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duhragonball · 6 months ago

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[FIC] Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan (217/?)

Disclaimer: This story features characters and concepts based on Dragon Ball, which is a trademark of Bird Studio/Shueisha and Toei Animation. This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made on this work by me. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don’t archive it without my permission. Don’t be shy.

Continuity Note: This story This story takes place about 66 years after the events of Dragon Ball Z.

[12 September, 779 Age. North Kai Planet.]

"After everything that happened with Lord Beerus, I would think you would take it easy for a while. But noooo, you just keep trying to borrow more trouble, don't you?"

"Aw, come on, King Kai, it's not like fighting Lord Beerus caused that much harm. I mean, we stayed out of the city and he was nice enough to spare the Earth, right?"

"Are you forgetting that you challenged him on my planet, Goku? You were so eager to fight him, but you couldn't even touch Lord Beerus. But you still managed to wreck my whole planet while you tried!"

Goku was in the middle of a set of squats. He paused just long enough to glance at the landscape of King Kai's planet. As small as it was, there wasn't much to see. Aside from a lawn, there was a tree, his house, a red car, and a stone road that ran along the circumference of the planet.

"Oh yeah, I forgot about all that," Goku said. He immediately resumed his exercises. "But I don't see what the big deal is, King Kai. You got everything cleaned up okay. Looking at it now, you'd never know anything happened to it."

"I'll have you know it took a lot of work to fix this place up, Goku! Not that you'd know anything about it, since you didn't lift a finger to help!"

"Well, if you would have asked…"

"I didn't want you here while I was repairing everything, because I was worried you'd blow it up again! You're the worst houseguest of all time, Goku!"

"Look, I keep tellin' you I'm sorry about that, King Kai. Besides, it wasn't like I blew up your planet. That was Cell's fault! And you got it back, and he's down in hell now, so what's there to be mad about?"

"I'm still dead, Goku! Or had you forgotten about that too?!"

"Oh, yeah! Right. I guess that does slip my mind a lot. Oh, speaking of that, did I tell you my son is having a baby? That's right, I'm gonna be a grandpa!"

"Mazel tov, Goku," King Kai replied dryly. "That's wonderful news, but you shouldn't change the subject."

"Right," Goku said. "I should be focusing on what I came here for. Which is trying to get a handle on this Super Saiyan God power. I figured that since you're a god, maybe you could give me some pointers."

"Goku, I never even heard of this Super Saiyan God business until Lord Beerus asked about it," King Kai said. "You heard the story Shenron told. You performed the ritual. I'd say that makes you the resident expert on the subject."

"Yeah, I know," Goku said, "but I can't figure out how to tap into the power like I did before. Even after it wore off, I was fightin' Lord Beerus in my normal Super Saiyan form, which never would have worked before. He told me it was because my body 'memorized' the power. I can tap into it as a Super Saiyan, but it doesn't feel like it's working as well as it did before."

"Goku, isn't that what the ritual is for?" King Kai asked. "If you want to experience that kind of power again, just ask Vegeta and the others to help you do what you did before."

"Aw, that's no fun," Goku said. "I wasn't too thrilled about using the ritual the first time, and now it seems like I might be able to skip it entirely. I won't learn anything if I keep using the others to help me."

"Well I don't see what you'll learn otherwise," King Kai said. "The answer's right in front of you, Goku. Your martial arts skills surpassed mine a long time ago, so I can't teach you anything, unless you want to learn some good jokes. I've got a whole six month curriculum on airline food if you're interested."

"Airline food?" Goku asked. "I don't even know what airlines eat. Who feeds 'em, anyway?"

King Kai stifled a chuckle. "You really are a natural, kid," he said. "With the right mentoring, you could have been a great comedian. Too bad you ended up in martial arts… Wait, what was that?"

The antennae on his hat began to twitch and vibrate. King Kai looked around in every direction, then back at Goku.

"What's wrong, King Kai?" Goku asked.

"I'm getting a message… from one of the Kaioshin," he said.

"You mean the Supreme Kai and his old ancestor?" Goku asked. "I haven't heard from them in a while. I wonder how they're doin'."

"No, it's not from them," King Kai said. "This is…. Oh, goodness. It's from the Supreme Kai of Time"

"There's a Supreme Kai of Time now?" Goku asked.

"There has been for millions of years, Goku," King Kai said. "And it looks like… she's coming here!"

Even as he said the words, King Kai's pet monkey, Bubbles, began to grunt and squeal as he pointed in the direction of King Kai's house. Goku and the Kai hurried inside, and found what looked like a young woman standing at his dining table.

"I'm sorry to barge in on such short notice, North Kai," she said, "but there's an emergency, both on Earth and at the Time Nest. I've come to ask for Goku's help."

"N-no problem at all, Supreme Kai of Time," King Kai replied as he bowed repeatedly. "It's a tremendous honor to meet you, and we're willing to help you in any way we can."

"Hey, I'm Goku," Goku said, pointing his thumb at himself. "What kind of emergency is it?"

She smiled and held up a scroll for him to see. "I'll tell you all about it. West City will be attacked soon. I've already dispatched a Time Patroller to intercede, but my own headquarters of Toki Toki City will be attacked at the same time. So I'll need to bring her back to fight that battle too."

"Time Patrol?" King Kai asked. "Er, I'm afraid I'm not familiar with them, my Lady."

"They're an organization of mortal warriors from different centuries," she explained. "When they resolve a temporal crisis, I use my abilities to repair the alterations to history. So we manage to keep a low profile that way. If we do our jobs right, no one will even know we did anything."

"Oh, I see," King Kai said. "Then the situation must be quite precarious if you've revealed yourselves to us now."

"It is," Chronoa said. "This Scroll I've brought you is part of the Scroll of Eternity, a manifestation of the history of the entire cosmos. If the enemy takes control of the Time Nest, then he'll control everything. The past, present, and future. But I can't forsake West City either. That's why I need Goku's help. Luffa will need backup, and I can't spare any other Time Patrollers to help her."

"Luffa?" Goku asked. "Who's she?"

"Goku, this is an emergency," King Kai said. "The Supreme Kai of Time didn't come all the way here for a Q&A session. There isn't time for that."

"Not at all, North Kai," she said with a pleasant chuckle. "It is a grave crisis we're up against, but we have a saying in Toki Toki City. 'There's time.'"

With that, she took a seat at the table, and gestured for Goku to join her.

"Oh," King Kai said. "Well in that case, maybe I should brew some tea…"

"I'll tell you all about her, Goku," Chronoa said with a smile. "As a matter of fact, she's been very interested to meet you for a long time…"

[9 May, 791 Age. The Tuffle Planet.]

The rest was history. The Supreme Kai of Time had deputized Goku into the Time Patrol, and sent him to join Luffa in the defense of West City. After the battle, Goku and Luffa had returned to King Kai's Planet to figure out their next move, and Luffa used the Scroll of Eternity left on King Kai's dining table to return to the Time Nest. Goku, however, had been unable to join her. Instead, Chronoa had arranged to bring Goku to Toki Toki City using a wish on the Dragon Balls. The wish had been crafted to summon Goku at just the right moment, to support them when they needed him the most.

But before all of that, before the attack on West City had commenced, Chronoa had told Goku who Luffa was. According to legend, there was a Super Saiyan who arose one thousand years before Son Goku. That Super Saiyan who could only maintain the power in his giant ape form, and who was ultimately destroyed by his own power. However, the tale left out a few important details. In fact, the Super Saiyan was a woman named Luffa, who was nearly destroyed by her own power, but she survived, thanks to the intervention of the Time Patrol. Like Goku, she was brought to Toki Toki City in their hour of need, using a wish on the Dragon Balls. After that, the Time Patrol discovered just who it was they had recruited, and learned that Luffa was the ancestor of quite possibly every Saiyan of the modern age, including Goku.

The idea was appealing to Goku. He had been sent to Earth as a baby, and a head injury sustained in early childhood had left him with no memory of his Saiyan family. He did not learn of his heritage until his brother Raditz invaded the Earth, and told him that the Saiyans were a race of brutal conquerors. The encounter had left Goku ashamed of his Saiyan identity, and he spent the next decade coming to terms with it. Meeting Luffa was proof that his family line wasn't all like Raditz. She was grumpy and moody and sometimes harsh, but she showed compassion to the weak and innocent. She was the kind of ancestor Goku could be proud to have.

When the Demigra crisis was resolved, Goku immediately challenged her to a battle, and she readily accepted. This was what led them to this fragment of time, where a dead villain had recreated Planet Vegeta in the Earth's Solar System. Goku had no memory of his homeworld, but something about fighting Luffa in this place felt very right to him.

As for the battle itself, that had been very uneven. Luffa had expressed concerns that their powers might not be evenly matched, and it seemed that she had underestimated the complexity of the fight. At first, Luffa had proven to be much stronger in her Super Saiyan form than Goku, so he relied on unorthodox tactics for a while to keep her from overwhelming him. When that stopped working, he transformed into a Super Saiyan 2, an advanced version of Super Saiyan which Luffa had never seen before. Now Goku had the advantage, and it was Luffa who was struggling to keep up.

And yet, it seemed to Goku that she still had a lot more fight left in her. What was her secret? If she had some alternate form she could use to level the playing field, then why was she so surprised to learn of Goku's Super Saiyan 2 form? And if she had some other ace up her sleeve, why was she waiting so long to use it?

This was what held Goku's fascination as the battle wore on. Every fight was unique, with different circumstances and conditions that made them special. This contest with Luffa was shaping up to be just as exceptional, even if he was beginning to get frustrated.

He had been searching the planet for several minutes now, and had found no trace of her. She had hidden her ki from him before, like at the Blinking Twelve Diner in Toki Toki City, where she met him to prepare for the fight. Goku knew a thing or two about being sneaky himself, as he had shown Luffa earlier in this battle. Still, he expected her to have made a move by now. Luffa seemed too aggressive to spend this much time playing defense.

"This is the perfect chance for an ambush," Goku said to himself. "I'm just floatin' around out here, leavin' myself wide open, so why doesn't she try something?"

"Are you looost, little boy?!"

Goku had been looking at the ground below him when he heard the voice. He quickly looked up to find a figure floating in the glare of the sun. He could sense some power in the figure, but it wasn't much.

"What the heck are you?" Goku asked as he flew towards the figure. As he drew closer, he could tell it was one of the ki ghosts Luffa had used against him earlier. Each one could act autonomously, and they would explode on contact. And yet, this one seemed barely powerful enough to stay airborne. The ghost's head was shaped to resemble Luffa, but in terms of power, it seemed like the sort of ki ghost Bulma or Mr. Satan would make, if either of them had the ability.

"Do I frighten you, Kakarot?!" the ghost screeched. She began to put her ghostly thumbs in her ears and flapped her tongue at him mockingly.

"Not really," Goku said. "You seem kinda weak to me, so either you're hiding your full power somehow, or you're here to distract me…"

"Good guess!" the ghost exclaimed. "Why don'tcha turn your back on me and look around for any traps that might be in the area. That sounds like a good idea!"

"Heh. Thanks, but no thanks," Goku said. "I've fought a lot nastier characters than Luffa in my time. I've seen just about every dirty trick in the book."

He began to float around the ki ghost, allowing him to look around without allowing the ghost out of his line of sight.

"That's sharp, really sharp!" the ghost said. "You're nobody's fool, Kakarot!"

"She's stalling for time, isn't she?" Goku said.

"I never said tha-aaaa-at!" the ghost wailed.

"You didn't have to," Goku replied. "I really spooked her when I turned into a Super Saiyan 2. She probably wants to get a handle on this form's capabilities before attacking. And she probably thinks this form isn't stable enough to go the distance." He swung around to face the ghost from the profile and added: "Well? Am I close?"

The ghost simply shrugged and made an innocent grin.

"It's not going to work, though," Goku said. "I can keep up this form for a long time, long enough to defeat her, I think. And if I have to power down, I can always rest and transform again. That's what makes Super Saiyan 2 so useful."

"Doooo tell!" the ghost cackled. "Dooooooooo tell!"

"Sorry," Goku said. "I'd love to stay and chat, but I think I just sensed the real Luffa down there. Even if it's a trap, I think I'd have more fun springing it than hanging around up here."

He powered up and prepared to fly down after her, but then something unexpected happened. A bolt of green energy lanced through the sky, and nearly hit his right arm.

"What the--?" Goku asked, but there were too many other bolts coming for him to finish the question.

"These aren't ki attacks!" Goku shouted as he batted them aside. "What the heck is she doing?!"

As he dodged the last of the salvo, he felt someone grabbing him from behind. "Oh crap!" he exclaimed as he realized that he'd forgotten about the ghost. Goku braced himself for the explosion, but to his surprise, there wasn't much for him to worry about. It was more like a balloon popping, but without the noise. All that was left was a cloud of glowing golden smoke.

"Enough of this," Goku said. He put his fingers to his forehead and used Instant Transmission to intercept Luffa's position. But to his surprise, he arrived to find nothing. Just an empty field, but with a scorched area to indicate there had been an explosion.

"Another one of her ghost decoys," Goku muttered. "Looks like this one had more ki than that first one. So she's trying to lure me into position, but for what? And where in the world is she?"

Another round of green energy bolts came at him, and Goku narrowly avoided one and then generated a ki force that deflected them away. He could sense nothing from the direction they had come, but now that he was closer, he could see the Tuffle city in the distance.

Goku knew little of the history of Planet Vegeta, other than various accounts of its destruction at the hands of Frieza. What little he did know was from King Kai, who gave him a history lesson while he was training for the Saiyan invasion of Earth. According to King Kai, the Saiyans and Tuffles once shared the planet, until a war broke out between them. Physically, the Tuffles were no match for the Saiyans' power, but they made up for this with their advanced weapons technology. It wasn't enough to win the war, but the Tuffles were able to drag out the conflict for several decades.

So if this planet was truly a recreation of Goku's birthplace, then it stood to reason that the city was a Tuffle fortress, equipped with enough weapons to hold off a Saiyan army.

"And if I could figure all that out," Goku said to himself, "then it's a cinch Luffa's way ahead of me. She's probably been to all kinds of crazy planets. I bet it wouldn't take her long to figure out how to shoot some of those guns."

The city was built around what looked like a crater, or possibly a dry lakebed. Smaller buildings were clustered around the rim, while a large column of earth jutted out from the center, with an enormous metal tower rising up even further. Flying buttresses extended from all sides of the tower, reaching down to the city below like a strange spider's web.

"Guess I'll pay her a visit," Goku said. "Anything's better than bein' out in the open waiting for her to take another shot at me."

He charged his ki and rocketed towards the city in a streak of golden light. As he approached, Luffa took a few more shots at him, but he was too fast for her. In the end, all she did was give away her location, at the top of the tower.

"Found you!" Goku shouted as he ripped through the steel walls of the upper levels. He had sensed Luffa inside, but what he saw was not what he expected.

The entire room was filled with glowing golden smoke. Goku tried to fan it away with his arms, but all this accomplished was to spread it around even more. It all had the same unique signature as Luffa's ki, but it wasn't her.

"That doesn't make any sense!" Goku said. "If it was just a decoy, then who's been shooting at me this whole time!"

As the dust thinned, Goku could see a supply crate with the lid haphazardly tossed onto the floor. It bore a Capsule Corp. logo, indicating that this was left behind when the Tuffle-infested Earthlings settled this world. The half-eaten apple and shredded MRE bags indicated that Luffa had been here very recently, and she'd had a snack while she peeked out the nearby window. Lying beside it was the rifle she had used. Goku could smell the exhaust from the hot barrel.

"She's still here," he concluded. "But how far could she have gotten…?"

As if to answer his question, the floor suddenly ripped apart beneath him, and two hands reached through to grasp his boots. Before Goku could react, he found himself yanked through the deck and down to the next level, where Luffa--the real thing-- swung him around like a sack of potatoes.

She only managed to slam him into a few walls before Goku recovered. Then he pulled his legs free and caught her fists as she tried to attack him again. For a brief time, they stood there, fingers locked together as they stared at each other.

"Some ambush," Goku said. "All you did was lead me right to you, Luffa!"

"I had to be creative," Luffa said. "I decided to take a page out of your book. I can hide pretty well when I want to, but I can't make a Spirit Bomb like you can."

"You were right below me," Goku said. "And you were powered up the whole time! How'd you manage to keep me from sensing you?"

"That would be telling, Kakarot," Luffa said. "A better question is: Why am I attacking you like this when I'm still not strong enough to match your power?"

Goku forced her backward until she dropped to one knee. "I was getting around to that one," he said. "I figured you might just save me the suspense and explain it on your own!"

"Like I said, I can't do the Spirit Bomb," Luffa said. "So I had to make sure you wouldn't notice me while I was setting up the explosives."

"The what?" Goku asked just as the floor beneath them blasted apart. Luffa was ready and she rolled with the unexpected drop and used her momentum to pull free. Goku was not prepared, and while he could apply his power to protect himself, he didn't know which direction the attack was coming from.

"I can't teleport either," Luffa shouted to him from above. "But after I'm through, I don't think you'll be able to do it either!"

She hurled a volley of rapid fire ki blasts down onto Goku, who continued to fall as the floors beneath him collapsed. Goku covered up with his arms to protect himself, but he soon realized that Luffa wasn't really aiming at him. As he crashed through the next floor, he soon realized why.

"Look who's he-ee-ee-re!" screeched one of her ki ghosts. There were at least a dozen of them waiting for him, though Goku didn't have a chance to respond. He twisted to avoid them, but Luffa's blasts did not, nor did the debris that rained down from the floors above. The ghosts all exploded around him, propelling him downward even faster.

As he descended, Goku could only wonder how Luffa had managed all this without him sensing it. Then he remembered the ki dust she had littered everywhere. By now, Luffa's energy seemed to be coming from every direction. Goku couldn't locate anything with his ki senses. He wondered if that first ghost had been sent to disrupt his ability to locate her. And if that was true…

The tower seemed to be collapsing all around Goku. Normally, he might have attempted Instant Transmission to get clear, but he didn't even bother trying it. The technique relied on his ability to pinpoint a ki signature to use as a reference point, and that was impossible now. As far as Goku could tell, Luffa might as well have been everywhere, in all directions.

There was no way out.

And so Goku covered up as best as he could and prepared to ride out the blast.

Luffa continued to rain down suppressing fire on the tower until the rest of her ki ghosts had exploded. They were all relatively weak, but their explosive power was enough to get the tower to collapse, and the sheer mass of the thing would carry the bulk of her offensive for her.

At last, she ceased fire, and alighted to the pile of rubble that lay on the butte where the tower had stood. The devastation was incredible. All of the metal buttresses that joined the tower to the rest of the city had fallen apart, collapsing into the crater around the butte. She knew little about the Tuffles, and even less about their grudge with the Saiyans, but she did find their architecture very satisfying to destroy.

"And that should hold you for a while, Kakarot," Luffa said triumphantly. "I'm sure you'll dig yourself out eventually, but since you haven't already teleported in front of me to gloat, then it seems like this worked out just as I planned. And by the time you do make it out, then I'll be ready to-- huh?"

The entire butte began to tremble, and Luffa briefly lost her balance. She could sense something from below, but her own ki senses were just as flustered as Goku's were, which made it difficult to tell what was happening. It was the sound more than anything. On top of the low rumbling, there was a faint howl, and it seemed to be getting louder.

