perform his role here, which does more harm than good.

“Good,” Jin Zixuan groans — and Sparks drops to its knees like a puppet with its strings cut. “I just…I need a minute, I’m sorry-”

Jin Guangyao’s heart is in his throat and Lan Xichen has to bodily pull the others away from the monitors as they try to crowd closer with ragged cries of dismay and fear, boxing Nie Zonghui in too tightly.

“It’s alright,” Lan Xichen soothes them all equally, hands patting shoulders in between restraining them. “He’s alive, he’s okay, it’s just what Wanyin said would happen. They’re still in the Drift, he’s only tired.”

Jin Guangyao watches helplessly as the Kaiju bellows a fresh cry and rushes past the sudden drop in defenses to head deeper into the city.

There’s no way he can realistically feel the impact of its passage here within the ‘dome and 20-odd stories up in the air as they are, but the mind is a funny thing. The floor seems to shudder under his boots in time with the Kaiju’s loping stride through the city, and the vertigo he always gets when he’s down in the streets creeps in, making his head spin as he tries to keep getting a read on the Kaiju. Is it nearly dead? Is it only getting started? He doesn’t know, but if he can find out maybe he can help. Maybe he won’t feel so horrifically useless.

“Oh god.” It’s Luo Qingyang this time, her voice so flat the exclamation barely counts as one. “It’s them.”

It’s who?! Jin Guangyao wants to demand, but considering the Wen brothers still haven’t arrived (any second now, he repeats like a mantra) there are only a handful of people who could elicit that reaction.

“I haven’t seen him in over 24 hours, Chifeng-zun,” Jin Zixuan had said.

“Make it hurt,” he had told Xue Yang. “Make sure he knows who’s behind you telling you to pull the trigger.”

Jin Guangyao tears his gaze away from his data to look at the camera feed only to find it’s been hijacked — it takes a long moment for the offset, grainy CCTV feed to make sense to his scattered mind, but when it does he feels his blood run cold.

There, in the wind and the rain ripping through Shanghai, stands Xiao Xingchen in glowing white. Song Lan in deep black, little more than a pale moon face in the gloom. Between them, sagging with exhaustion and with blood clearly running from both nostrils, is Xue Yang grinning wickedly straight up at the camera, wild-eyed and sharp around the edges despite the fact that he’s only standing thanks to the support of his companions gripping his arms.

Behind them, in the rubble of the street, two barely-identifiable figures attempt to crawl for cover.

Jin Guangyao can tell even through the horrible camera quality that their legs are not at all at the right angles to allow them to get very far.

Xue Yang blows a kiss at the camera before he allows the others to haul him away, but rather than escaping for cover between the buildings they hurry straight down the wide, empty street, the wind whipping their hair and traditional-looking robes in a flurry of movement that has Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan turning to look over their shoulders in tandem, cybernetic eyes glowing pinpoints of light in their faces as they crane their necks up - up - up.

“It’s following Xue Yang,” Jin Guangyao whispers with horrified understanding. “It’s his..his Kaiju Drift. He’s connected to them permanently. They’re tracking him.”

“He’s guiding it inland,” Jiang Wanyin says.

“No,” Mo Xuanyu corrects, softly horrified. “He’s using it as a weapon.”

Jin Guangyao rises to his feet without conscious thought, and Lan Xichen doesn’t attempt to stop him as he approaches the monitor until he’s close enough to see each individual grainy pixel in the footage. Xiao Xingchen, Song Lan, and Xue Yang have disappeared out of the frame, but all that means is that there, perfectly captured in the center of it, lie Jin Guangshan and Jin Zixun, twin crumpled heaps in the street outside the brightly-lit facade of the brothel they frequent the most.

Directly in the path of the Kaiju currently barreling through Shanghai unchecked.

His nose is nearly touching the screen when the Kaiju swings into frame and crushes both of them underfoot as casually as he might step on a crumb.

Qin Su screams, hastily muffled in her hand. Mo Xuanyu chokes on a gasp. Jiang Wanyin shouts an inarticulate swear, Luo Qingyang adds her own mess to his in the bin, Lan Xichen grabs him by both shoulders and squeezes hard enough to bruise.

Nie Mingjue plants both his fists on the desk to close his eyes and breathe.