"No," Luffa gasped with a growing sense of dread. "He couldn't be… Not this quickly… Not even I could…"

Her pride refused to allow her to finish the thought, and Luffa could only look down at her feet to see what happened next. The debris around her shifted and spilled down the sides of the butte, until finally the butte itself began to crack open. A thin, jagged line appeared between her feet. She stared down as it widened, and she could hear the echoes from within.

And then the scream was unmistakable. She could actually see the golden flashes down below. Lightning crackled around the entire butte. Arcs of pure ki energy rippled through the air, some dancing across Luffa's body as they passed her by.

Soon, the crack was too wide for Luffa to straddle. Son Goku was quite literally forcing the mesa apart with his bare hands.

As impressed as Luffa was with the feat, her combat instincts demanded that she withdraw to more favorable terrain. With a single leap, she crossed the space between the butte and the rim of the crater, and took cover behind a retaining wall. Once there, she concentrated and manipulated her ki to hide herself.

She had developed the technique from working with her wife, Zatte. The Dorlun had a unique ability to manipulate various types of energy and one of her favorite uses of this power was to bend light around herself to become functionally invisible. Luffa had no way to replicate that ability, but Zatte had ways of manipulating ki energy that Luffa could imitate, however crudely.

The result was that Luffa could hide at least some of her power from other ki sensitive fighters. This could be used to keep them guessing about her true strength, or she could use a certain level of her power below the limit of what she could hide, and operate virtually undetected from adepts like Goku. She had used this to great effect in her own era, but there was another application she had rarely gotten to use in the field.

While Luffa's full power was too great to conceal completely, it was possible for her to hide it from a single direction. This was often useless in her old life, and in Time Patrol missions, where she often had to contend with multiple hostiles at the same time. But with a single opponent, she could face in their direction and hide her power from that angle. As long as they didn't circle around beyond the range of the effect, they wouldn't be able to sense her presence.

A skilled sharpshooter, Zatte had been very impressed by the idea, but for Luffa it was a solution in search of a problem, since she rarely found a solitary opponent willing to stand still long enough for it to be worth the effort. But with Goku's Instant Transmission out of the picture, her camouflage finally seemed to be paying dividends. She only had to charge up her next attack before Goku emerged from the butte.

There was a tremendous upheaval from the crater, as Goku's aura blasted up from it like a pillar of fire. Cracks began to form in the retaining wall, but Luffa held her position, even as nearby buildings collapsed from the shockwaves.

She could not get a precise fix on his location using ki senses, but she could still manage well enough by line of sight. She swung out her arm, and fired.

She doubted her Vengeance Cannon was powerful enough to kill Goku in his current state, but it could still wound him, or at least incapacitate him. She expected him to try to dodge it, which would leave him open to a mid-air tackle, or perhaps she could lure him into the city to find more favorable terrain.

All of those considerations were cast aside when her beam finally reached Goku. He did not dodge the Vengeance Cannon. Nor did he deflect it. Nor did he sustain a hit.

Instead, he caught it.

"He can't…" Luffa said breathlessly. "There's no way he could hold that back."

Soon, she had no choice but to cease fire, and the beam was left at a finite length, suspended impossibly from one end in Goku's hands. It trembled and vibrated like a red-hot filament.

Luffa should have used the moment to figure out her next move. Instead, she watched in awe as Goku set his teeth, then cried out. The lightning crackled around him and his hands glowed yellow and the Vengeance Cannon dissipated in mid-air. From there, he launched himself down to the origin of the beam, and directly at Luffa's position.

Put simply, Luffa was too amazed to stop him. He crashed into her like a missile slamming into pavement. She had enough power to absorb most of the impact, but it was a serious blow nonetheless.

She found herself in near-total darkness. There was only the light from their Super Saiyan auras, and whatever daylight dared to follow them into the hole Goku had made. Luffa could only guess that this was some sort of Tuffle mass transit corridor. Her main evidence of this was the metal track that she was lying on. It hurt, but not as much as her ribs did after Goku's tackle.

As she got back up, Goku was already preparing to attack again. She pitched forward to somersault under his right hook, but he was too fast and the blow glanced off her shoulder instead.

"I won't bother asking you to give up," Goku said. "But you ain't slippin' away again, either. If you want to continue, you'll just have to slug it out with me."

She stumbled as she got back up and raised her hands. "I've got no problem with that," she said with a wide-eyed grin. "If that's the best you can do, Kakarot, then I think I'm on the right track."

"Are you out of your mind?" Goku asked. "You can tell the difference between our powers! I don't know what you've been stalling for, but you've run out of time, Luffa. You're cornered, and that's all there is to it."

She began to laugh. "What's wrong, Kakarot?" Luffa asked. "Are you afraid that you need to finish this before it's too late? Or maybe this place is beginning to jog your memories. Maybe that's it. Maybe your mother used to ride the monorail, and while she waited for the train, she would tell you tales of the Legendary Super Saiyan, and what makes me so dangerous…"

He shook his head. "Sounds nice, but if it really happened, then I don't remember a bit of it. You won't talk your way out of this, Luffa," Goku warned.

"Then bring it on," Luffa said. She held out her hand and curled in her fingers, practically begging him to attack. "You've got all the answers, right? You've ascended beyond the Super Saiyan, haven't you? Then prove it, Kakarot. Prove you've ascended beyond me."

Goku did not hesitate to strike. But even as he did, Luffa continued to smile like she had the entire battle in the palm of her hand. He did not doubt his advantage, but when he looked into Luffa's green eyes, something made him wonder…

NEXT: Balance of Power

#dragon ball #fanfiction #super saiyan #luffa #goku #the tuffle planet #king kai #supreme kai of time #lssjluffafic

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rebelwheelssoapbox · 2 years ago

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George & How The Great Annual Hop Came To Be (As Told by Harold The Fox) [a short story]

by Michele Sommerstein (RebelwheelsNYC)

I came home with a fragrant bouquet for my beloved. “Harold, my love,” I loved how Martha always greeted me when I returned from a day's work in the forest. The way the sunlight through the kitchen window of our modest home, shined brilliantly on her orange and vermilion red fur. The way her ears always perked up when she saw me. “You brought me mustard greens, my favorite!” Her warm smile gets me every time, even after all these years.

I could see that she was working on her latest painting. You know, at first her paintings were just landscapes, which don't get me wrong were lovely and were well received at Dath Agus Éirí Amach (The local art gallery) but lately she’s really been into these portraits of fellow animals in The Collective, and some of them are really spot on. “Only the best for my beloved.”I said.

Martha blushed a bit, Well, I mean more on the inside as us foxes don't really externally blush. Our fur is just not influenced by mood. Now, that would be interesting. Mood fur. But alas, I looked at my beloved Martha with a stillness and knowing of a love that needed no words or confirmation. Of course, we verbally say I love you and bring each other little gifts of appreciation now and then, such as her mustard greens. She loves mustard greens. But to pause in our day, at least once, to have that fleeting moment, fills my heart. “Love, I have to tell you what happened today” I said “Oh?” “It was a weird one...” “Aren't they always in these woods?” I sat down by the kitchen table to rest my healing leg. I had recently been in an accident in the woods, but well... that's another story. “Even for these woods... ” I said. “Oh my...” “But first, you must tell me how was your day at Dath Agus Éirí Amach?” Martha worked at the local art gallery and sometimes showed her art there. “Oh, you won't believe who I ran into today...” “Do tell...” Just then I heard the flushing of our toilet, when who should emerge from the bathroom, but George Na Bears Ón Oirthear (The Bear From The East.) In that moment and forgive me, but I hoped to Goddess he didn't sit down. With all due respect to bears.... and I mean, I have nothing against them, but size... logistics... our toilet was meant for our much smaller bodies in comparison. But I... well, I didn't want to say anything and make it awkward. “Woo! That is a low one” he said. “Well, we are foxes” Martha chuckled as she washed her paws in the kitchen sink. “Indeed.” he replied. Please Goddess tell me he did not break the toilet. “George” I said “I didn't expect to see you today.” “Well, I ran into Martha at Dath Agus Éirí Amach.” (the local art gallery) “Not literally, Harold” she said before I could even say a word. Martha knew me too well “Thank Goddess.” I grinned “I mean with all due respect, George for at heart I know you are a gentle soul, but well, with you being a bear and all and Martha being a fox... such a collision could be quite painful.” Martha just shook her head, chuckled and smiled. To be honest though, I was only half kidding. “Indeed. I … I hope you don't mind me staying for dinner” George said looking down a bit, It was odd. Not that George was staying for dinner. He is a lovely soul and always welcomed. It's just that normally George is the life of the party, always cracking jokes. Oh, he does a fantastic impression of humans. 'Look at me, I'm a human' as he stands on his hind legs 'la la la la'. Oh, it's great. But something was different about him today. “You okay, George?” I inquired. “It's okay, George, you can tell him” Martha said with a kind & gentle encouragement. And as me and Martha made dinner and set the table for three, George spoke, hesitating and in an almost quiet and nervous tone. He looked sad and I tell you, it just wasn't like him. But then again who was I to say that, that this was out of character? It's not like I ever sat with him one on one and had a serious conversation. George really wasn't one for serious conversations. I've really only seen him at parties. “It's just.. I mean... don't get me wrong” he said “.... I... I... love being a bear. Being a bear is great. I mean, bears are great, right?” “Oh yeah, bears are fantastic, George. Large and furry and roar and all that goodness.” I wondered where he was going with all of this. “But have you ever... I mean... you two are foxes... “ “Foxy and proud.” “Go on, George” Martha said with a gentle compassion. “I just... well,... um....sometimes.... you know... not always... but ... sometimes... I... I don't always want to be... you know... a bear... I …I … um... I mean I want to be a bear of course, I am a bear... “ “A fine bear at that...” I said “Th-thank you... but I … it's just..... sometimes … I... I.. want to be.... more than a bear... you know... I mean... uh.... maybe.. I don't know.... um.... say... a bit... rabbit, you know...as an example? Right? I mean rabbits are pretty great. They … they get to hop around all day and have those... great ears. I mean... I have ears, but rabbit ears are just.., oh! They can stick right up or be all floppy like and long and interesting... “ George spoke with a light in his eyes that I had never seen before. “Oh yes, rabbit ears are quite versatile and delightful “ I said. To be honest, I never really thought about it before, but they were pretty great now that he mentioned it. “And … and to be clear, I... I... I don't want to be a rabbit, right? I mean... “ George chuckled a little “I'm just imagining myself as this big bunny... you know... a rabbit but bear sized...” “Well, you know they used to be a lot bigger” Martha chimed in “Rabbits, I mean.” “Did they?” I said “Oh yes, when I was growing up, my grandmother used to tell us about her neighbor, lovely woman. Brenda, Brenda was a rabbit but as big as a bear. Width, height and all. You would've liked her Harold. She was apparently well known for her hummus” “Oh, if only she was our neighbor...” “By the way, speaking of which, I picked up some carrots for you on the way home. They're in the fridge.” Martha said while smiling at me. I placed my hand on my heart. “My love....” She knows me well. “Sorry, go on George.” Martha said “Yes, please.” I said as I got up to get the carrots, “So, yeah you know... maybe I could be … a bear but also … you know... a bit rabbit... as well?” “Alright,” I said in between crunching of my carrots so not to be rude “so, what would that look like?” “Well, I could ya know maybe … hop around sometimes a lot... and um... maybe.... you know... wear bunny … ears all floppy and... and... oh, that's too silly, isn't? You're such a fool, George!!” My heart broke a little when he chastised himself. “George, that's not foolish at all. If wearing rabbit ears makes you happy, then why not? Carpe Diem.” I said. “Really...?” He looked up and his eyes were almost on the verge of tears, Oh,my heart. I'd offer him a hug if I had long enough arms to do so. At best I could only really give a solid hug to his arm... maybe a leg, but that's awkward. I digress. “Of course, George.” I said in an attempt to reassure him. “You know, I know someone who makes headbands with the various animal ears.” Martha said referring to Velma from Dath Agus Éirí Amach (our local art gallery). Velma was a very interesting artist. Experimental and subversive. I really enjoy her work. “Oh yes,” I said “They are very realistic, I saw the ones she made of fox ears, I tell you, I wouldn't be able to know the difference.” “I'll ask her if you like, George if she makes the rabbit one in bear size. I'm sure she does.” And as Martha spoke those words, I could tell there was a storm brewing inside of George. He began to quietly shake his head no until finally he erupted and said “I can't! I can't!...” George did his best to smile and speak in a calm tone. “Oh, uh... thank... thank you both, uh you've been very very kind, but I.. I shouldn't waste your time like this... I’m sorry” and just like that, he bolted out of the house. It broke our hearts to see such a gentle soul with such pain & conflict. And for what? “Wait, George!” Martha called out “Come back!” but it was in vain. “Oh, poor guy. Life is too long to be a dick to yourself.” I said “Indeed, my love. Indeed...” Martha looked down at the third plate and sighed. “I wish there was something we could do...” I pondered as I further snacked on my carrots. And just then, a lovely idea came to Martha. “What if,we hopped with him?!” she said in a moment of inspiration. “After all, if he wasn't alone in hopping, maybe he'd feel more free to do so. Why we could even make it into a surprise… a George Appreciation Party. He's such a kind soul. We could do it right out in the road in front of our house. Invite him over for dinner and then surprise him with bunny ears and such, which of course we would all wear, so it wouldn't just be George putting himself out there.” “Well, then. It seems that it's time for a party, my love” I said. Goddess, I love my wife. “To George!” “To George!” And with a smile, it began, All throughout dinner, we brainstormed and figured out the logistics of the George Appreciation Party. It started small. Originally it was just us & some neighbors who were more than happy to show solidarity and thus love to George. “That lovable oaf. Sure, I’ll wear bunny ears for him” one neighbor said smiling. Originally, Martha and I were just going to make some sandwiches, maybe put on some music, but soon word spread and almost everyone in An Comhchoiteann (The Collective) wanted to come and were welcome to do so. From Na Muca Dea Ar an Scáth Ghealach Thiar (The Great Pigs Of The West Shadow Moon) who liked to sometimes caw like a crow to An Iora Staccato Ó Na Crainn Saileach Thuaidh (The Squirrels Of Staccato From The North Willow Trees) who liked to incorporate howling like wolves into their interpretive dance numbers. You should see them, they're really quite good. It was soon very clear that George was not only well loved, but also not alone in his these thoughts. So, we found a bigger space to do the party, everyone brought a dish, some brought drinks, everyone wore rabbit ears in solidarity and... oh, it was wonderful to see. I don't know how we kept it a secret, but George had no idea. He arrived with his weekly bag of groceries (the location was right outside of his home) and nearly dropped them when we all shouted “Surprise!!” And it's true, the event wasn't everyone's cup of tea (which was fine. It didn't need to be.) At first Ronald and Peter, two Aardvarks from The Tailte deannaigh Ghleann an Iarthair (Western Valley Dustlands) notorious sticklers for so-called tradition, just didn't seem to get it – and yet for some reason they showed up to the party. Yes, they were naturally invited being part of The Collective and all, but honestly, we were all very surprised to even see them. “A bear should be a bear and a rabbit should be a rabbit. I mean, what is he, a cub?!” Peter said slightly flustered. And it's not like The Dustlands are that close ether. That's a half day's trip if not more. But after a half of glass of their signature Aardvark Punch, that they made just for the occasion, it all became clear as Peter (an Aardvark elder) started to sob as he confessed, he too always wanted to nay like a horse for it was such an enjoyable noise, but felt too ashamed to even try. “Life is too long for such shame...” His dear friend and fellow elder Ronald told him after only one cup of punch, as they put on bunny ears. It should be noted there is absolutely no alcohol in Aardvark Punch, but I saw no reason to tell them that we all knew. And besides it's not that George wasn't a bear. He was still a bear and a fine bear at that. But he was now a bear who finally felt comfortable enough in his fur to embrace the joy of hopping and wearing floppy ears as he saw fit. And there was nothing wrong with that. George was now a bear on his own terms and it was beautiful to see. He was still the life of the party, but now in a more authentic way. Even The Coiníní Mór Uiscí an Tuaiscirt (The Great Rabbits Of The Northern Waters) who could not make it in time, given the distance, sent a fruit basket to George and said he was welcome to hop with them anytime. But it was the moment when other Bears Ón Oirthear (Bears From The East) showed up, bunny ears and all, that George broke down and sobbed his eyes out. A mixture of happy tears of gratitude for the outpouring of love from his peers, relief for he no longer had to hide and a bit of exhaustion for he had been hiding for too long and that can wear on one's soul, Especially so on one as gentle as George. And so we all cheered “A chairde maithe, don phobal agus don tsaoirse le bheith dílis dúinn féin! Fada beo An tSean-Foraoise Comhchoiteann!” which translates to “To good friends, community and the freedom to be true to ourselves. Long Live The Ancient Forest Collective!” And while the first party was organized by Martha and myself, the second year George with bunny ears and all, organized it every year after and that is how The Great Annual Hop came to be. THE END (Author’s note: This is Chapter 2 of a series of stories in progress. If you’d like to read Chapter 1 and learn more about Harold and his mystery leg accident in the woods, you may do so here. )

[image description: the background is a dimly lit forest. to the center is a cut out image of a brown bear with white and pink bunny ears. via a speech bubble he are saying life is too long to be a dick to yourself. in the lower right hand corner reads @ rebel wheels nyc]

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steveyockey · 4 years ago

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so what r ur thoughts on dean seeing cas as not-human how does that fit into his Feelings about cas? did they work to bury them or was it like oh well this is obvs not gonna go anywhere he’s a talking dog. was he self aware in the trap? did self awareness and understanding slam into him post-15x18?

oh this is gonna be a long one

not to be too by-the-book on this, but to start with your last question, I’m absolutely on board with jensen’s post 15.18 explanation (which I will link here) that, even in the moments leading up to the confession, dean still conceptualized of cas as a celestial being who thinks in a way that “might not be comprehensible by a human heart or by a human brain.”

in my interpretation of his response, he was trying to counteract the narrative he had seen on social media (he admitted to doing a little investigation into how people were reacting) that dean was unresponsive on account of his rejection of cas/“holding back a slur.” I think it’s actually a really genius move that he completely reoriented the conversation away from sexuality to clarify what he as the character was thinking in this moment — it wasn’t oh my god a person I perceive as a man is confessing his love to me, another man, in a way that’s unquestionably not heterosexual but instead this creature I have built up in my mind as too vast and powerful for pitiful human emotions is telling me the thing I never knew I wanted to hear most in the world and this articulation should be impossible for his being, especially considering I am not worthy of this level of attention from a cosmic entity. which I think is also reflective of his general understanding of cas at all times, not necessarily at the forefront of his mind but part of the landscape of awareness, which, as I stated previously, dean deals with by diminishing cas. he’s a baby in a trench coat, a little nerdy dude with wings, and of course, kind of like a talking dog. because if you can’t come to terms with something vast, you might need to pretend it’s actually quite small. and when the vast thing seems to willingly live in your house, you need to reason with that in a way that makes it something involuntary, like animal devotion. and if this vast thing also is the object of your affection and makes you feel protective in the way that you know death herself would make you watch him die because that would be more painful to you that the loss of your own life, you might talk about him in a way that dismisses his agency.

I think it’s important to clarify that I don’t think dean lacks all awareness of cas’s feelings for him before 15.18. I mean, they have a child together. they watch movies together, they drink beers together, they are in a lot of ways already living in ambiguous bachelor paradise. repression isn’t a single action but an endless cycle of questioning/hoping/fearing/cordoning/etc. it’s not a question of whether dean represses his feelings for cas or if he understands his feelings to be pointless since they can never be consummated, he’s dealing with both of those tracks simultaneously. there’s even an additional track where he entertains that cas does have feelings for him but thinks their current relationship is the best it’s ever gonna get due to 1. internalized homo/biphobia (which functions as both an internal and external deterrent, internal in that being gay/bi does not comport with dean’s allowed reading of self and external in that to embrace a relationship with a man would be to willingly expose both of them to additional cruelty), 2. the idea that, even if cas has feelings for dean, they are of such a fundamentally different substance it would disservice both of them to try to make it work, and 3. his ingrained belief that love is a weakness which will be taken advantage of.

obviously a lot of this logic is completely annihilated by the confession; cas names love as a strength and classifies his feelings as deeply human. it’s not so much that his words unbury what dean had buried but that they decimate the narrative he bought into that clarifying the feelings of either party would ruin their relationship. I think the sexuality conundrum also dissolves at this point, just on account of dean having a willing object of affection. it’s not about loving men, it’s about loving cas.

of course the trap is essential to this moment, but I would say it’s actually most significant not for what it says about how dean interprets cas’s feelings but how dean views his own feelings. dean’s prayer is really the first time the entire show he’s held himself accountable for his supposedly righteous anger. he’s deliberately breaking his own rules to never give voice to the meaning of their relationship and also to never give voice to his failings in a way that isn’t self-serving. he’s acknowledging their bond while acknowledging he has responsibility over the harm he does even when this harm is something that he’s been taught to tacitly accept as the price of the ticket — because he’s harmed cas (something that shouldn’t even be possible in his reading of cas as foreign). and he’s only speaking this aloud because the relationship is fractured and he thinks cas could be dead and the one thing dean understands without question is life without cas is not worth living. I do think the prayer mutually deepens the understanding both characters have of their relationship, but it isn’t enough on its own to shake for dean the idea that cas feels in a different way, albeit one significant enough to make him decenter the rage he has long viewed as core to his being. if the prayer is a decentering process, the confession is a recentering process. cas, previously assumed as unfeeling, and dean, previously assumed to only act in anger, both become characters motivated first and foremost by love.

#this is an ask i got after last night's 'cas is kind of like a talking dog' breakdown #anon #spn #ziz watches spn #one day i will learn to stop talking #i honestly don't even know if i answered the question here #everyone who thought we weren't going to tumblr university today - surprise!

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wuxiaphoenix · 2 years ago

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Worldbuilding: Spun From Glass

What’s the fiberglass of your story’s world?

Every plausible world has at least one; stuff that can be ugly and prickly and hazardous to handle without proper gear, yet just too useful not to keep around. Janet Kagan’s Mirabile has recessive genes as engineered genetic backup

as part of all Earth-import plants and animals from their colony ships’ storage banks. Meaning sometimes you get useful surprise fireflies from red daffodils, and sometimes you get biting cockroaches - or deadly Frankenswine. The Roman Empire had concrete.

Yes, concrete. It’s way older than most people think. And by incorporating volcanic ash, the Romans came up with a mix that would harden underwater. We didn’t figure out how to replicate that until fairly recently.

Your world should have things in it that are wonderful, awe-inspiring, and just plain pretty. But if you want it to feel realistic, it should also have things that are... eh. Useful, but not usually seen bare-naked in public unless there’s a major project in progress or something has gone interestingly kaboom. Like fiberglass.

Note, this is a detail to be used sparingly, and with careful attention to the tone you’re setting up. Bare fiberglass is okay if it’s part of a new building going up (things getting done! Improved on!) or if it’s blown to bits over the landscape by a bomb or tornado (oh no, horrible disaster - your heroes are going to do something about this!)

If it’s just... leaking out into view because the siding’s cracked and worn out, or people have prized off the building A/C for salvage, or there’s a hole in the roof nobody’s bothered to fix....

Then it’s a sign of decay, of humans gone feral, of society breaking down. This is treading the edge of Grimdark territory, people. Unless that’s what you’re actually aiming at, steer clear.

You can tell a lot about a society from how much of its nitty-gritty details you don’t see. Keep this in mind when you’re scene-setting. Also keep in mind what POV character you’re using to show readers the place. The hero who sees scattered fiberglass tufts and tenses, because Something Has Gone Wrong, gives an entirely different impression than the barefoot street urchin who just steps around it, as they have for as long as they can remember. And that’ll be different again from the construction worker picking up after a superhero/villain battle, c’mon guys, couldn’t you have waited until the roof was on and we all got paid...?

(Yeah yeah, empty warehouse site, no people, minimal collateral damage, sure. But my paycheck, man. The project’s gonna be over budget now and it’s not our fault!)

And if that’s bad, imagine the construction workers looking at the aftermath of Godzilla.

So when you’re building your world, spare some thoughts about what it’s built with. Your readers will appreciate it!

(BTW I highly recc’ Mirabile. Great setting, wonderful characters, and an excellent model if you’re trying to figure out how short stories should work. And you can’t beat the story hooks. “This year the Ribeiros’ daffodils seeded early, and they seeded cockroaches.” That line got me to outright buy the book when I was a VERY broke college student....)

#creative writing #worldbuilding #Mirabile #building

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binniesthighs · 4 years ago

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call me babydoll | reader x chan

soooo shhhh this actually a part one shhhh but i’m just trying out writing out different things and getting out some of my ideas outta my head that i’m really excited about, this one being one of them!! for now...just pretend that this is just a regular ol’ drabble hehehehe. this part is the set-up chapter (shhh i mean drabble)

One

Pairing: self insert, female reader x bang chan

Genre: fluff, smut, and angst

Tags: (overall) bodyguard au, moderndayprince!chan, bodyguard!reader, secret agent au, royal au, action and peril, plot driven, running out of time, slow-ish burn, growing feelings, softswitch!chan, hardswitch!reader, some skz side characters, jeongin third wheel and comedic relief LOL, travelling, chan being expensive and having a lil bit of a superiority complex, flirtyyyy chan, bits of mystery, explicit language, mentions of food and alcohol, idk think like 007 vibes hehe

CWs: guns and gun violence, a shooting in a ballroom, mentions of blood

Word count: 4.6k

Parts

ONE | TWO

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here early.”

“Well, expect the unexpected.”

“Don’t turn the motto back at me. I’m sick of hearing it so many damn times.”

“What? You and I both know that it’s true. You’re here early too, so, technically you don’t get to say anything.”

Jeongin straightened his bow tie, then patted down the sides of his perfectly ironed tux with not a crinkle to be found. Knowing him, it was a miracle that he hadn’t messed it up in some form yet. He promptly took out his pocket square to clean off his glasses.

“You’re looking nice. Seems like they don’t mind spending money now on you these days.” He blew off the flecks of dust on his lenses.

“They know that they get their return on their investment. And thank you.”

You smoothed down the sides of your dusty pink dress that nearly went all the way down to your ankles. Had you any other choice, it would’ve been something different, but, dresses were really good at hiding your thigh holster compared to the slacks you usually favored. You didn’t mind the times that you would have to put on a pretty dress, it somewhat reminded you that there was normal life outside of your job. Not to mention, they had started sending you jewelry as well. You always had liked the look of a diamond necklace.

“You do your research for tonight?”

Jeongin nodded, then took from his pocket his phone to read over the details.

“I’ve done a background check on everyone attending, we shouldn’t have any issues. It’s already a low risk event anyway. Charity is never something to get too worked up over, but, you never know with the detail that some of these people come with...who they might be tied to...”

“--The only people we can trust is ourselves.” You nodded with arms crossed.

“Expect the unexpected, I know.” He slid his phone back into his inside suit pocket to adjust his cufflinks.

“--Nervous?” You took note of his fidgeting actions.

“Nervous? No. I’ve been through this before. You know that.”

You flicked your partner right on his forehead strung with his white hair. You had really wished that he had picked a less conspicuous color, but he had strings to pull that you didn’t.

Jeongin cleared his throat, “You do your once over?”

“Do you even need to ask? I did it hours ago and when we arrived. You know that I’ve done this before too.”

“I know. I know.”

Jeongin looked out at the vast circular atrium that made up the center of the hotel. Several stories down under the glass rooftop, you could hear the faint sprinkling of the intricate fountain which smelled of copper. A bit further down, you could see the tips of the tree branches from the indoor landscaping. Across the way, a door slammed with residents tucking in their ties. The two men you had recognized from the roster: a simple thing which made you feel at ease. Your young partner must’ve started to have an effect on you. A sense of unease seemed to quell in your neck. You always listened to your hunches.

“W-what do you think he thinks of us?” Jeongin broke the silence.

“Well,” From inside the room you had waited outside, you could hear his distant murmuring, so you lowered your tone. “I think that he has yet to trust us. It’s only been a few weeks. He doesn’t seem like the kind to give himself up easy. That, and I’m sure his resentment of his father must have some influence.”

“You think he hates us?”

“I think he hates his father for hiring us. I mean, wouldn’t you? His old security detail, he had them for years.”

“I guess so. But, we’re not like his old detail.”

“No. We’re not. I don’t think he gets that yet. I think he sees us as one more way his father has a hold on him.”

“It’s not like he can do much else about it when his dad’s a kin--”

“--No, no, thank you, really, it’s lovely. Some of your best work. Thank you.”

Chan swung open the door to his room, stopping Jeongin right in his sentence.

“Ah. You’re here already. That’s...punctual.”

As dazzling and showy as ever, Chan looking nothing short of a magazine model. For a prince, he had certain...appearances that he had to maintain. Today, it was a velvety and maroon suit jacket with a white button up. On the collar, two matching brooches had been perfectly placed, and they were silver like moonlight in the shape of English ivy and adorned with diamonds. On his lapel, he wore the royal insignia of the lion and the wolf. Behind him, you could see his slew of stylists cleaning up their makeup kits and obscene assortment of designer dress shoes for him to pick from. You had thought before that he even smelled like royalty: stuffy white roses with a hint of priceless cognac.

Jeongin bowed his head respectfully. “Everything has been prepared for tonight. The rest of your guards are surrounding the building, and I’ll be corresponding with them as needed, your Highness.” He tapped at his earpiece.

Chan drew his attention over to you, giving you a rather lusty glare. Over the past couple weeks, you had gotten used to it. He was a prince to every extent of the word. If there was anything that he had wanted, he simply had to ask. It drove him insane that all he could do was merely look at you. You had wondered if he harbored anything else for you besides the way that he would devour the curves of your shoulders and hips.

“Fox. Bee. You look nice tonight. I like seeing you dressed up. Makes me feel less out of place.”

You couldn’t help but let out a little sound of discontentment over his rather affectionate nickname for you. You and your partner had been introduced to him as F and B. Quickly he had figured out Jeongin’s codename as Fox, considering that he had done a poor job picking out one that wasn’t related to him at all. Anyone could tell that boy was fox-like, and he also just wasn’t that creative when it came to picking out a name for himself. B, or Bee as he had decided, was your name; as in bumblebee. After learning about Fox, he figured that there was an animal theme going, so Bee seemed to fit best in his oponion.

You tested his glare with your best, “Thank you, your Highness.”

Jeongin gulped. “Your assistant should be waiting downstairs with your itinerary. She told me that you should meet her first off.”

“You work too hard F. Have some fun tonight, hm? But don’t...drink too much. You’re responsible for my life remember?” Chan clapped his bodyguard on the back.

Your partner nervously laughed and adjusted his glasses once more: his preferred tic.

“And Bee?” Chan rose a brow to lean into close and whisper. “Stay close, alright?”

“Of course, your Highness.”

Chan let out a little scoff after getting one more proper look at your frame. “Damn. You really are stunning. Just a little too dangerous for me though.”

You rolled your eyes, dishing him outa, “Whatever you say, your Highness.”

Jeongin threw you and annoyed glare before tracing after Chan as he sauntered down the hall to the glass elevator.

“Bee? You coming? Or do you have something better to do?” Chan’s voice called down the hall with an echo and a little teasing gesture of his hand.

━━━━━━━━━▲━━━━━━━━━

It had been seven years since you had chosen this line of work, and each time that you had to go to one of these things, you hated them more and more. Not because they were hard to control--they were easy--but you just hated how many superficial and self-absorbed people that they could fit into one room.

The air was filled with the scent of champagne bubbles and too much Chanel No. 5. From corner to corner of the room, and even next to the ice sculpture of the lion and the wolf crest, silk, satin; velvet and the best cotton could be found. Long gloves covered the arms of ladies with wrinkling skin, and tweed vests held in the guts of men who indulged in their food just as much as their mistresses. All this effort just to appear as if they had given one care about the philanthropic efforts of the royalty.

Several neatly dressed waiters passed you with golden platters of hors d'oeuvres made of ingredients so expensive, they would’ve cost the same amount as the generous donations made by the attendees. If you could’ve, you would’ve scooped up as many of them as you could, just to eat all of their copious amounts of money yourself, but, there was somewhere a rule that you had to keep your hand to yourself when you were on duty. The best that you had to look forward too was take-out to eat at 3 in the morning with Jeongin later.

Buzzing chatter filled your earpiece while each of the additional guards gave their hourly report.

“Damn. It’s fucking colder out here than I thought. It’s fucking summer.” One of them joked to the tune of the other guards laughter.

“Stay focused.” Jeongin scolded over the line. “Don’t leave your posts until your shifts change.”

While he was a timid man, Jeongin was not one to mess around. Son of the director, he knew that he had big shoes to fill. After pleading for years for her to admit him into the academy, she had agreed. Everyone knew the reason why she didn’t want him in this line of work. Too many dead. Too many missing. In some ways, he was also yours to look after.

You trailed after Chan who was busy talking to his assistant and his publicist. While he nodded at their words, you knew that he must’ve been barely listening. Chan never really was one for formality, but much rather enjoyed simplicity and pleasure. Jeongin and you had somewhat of a bet going: out of all the guests, you had liked to bet which one he would take with him to his bedroom. Since you had all the profiles of the guests, you liked to bet a little money on which one it would be.

Jeongin had guessed it to be the heiress and daughter of a tycoon who had made a multi-million won donation in the name of his company. It was ironic; his very company was a big-scale pollutor who liked to make nice with the crown. She was conventionally very pretty: long legs, a thin frame, she was educated and looked as if she could hold somewhat of a conversation...not like that mattered to him.

You had predicted it to be the foreign CEO who had just started business dealings with the crown. While she might’ve looked a bit stuck-up and prim, she was intimidating, and a challenge. Chan loved challenges. Chan also had a pension for pretty boys with a bit too much money on their hands--usually inherited--and with nothing much else to do other than dote on him. There were plenty of those attending the gala tonight.

Chan snaked through the crowd, bowing his head at all of the Good evening, your Highnesses and the It’s a pleasure to meet you, your Highnesses. Every few moments or so he would take a bite from a golden plate and then pop it into his mouth. The whole night long, he would hold his glass with him and it would get refilled for him without him even needing to ask. You sometimes liked to pretend that in some places, they must’ve assigned someone to watch him from afar to make sure that he would never need anything before it was given to him. It wouldn’t have surprised you.

“Having fun Bee?” Chan languidly rolled his head back, swirling his glass.

“As much fun as you are.” You quipped.

“Anything that I should be concerned about?”

“Nothing of concern.” You stated matter-of-factly. Had you matched his flirting tone, you knew that you wouldn’t hear the end of it for the rest of the night. “Fox. Report?”

“Nothing that I can see. No one has been tagging you.” Jeongin had staked himself up on the upper balcony of the banquet hall room, and had been watching for as long as you had been following after the prince. “You sensing anything strange?” His voice tickled in your in-ear.

“Just a bunch of the normal crowd.” You kept your tone down low. “He’s rubbing noses with the usual. You’ve seen too?”

He chuckled. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

You followed Chan to his seat nearest the front of the room which had been fashioned into a stage with a clear glass podium in the center. Right in front there was one more crest decorating it. Chan had ensured it to be so: he had wanted everyone to know that this was all for his charity.

“It seems like our bets aren’t working out. He hasn’t talked to either of the...suspects.” Your partner changed his choice of words knowing that the other guards were listening.

From the opposite side of the room both the heiress and the CEO stood with thin glasses of wine in their lithe hands. Chan had in fact walked right past them, and didn’t even notice.

“Tonight is going to be a long night.” Jeongin sighed over the line.

You politely pushed past attendees with a raised hand and a sweet smile. You had found that when you smiled, you had appeared less intimidating.

“Oh wait...what’s this?”

“What?” You whipped your head around after Jeongin’s interjection. “What? Do you see something? What’s the call?”

“Relax! It just looks like he’s approaching someone he wants to talk to. I think both of us are about to be proven wrong.”

“Ah, shit.” You sighed. “Don’t put me on edge like that.”

“I’m only trying to entertain myself.”

“Name. Who is it? You’ve got the roster.”

You partner was quiet for a minute, and you watched from a distance as Chan approached the man leaned over a martini seated at one of the perfectly decorated tables.

“Uh, I think that he’s Lee Minho. Some kind of royalty from somewhere else. Pretty low ranking from the looks of it. I think that he made a donation himself...and it’s...damn, larger than you would expect.”

“Should we be concerned?”

“No. Seems harmless.”

“Thank you for coming,” You made out the words that Chan had mouthed. He drew a chair next to the unknown man.

From what you could tell, Lee Minho was handsome to the full extent of the word: nearly all of his physical features were exemplary and his suit appeared to have been fitted to perfect for him; likely one of a kind. He too wore an insignia on his lapel, but it was one that you hadn’t recognized before. He had immaculately styled hair that had some kind of rebellious and boyish charm to it. The man had a kind of mystery about him too: you had been able to pride yourself in being able to read people, and it had saved your life on more than one occasion. But with him, there was something that you couldn’t place.

“Do they know eachother?” You asked Jeongin.

“Not that I know of. School friend maybe? Seems like all the royals send their kids to the same schools.”

“Hm. That would make sense.”

“Enjoying yourself?” Chan said.

Lee Minho nodded, and rose his glass to clink it with the prince’s.

“Do we think that he’s our...suspect?”

The stranger dipped his head into his hand as he listened to Chan speak. A flirty gesture that you had seen a hundred times or more. Still, the way that he inspected Chan, it wasn’t adoring. Or at least, you didn’t think that it was.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“What the hell are you yapping about?” One of the other guards snapped over the line.

“Um, classified stuff.” Jeongin quickly explained. “Above your paygrade. Don’t worry about it.”

“Fox. Watch out for him tonight.” You snuck over to a corner of the room where you could watch the two of them more discreetly.

“Affirmative....” Your partner paused. “Babydoll.”

“Pffff--Babydoll??” The same guard stifled his laughter. “You call her Babydoll, Fox? Damn, you all must be closer than I thought. Didn’t know that I was missing out on some of the action--”

“--Ever heard of a codename, Three?”

“Babydoll’s her codename.”

A grin crept over your lips. “Expect the unexpected.”

You had almost gotten distracted enough to miss how Lee Minho had leaned over to whisper something into the prince’s ear. After he had done so, Chan laughed out a little, then reached his arm around the other man’s chair comfortably.

“They’re...cozy.” You updated your partner.

“I’m trying to cross-check where he might know him from.”

Chan’s assistant and publicist finally slipped away with giddy little smiles. In many ways, you were jealous of them. They could leave whenever the wanted, eat what they wanted...

Jeongin scoffed. “Well, turns out...nothing. I can’t find anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Negative. I’m not seeing any crossover.”