Jin Guangyao processes all of this through the numbing cushion of shock protecting him from losing his mind entirely.

The screen cuts black for a second before their helicopter feed is allowed through the transmission again, as if it wasn’t already clear enough that they’d been meant to see every second of that. Jin Guangyao steps back from the monitor to sit at his desk again and mechanically return to his task.

The fight is still on. The Kaiju is still out there, running rampant and following Xue Yang wherever the others have taken him. If they’ve escaped then it’s likely the Kaiju will as well, and no matter what else has happened there are still civilians to protect.

Jin Guangyao’s hands shake as he types fresh coordinates into the mapping system for Sparks and conveys the same to the short-range radio to deliver to Eternal Sun.

“What happened?!” Jin Zixuan begs through the comms. “Is everyone alright?”

No one seems to have the strength to answer him.

The rest of the battle and its aftermath goes like this:

Eternal Sun sweeps in and drags the Kaiju back towards the harbor kicking and shrieking to pay for its crimes.

Jin Zixuan pushes through his exhaustion to return to the fight when it’s dropped right at his feet.

Jiang Yanli, acting as a reserve of near-boundless energy needed for the final push, screams herself hoarse as she and Jin Zixuan push themselves beyond the limits of what any pilot should ever experience in their Jaeger to deliver the killing blow.

They will never be able to drop again, but will forever be the first pilots to successfully kill a Category 5 Kaiju.

The moment Jin Guangyao confirms the death of the Kaiju, Nie Zonghui yanks them out of their Drift and sends their Jaeger into emergency shutdown to be retrieved later.

Eternal Sun will claim the spoils of the kill, but agree to allow Sparks the glory.

Jin Guangshan and his nephew are dead in the street, and their bodies aren’t able to be cleared away before the news broadcasters catch wind of it and begin plastering the news on every screen in Shanghai.

Jin Guangyao, the moment his duties are done and everyone else’s survival is assured, faints and doesn’t wake for two full days.

[illarian-rambling]

Thanks for the tags @elsie-writes @somethingclevermahogony and @mk-writes-stuff!

OC Questionaire

My questions:

Is life going the way that you hoped it would?

What is in your pocket right now? Why?

If you could relive a single minute of your past, what minute would you pick?

What type of music do you like to listen to?

What's an unpopular opinion you have?

What are your thoughts on cheese?

What’s the worst insult you’ve ever been given?

How would you react if someone catcalled you?

If you suddenly appeared in an unknown city, what would you do/look for first?

So maybe I let these build up a little lol. I'll just do one character and by the power of rng, that character is Sepo!

1) Is life going the way that you hoped it would?

"As I hoped it would when? Sepo the junior priest would've killed me on sight if he could witness me now. Sepo the inmate would've wept for joy. Life is going how it's going to go - I just hang on and try not to scream."

2) What is in your pocket right now? Why?

"A knife. For persuading people with boorish manners to shape it up."

3) If you could relive a single minute of your past, what minute would you pick?

"I think, if I could relive any single minute, I'd pick singing with Saius. It's been so long, but I could never forget his face. I see his spitting image staring me back in the mirror every day. His voice though... My voice.... I would love to hear both of those again."

4) What type of music do you like to listen to?

"What type of music do I listen to? The Golden Era composers are by far the best thing to come out of the pitchy wails that are considered music above the waves. Their sense of timbre and rhythm were second to none. Indeed, I think it should be mandatory for any aspiring musicians to study their work. It'd certainly cut down on the number of snivling fops who think they're worthy of holding so much as a tambourine. Second to them are traditional dwarven brass arrangements. Though their instrumentality is lacking when performed with the typical ensemble, their sense of harmony-"

(This continues for about an hour)

5) What's an unpopular opinion you have?

"Purple is a shit color, religion is a scam, neutrality is for cowards, and everyone should own a weapon. Four for one, there you go."

6) What are your thoughts on cheese?

"Whoever first decided to eat milk so curdled it was solid must've been wrong in the head. Such insanity really doesn't help resist the siren case against human sentience, for what sentient beings would invent such a monstrosity?"

7) What’s the worst insult you’ve ever been given?

"That one... that one came from Djek, most shamefully. He didn't even say anything, just pointed to a drawing of a hairless cat wearing a long, brown wig. The others didn't let me live it down for weeks."