“So they really are strangers?”

Your partner sighed. “Looks like neither of us are cashing ou--I mean--finding the suspect.”

Under your breath, you wondered aloud, “Who are you...Lee Minho?”

━━━━━━━━━▲━━━━━━━━━

The night drew on longer with the rest of the formalities: the formal dinner, followed by several speeches from important people while dessert was being served. It all led up to the final act: His Royal Highness, Prince Chan’s speech. On several neat notecards marked with the crest, he held them in front of him while he ate his last bits of Mont Blanc Chocolate Pavlova. Even the name of the sweet itself sounded pretentious. Granted, it smelled delicious--as many expensive things did.

You stifled a yawn from your little set up on the edge of the room. At least you should’ve been able to sit, but it turns out that sitting is also against the rules in this line of work. A couple other security and bodyguards had joined you at the edge: some of their heads nodded with sleep, and the others looked as if they had taken one too many energy shots. Luckily, your stamina had been well crafted.

A fancily dressed MC made his way up to the podium and the room filled with applause after the last speaker had said all of their correct mandatory words.

“It is my honor to introduce to the stage, our wonderful head benefactor of this organization, His Royal Highness, Prince Chan of the Crown.

Applause tenfold of before erupted through the whole room and it wasn’t even an afterthought for the every attendee to stand up from their seats in an ovation. It was a force of habit for you, but you found yourself clapping as well.

Chan rose with grace, and re-buttoned his jacket with finesse. A blinding spotlight found him and it made the diamonds adorning his beck wink brilliantly. Even more blinding was his pearl white, and perfectly trained smile accompanied by his wave.

Thank you. Thank you. He mouthed.

“It’s like he’s a frickin’ movie star.” Jeongin groaned.

“Might as well be with the way that they treat him. You know deep down they’re all just terrified.”

Chan made his way up to the stage in all of his regality, and the applause didn’t stop until he cleared his throat. A collective groaning of a couple hundred chairs squeaked when everyone sat back down.

“Thank you everyone, really. I wanted to thank you all for your generous support in your donations to this organization, as well as your association with the crown. I’m sure that all the beneficiaries of your donations are beyond thankful compared to me. Without you, this would not be possible.” Chan spoke with grandiose gestures, as usual, but this time, he had found you on the side of the room. “Listen, aside from being a prince, I’m also just a person. A person who knows what it means to struggle, to--”

“--I can’t listen to this anymore.” You whispered into the quiet room, and to your partner.

“Just a few more hours.” He droned. “I almost wish that something would happen so that we don’t have to sit though much else of this.”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

In the corner of your eye, Lee Minho shifted in his seat, but still kept his undivided attention to the stage. You figured he must’ve been just like the rest of them: enamored by the flashiness of the crown--and Chan. He had a way of putting a spell on people: it was the kind of spell that a prince of deception had crafted after years of being kept under lock and key.

“--Anyway, what I’m trying to say, royal or fanciful we all might be, in the simplest way, we’re all just people, therefore this is what connects us all. Thank you.”

Chan was gifted yet another standing ovation that was somehow even more thunderous than before.

“Yeah right.” You scoffed. “People born into money. There’s a difference.”

Chan gave his last waves, then a clamor echoed from the back of the room. At first, it had just sounded like the same raucous laughter you had heard all night, but then it shifted to something different. The sound of laugher turned into shouting, then screams: high pitched and piercing. You had seconds to respond, head whipping around the room to catch sight of the confused prince. In your in-ears, the the sound of gunshots echoed with rapid-fire speed. Machine guns. Shouting commands barked in your ear, and muddled with Jeongin’s string of demands and questions.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON OUT THERE? REPORT! REPORT!”

Your heart instantly started beating into hyperdrive, and your legs sprinted as fast has physically possible

“THEY’VE GOT GUNS!” A shrill and cracked voice of an older woman wailed from the back of the room.

Immediately after she had said so, shots fired into the darkened room with sparks, and the metallic sound of bullets hitting the marbled ground followed.

Chan looked around in his panic for you, petrified on the stage. You slung your gun out from your thigh holster and latched onto him with all of your might.

“TH-THEY JUST CAME OUT OF NOWHERE IN THESE VANS. THEY’RE ARMOURED, WE CAN’T--”

“Get the fuck down there and secure the exists!” Jeongin growled into his mic. “B--is the prince secure??”

“Secure!” You yelled back. Using your body as a barrier, you led the cowering prince through the mass hysteria of the crowd.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Shit.” Chan shook under your iron grip.

More shots fired into the room and bodies parted like the sea and fell over each other.

From the balcony, you had caught Jeongin aiming his own gun at the chaos below.

“I’ll cover you! Fuck! There’s so many of them! Get him to the car out back--Three, Six, meet B out there! Three!? Six!? Report!”

“Three and Six are down F!” One of the guards panted. “I can provide cover out back!!”

“Who’s speaking??” Jeongin bellowed, then aimed from above at one of the intruders. Your only focus was on weaving you and Chan out of there, but you had seen one of them in a blur. Each of the men with guns wore dark grey suits with black ties and leather gloves. Each of them wore their own crest: and it was all red.

“Bee?? Bee???” Chan shouted out for you, and jumped every time the crack of a shot echoed in the ballroom.

“I’ve got you, your Highness. We’ll be out soon. Keep your head down and listen to me.” Your arm held to him tightly, and you soon found the exit nearest. There was no telling if there would be more of them outside, but you loaded your gun quickly just in case, and pointed it out.

“Jeongin, get your ass down here!”

“Jeongin? Who the fuck is that??” Chan ducked down to hide himself behind your frame.

His name had slipped on your tongue, but that hardly mattered.

“I’ll be down in a second!!!”

“Don’t fucking waste time up there when I need you down here!!”

“Two! Two Reporting!!” A man suddenly yelled in your in-ear. “I’ve made it out back and I’ve secured the exit. The car is safe!!”

“FOX! Now!”

Your partner heaved, “I’m coming, I’m coming!!”

You kicked open the exit door, gun’s still blazing, however one one else could be found on the other side.

“Thank God,” You sighed.

“Oh shit, I’m gonna be sick.” Chan had turned paler than white, then stumbled in your arms.

“Hey, HEY!” You held him upright. “It’s gonna be alright. I’ve got you. You’re safe. You need to trust me. Your life is in my hands and I’m not giving it up easy, got it?”

“O-okay.” He stammered, then attempted to straighten himself.

“The Prince is outside, repeat, The Prince is outside. Two, are you in position?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

Other than the fact that you had just escaped absolute peril, the evening was unbearably pleasant. Crickets chirped in the summer evening, and the humidity of the night smelled gorgeously of the lake that was near-by as well as the vast array of flowers that had been purposefully landscaped around the hotel. Chan’s uneven steps scraped at the gravel walkway.

Since you had canvassed the whole building well, you had known exactly where the getaway car was, but you were still careful.

“Bee. Bee!” Chan blabbered. “Have-have I told you yet that I-I’m in love with you?”

“No, you haven’t Your Highness.”

“I fucking am. If I die tonight, I want you to know that I am ridiculously in love with you, and fuck, I wanna--”

“--I’m sorry, Your Highness, respectfully, but now is not the time for this and you are not dying on my watch.”

Somewhere off in the distance, frogs croaked, and the splashing of fish in the lake plopped at the surface waters. You turned a corner to finally see Two waiting his his gun raised. He was a bit of a shorter and scrawnier man, but something about him told you that where he lacked in strength, he must’ve made up for in agility.

“I’m out! I’m out!” Your partner gasped, and over the in-ear you could hear his running footsteps. “I’m almost there! I’ll be there in a second!”

“Your Highness,” Two bowed and opened the car door. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. You can call me Two or J. Either you prefer.”

Jeongin came bounding around the corner with heaving breaths and his clothes askew. His glasses which just barely held onto his face had a crack on them and his knuckles were covered in blood.

“Let’s go.” The younger man prompted.

“In the car you go, Your Highness.” You motioned for him to do so.

Chan whimpered like a toddler.

You shoved his body in, “Stop that. Get in the car.”

“I’m in love with you Bee!” He yelled out, “I’M FUCKING IN LOVE WITH YOU BEE!”

Jeongin slammed the door in his face with a bit of a chuckle.

“He’s delirious.”

“Mm.” your partner smiled. “Sure.”

320 notes · View notes

just-some-random-blogger · 4 years ago

Text

Curse Of The Tiger King

NCT King!Jung Jaehyun x Zoologist!Reader Characters: Jung Jaehyun, Lee Donghyuck (Haechan), Kim Dongyoung (Doyoung), some tigers n stuff. Summary: Jung Jaehyun was known as the Tiger King of the Joseon Era because of how many men he fearlessly killed on the battlefield that matches how many tigers he said to have killed with his bare hands. Because of this, he was cursed into a eternal life as a tiger spirit with only one way to break it. Word Count: 6k+ Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, animal abuse, war, curses, suicidal thoughts, angst, fluff, etc.

A/N: Idek my mom said the plot is weird but i dig it also listen to tiger inside by superm prolly okie thx. I honestly could have done more research on tigers but like let me live with my inaccuracies okay. Also i may do a pt2 idek

Donghyuck was thankful that it started to storm tonight. Even to the roars of thunder he was indebted to, for it meant his king would not go out and hunt at this hour.

The sycophant adviser Moon Taeil argued with Donghyuck constantly that he was trying to constrain the King of their nation his rights to a glorious hunt of tigers. Why must he dissuade the hunts of the King when he was doing the people a favor and destroying the monsters that could come into their towns and each their children?

It took a lot for Donghyuck not to roll his eyes at the blatant excuse that old minister Taeil had to get the king’s favor. Never in his life had he even heard of a tiger willingly coming out of the wilderness close to human territory had it not been forced out.

It was not that Donghyuck felt sympathy towards tigers either. I mean, who did in this era? It was just that Donghyuck worried the king would strain himself if he immediately goes hunting after just defeating a fleet of usurpers with his army.

He knew how frenzied the king got after drawing blood.

Donghyuck, as the king's right hand man, had a responsibility to keep the nation's sole rule sane.

"Stop worrying," the king said to Donghyuck who was stood not too far behind him.

"I always worry about you, Jaehyun hyung."

Behind closed doors, Donghyuck and Jaehyun were brothers forged by time and not blood. If anyone could help Jaehyun keep his sense, it would be Donghyuck.

Jaehyun was in a dim lit room, kneeled in the middle in front of a slab of stone which he slid his sword back and forth from to sharpen it. Truth be told, it was a habit of his to do this every time he used his sword. But that wasn't what Donghyuck was anxious about. It was the fact Jaehyun didn't wipe the blood on his skin nor did he properly wear his royal robe that keeps goose bumps on his arms.

"It's almost your birthday, Hyuck-ah. Would you like one of my tiger pelts- ah-- should I hunt a tiger for you?" Jaehyun stops sharpening his sword and turns to Donghyuck.

The younger of the two shakes his head and replies, "I couldn't possibly ask for something from my king."

Jaehyun scoffs, "ya you bastard, tell that to all the times you made me buy you noodles when we snuck out the palace as kids."

Donghyuck cleared his throat, "that's on you though for agreeing."

The king chuckles and stands, "there's some rumors going around that there's a white tiger roaming the mountains. They say it is mightier than any ordinary tiger. What do you think? Would you like a white tiger cape?"

"You'd give me something so rare?"

Jaehyun scoffs again and rolls his eyes. He points his sword to Donghyuck, to which he the latter thinks nothing of, "why? Do you think your king is so selfish and keeps everything to himself."

Donghyuck is touched.

But he regrets how pleased Jaehyun's smile was that night. He regrets how he said they should bathe in the royal bath house together and should hunt the white tiger at the break of dawn. He knew in his bones something somehow was going to go wrong with the king.

And even with all his efforts to stay close to him, with all his looney athleticism and determination to catch that white tiger in the mountains, Donghyuck's foot got stuck and twisted upon a tree root.

Of course Jaehyun and he at this point had caught sight of the beast and had scared it off with their numbers. You couldn't possibly believe that the king would be left to hunt alone, would you? But Jaehyun had always been gifted with such immeasurable agility, and well Donghyuck spent most of his life trying to measure up to that. He could not match him however, but much less could the soldiers.

That was why Jaehyun stopped and turned to Donghyuck. He was worried for him like anyone would their younger brother since he deemed Donghyuck as such.

I suppose it was Donghyuck's mistake of trying to talk the king out of catching the white tiger. He knew out of everyone that Jaehyu didn't believe in supernatural or superstitious beliefs simply because they historically worked against his favor. Jaehyun had a knack of proving people wrong with his sheer will, and up to now, he had done nothing but that

Donghyuck had triggered that in him when he muttered to the king, "I have a bad feeling about this hunt. We should turn back, lest you get hurt."

Jaehyun's face ignited at the posing challenge. "Nonsense, I won't let your injury heed nothing. I should definitely catch that tiger no matter what."

So Jaehyun tread off by himself. Donghyuck tried to force himself to go after him. He watched as the king got far enough that he looked like a dot. Still, Donghyuck pushed on. He propped himself up and limped as fast as he could. He thought of simply turning back, but he didn't have much of a choice when he heard the king scream and a tiger roar.

Suddenly, it was silent.

Donghyuk felt like he choked on his heart, "the king is dead."

Jaehyun doesn't remember what he saw, but he remembers what he felt. He felt excruciating pain, like his inside were being pulled from inside out. Then he felt cold. Then there was darkness.

Then he blinked his eyes open and saw the face of a white tiger. His heart dropped and he felt the need to flee. But he was unable to do nothing but wiggle like a worm. He could no longer feel his hands.

The realized then... he had no hands.

The white tiger at this point was above him. It began to lick Jaehyun's body. There was an aroma in the air he recognized as blood. Dear lord, did this tiger devour his body?

But Jaehyun felt no more pain. He tried to scream, but he was only able to make a small sound.

He heard a similar sound next to him, and soon he was kicked in the face by paws. Instinctively, he was annoyed and felt the need to fight back, but he could barely muster the strength to stand on his four feet.

Wait... he had four feet?

The white tiger who had assaulted him with its tongue, laid before him and rolled her belly, revealing pert nipples. It seemed a litter of kittens waddled towards the invitingly plush belly and began suckling. Jaehyun disagreed as it slowly sank in what was happening. He felt his belly rumble in hunger.

Somehow, this large tiger felt Jaehyun's reluctance and clumsily but softly shoved Jaehyun close to its belly. The white tiger was a mother to four cubs, and Jaehyun was one of them.

The mother tiger laid down and yawned, blinking slowly until she shut her eyes. He saw there was an available area where he could suckle in between the two cubs on the left and the one on the right.

Jaehyun screamed, but again, there was only a pathetically small sound that left his throat. After minutes of waiting, he grew weaker and found it was futile. This baby tiger body he was in much strongly disagreed with the emptiness of its stomach.

So he nursed on warm milk and he began to dream he was a white tiger cub.

Except it wasn't a dream, and he remained trapped in this body up he slowly grew stronger and stronger.

Jaehyun began to recall the voice of his mother, his real mother, in his sleep. She warned him of spirits in the rivers, in the trees, in the mountains, and how it was the king's duty to protect the people from it.

It made him think that the white tiger he was following in the mountain may have been a spirit, and this was the punishment for wanting to hunt it. That white tiger spirit made Jaehyun the cub of a real white tiger. He knew this tiger he now trusted like a mother was not the one he had been following in the forest by the mountains, simply because this forest they roamed where not by those mountains.

He knew that place like the back of his hand since he both grew up there and hunted there frequently. Jaehyun found no familiarity in the landscape here. It smelled very similar, but even in that he could tell a difference. There was a repulsive bitterness in the air he could not distinguish. It was unlike any smoke he had breathed in. He began to doubt he was even still in his Joseon borders.

What he was certain of, after moons and suns passed, was there was no way he was getting out of this body. He thought of killing the cubs, but it seems the cub-body he was in was the weakest of the four. And of course, killing the mother came into mind, but he could barely fend himself from the cubs, how could he defeat the largest of them all?

Jaehyun vowed to learn their ways and use it against them once he was large enough. One may think it despicable, especially when Jaehyun trusted the tiger mother would not harm him, but it was his only chance as he could see it.

That was until a storm struck the forest, and it awakened a vivid memory of Jaehyun. It was like his last night with Donghyuck. He had just told him he would catch a white tiger for him. They had bathed in the royal bathing house. Jaehyun shivered under his fur at the memory of the warm water Donghyuck farted it.

Donghyuck.

He could help him.

Why hadn’t he thought of looking for his friend before?

So from the dry safety of this cave they stayed in, Jaehyun ran past the licking cubs and ran into the storm. He didn't know how he could find Donghyuck, but Jaehyun thought he would probably at least find his palace... Right?

It was funny that he heard chuffing from behind. He initially thought it was the rain beating down on him or the water that got into his furry ear, but he realized it was the mother tiger calling out to him. She ran after him and snatched him by the nape to drag him back into the cave.

Jaehyun knew there was no way out of this, since this tiger had done it to him multiple times. He had to wait until she put him down before he could run again.

And she did, gently on the other cubs. Jaehyun made sure to paw the largest of the other three in the face. He was satisfied when he shook his head at the action.

The mother tiger then shook off the water on her coat just as Jaehyun did. She then thought to lie in front of the opening of the cave to block further passage, as if she knew Jaehyun would try it again.

He had to admit, this mother was intuitive, not unlike Jaehyun's own mother. Part of him couldn't help but feel pity of the dumb creature because she genuinely believed Jaehyun was her cub. If she only knew what he did to tigers in his life. She surely would not hesitate to let Jaehyun leave.

Jaehyun suddenly got his head bashed into the mother tiger's arm.

WHO DID THAT?

He turned and saw it was one of the other cubs in the litter that then made one of those playing sounds and began to batter at Jaehyun's face with its paw.

Jaehyun scoffed, you don't know I've been practicing my pouncing.

He then put his front legs down and hind legs up and aimed for the annoying cub. He then jumped to its face and began gnawing at him. Haha, serves him right.

But suddenly the fat cub joined in and went at Jaehyun and the other cub. At this point they were really going at it. Jaehyun screeched for help, knowing it would alert the mother, to which the mother tiger did then sound back a warning to the cubs which made then pull back instantly.

Serves them right.

Jaehyun decided he was too tired to run away today, and wasn't even sure how to catch prey yet, nor was he big enough to kill something larger than sparrows, so he should probably stay and learn that first.

He turned and saw that one of the other cubs were being licked, to that Jaehyun felt vexed because as far as he remembered, he was the one that got wet and needed excess water off his coat.

So he then shoved his cub brother to the side and took all the warm licks from his mother tiger.

It dawned on him why this tiger went after him. Jaehyun had been left to nothing but thinking. Mother tiger wouldn't have been upset that she only three cubs left, she would be upset because she lost one. This tiger, after all, was still a mother, aside from being a beast.

Through time, Jaehyun grew fond of her. Jaehyun realized she was very patient and her favorite food was deer. He even grew fond of the annoying cubs enough that he gave them their own names. The big oaf he named Youngho, the daintier one, Jungwoo, and the more refined one, Taeyong.

He didn't have to name his tiger mother since she was set apart, but Jaehyun decided to call her Aerum, which meant beautiful.

There was a roar of thunder in the sky one day, only it wasn't raining and there were no dark clouds. It was the first time Jaehyun felt palpable fear in this form. It was so intense he ran to his mother.

He saw something moving in the sky. Jaehyun's tiger eyes widened as he decided it was most probably a dragon. His mother did not seem to fear it, and so he thought the five of them could probably kill that dragon if it came near enough. In the clear sky, Jaehyun could not believe what he saw. He began to doubt it was a dragon all together since it looked nothing like one. It had no scales and was silvery smooth, it neither had a head to breathe fire from, nor did it have impressive flapping wings. In fact it wings didn't beat like a bird's at all, which made Jaehyun wonder how it was flying anyway.

He soon forgot about the encounter with that wannabe dragon. Jaehyun knew he had nothing to worry about anyway since he was with his mother.

That is until there was a slipping sound from not too far and it alerted everyone of them.

Jaehyun breathed in deeply and smelled something different in the air. He heard what he could never mistake, the hushed arguments of humans.

He turned to mother tiger and saw her defences were up. They were being hunted.

It somehow made Jaehyun both relieved and concerned that mother tiger knew exactly what was happening.

There was suddenly crack in the air and it made Jaehyun's hair raise. He could not distinguish the sound. It sounded something like a canon, but it was not as loud. He knew arrows would not sound as such, so it frightened him that he did not know what it was.

It all happened so quickly, so quick in fact that it made Jaehyun realize how terrifying it is to be hunted.

They were upon then. There were three hunters with blood shot eyes. Jaehyun wondered what county these people came from that they dressed so awkwardly and held black sticks wherever they went.

But then they aimed at Youngho and head was cracked open. He fell instantly without a sound, and all they could do was run.

Jaehyun heard them laugh for joy, but I knew they would not stop until they got all of us.

The cracking sounds, Jaehyun realized, came from the weapons he thought to be sticks. It smelled hot and malicious. He loathed them.

They were bought to a mountainous area. Surely they could not keep up with them if they climbed high enough. Jaehyun was perturbed when they saw the men in some sort of machine with wheels. It had to be the most terrible thing he had seen.

They thundered towards them. Jaehyun knew they were aiming for their mother. Still, they ran and ran. Jaehyun wondered if he could try and lead them astray if he separated from them. So he did and breathed heavily as he ran with all his legs.

Crack.

Jaehyun was scared they were shooting for him but he dared to turn back and jar his teeth out. It was then he saw Jungwoo fell flat and so did Taeyong from behind. His mother was now running towards him.

Their mistake was to stop and gather Jungwoo and Taeyong's bodies. As much as it enraged Jaehyun to see them, it made mother tiger furious. She began to charge towards them, and so did Jaehyun.

The fools somehow did not know it was coming, and the three that had been on their tail were scared for their lives that they had not time to act.

She came for their throats and ripped them off with her mighty power. I came for the leg of the other that tried to flee and when he fell on his face, when for his neck as well.

Crack.

The man shot at mother but only got her leg. She tried to come for him next, but he tried again and then shot at her head. Once she was down, he shot at her again, and again, and again, and again, until he could no longer make a cracking sound with his weapon.

This was his mistake. He realized this when he and Jaehyun caught each other's eye. Jaehyun was pleased he looked terrified beyond compare.

Donghyuck always said he got into a frenzy whenever he's just gotten his sword slick with blood after he's gotten off of the battlefield or done with a hunt. But in truth it was the chase that excited him, and not what he has slain. But Jaehyun knew for certain that he was going to enjoy killing him.

Jaehyun knew he deserved to die a miserable death when he ran like a coward and didn't think to raise up one of the weapons his friends had. He was upon him, but then out came more people. They were in the same machines the three came in, and there were much more of them. Jaehyun would be a fool if he thought he could take them. He had no sword, no army. He barely had fangs and claws.

Jaehyun decided to slow down. He came to a halt when he saw these people were seemingly not on his side. They apprehended his mother’s kill. They shoved him against a tree and bound his wrists behind him. He was half pleased, he would be fully if he could rip his throat out.

But then there was you.

You came out of the same contraptions the ones who killed the tiger brothers did but you came out slowly.

You wore the same thing they did, but you held a different expression.

There was a man next to you that raised a similar weapon the other men had, but you told them to stand down.

You brought out meat. It smelled old, but it made Jaehyun realize he was so hungry. So hungry, and scared.

He knew you were trying to win him over. But he knew better than to easily trust a stranger. Then he thought of how the people on your team apprehended his mother's killer, and how you told off the man who was going to aim at him. Jaehyun decided he could take the meat you had and run.

You slowly crouched down and tossed the meat to him. Jaehyun thought it smelled unlike the meat he had eaten before but decided to eat it.

Jaehyun decided to bolt, but there was a sound of a fired arrow in the air, and he so suddenly he couldn't feel his legs.

When Jaehyun woke up, he was in a cage. It wasn't made of wood, but metal. There was food and water in a metal bowl in front of him, but he knew better than fall for that again.

He looked around the room with white lights that had no flame. There were dried plant stalk on the ground, much like a prison cell but it was only Jaehyun.

"Hi there," you spoke when you came into view. You smiled at Jaehyun’s tiger form and stuck your finger into the cage to point at the food.

Jaehyun thought if he wanted, he could bite it off.

"I'm sorry Dongyoung had to tranquilize you. I'm sure you must feel horrible."

Oh, don't try to sympathize with terms I don't understand.

"You should eat. I promise no one will shoot at you."

Jaehyun and you stare at each other. He decides he would rather get shot and join his tiger mother and brothers that live the rest of his life in this cage with you as his captor

You expected no less than the reaction you were getting. Still, you continued with what yow wanted to say, "You must feel so angered and lonely."

Jaehyun watches as you sit on the floor you stood on. He paces around the cage as you continue, "I saw what you did to the man. You tore his calf and punctured airway, suffocating him with his blood. Impressive for your size, honestly."

I would've killed his friend too had you not taken him.

"And you should know, the poacher who killed your mother is going to spend the rest his life in prison for hunting the last snow tigers in the country."

Jaehyun freezes. Hunting? Jaehyun begins to wonder then who has made the act illegal.

Could it be Donghyuk? Does that mean he ascended to the throne. That seems unprobable, when his cousin Sungchan has been eyeing the throne since he was born and Donghyuk had no desire for power. And why would Donghyuk make it illegal anyway? Could he possibly know his king was turned into a tiger?

A thousand questions ran into Jaehyun’s head.

"Don't worry, I'm fighting to pass a law that can protect you and your kin with the U.N.," you say suddenly, which further baffles Jaehyun.

Who is the world are you to have such a power? And who was this Yooen?

"Now come and eat, tiger cub. The sooner you get big and strong, the sooner we can release you back into the wild."

Based on that, Jaehyun didn't believe you at all at this point. He knew you had to at least be blantantly aware he was not a cub. Sure he was not nearly as large as his mother yet, but he was neither a defenseless suckling baby. You said it yourself, he killed a man.

You watched as the caged tiger continued to pace inside. You knew animals could feel and mourn, but somehow you felt this tiger was scheming. You knew this white tiger was still leaning into maturity, since it took a long time for him to kill the poacher. It excited you that you’d be able to spend a few months with such a rare and majestic creature.

Jaehyun decided to pretend he was going to try and trust you. He might learn a lot about his predicament from you since you shamelessly talked to the him as if he were still human.

His days began like this for a while, there would be food given everyday in what he observed to be the exact same time, and you would randomly come and talk and talk and talk and talk.

Jaehyun supposes he got on your good side when you drew him into a cage and let him into a grander setting. It was in a vast cage outside, not like the stuffy one he was originally in. Prison was still prison, but at least he couldn't see all four walls on one side.

There was initially a drawback with that. In this enclosure, as you called, you were much more present, and became more bolder. You began to touch Jaehyun, which made him shudder. How dare you touch the king of Joseon?

"You're such a drama queen," you would quip everytime Jaehyun jumped at your touch from behind the thin rodded cage.

"Maybe I should name you that, huh, drama queen," you jested. Jaehyun rolled his eyes and finished his chicken. You were bold no matter what. You were making fun of not only a white tiger, but the Tiger King. What's more, he found it annoying you gave him old chicken all the time.

"Wang," you said suddenly, which made Jaehyun stop his feeding. King, he hadn't been called that in so long.

You made a sound, "you seem to like that, huh. I guess that can be your name then, Wang."

It felt so sudden to you that Wang grew in to that what you proudly stated a fine tiger specimen. Jaehyun felt proud of himself whenever you would bring what he grew to learn were doctors who studies animals as their profession.

You and Jaehyun at this point had grown comfortable enough that Jaehyun let you sit next to him and stroke his head while he slept. It was only you though. He hated it when that Dongyoung tried to touch him, or when he tried to touch you, especially when you'd let him.

On this breezy afternoon, he was saddened as he put his chin on your thighs. He had never been so vulnerable like so with a woman. Sure he had bedded gisaengs in his time, but he wouldn't let them touch him, much less stroke his head.

It saddened him more when he realized the reason why you and the rest of the people here wore such strange things and had such strange objects was because you no longer lived in the time of Joseon. After all the stories you've told about your day to Jaehyun, he has learned hundreds of years has passed between the time he was king and now.

You now were born into the country of Korea, a nation split in two; you were in its Southern part. You cared deeply for who you called Wang because Jaehyun lived in the body of the last white tiger in the country, the few left in the world. You were a doctor and an officer that protects the welfare of wild animals.

You were going to set him free in a few days.

That is, until this tiger was put in the enclosure next to Jaehyun's. He smelled afraid. He jumped at everything and had lash and burn marks on his body. It was clear to anyone humans inflicted these marks on him.

"Wang, this is Yuta. Be kind to him because all he's ever known is abuse from his captors."

Yuta, beyond smelling like fear, smelled like he was dying. He was clearly unwell. Jaehyun had to make sure you knew this somehow.

Jaehyun was unsure what you thought would happen, but Yuta barely came near him even though Jaehyun chuffed his way. He barely acted like a tiger, if you asked Jaehyun. Trust him, he knew.

You began to focus your time on Yuta more. For once, Jaehyun didn't mind, because he knew the battered tiger needed it. He didn't seem that much older than Jaehyun, which somehow made you think you would be instant friends. For your sake, Jaehyun tried to show him what could be done as a tiger. He flaunted his prowess in running, tree climbing, even in roaring.

Yuta didn't seem to care and stayed in his side of the enclosure.

Strangely enough, Jaehyun still tried to chuff at Yuta, and to his surprise, Yuta chuffed back.

You jumped into Dongyoung's arms upon seeing Jaehyun's victory, to which Jaehyun nearly lashed out for.

It was then, Yuta and Jaehyun slowly became to form a bond. They would meet each other in the middle of the enclosure and would pace around together. You began to suggest bringing each other into the same enclosure, to which Dongyoung strongly disagreed with. Jaehyun wanted a chance to prove that man wrong, and it was eventually given to him.

Everyone was apprehensive with the idea of putting two male tigers into the room, which was why Dongyoung held tightly onto that weapon of his, but you reason you were both not fully adults yet, so there is a chance Yuta and Jaehyun to bond.

And a bond was surely created.

Jaehyun felt his heart swell at the sense of companionship he had with Yuta. It was neither that of what he felt with Youngho, Taeyong, or Jungwoo, but he somehow felt an undefinable closeness with this tiger.

Yuta was not a white tiger like Jaehyun, but an orange tiger. You reasoned that could be a reason why you had a bond with each other, you were different to each other and there was no females present for competition.

Jaehyun began to think of you and Dongyoung, and how he could eat him without getting caught.

Again, the day of the new joint release of Jaehyun and Yuta came close.

You cried on what Jaehyun knew to be your last visit.

You led the two tigers into cages and shipped them into protected forest land.

Yuta waited for Jaehyun before coming out of the cage they were shipped in. Jaehyun felt something indescribable in his paws when he walked out. Recognition came into his senses. He gave out a roar and began running.

He found that he was being followed by Yuta as he wove through the forest. The breeze was not exactly that of his childhood, but there he saw the same mountain he tread upon when he was hunting a white tiger. Suddenly, he began to see a figure of a man running towards him. He held a sword and a determined look. It took a moment to realize that it was him.

He screams and jolts up. It seems he was lying on a leafy ground and sat up.

Donghyuck shouts, "the king is dead. Oh, lord let him not be dead."

Jaehyun snaps his head to the limping figure from afar who was struggling to stalk towards him. He quickly stands from his the ground he was sat on.

"Donghyuck-ah!" Jaehyun calls, running towards him and sealing him into a tight hug.

Donghyuck is nearly taken aback but pats the king's back, thinking the relief he felt was from his brush with death.

"Let's go home," Jaehyun mutters.

Donghyuck is flabbergasted that the king decreed the next day he would make hunting for sport illegal. Everyone is appalled by the sudden decree, but the law is quickly passed.

Donghyuck does not believe the story Jaehyun said, how he saw the white tiger he was following had four cubs and it made him realize that the tiger he was trying to hunt was a mother more than a beast. Still, he couldn't possibly dare try and argue with the king, no one did for that matter.

Since he had no white tiger pelt to offer, Jaehyun instead bought him a house just outside the palace as a birthday gift. On Donghyuck's day, the king even organized a house warming.

The birthday boy was not enjoying it however.

"Hyung, are you sure you're okay? You haven't been the same since we got home from the hunt."

Jaehyun turned to Donghyuck, who scowled at him. The older of the two placed a hand the younger’s shoulder, "It's already been four days since that incident. Drink some alcohol, relax."

Donghyuck sighs, "Why did you even buy me a house when I live in the palace?"

"Consider it your approval for freedom."

"What?"

Jaehyun pours Donghyuck a drink. "I know you find only burden in the throne. You were sent to the palace by your scheming father so he could get his hand in power. But your father is dead, and you are the head of your household." He turns to his own drink and sighs, "I know what it feels to be imprisoned. Follow your own path. You don't have to live the rest of your days worrying for me anymore."

Donghyuck watches as Jaehyun drinks.

"You are my king," Donghyuck says, "but before that, you were my brother and my best friend. I will gladly live my life close to you if you let me."

Jaehyun feels his lips curve and he scoffs out a chuckle, "ya, it's like you want me to marry you."

"Nope. I already have someone in mind to marry."

Jaehyun looks at Donghyuk with a baffled expression. The latter drinks his drink and mutters lowly "you don't possibly believe I don't get around, hyung?"

The king slaps Donghyuk's shoulder, which nearly makes him spit out his drink, "bring the lucky fool to the palace tomorrow."

Jaehyun has never regretted a decision before, but as Donghyuck knelt there with that person he said he wanted to marry beside, he began to regret something wholeheartedly.

Donghyuck wanted to marry... this? This person that had your face.

How... how could he... how could your face exist in this time.

Donghyuck and this person were knelt before him in his throne room. Jaehyun was stiff on his throne and he quite frankly didn’t know what to do. He left the room in a thick silence. His throat was caught in anxiety. Donghyuck noticed his lover was beginning to get uncomfortable, so he snuck a look at the king and found his face was pale.

“Your majesty,” Donghyuck spoke in concern.

Jaehyun snaps out of it, “how long have you been seeing each other?”

“Two years, your highness.”

He hisses, “you have been going behind hiding this from me for two years?!”

Donghyuck knits his brows and his lover squeaks in fear.

“SURE!” Jaehyun shouts and he stands, “you traitors should get married and get out of my sight!”

Jaehyun got drunk that night and wandered out into the mountains. He bought a bottle of alcohol with him and threatened to kill anyone who dared stop or accompany him.

Of course the servants alerted Donghyuck about this, which was why he ran after the king with a torch.

“WHAT KIND OF CURSE IS THIS?” Jaehyun screamed as he slung his alcohol bottle around, “you want my best friend to marry someone with that face?” Jaehyun began to laugh, “I made hunting illegal! What more do you want from me?!”

“MY KING!” Donghyuck shouted when he caught sight of Jaehyun.

When he got close enough, Donghyuck took reached out to Jaehyun with his free hand. Jaehyun splashed alcohol on him, “I don’t to live like this.”

“Like what, hyung? Do you hate Aerum that much?”

“Aerum?” Jaehyun felt sober again.

“My woman, Aerum.”

“That woman’s name is Aerum?”

Jaehyun began to laugh again. Donghyuck grew uneasy. Jaehyun fell to his knees, his friend dashed over to him in concern. Jaehyun shook his head as Donghyuck talked to him like a gong being sounded. Jaehyun whispers, “I don’t want to live like this.”

But he had no choice.

Jaehyun and Donghyuck went back home. Donghyuck threw Aerum away for Jaehyun’s sake, but he began to slip into depression. It was then Jaehyun began to notice things he was blind to, like how Donghyuck always went out of the palace at a certain time, which he no longer did, and how he always smelled like oranges and had messy hair. No longer did his brother suddenly smile for no reason, nor did he ever ask for mooncakes anymore during lunch. It was then Jaehyun realized he had not hidden anything, but that he was blind to Donghyuck’s sentiments.

So Jaehyun told Donghyuck to marry her, to which he firmly declined. Jaehyun reasoned with lies on how he loved a woman with a similiar face when they were younger, but Donghyuck knew nothing of a woman like that. If he had, he wouldn’t have dared liked Aerum in the first place.

“Do you love her?” Donghyuck asked Jaehyun.

Jaehyun saw the desperation in Donghyuck’s eyes as he asked him this. He was praying he’d say no. Jaehyun spoke firmly, “I don’t.”

Donghyuck believed him, but he wasn’t satisfied.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Jaehyun said. He chuckled bitterly to himself, “I don’t even believe myself.”

“The truth can be hard to believe, but it’s still the truth,” Donghyuck said.

Jaehyun looked at his dear friend and licked his lips, “alright.”

Donghyuck believed every word, to Jaehyun’s astonishment. Jaehyun told him that Areum was not you. Donghyuck was still reluctant when Jaehyun gave him a hairpin to offer Areum, but when the lovers met again, it was easy to fall back in love.

They got married a week later, and it wasn’t long until they welcomed a son into the world. The couple allowed the king to name the boy, and so Jaehyun called Haechan, which meant to shine bright uprightly.

Jaehyun watched as the boy grew stonger, taller, and better in archery than he was at this age. He too watched as Donghyuck began to get slower, and he slowly realized that the world was changing and yet he wasn’t.

It was when Donghyuck had a daughter that both Jaehyun and Donghyuck came to terms with the fact the former was not ageing. At this point, Heachan was eight and brave enough to ride a horse. Donghyuck and Jaehyun looked like they were the same age, or how Areum joked, Donghyuck looked older than the king.

Jaehyun at a point realized if he was not aging, he could meet you again.

So when a time of war came, Jaehyun saw it as a chance to disappear. Donghyuck decided greatly against it. Since Jaehyun took no bride, it meant his cousin Sungchan would succeed the throne. He told him not to worry, and that he would keep a close on eye everything once he was gone.

And so he did.

The line of succession shifted. The colors of the sky changed. Haechan had a son, and his son had a son, and his son had a son, but Jaehyun roamed on his own.

“That’s basically the story of the Tiger King,” Jaehyun smiled his dimpley smile that made all the lined up teenager sound out, impressed with the story.

“So, basically, the Tiger King is still alive, Mr. Jung,” one of the students asked as they moved to the next painting in the museum. Jaehyun looked at the child and thought her eyes reminded him of yours.

“Yes. I think so,” Jaehyun spoke.

“Are you the Tiger King?” another voice spoke, pointing at the ancient drawing behind glass, “you look like him?”

Jaehyun hummed and adjusted the glasses he wore for show, “I get told a lot that I look like him. Would you believe me if I said yes?”