8) How would you react if someone catcalled you?

"I'd put a knife in their eye, since they want to look at something sharp."

(This is a lie. Sepo gets catcalled frequently due to his siren looks and he freezes up every time, usually blushing a fluorescent red. If any of his friends are with him, they kindly throw the nearest rock at the catcaller's head.)

9) If you suddenly appeared in an unknown city, what would you do/look for first?

"I'd search for the ocean. It might not be a good option, but if I have an ocean, I have an out."

(Fun fact, I don't think Sepo has ever been to a non-costal city. I'm not sure he knows they exist.)

I'll tag @davycoquette @mysticstarlightduck @the-golden-comet @cherrychiplip and anyone else who wants to play :)

Your questions:

Are you a pirate, a cowboy, a samurai, or a Victorian waif?

What's your favorite word and why?

Would you confess to a murder you didn't commit to save a friend who did commit the murder?

[scipiosmith]

Hello mate, I have a question that makes me curious: what made you want to expand on Cardin Winchester?

I will be honest: when I saw the tags on ao3 long ago I thought it would be Cardin like any other fanfic story: bully - forever fall - forgotten and the cycle repeats in the next stories.

Heck I thought you were going to have him killed down the road.

The fact you gave Cardin character and growth surprised me greatly!

What made you want to do something different for Cardin?

Well, there are a few reasons.

First, I really wanted to tell a story with a big ensemble cast, something like Naruto (or, indeed, the already-mentioned Infighting, Insanity and Social Ineptitude) where it had 12 main characters all coming in and out of the narrative, with their own moments of focus etc. I don't think I quite got there, but I gave it the college try and Cardin was always going to be a part of that.

Secondly, I have some sympathy for entitled bastards who think the world owes them something, that's why there are so many of them in the story (Sunset obviously starts as just this sort of person, Cinder is an edge case because she doesn't come from a place of the most rarefied privilege compared with the other characters on this list, but then in addition to Cardin you have Turnus Rutulus, Phoebe Kommenos, Bon Bon in some respects although she isn't an aristocrat). I... I went to a super-posh boarding school, one of the grand old ones that has existed since Tudor times, and as well as just the general tenor of my fellow pupils there I always remember that there was this one boy who could trace his lineage all the way back to a Norman knight who had come over with William the Conqueror in 1066, which is... it's very cool. And so, as much as I don't remember my time at that school with immense fondness, mixed with that there has always been a sort of very Sunset-like desire to bootlick to the aristocracy, to toady to the Lady Nikoses of the world, and the indulgence shown to some of these characters by the narrative reflects that.

Thirdly, I actually find it very difficult to keep a character as a complete arsehole. Looking back through my work it's interesting to see how characters that I remember creating to be antagonistic ended up growing on me. The rude, abrasive major who everyone hates? He rides his men hard because it keeps them alive, he would never ask anything of his men that he isn't willing to give of himself, and they know that he doesn't mean half of it anyway. The villain who has kept himself alive for 500 years by human sacrifice? He has been working those 500 years at the downfall of the Empire that destroyed his home and slaughtered his people (not to mention his found family when they joined him in resisting said Empire) and if he stops then all of the loss and sacrifice will have been for nothing. Cinder. You know, when I first started writing this story, Cinder was going to die on top of the tower after one last fight with Team SAPR, and now, well...

You know, if I can write myself into sympathy with people like then Cardin is nothing. It's very hard for a character not to grow on me, is what I'm saying.

A lot of my readers judge some of the characters (naming no Cinders) a lot more harshly than I do.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention Spark to Spark, Dust to Dust, a RWBY/Hasbro crossover written by my beta readers (I've also contributed some writing to it myself; pairings are BlackSun and Arkos by way of some temporary Lancaster). Cardin isn't a major character, in fact he doesn't even warrant the character tags, but some important details like Cardin originally dating Skystar Aris originated there before I borrowed them for my own use.