The class cheered, “yes!”

Jaehyun chuckled, “okay then. I am the tiger king.” He said, curling his fingers and pretend growling. The teenagers laugh, fully pleased that he was in on what they believed to be a joke.

By the end of the tour, Jaehyun escorted the students to their bus, where their teacher was waiting for them. And for the first time in years, Jaehyun felt his heart pound at the sight before him.

A group of girls ran up to their teacher and muttered to her how cute the tour guide was. They got a chuckle in response.

“Thank you Mr. Jung for taking care of my kids,” you spoke as you made your way towards him from the bus. Jaehyun looked at you for a prolonged moment, which made you raise your brows slightly.

“So you’re their pretty teacher?” Jaehyun spoke.

You froze for a moment, which made Jaehyun feel smug. He placed his hands in his grey pants’ pockets and clarified, “I mean, the kids described you as ‘their pretty teacher’, that must be you.”

You looked at him for a moment and nodded slowly. Jaehyun smiled, “are you teaching science perhaps?”

You again nod slowly.

“I love science, anthropology and biology especially."

You nod and chuckle nervously, unsure of what to say.

Jaehyun decides to clarify again, "are you teaching part time?"

"Uh, I'm actually going to be a full time faculty soon."

He grows a little confused, "I see. I don't know for some reason you pegged me as a zoologist. Maybe it's because your kids kept singing 'In the jungle the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight'."

You blush, "yeah, sorry, I actually studied zoology which is why I am so passionate about teaching animals to my kids. I unironically play that song a lot in class."

Jaehyun smiles, "well, you know. I think you're interesting and I do agree with your students that you're pretty. Could I possibly get your number?"

"SAY YES, MISS!"

You and Jaehyun turn to the kids sticking their head out in the window. Jaehyun snickers lowly. You begin to burn from head to toe, you feel like. You turn to Jaehyun and turn away, "I'm sorry. I-" Jaehyun watches as you fumble for words and he has honestly never seen you in this light before. You've always been so confident around him as a tiger, and yet you were so timid in front of him as a man. "I'm on the job right now."

Jaehyun nods with a soft smile as you turn around and walk away. No hard feelings. It's not like he's been waiting his whole life for you or anything. He calls out, "visit me sometime, okay?"

The teens squeal.

He watches as the bus drives off and takes note of the school name.

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iclaimedtobethebetterbard · 4 years ago

Text

his name was chad - chapter 1

Fandom: Sanders Sides Characters: All the sides Rating: Teen & up (see Warnings) Relationships: Lamp (with a focus on Logince and Moxiety), Dukeceit Warnings: Language, sexual humor/innuendo, mostly non-graphic violence, temporary major character deaths, minor animal death (not all of these are in this chapter, but I like to put general fic warnings on the first chapter) Word count: 1782 Notes: Based on that one short Thomas made ages ago; fic is mostly to be treated humorously.

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My writing masterpost

Summary: “We thought it’d be fun to make an apocalypse game!” Roman explained. “One we can fully immerse ourselves in!” “Well, technically,” Remus put in, “it’s part apocalypse, part western, part post-apocalypse, part zombie apocalypse—” “No! No zombies! We’ve been over this!” Roman snapped. “Right, right, I keep forgetting. Part horror, part thriller, part mafia game, part—” “I think we get the picture,” Logan interrupted. “A mishmash of ‘edgy’ genres you both enjoy, am I correct?”

Chapter 1

“Everyone!” Roman shouted from the common area at the top of his lungs. “Hey, everyone, c’mere! Right now!”

“What the hell do you want?” Virgil demanded, rising up at once.

“Wait, wait, wait wait wait. Logan! Patton!” Roman called for their other boyfriends.

Remus popped up between Roman and Virgil, making them both jump. “Janny!” he added in an ear-grating shriek.

“What on earth is the matter, Roman?” Logan inquired as he and Patton made their way into the room.

Roman glanced around just as Janus rose up in the corner, taking up residence lurking in a dramatic puddle of shadow. “Good, everyone’s here. Come see what me and Remus made!”

“Oh, you mean the thing you two have been holed up working on for two weeks now that nobody has been allowed to ask about?” Logan said, sounding interested.

“Yeah, that!” Roman grabbed his and Virgil’s hands. “Everyone come on!”

Patton followed just behind his three boyfriends; Remus and Janus, somewhat surprisingly, followed at a more leisurely pace, Janus leaning on Remus as he wrapped an arm around Janus’s waist, held his hand, and talked a mile a minute in a voice too low for the others to make out.

Roman led the group to the workshop he and Remus shared, having everyone gather in a huddle around a table with a large piece of fabric covering whatever was on it. “Ready?” he asked dramatically.

“No, can I take a nap first?” Virgil inquired sarcastically.

“Some other time, my stormy darling. Behold!” Roman drew the cloth away with a flourish.

“Ooh, it’s a little world!” Patton exclaimed.

“Fascinating,” Logan commented, leaning closer to examine the miniature landscape, dotted with buildings and trees. “What is it for?”

“It’s a game!” Remus piped up from the back of the group. He let go of Janus and elbowed his way between Virgil and Patton. “And we’re going in it! Blood and guts and gore and death!”

“What?” Patton inquired, sounding distinctly nervous.

“What do you mean, in it? What do you mean, death?” Virgil demanded.

“Oh, cool your tits, the death is just for realism,” Remus said, waving his hand.

“That is not reassuring!”

“No, no, wait, listen!” Roman interrupted frantically. “He’s explaining it all wrong! Virgil, listen, I promise it’s not that bad!” He paused. “Well.”

“See?” Virgil pointed an accusing finger at him. “What the hell are you two up to?”

“We just thought it’d be fun to make an apocalypse game!” Roman explained. “One we can fully immerse ourselves in!”

“Apocalypse?” Virgil demanded, sounding torn between delight and outrage.

“I don’t know…” Patton put in hesitantly.

Logan looked up from where he had still been examining the table. “This is an impressive level of detail work, Roman, Remus. You should be proud of yourselves.”

“Don’t encourage them!” Virgil snapped. “Not when they’re apparently trying to get us all killed for fun!”

“What?” Logan blinked. “Oh, that. I imagine it will be harmless.”

“Yeah!” Remus backed him up immediately.

“Yeah,” Roman echoed a beat later, less certain.

“Logan,” Virgil said, “they are trying to put Patton in an apocalypse. In what world is that a good idea for anyone?”

“Well, technically,” Remus put in, “it’s part apocalypse, part western, part post-apocalypse, part zombie apocalypse—”

“No! No zombies! We’ve been over this!” Roman snapped.

“Right, right, I keep forgetting. No zombies yet. But it is part horror, part thriller, part murder mystery, part mafia game, part—”

“I think we get the picture,” Logan interrupted. “A mishmash of ‘edgy’ genres you both enjoy, am I correct?”

“Oh, that’s a good way of putting it.” Remus nodded.

“It will be fun, I promise,” Roman said. “We made it! Just for everyone in this room! So it’ll be okay. We made such cool character designs for everyone, you’re going to love it, just please can we play just one time please?” He turned pleading eyes on all three of his partners.

“And you’re sure this will be safe?” Logan asked, just to be sure. Both Patton and Virgil looked too nervous for his liking and could likely use the reassurance.

“Absolutely!” Roman assured him.

“Probably,” Remus amended.

“Shut up! We know what we’re doing!” Roman smacked his brother’s arm.

“The effects will look, feel, sound, and smell realistic,” Remus said. “Try not to die gruesomely. Or don’t, it will be lots of fun to watch guts going everywhere.” He lit up and looked over at Roman. “Hey, can we add—”

“For the sixteenth time, we said no zombies on the first run!” Roman stamped his foot.

“Boo.” Remus rolled his eyes and glanced back to Patton. “But yeah. It’s safe from the outside. We’ll just be on the inside, you know?”

“What does that mean?” Patton asked nervously.

“Don’t worry about it,” Remus said instantly, grinning very wide indeed.

“Patton.” Roman took both Patton’s hands in his own. “I would never ask anything of you if I wasn’t perfectly sure I could keep you safe. It’s all just effects, I promise.”

“You’re sure?” Patton said.

“I promise,” Roman repeated. He glanced up at Virgil, who was hovering darkly just behind Patton’s shoulder. “And that goes for everyone here, Doom and Gloom.”

Virgil narrowed his eyes and looked over at Janus, who was standing a little distance away from the rest of the group, examining his gloved nails. “And what do you think of all this?” he demanded suspiciously.

Janus looked up, blinking comically wide and raising his eyebrows. “Hm? Oh, I’m sorry, I was under the impression that you ‘don’t like liars.’ Why would you ask me?”

Virgil growled under his breath. “You know you’re self-preservation too,” he snapped.

“Oh, yes, of course, it’s just fun to make you admit it.” Janus gave Virgil a very self-satisfied grin.

Virgil glared at him. “Just shut up and answer my question. Are you going in there?” He pointed at the landscape on the table.

“Maybe. I haven’t decided.” Janus shrugged, seeming disinterested. “You should definitely go, though, I’d love to watch you get taken out by tripping on a rock or something.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

Janus smirked. “I suspect your boyfriend collection would be unhappy with that idea.”

“Fuck off, you know I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Oh, is it bullying Virgil hours?” Remus inquired, looking up from the landscape on the table.

“No, hey, wait—” Patton began in protest.

“Shush, Daddyo, it’s all in good fun,” Remus said without looking away from Janus.

“Isn’t it always, darling?” Janus responded as if Patton’s interruption had not taken place.

Remus grinned. “Ooh, fair point.”

“I hate you guys,” Virgil announced.

Janus blew him a kiss. “Thank you ever so much.”

Remus draped himself over Virgil, with his chin resting on Virgil’s shoulder. “So whatcha talking about?” he asked.

“This loser won’t tell me if he’s participating in the game or not,” Virgil snapped, jerking a thumb at Janus.

“Ooh, ‘loser.’ Very nice. Classy. Screams ‘seventh grade,’ that’s how you know it’s a mature and grownup insult,” Janus commented.

“Baby, you aren’t playing?” Remus gave Janus a pair of very distressed, pleading puppy dog eyes. “I worked so hard on it! You’re going to be so sexy, I made you such a cool backstory!”

“No, no, of course I’ll play,” Janus assured him composedly. “I was only messing with Virgil.”

“Hey!” Virgil snapped.

“I’d love to see all the horrors your mind has come up with,” Janus went on with a startling sincerity, serenely ignoring Viril. “You’ll have to be sure and show me everything.”

Remus lit up. “Oh, I will!” He pushed away from Virgil and ran to take both Janus’s hands in his own. “I made you a whole lair thing, it’s so cool, it has so many—”

“Why don’t you show me?” Janus inquired, raising one of Remus’s hands to his lips to press a kiss to it.

Remus vibrated with excitement. “Yeah, okay!” He glanced over at Roman.

“You can go ahead early, you have a little more setup to do anyway,” Roman said, waving his hand. “We’ll catch up to you.”

Remus grinned and drew Janus close by the waist—and they both vanished.

Virgil yelped, looking distinctly alarmed.

“Never fear!” Roman assured him. “They’re just in the game!” He pointed down at the landscape; two little tokens, in green and yellow, had appeared on it. “Is everyone ready to go?”

“How long will this take, again?” Logan asked.

“A couple of hours,” Roman said. “Time goes slower inside the game by default, but Remus and I can mess around with it a little if we need to.”

“And the goal of the game?” Logan asked.

“To have fun! Also not die. There’s a little bit of a story but there’s also lots of room to play around. Don’t worry, the only thing that happens if you die is you’re out of the game and you come back here. The winner gets a minifigure of their character! And bragging rights.”

Logan and Virgil both perked up at this second prize. Roman snickered. “So, is everyone ready?” he asked again.

“I just feel like it’s a little scary…” Patton said.

“Oh!” Roman snapped his fingers. “I knew I was forgetting something. We made a filter for you, Pat! It puts you on easy mode. Way less things will want to attack you. And me and Remus both have some of our mod abilities available for emergencies if you need us to change something!”

Patton thought about this for a minute, then nodded. “Okay. I think I can try it out, then.”

Roman grinned and kissed his cheek. “How about you, Gerard Gay?” He looked over at Virgil. “You in?”

Virgil grumbled to himself for a moment, then shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, fine, whatever. Jan went in, and he’s a better judge of safety than you or Remus.” He glanced away and mumbled, “Plus it sounds really cool, or whatever.”

“Normally I would be very offended, but I’m just happy you want to play.” Roman offered Virgil a dazzling smile. “Logan?”

“I will participate. I am curious to see what you have come up with.”

“Oh, I love you all so much!” Roman declared. “Alright, everyone come over here.” He shuffled them around until each of them was holding somewhere on one of his arms. “Now, the game will drop us in randomly within a certain area and timeframe, and then we just have to find each other! Have fun—it’ll start off easy and get more challenging as we get used to it!”

Roman pulled at the fabric of Thomas’s imagination itself, and there was a funny yanking feeling in everyone’s gut, and the world went dark for just a second.

Taglist (ask to be added/removed!):

@fivehargreeves05 @theimprobabledreamersworld

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lilover131 · 3 years ago

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Opening Art Commissions!

I’ve been pondering this for a while and decided to try and put myself out there. I am going to try accepting commissions!

Below is my tentative price sheet, but I have details typed below should anyone have trouble seeing the image or reading my handwriting. Also, I’ve got a link here to my Deviantart page where you can take a look at works I have done!

Step 1 (Choose your Size): Headshot- $20, Torso- $30, Full Body- $40

Step 2 (Choose your Coloring): Line Art-no additional charge, Black & White Sketch- +$5, Flat Coloring- +$5, Full Color- +$10

Step 3 (Choose your Background): Solid Color- no additional charge, Basic Gradient- +$2, Basic Pattern- +$2, Basic Landscape- +$10 **Additional characters will cost $10 per character**

Will Do: LGBTQ+, OC’s, Chibi, Anime Portraits, Ships, Some animals (ask me!), Mascot characters (ex: Pokemon, MLP, etc.), Non-anime cartoons

Won’t Do: 18+/NSFW, Gore (light gore is fine, but no viscera), Realism, Complex landscapes/backgrounds (talk to me about an idea, and I’ll tell you if I can do it or not), Buildings, Vehicles

Disclaimer:

Because I cannot see the future or anticipate all possible situations, if I determine that a commission is something I do not feel comfortable with, I will let you know and offer you the opportunity to cancel the request or alter it. I will always do my best, however I cannot always predict what makes me feel uncomfortable until the particular moment arises.

These situations may include:

The nature of the request being too sensitive/controversial for my comfort level. I consider myself pretty open-minded, so don’t be shy asking for something, but I ask for understanding if I choose to deny a request.

Time constraints/Personal Issues (real life always comes first!)

Inability to complete the request in the best quality possible due to my skill level. I will not accept a request that I don’t think I can do well. I want the work to be worth the money you’re spending!

Feel free to message me on Tumblr, Twitter, Deviantart, or Discord (my username is LIlover131 on all of these) for any additional details/questions! I am also open to ideas that may not fit the price sheet. If you want something different than what is listed, feel free to message me and I’ll determine if it’s something I can do and work out a fair price!

#chrissy talks a lot #fanart #digital art #commissions #chrissy draws sometimes #opening art commissions #please go easy on me #this is my first time

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badmoonyellow · 4 years ago

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HP HEADCANON: PARIS UNIVERSITY

𝓵𝓮𝓼 𝓯𝓪𝓬𝓾𝓵𝓽𝓮𝓼 ✯ 𝓊𝓃𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑒𝓈

(click here for contents)

There are five different facultés (abr. fac) in Paris, each one called by a number and the name of a famous wizard/witch or a district in Paris. Each fac has its specificities and various pathways that should please most of the young students trying to find what they want to do with their life after they graduate

Paris I — Babel: Modern languages, dead languages, magical languages, magicology, magical literature, theoretical studies of magical and non-magical art

Paris II — Ruggieri: Astrology, astronomy, divination, theology, psychology, philosophy and sociology

Paris III — Nicolas et Pernelle Flamel: Alchemy, occult sciences, arithmancy and mathematics, magical and non-magical medicine, biology

Paris IV — Cluny: Botanics, care of magical creatures, potions, magical geology and crystal healing, elementary magic

Paris V — Kardec: Necromancy, spiritism, divination, transfiguration, illusionism and oneiric magic, hypnosis and psychology

French students either use the number or the name of the uni to refer to it, never both. Ex: “I did my masters at Paris IV”, “I was a teacher at Cluny for two years” or “Flamel has the best course for arithmancy”

Paris universities are known for being selective but welcome students from every social class: there are no tuition fees except for social security which is calculated on the income of the student or their household if they still live with their parents. The more you earn, the more you pay but it is capped to 20 galleons per student (roughly 450€). If you’re doing a joint honour degree in two different fac, you won’t have to pay twice.

Be careful with this because French bureaucracy is kind of a mess, especially when it comes to uni life. Most people working for the administration have a precise timetable they like to stick to and won’t be kind to you if you raise your voice, even if you’ve been waiting for 2h at their door because the only free time you had is during their lunch break. But sometimes, the right owl sent to the right person will be enough, so don’t hesitate to communicate!

Depending on which fac you’re attending, you’ll probably meet a lot of different people but since we’re French (a.k.a. judgmental), each fac has a typical profile of students:

Students from Babel are considered clever and cultivated but most people think they just don’t really know what they want to do with their life yet. They enjoy uni life in Paris and spend time hanging out with a great deal of foreign students from every part of the world, learning and researching for academic purpose. They create more or less harmful spells and like to talk in latin or ancient greek on a daily basis. They make inside jokes about politics and are the first ones to go on strike any time they don’t agree with the government’s decisions. Very diplomatic and charismatic but also kinda conceited since Babel was the first actual French magical faculté in the Sorbonne (this title is also claimed by the Perrault Institute). They love to debate about any topic of the wizarding world and for the most part, they know a lot about the non-magical world too since they study languages spoken by muggles as well.

Students from Ruggieri are more discreet and contemplative. They are passionate and having your astral chart drawn up by one of them feels like becoming an open book, even though knowing about astrology doesn’t always mean being intuitive. They aren’t known for being empathetic though, and they have a tendency to despise divination techniques that aren’t based on what’s written in the stars (students from Kardec can tell). They love mythology, mind games and poetry. They often go to the countryside beyond Paris’ suburbs to escape light pollution and if you’re lucky, they might invite you to their next nocturnal picnic in Seine-et-Marne.

Students from Flamel are hard-working and competitive since medicine studies (and other courses taught in this university) follow the numerus clausus method. You have more chances to see a Flamel student at the BAM (Bibliothèque Académique de Magie, en. Academic Library for Magic) than attending any of the cool parties young French witches and wizards organise throughout the year. Actually, since the BAM is physically part of Paris I, this has created a long-time resentment among students who all claim priority to access the Library. Flamel students are ambitious and passionate by their field but suffer from a great deal of pressure since failing one exam can be eliminatory. They also have the worst writing ever.

Students from Cluny are seen as the weird hippies of the academic wizarding world. Always down for going on a trip or testing new things. Their shared interest in elementary magic makes them very welcoming and warm since they tend to focus on how a group is stronger than an individual and how you can always seek for help in others (“others” sometimes meaning plants, animals or rocks). They are very genuine and you won’t know for sure if they are really down-to-earth or if they constantly keep their head in the clouds. They love going outdoors and escape the city from time to time but they can also spend hours (days) underground cultivating fungi. Laugh now if you want to, but they get the best kind of psychedelics and liquors for your next party and they won’t bring any if you make fun of them. Also, they throw their own parties in cool speakeasies all over the Mines. Keep your ears open if you want to get the password!