[autumnrory]

the other thing was like insisting on calling daisy skye and like i don't really remember how things went on aos maybe the show hadn't made it clear at the time this was written that daisy is the name she's sticking with bc most of the time when i see people who insist on calling her skye they're people who ship her with ward and don't acknowledge she evolved past that period of time obviously ward had nothing to do with it bc she was part of one of the weird side pairings BUT like i can appreciate that it was the name she'd chosen for herself and she wanted to keep it but yeah i'm always just like but her name's daisy :(

and since it was such an ensemble story it did feel like an avengers movie in that i didn't see a lot of MY faves namely sam and nat as much as i wanted like obvs giving me a good bit of stevebucky is what matters most but ya know

also while as i figured they didn't tag minor character death bc she wasn't dead but also they never CONFIRMED just hinted and it was one that wasn't meant to be tied up nicely but i was just bummed bc i was so excited when i saw bruce/betty and then didn't get to see them together and didn't get to see them reunite when she was revealed to not be dead so like that particular bit was the most unsatisfying to me bc people virtually NEVER bring her into fic and i loved them in the hulk movie so like something is better than nothing but i wanted to see them together and happy when virtually everyone else ended nicely with their respective significant other except for him

i do like this fic otherwise but the side pairings i'm just skjdfjs

[raripuh]

RARIPUH: WRITEBLR INTRO

hi hi hello everyone! after a year lurking the writeblr side of this blue hell, i finally decided to join in!

about me

i'm kiki! 18, indonesian, and also a genderfluid aromantic bisexual. i use any pronouns but most comfortable with he/him (don't hesitate to use others though! variety is nice to me lol). a multilingual; i speak indonesian and english and some local languages, and i'm learning spanish and dutch. sadly i have an unhealthy obsession with 2000s american "emo" scene, and my ocs, and lately—my country's politics, history and culture. this is gonna appear a lot in my wips, even subtly!

this writeblr is mostly for me to engage with the community! i've been lurking and falling in love with a lot of wips, so, yeah. i don't think i'll be sharing excerpts of my wip because currently i'm writing it in my native tongue, but maybe in the future! i will most likely share some graphics (and rambling. a LOT.) of my ocs, though, since all my wips feature the same characters again and again. you can even say... i'm the fandom of my ocs=)

my wips

dreams of hearts and crowds — you know how kpop boomed and started kwave around the world? in this wip indonesia does that too but with rock music inciting the quake. it covers the stories of several bands; the first installment of the series follows a bisexual rhythm guitarist of the most prominent rock band in the scene, from zero to hero to zero again.

menumpah darah — historical wip set in 1940s, when the nation of indonesia was still a dream of the oppressed, so out of reach yet so close. an anti-fascist young man lamented his fate of being saved from a death sentence with the intervention of a powerful friend, even though his comrade wasn't so lucky to be graced by the same fate. perhaps that's why he was in sorrow. or perhaps... it's a certain peta cadet, whose sharp eyes and sharper bones enveloped his frail figure on rainy nights.

sunstealers — working title bc i really have no idea. it's a typical superhero novel, with corrupt government and even wicker superheroes. when the people who are supposed to protect you harm everyone, there's nothing left to do but fight.

you can peep some more details on my wip page! it still needs to be fixed because i did it in a hurry, but the basic is there.

(spoiler: all three wips have the same protagonists and ensemble cast, only with slightly different personality adjusted to the setting. lmao i'm sorry this is gonna happen a lot unfortunately kdkskdks)

others

i'd love to see more wips! i tend to gravitate to darker themes and heavy topics, but if your wip has:

lgbtq+ reps (genderfluid?? or trans characters in general would be nice)

poc reps (esp se asians!!)

muslim reps

political themes/undertones

wips centered on art... any kind of art. music, theater, literature, painting—i'll take anything

something to do with culture (any culture!)

super powers

groovy fantasy with nice worldbuilding

magical realism

dumbasses in love

enemies to lovers

tight group of friends (PLEASE i love them)

socially inept characters

i'm most probably interested in it!

i'm also v cool if you want to talk about cultures with me. or teach me spanish or dutch since i'm struggling with it. but either way i'm always happy to meet new people—i'm just. really shy at first. after the ice breaking we're good to go!

tagging a few writeblrs i adore (hope you don't mind aaahhh!): @aelenko @vandorens @emdrabbles @laketrials @writemares

looking forward to interact with everyone!

[kjmsupremacist]

Uhm I don't want to bother you with writing advice and I'm not planning on becoming the next Shakespeare or anything but I've been trying to write some of the ideas in my head for a while now and I've been failing spectacularly. It's like as soon as I start typing I either don't know what or how to type, or it ends up being a boring mess. Is.. that normal or should I just quit?😶 And sorry for bothering you, your writing is just absolutely fantastic so I thought I'd ask you for your experiences

hi anon!! first of all, please don't think you're being a bother. Writing was my first love, and remains my greatest love, so I'm always happy to talk about it. plus it's like my one area of expertise, and I'd love to share my experience and everything i've learned.

I'll put the rest under the cut, but I've also given some general writing advice here as well if you'd like more resources. My #writing-tips tag also has some awesome posts from other writers! Lastly, I'm linking a bootcamp doc for writers who want guidance planning and worldbuilding here, which I'll talk about below <3

TL;DR: writing requires patience and practice. What you're experiencing is normal, and if it feels hard that means you're doing it right. Don't quit! You should let yourself plan your work out in great detail before just trying to sit down and write because I don't think that works for anybody. You probably feel like you don't know what to do because you've gotten lost in all your ideas and don't have a foundation or a direction to guide your writing. I believe in you!

Writing is all about practice, so if you're relatively new to writing (and honestly even if you're not), what you're experiencing is entirely normal. It's hard to get ideas in your head down on paper in a way that is both accurate to your thoughts and palatable to a reader. It's one of the biggest struggles and also greatest joys of writing, because when you do manage it, it's, like, euphoric.

I've mentioned this elsewhere, I think, but all art is about taking something you feel and trying desperately to put it into some form that other people can consume. Every time you create something, especially if it is written, you are saying, "look, this is how it feels to me. Can anybody else understand this? Does anybody hear me?" and the magical thing is that invariably, you'll get at least one yes.

Writing is particularly uncomfortable because there is less wiggle room for interpretation the way there is for other forms of art. Writing is like entering a confessional, even if what you're writing seems to have very little to do with you. but that's what makes it good! If it's hard and uncomfy, that means you're doing it right.

I recently attended a talk by one of my favorite poets, Ocean Vuong, and he was talking about how to choose what you write about. He said to write for yourself, and to privilege your curiosity and write towards the unknown. So it's okay to not know what or how to do what you're trying to do! Writing is just as much about all the times you failed as it is about the one time you succeed.

Philosophy and comfort aside, I linked that doc above as a more concrete potential solution to your roadblocks. A note on Google Docs - you'll be a viewer, but you can make a copy of the doc to use yourself, as it's a sort of interactive instruction manual haha.

To me, it sounds like you're forcing yourself to go straight from ideas to prose, and that rarely works (unless your ideas are HIGHLY specific and you have a LOT of practice). I can't do that most of the time. No good writer just starts writing cold and immediately produces something publishable lol! Instead, you should give yourself plenty of time to plan. Not only does this gives you a sort of playground to try out and expand on new ideas, but it also means you get steps to work your way down the cliffside instead of just... running and jumping haha. Plus it's a really, really great way to eliminate plot holes, because you have all your information in one place.

The doc contains a lot of guidance so I won't go too far into detail, but basically it helps you flesh out ideas and build up your characters so you're not going into the actual writing with only the bare bones of what you're trying to accomplish. I use that guide in some form for literally everything I write so that I don't get lost in all my ideas and forget which direction will keep me marching through the plot.

The doc shows that bootcamp in its most complex form, which is GREAT if you're writing something really long that requires elaborate worldbuilding and has a HUGE ensemble (hi, warm like a gun!). but you don't need to use all of it. It's meant to be a general guide, and you can prune sections as you see fit.

So don't let it daunt you! you don't need to have every single thing figured out before you actually start writing; it's just nice to have a lot of it down so that you're not falling with no parachute. if you have any questions at all (regarding that doc or this long ass post lmao) feel free to pop back into my inbox. I promise you're not bothering me.

Lastly, don't quit!! As you mentioned, not everyone can be a shakespeare, but I firmly believe that anybody can be a good writer if they just practice. I started writing as soon as I was able to speak. I've been writing novel-length work since I was about seven years old. I love it, even when it's hard. And it's hard! Especially when you're just starting out. Don't be afraid of it being bad. Just write it. The more you write, the easier it'll get, and the better you'll be.