Students from Kardec are actually the real anarchists of the academic landscape, even though Babel tries to steal their far-left thunder. Non-conformists, skeptical and teasing, they love throwing some unpopular opinion in a debate and watch how it takes. You’ll see them at protests and art events since they hang out a lot with students from the ENSBAMO and the Académie de Musique. They generally have no filter whatsoever and are also trying to figure out what they want to do with their life but even though they seem a bit puzzling at times, they’re really sweet. They might know their way around the Mines better than students from Cluny and believe me when I tell you this: they throw the best Halloween party every year — apparently being located in a cemetery helps a lot.

Of course, these are reputations, not distinctive character traits and every student is different from the other so don’t worry: you’ll fit right in wherever you want to go!

#harry potter #hp headcanon #hp headcanons #hp hc #hp hcs #beauxbatons #paris #hp rpg

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beelsnack · 4 years ago

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Hi! I love your blog❣ Can I request a brother + undatables ( if you do that) reaction with a very obedient mc? Like they do everything they've been asking and stuff? Thank you in advance!❣❣

Aw, thanks a bunch, Nonnie! This will be a good test for me, since I usually end up writing snarky characters who fight authority. I hope you like it!

I’m going to stick this under a cut because it, uh, got away from me a little bit. I didn’t even do all of the undateables and I was over 3k. ^^”

Lucifer: “I’m sorry to keep piling tasks on you.”

With a grunt, the human set the heavy stack of books down on the table in Lucifer’s study. “It’s alright, I don’t mind.”

Lucifer let his professional mask slip for just a second to smile warmly at them. “If only my brothers were as agreeable as you.”

“At least they provide entertainment.” they laughed. “What are all these books, anyway?”

“Old spell books,” he removed the top book off of the stack, unleashing a cloud of dust that sent the human into a coughing fit. “In desperate need of some maintenance.”

“That sounds more like Satan’s territory.” they rasped as the couching subsided.

“It usually is, but I don’t need to give him any more ideas for his curses.” despite his words, there was a glint of fond humor is his eyes. “If you aren’t busy, could you give me a hand with these?”

“Sure!” they took a seat in the armchair across from Lucifer. “I’ve been studying all day, so I ind of need a break.”

“Oh? An dutiful helper and a diligent student?” he hummed, smoothing out the crease of a page that had been marked with a dog-ear. “I may just have to reward you.”

“What kind of reward?”

“Hm...” he pinned them with a heavily-lidded stare. “Anything you want. What kind of reward do you desire?”

“...Ice cream!”

Lucifer couldn’t hold back his surprised snort before he quickly devolved into laughter. “My, but you do know how to surprise me, my dear. Very well, a trip to Madam Scream’s as a reward, then.”

Mammon: They looked really tired.

“Come on, it’ll be fun! Promise!” Asmo was tugging insistently on their sleeve like a child begging for their parent’s attention. “You’ve never been to a club like the Fall, I guarantee it. It’s the perfect place to get up to something naughty ~”

Alright, that’s it.

“Oi, Asmo!” Mammon rounded on the other demon. “Quit trying to drag the human along with your gross BS!”

“Oh, but it’s fine when you do it?” Asmo shot back, amber eyes narrowing. “At least I’m not conning people out of cash.”

“Whatever!” Mammon grabbed onto the human’s upper arm, shaking Asmo’s hands off of their sleeve. “Come on, human, I need you to help me with somethin’.”

“Whoa, okay, um...maybe next time Asmo.” they managed to get out before Mammon dragged them into his room and slammed the door.

He was muttering under his breath so quickly and quietly that the human could just barely make out a few phrases. “...fuckin’ Asmo...advantage of...where does he get off...”

“Uh, Mammon?” they asked hesitantly. “You said you needed my help with something?”

“Huh?” he whipped around, looking slightly startled. “Oh. Nah, I was just sayin’ that so Asmo would let you go.”

They blinked, tilting their head like a puppy. “Why would you do that?”

“Come on, human, don’t lie to me,” he rolled his eyes, hands on hips. “You don’t want to go clubbing after spending the day running around like Lucifer’s little servant, do ya? You look like you’re about ready to pass out.”

Instinctively, their hand shot up to beneath their eyes, where there were some pretty prominent bags. “...Do I look that bad?”

Mammon flinched. “No! That’s not - I didn’t mean - ya look tired!” he scratched at the back of his neck. “It’ll look bad on me if you keel over from exhaustion, and since you can’t seem to say no to anyone, I’m gonna have to do it for you!”

For a moment, they just stared at him. Then, slowly, a big grin spread across their face and they stepped forward to wrap their arms around his middle. They only came up to his collarbone, and he was suddenly very aware of this fact.

“Thank you, Mammon.”

“F-For what?”

They laughed, squeezing him a little bit tighter. “For looking out for me.”

He stilled for a moment before resting his chin on top of their head and returning the hug. “’S my job, ain’t it?”

Leviathan: Knock-knock-knock.

“What’s the password?”

“I’ve got your Akuzon order.”

Levi practically ripped his door off of the hinges as he flung it open. “Yes! Thank you, thank you, omg!” he was already ripping the box open, leaving the door open in his excitement.

“What did you get?” the human asked, poking their head in the doorway.

“The anime adaptation for I’m A Human Who Accidentally Enrolled In A University For Monsters But They’re The Only School That Has My Major So I Guess I’ll Stick It Out! Anime based off of dating sims usually aren’t that great, but I loved the game so much!”

They laughed. “We played it together, remember? We had that big debate on the order we should do the routes.”

“Right, yeah, we did!” Levi paused for a moment, looking down at the cover, and then back up at the human with a slightly blush on his cheeks. “Hey, um…since you went and picked it up for me, and, like, you were just as into the game as I was, so…maybe, um, you would want to watch it with me?”

“Really?” they blinked. “You sure?”

“Yeah, marathons are always better with friends.” Levi was already popping the first disk in. “Hey, go get some snacks!”

Satan: “Oh, you’re still working?”

The human glanced down at him from their position at the top of the ladder, smiling sheepishly. “Yeah, it’s taking me a bit longer than I thought.”

Lucifer has asked them to clean the library earlier that day. Well, not just them - Mammon was supposed to help, but he had oh-so-conveniently remembered that he had something else very urgent that he needed to take care of. So, here they were, five hours later.

Honestly, the library wasn’t even that dirty. But it was quite a large room, far too large for a human to clean by themself.

Satan sighed, shaking his head. “Well, it’s a good thing I made a pit stop on the way home, then.” he set down the cardboard drink carrier in his hands. “Come down for a moment, will you?”

“Ah, yeah, just give me a sec.”

Satan heard the slight clattering of wood against wood, and looked up to the the ladder swaying slightly. The human was carefully picking their way down, seemingly painfully aware of the instability.

“Oh, here, I’ve got it.” one hand on the side of the ladder was enough to steady it, and he heard them let out a sigh of relief as they clambered down the rest of the way.

“Thanks, Satan.” they said as their feet touched the ground. “I didn’t realize it was shaking until I was already on it.”

“Mention it to Lucifer, he’ll do something about it.” Satan replied, brushing a bit of dust out of their hair. “Come on, I brought you some coffee.”

They followed him over to the table, and their eyes lit up when they saw the logo on the bag. “Starbats! Yes, thank you so much!”

“Did I get your order right?” he asked, plucking his own drink out of the carrier. “I was pretty sure, but…”

“Perfect, as always.” they beamed. “You’re the best, Satan.”

“Hey, come on, now,” there was a faint blush on his cheeks. “You’re the one who does everything around here. Buying you coffee is the least I can do.”

Asmodeus: “Well? How did it turn out?”

The human stared at their D.D.D, brow furrowed in concentration as they studied the picture they had just taken. Asmo had texted them frantically, telling them to hurry because the light in his room was just perfect for a photoshoot and he needed a full-body shot.

“I mean, it looks good to me, but you’ve nixed every shot I’ve taken so far…”

“Let me see it then,” he hopped up from the chaise lounge that he had elegantly draped himself over. His silk bathrobe just barely covered all of the essential parts, and the human had to make it a point not to stare. Not that Asmo would mind in the slightest, but still.

“This is it, darling, this is the one!” he pressed an affectionate kiss to the side of their head. “You’re a quick learner, I knew it. Text this to me, okay? I’ll tag you on Devilgram, promise!”

“Glad I could help.” they laughed as they began making their way out of Asmo’s room.

“Hm…wait a minute.”

The paused just in front of the door. Maybe there was an issue with the picture after all? They bit at their lip, ready to question Asmo, but he pressed his deceivingly strong hands against their shoulders and shoved gently.

“Go stand by the window for a second…mm, no, not quite, sit down for me…”

Confused, they obeyed his orders. They placed themself on the window seat, one of those fancy three paneled setups with a bench in the middle.

Out of habit, they turned to look out the window. Asmo was right, it was pretty out. The full moon cast a silvery glow over everything, but it was low enough in the lavender sky that it cast long, creepily elegant shadows all over the garden below. The whole landscape just screaming Gothic novel.

For just a moment, they forgot about Asmo and turned fully to gaze out at the scenery. The Devildom was always pretty in a morose sort of way, but very rarely did they get the chance to appreciate it. They shifted to get more comfortable on the window seat, pulling their knee to their chest and wrapping their arms around it while the other foot kept their balance on the floor.

“Perfect!”

When they whipped around in shock, Asmo was grinning victoriously. “Look, look, this is perfect!”

“Did…did you just take a picture of me?”

“Mhm!” Asmo bounded over to their side and handed them his D.D.D. When had he picked it up? His robe didn’t have pockets. Shaking their head, they looked down at the photo.

“...Oh wow…”

“Right?” Asmo cooed. “Don’t you look absolutely stunning? That longing stare, the way you smile, you look like the protagonist in a paranormal romance”

They blinked down at the picture. “Can…you text this to me?”

“Of course, darling.” he said. “Oh, but let me post it to Devilgram, okay? I want everyone to be jealous of me.”

He plucked his phone out of their hands, stealing a quick kiss from their lips.

“Well call this a reward for being good and obeying orders, okay?”

Beelzebub: “Where are we going?”

It was their lunch hour at RAD, but Beel was taking them in the opposite direction. He had asked the human to come with him, but hadn’t explained where they were going. He had just linked their hands together and smiled down at them, saying it was a surprise.

Finally, he pushed open a door that lead to one of the many internal courtyards. Rose bushes scented the air around them, and a stone path led to the middle of the courtyard where a gazebo stood. As they approached, they saw an amazing array of food spread out on a blanket.

“Beel…?”

“My brothers had you running around the whole weekend.” he said, running his thumb over the back of their knuckles. “You were so busy last night you didn’t get to make your lunch for today. So I asked Barbatos to make lunch for us.”

“Aw, Beel!” they wrapped their arms around his middle and squeezed. “You’re so sweet. Thank you for taking care of me.”

“I should be thanking you for taking care of us.” Beel hugged them bag, almost painfully gently so as not to squish them. “My brothers don’t appreciate you nearly as much as they should.”

“It’s fine, Beel, I don’t mind it.”

“I do, though.”

They backed away from the hug a little to look up at Beel, brows furrowed. They were about to say something, but, as usual, the moment was interrupted by a growl from his stomach. The confused expression broke into a grin, and they rejoined their hands, tugging him forward. “Come on, let’s eat.”

Belphegor: Finally, they were alone.

It was rare that Belphegor got to spend any alone time with the human. It almost made him miss being hidden away in the attic, if only for the privacy. But, today was apparently his lucky day, because when he had finally managed to drag himself out of bed, he stumbled - quite literally, he was struggling to keep both eyes open - into the human on their way back to their room.

“I mean, I’m going to be studying, but if you want to come over, you can.”

“You say that like I’m not going to be sleeping.”

They laughed, eyes crinkling at the corners. He really liked their laugh, especially when it was genuine.

He was almost home free. They had just made it up the stairs when -

“There you are!”

…Damn it.

“Oh, hey Asmo.” they greeted the other demon, smiling at him. “What’s up?”

“I left my makeup bag at RAD!” Asmo wailed like someone had just kicked his pet hell hound. “I have a date tonight, and I need to get in the bath, which you know is a solid two hour process. Do you think you could be a dear and run and grab it for me?”

The human was going to agree. Belphie could see it in their eyes. They didn’t want to, clearly, but that naturally agreeable disposition usually won out in these scenarios.

“Go get it yourself, Asmo.” he drawled, draping himself over their shoulder. “You’re a grown demon, aren’t you?”

“But - “

Belphegor straightened up from his perpetual slouch, one hand remaining on the human’s shoulder while he shouldered his way past Asmo. His shrieks of irritation were abruptly cut off when Belphie slammed the door to the human’s room behind him.

“What was that for, Belphie?” the human asked.

“You were going to do it.” he shrugged. “Even though you didn’t want to.”

“Well…”

Belphie made his way over to the bed, flopping down on his side with an oh-so-graceful thwump. “I don’t understand you sometimes.”

“I don’t understand me sometimes either.” they sighed, folding their arms. “It’s like, I feel guilty for saying no even if I’m perfectly within my rights. I don’t know why.”

“Eh…” Belphie hummed, sitting up a little bit. “Well, since you can’t seem to say no, I might as well take advantage of that.”

They recoiled a little bit at the wording, but he continued, opening his arms. “Let me cuddle you.”

For a moment, they were silent, and Belphie worried he might have put his foot in it. But, slowly, a smile tugged at their lips, and they clambered into bed with him. With a soft, contented sigh, they snuggled against his chest.

“It’s about time someone else took care of you, you know?”

Diavolo: “Lucifer needs to stop making you deliver his reports for him.”

The human laughed as they handed Diavolo they manila folder containing Lucifer’s paperwork. “I don’t mind it. The scenery at the castle is amazing to look at, it gives me an excuse to walk around a little bit.”

Diavolo grinned down at them. “Always so positive! You truly do brighten the room, my dear.” his molten gold eyes shined with a bit of mischief as he extended an arm to them. “Shall I make the trip worth your while? If you love the scenery near the entrance, you’ll be absolutely enchanted with everything else.”

“Oh,” their eyes widened slightly. “Is that alright?”

“Of course,” he beamed when they hesitantly linked their arm through his. “Honestly, you have enough on your plate without Lucifer using you as a mule.”

“I told you, Lord Diavolo, I don’t mind it.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” he replied, leading the two of them through a door that lead to a courtyard with a rose maze. “But I didn’t bring you here to be a servant. It’s unworthy of him to take advantage of your agreeable nature, even if he doesn’t realize he’s doing it.”

“I mean…” they glanced around the courtyard, avoiding Diavolo’s painfully earnest eyes. “The brothers let me stay at the House of Lamentation, so helping out wherever I can is the least I can do, isn’t it?”

“It’s not like you’re intruding.” there was a hint of laughter in Diavolo’s voice as he expertly guided the two of them through the maze. “You were deposited here with nothing but the clothes on your back, the fact that you’re thinking about paying them back is astonishing.”

He paused. They had reached the center of the maze, stopping just beneath a great stone statue of what the human assumed was a previous king, or maybe even the current one. Diavolo turned to face them and took their hand in his large one, bringing their knuckles to his lips while never breaking eye contact.

“It’s one of the many things I find so charming about you.”

#shall we date obey me #obey me #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me levi #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me asmo #obey me beelzebub #obey me beel #obey me belphegor #obey me belphie #obey me diavolo

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isoscele · 3 years ago

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Lumberjanes Week Day 6 - Ghost Stories/Land of Lost Things

In Xian’s bullet journal, in purple gel pen, the four of them wrote their last will and testament. It was an incontrovertible fact, said Presley, that they were going to die here. One, it had snowed every single one of the four days they had been here, and showed no signs of stopping. Two, despite their best efforts to ration their fruit leathers and peanut-butter-banana sandwiches, they had run out of food. Three, Ana’s ankle was sprained and they were probably not going to be able to get back up on the cliff they had fallen from. Four, despite what fantasy books said, kids on hiking trips did not actually survive tripping into a desolate, war-torn alternate dimensions, no matter how much moxie and general perseverance they showed.

It was hard to argue with that. So they divvied up their belongings among parents and siblings and pets, taking turns with the pen in a kind of grim ritual.

Once they finished, they surveyed their work.

“Don’t give your rollerblades to Peter,” Ana told Xian. “He’s going to break his collarbone immediately.”

“If I have to become a ghost, I want to spend my afterlife watching Peter eat it in the Walmart parking lot,” Xian said firmly.

The sky here was a kind of burnt-rubber color. The snow kept coming down, so there must have been clouds up there somewhere, but it was difficult to distinguish them from the blank slate of horizon.

There were no plants, no animals, nothing but a long line of snow-covered earth. If you dug down to the surface, as Siobhan had, there was only scorched dirt. There was a little rubble, but not much. As far as otherworldly apocalyptic wastelands went, it was disappointingly barren. There were no helpful clues, or conveniently-placed newspapers with pictures of mushroom clouds. Even the breaks in the landscape looked harsh, a continual jag of cliffs and valleys and something that smelled like it might have been a swamp, a long time ago.

When they’d first set up camp, Siobhan had knelt down to wrap Ana’s ankle and Presley had started clearing space to make a campfire, and so Xian had gone around looking for something to help start it, trudging through the knee-deep snow with her windbreaker tied around her legs to keep herself from getting frostbite.

Mostly, she had been walking towards a massive rupture in the snow that looked like it might have been a felled tree. Probably, it would be too damp to burn, but Presley had mad survivalist skills wrapped up in her little band-geek brain, so maybe she would be able to scrape the bark off or something. Or maybe there would be something they could eat. Even then, back in the halcyon days when they still had two out of four fruit leathers left, that was a pressing concern.

As Xian approached it, though, it started to look less and less like a tree. It was curved in a weird way, and it didn’t have any branches. It took a long time for her to reach it, so by the time she reached out one hand to wipe away the snow, there was a part of her that already knew what she’d find.

It was a rib. More specifically, it was the rib of something that had ribs the size of a school bus. It was picked completely clean of meat, as pristine as a museum exhibition.

Xian had to take a step back and stare at it. It filled her whole vision, and she couldn’t get over how clean it was. Her first thought was scavengers! Her second thought was HUGE scavengers! Her third thought was no, that’s dumb. It’s just old.

Siobhan’s theory had been nuclear war. Presley agreed with her–maybe not with the method, but she thought they were in an alternate dimension that had destroyed itself somehow. Ana had suggested time travel, like they’d tripped into Earth’s first ice age.

But something bad had happened here. With that understanding came a powerful, terrible relief. Of course they were standing on a graveyard too vast and ancient for them to ever understand. Of course this was a place of tragedy. It still was, the white of the ground and the orange of the sky and the way that Presley had said we should find some kindling, as if they were ever going to find any kindling.

Xian had looked at the bone for a moment longer. She thought about how, in horror movies, the characters always tried to find some justification for what was happening to them, had some big why-me breakdown. From an audience’s perspective, though, it was easy to tell who was earmarked for catastrophe. From the moment they stepped onto the screen, they were tasked with telling a story. They were suffering because they were only ones who could tell it. It wasn’t their fault.

Xian didn’t know what that meant about them. They were teenage girls, which could make some sense within certain narratives, but they were teenage girls who were probably not going to get out of here. Girls who were plucky and inquisitive and charming and still would not be saved.

Then again, sometimes the answer to why-me was just you were there. Sometimes, it was as simple as an extinction event, coming to wipe you and everything you knew clean.

Xian turned around and started the long walk back to camp.

The hike had been Siobhan’s idea. School had just ended and it was Presley’s last summer before she moved away, so everything was terrifying and big and moved in slow-motion. It felt like every minute the four of them weren’t doing something amazing together was a minute wasted. Siobhan imagined growing up like a skin you shed in reverse. The more you crammed into those early layers, the harder it was to lose them.

She’d packed the bag, which was another mark on her ledger. If she had brought a first-aid kit, if she had brought more food, if she had brought a second water bottle, things might be different. Never mind that it was only supposed to be a day trip, and her mom would’ve lost her mind if Siobhan had packed for an overnighter.

The third thing that she could never ever be absolved of was that she was the one who saw the fox.

It had streaked through the trees, a blur of formless red, but for a second it had looked at her and–and Siobhan wasn’t exaggerating, time stopped. Its eyes were golden and a million years old, and somehow she had known exactly what it was saying to her.

They’re leaving you they’re leaving you every second they are getting farther away from you and you can’t do anything to stop it and you’re the only one who wants to anyway, you’re the only one selfish enough to ask for forever.

And then time had unstuck and it had leapt back through the trees, and Siobhan had pushed past Ana and almost tripped over Xian and she hadn’t even realized that she had started running, it was more like she knelt into the air and kept going.

She hadn’t realized the others would follow her, but of course they had.

So Siobhan couldn’t sleep. She was cold, and she was hungry, and she was ashamed that during their will-writing she’d made up people to give her things to because she wanted her friends to think that she had friends other than them, that she too had cool cousins in New York and family members she could trust with the contents of her bedroom.

And she was ashamed about everything else, too, every dumb decision she had made in possibly her whole life, and then Presley said “Siobhan?” and she realized she was kind of crying into the snow.

“I’m okay,” Siobhan said, “I’m okay, I’m fine.”

Ana reached out and touched Siobhan’s elbow. Her fingers were cold, but steady, and it did make Siobhan feel better.

“I think I’m gonna go look for food,” Siobhan said. She hadn’t realized she was going to say it until she did, but it felt right. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t just lie down and try to sleep through another night that looked exactly identical to the day.

“Okay,” Xian said. She pushed herself onto her elbows and tried to brush some of the snow off her shirt. “We’ll come with you.”

This was how they got into all kinds of world-ending trouble, but Siobhan supposed there were worse things.

She didn’t think she could get any words out if she tried, so instead she reached out and helped Xian get the snow off her shoulders.

Ana’s ankle didn’t hurt much anymore, but Presley still stoically bore the task of giving her a piggyback ride. Ana liked this arrangement because Presley would kneel down and wait for Ana to loop her legs around her waist and then she would say, with all the seriousness of a soldier about to pull the knife from his dying comrade’s stomach, I’m going to do it, get ready, get ready, and then she would stand up.

They didn’t have a direction, and none of them were entirely sure which way they had come from, so they were just kind of walking. Most likely, they had already gotten turned around three or four times, but Ana was hoping it would eventually cancel itself out.

But then again, it probably didn’t matter whether they got anywhere new. Already, the snow had probably completely concealed their old campsite. Everywhere they stepped was a new world, fresh and footprintless. Packed with promise.

Presley and Xian were talking, but Ana was a little too tired to follow the conversation. Instead, she tried to catch Siobhan’s eye and silently communicate something deep and necessary to her. She didn’t know what that deep and necessary thing was, but she trusted Siobhan to figure it out.

They walked for a long time without finding any kind of break in the landscape. Ana let herself feel reassured by the steady rhythm of Presley’s footsteps below her, the slow thread of Xian’s voice. It almost felt like home, pacing circles around Siobhan’s trampoline or getting marched to the principal’s office for “disturbing the classroom environment.”

So of course, she was the last one to see the cave.

It looked a little like a wasps’ nest, fat and bulbous and buzzing from the inside out with a pale yellow light. Shadows stretched across the entrance, flickering in stop-motion. The cave, whatever else it meant for them, was inhabited.

Ana looked down at Xian, who tended to be the most genre-savvy of them all. But Xian wasn’t looking at the cave; she was staring into the sky with a look of abject terror on her face.

“Presley,” Ana said. “I think we should–”

Presley locked her arms around Ana’s ankles and took off running towards the cave.

Ana had to duck so they could get inside, pressing the side of her face against Presley’s crown of braids. Then, the light was everywhere, and she had to blink hard to disperse the pink clouds that spotted her vision.

“Oh my God,” Siobhan said from somewhere behind her.

Xian shuffled closer. “What is that?”

In the center of the cave, a candle had burned almost to a stub, giving off the unmistakable smell of pine. Behind it, half-submerged in the pool of light, lay some kind of abomination.

It was a wolf and yet it wasn’t, couldn’t be. It had thick white fur and a distinctly lupine body, but it had human hands, bent and weathered. An old woman’s hands.

Oh Grandmother, Ana thought, inanely. What big teeth you have.

And if it was dead, which it could very well be, it had not been dead for long.

As slow as the shifting of a tectonic plate, it lifted its head and opened one blazing eye. Ana understood with a jolt that it had known they were there the whole time, that it had been listening.

It surveyed them, looking very old and very tired. It locked eyes with Ana. Then it spoke, in a voice so gravelly and ancient that Ana had no problem believing that it had been here for as long as there had been a here to be.

“Kids come with two heads these days?”

“Yes,” Ana said automatically, because even in her mindless terror she had to indulge her favorite hobby, which was tricking old people into believing things about The Youth. “But only the ones who are on social media too much.”

Presley frowned so hard that Ana could feel it from her shoulders, like an earthquake. “That’s not true,” she said. “We’re two separate kids. Stacked on top of each other.”

Wolf Lady huffed and closed her eyes again, apparently done with the conversation.

“Hey!” Siobhan said. “Hey, ma’am, please–can you help us?”

“We fell down a portal,” Presley supplied. “We’ve been here four days, and we’re going to die here.”

Wolf Lady smiled. It was the smile of a rotting jack-o-lantern, and it showed a glint of teeth. “Not a bad place to die,” she said, almost to herself. “But most people deserve better.”

“Do you have food?” Xian had crouched down, like she was speaking to a sleepy child. “Or–or do you know how to get some?”

“No,” Wolf Lady said. “No. You don’t need to get food. You need to get out.”

Silence. Outside, the wind wailed.

“What happened here?” Xian asked. Her voice was tight, thin. “I found these–all these bones.”

“You what?” Siobhan said.

“War,” Wolf Lady said. There was something inarticulable in her voice, a kind of grief that had exhausted all other avenues and therefore had no choice but to live forever in this cave.

“They were huge bones.”

“Big war.” Wolf Lady opened her eyes again. “Maybe you’ve noticed it. Wasn’t the kind of thing you can get out of the carpet. You, two-headed one. Grab my specs.”

“Specs?” Presley said, confused, but Ana tapped her head and then pointed to one edge of the cave, where a pair of thin, cracked glasses had gathered what looked like years’ worth of dust and melted snow.

Xian was the one who picked them up, but she handed them to Ana. On some old impulse, Ana slid them over the bridge of her nose.

Immediately, the world exploded in a paroxysm of color, spreading across the four of them like an oil slick. Wolf Lady seemed to be the center of it, bleeding orange from every inch, but there was so much of it coming from everywhere that Ana had to pull them off again.

“You can use those to get home,” Wolf Lady said, in the tone that one might say you can use salt to improve this soup. “Find the portals. For the love of God, get out of here.”

Ana cradled them against her chest. Siobhan looked openly skeptical, but she hadn’t tried them on. Ana believed that the glasses could do whatever they had to. Could reach through time and bring them back to some soft, scared world where everything they needed was still in one piece.

“Are you coming with us?” Xian asked. Her voice had gone quiet again, the way it did when she already knew the answer. Like when she predicted the endings of movies, the sad, certain everyone dies.

Wolf Lady laughed. As strange and animalistic as the rest of her was, her laugh seemed very human. “A very, very long time ago, I worked at a place where the only rule was that the kids had to make it out okay. The rest of us–well, it depended on how the forest felt. But we made it a long time, on that rule. I’m not breaking it now.”

“Thank you,” Presley said. Every word out of Presley’s mouth had an incredible gravity to it even in the silliest of situations; now, Ana could hardly bear to hear it. “We’ll remember you forever.”

“Oh, don’t do that to yourselves,” Wolf Lady said. “My name is Rosie. Think of it every once in a while, and forgive yourselves for the rest.”

Outside, everything was degrees of white and black, the snow bracing itself against the sky. Presley’s stomach was a black hole, and the rest of her was so numb as to cave in on itself.

She took one of Siobhan’s hands and one of Xian’s. Ana reached down and squeezed her shoulder.

They began to walk, and across the end of the world, a portal blinked into being

#okay take 3 #lumberjanes #lumberjanes week #my writing #for context: this is yesterday's prompt which i accidentally posted on a sideblog at 4am

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manychocolatefactories · 4 years ago

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CatCF Milk Chocolate: Part 1, the kids

About this version: Milk Chocolate was inspired originally by a mix of the book, the vibes of the 1971 movie and the Tim Burton movie aesthetic. A bit more goofier and whimsical than the other versions. In term of era, I thought of it as a mix of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

In this version seven Golden Tickets are spread throughout the world, and each time one is found the same female reporter (her character is a reference to the musical) goes to interview the children. Another recurring joke is that while the hunt is going on for the Tickets, there are all sorts of ridiculous debates on television such as: do the Golden Tickets really exist, or is this just a hoax ? Do the Golden Tickets give cancer? Can animals go on a tour like humans? What happens if a Golden Ticket winner dies before the tour? Are the Golden Tickets linked to the rise of youht delinquence? Are the Golden Tickets a proof of Wonka's alleagiance to the obscure sect of the Golden Bird?

First Winner: Augustus Gloop

(Based on Augustus Gloop)

This Augustus was actually based on an idea Stained-by-the-sea allowed me to "borrow" a bit. Stained noted that Augustus always made him thought of this section from the movie "North", about Buck and the Texan parents. If you don't know what I am talking about, I'll leave links down there. And this is such a perfect matc I had to dig a bit down there.

This Augustus is basically a mix of all the archetypes associated with Texas and Nevada. But more precisely, he is basically "Buck" from North - a boy whose family (and his own mindset) embody the motto "bigger is better".

The Gloop family always thought that they should be "the biggest and the bests" and that "bigger is better". Ironically, the Gloop parents themselves are regular-sized people, but they clearly enforced this mentality on their son. Augustus is a big boy. Literally. He is tall, he is thick, he is fat, he is very, very big. He is probably one of the tallest, and definitively the largest boy on the tour (in fact, he once or twice gets stuck in the doors of Wonka factory). He eats ten meals per day, and we are not talking of regular sized meals. We are talking piles of ribs, kilos of potatoes, entire chickens... His parents also prepared for him a "big" and "best" future - paying the local sportive teams to claim he is a sports champion despite Augustus never setting a foot on a sports field, arranging his marriage with the local beauty queen of the state he lives in, already preparing the three different houses he will live with his fifteen kids... As a result, Augustus isn't just big and fat physically, he also has a massive and bloated ego. He thinks that he is the best at everything, and that he should have absolutely everything he wants.

The Gloops themselves are actually the masters of the state they live in, so to speak. They are the wealthiest and most influential industrials of the area: they built highways, casinos, hotels, private villas, they are cow-farmers, owing a lot of slaughterhouses, and also dig for oil and gold. They want their business to be the "biggest there ever was" and all they do is exaggerately big: their villas are enormous, their hotels are everywhere, their farms hosts several thousands cows, their mines are among the deepest in the world...

Trouble is that, due to their expansion and consumption of everything, they are a threat to the landscape and the environment - destroying forests to build their roads and buildings, drying out the lands to feed their farms... in fact, part of the reason why their state looks like the most desertic parts of Texas and Nevada is due to their actions.

Think... Buck from North. Think Art Land from Mar Attack. Think an evil (and obese) version of Clay Bailey from "Xiaolin Showdown". In fact, if I remember well in one episode Clay turns into a sumo for one of the Showdowns... this would probably be Augustus' appearance in this version: sumo Clay Bailey. (Edit: Yes, I checked out, it is episode 23 of the series).

Second Winner: Clarence Crump

(Based on: Clarence Crump)

Clarence didn't had any kind of personnality in the original drafts outside of a desire to prove he was right. As a result, I decided to have a lot of fun and create my own character.

The idea of vanity has already been touched several times with the other brats, but I wanted to give it its own character and kid. I also wanted to create a polar opposite of Augustus, denouncing the fact that being skinny can be just as bad as being fat when in excess. As a result, Clarence Crump is here a boy obsessed about being thin, and proud of being too skinny for his own good.

Mr. Crump is a pseudo-health guru that keeps writing phony and very dangerous diet books, the kind that will advice you to stop eating altogether to lose weight. As for Mrs. Crump, she is a beauty pageant champion (local and regional, and while she acts as if she was some national beauty champion, she always failed at nationals). From their union was born a child who inherited their vanity, pride and obsession with "health"

Black haired, very pale, very thin, very slender, to the point his bones show, Clarence delights in being skinny, and works as a teenager model promoting the "thin-fashion". He is also the embodiment of fat-shaming, never missing an occasion to insult fat people (in fact he often calls Augustus a big fat cow). He uses however the excuse of health for that (a trick his parents taught him) - promoting extreme thinness by talking about health and fat-shaming people in the name of health allows one to be much more horrible than normally accepted.

A good proof of how Clarence actually is just very vain and obsessed with being thin, and not at all defending health - Clarence condemns sports for being unhealthy, because according to him "muscles are unhealthy because they don't make you look beautiful, they make you look ugly".

He always wears short and black sleeveless tank-tops, the point being that he needs to show as much as his body to the world as possible, to be a "living example". He even wears his black short and tank-top during the tour (despite it being winte - the only thing he wears on top of his clothes to not get cold is a skunk fur coat).

Third Winner: Miranda Grope

(Based on: Miranda Grope)

This character was based on Dahl's own character of "Miranda Grope" from early drafts of the story, the horrible and atrocious girl allowed to do "whatever she wants".

In my version, the Grope parents are hippie-like people, the father having a very long beard and being covered in fleas, while the mother is covered in flowers and oss (plants that grew over her), and both always wearing rose-tinted glasses. They are the kind of parents that refuse authority and orders, seeing these (and social norms as a whole) as a "dictatorship". They prefer to trust their daughter to find her own way in the world, believing that experience is the best teacher in life. The result? They lazily raised her by telling her they would never forbid her anything and that she could do anything she wanted.

Miranda is a devilish little girl who does only what she wants, and becomes extremely violent when prevented from doing something. Or when people say something she doesn't want to hear. Or just when people she dislikes are near her. She shouts, the screams, she insult, she kicks, she hit, she throw enormous and terrifying tantrums. She has a very wide range of insults, and a truly evil mind : most of the things she wants to do are borderline crimes. It seems for her only chaos and destruction is "fun", a true little punk.

Miranda has a disastrous haircut because she cuts her hair herself, and she is always wearing the same clothes that she rarely washes): a white shirt, a blue sweater with long sleeves, and a plaid tiles skirt. An outfit that looks strikingly like a school uniform - but it is pure irony, because Miranda hates more than anything in the world school. She doesn't go to school, and the only time she went near one was to try to burn it down. (Her appearance is in fact based on Lauren Child's illustrations for Miranda, if you are wondering).

Fourth Winner: Veruca Salt

(Based on: Veruca Salt)

For this Veruca, I wanted to do something slightly different... here, Veruca doesn't want everything just because she is a spoiled rich brat. She is still one, but she is also the product of post-WW2 consumerism.

This Veruca was born surrounded by advertisements, logos, slogans and product placements. On television, in the streets, in shops, in journals, at the radio... She grew up with them and was influenced, brainwashed by them. As a result, she is obsessed with obtaining everything that was advertised, and she herelf looks like a walking billboard since she is covered in big, flashy logo and keeps reciting different brands' slogans and mottos. As soon as she sees something she saw publicity of before, she needs to obtain it at once. She is a true zombie, only hearing the call of the shopping mall and of the television advertisements.

One idea I had was that the Salt parents actually worked for (or where at the head of) a wealthy advertisement company, known to produce, design and create all kinds of famous publicities and slogans - and that they used their daughter as a guinea pig for their tests, and delighted in Veruca being so addicted to consumerism. In fact, they may have named her Veruca because at the moment of her birth they were working on advertisements for an anti-wart product, so that's all they had in mind.

Fifth winner: Herpes Trout

(Based on: Mike Teavee)

I went with this version of Mikee Teavee with the focus on "violence" already present in the original work, but also heavily used in the opera (and touched a bit in the 2005 movie).

This Herpes Trout is the embodiment of the fear of kids becoming violent upon watching television and playing video games (his only two passions in life). He has a true fascination with guns and firearms - US soldiers shooting aliens, gangs shooting each other, cowboys shooting at bandits, it's all he ever plays and watches. Herpes worships violence, and is absolutely obsessed with war (here I am thinking of all the wars present from the 60s to the 80s, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars...). War propaganda and the fight being glorifyed heavily influenced him - as a result his biggest dream is to go at war in some foreign country to kill everyone there and come home a hero.

Herpes comes from a family of rednecks and hillbillies from the deep country. They are not poor however, they are wealthy enough to have television and several video games, but they are uneducated people full of stereotypes, discrimination and hate. They named their son Herpes because they ignored what it meant but just thought of it as an "intelligent" name. Herpes has everal brothers and sisters, and all have a disease name.

Herpes himself is a big and strong kid, who followed body-buildings process a la Charles Atlas and military training, becoming impressively muscular. However, he retained a soft, childish and chubby "baby face", which kind of ruins the effect of this massive, muscular, almost adult body. Always dressed in a military outfit, he carries everywhere with him guns and firearms, the question being: are they real? Or are they not?

Sixth Winner: Violet Glockenberry

(Based on Violet Beauregarde)

I wanted with this version to take back the idea of a competitive and "sportive" girl obsessed with contesting and winning - introduced in the Tim Burton movie.

This Violet is a tall, muscular and strong girl. She won numerous sportive competitions, but this doesn't make her just arrogant and prideful like in the Tim Burton version. In my version she is also very aggressive and violent (a bit like in the original novel). She is a nasty and rude bully easily prone to anger (in fact, if she keeps chewing gum it is mostly to calm her down sot hat she doesn't punch everyone around). Her parents originally pushed her towards competitions to manage her anger issues, but sports only gave her more strength and destructive power. In fact, they became terrified of her, while she considers them losers here to serve her - she basically thinks of herself as self-made, literaly.

Seventh Winner: Charlie Bucket

(Based on: Charlie Bucket)

For this Charlie, I wanted to go with a Charlie similar to the original illustrations of the character: blond hair, blue eyes, a white boy...

Basically, he is the original Charlie. Very sweet, very innocent, a gentle kid, the best of the group.

However I changed slightly his background. Charlie in this version is not the grandson of four grandparents, but rather the big brother of four younger siblings - and his family here struggles with trying to feed five children (and a total of seven mouths) despite having very humble and low-paid jobs. I think Charlie has taken the role of a parentive figure for the siblings, but at the same time him spending so much time with young children helped him keep in touch with his "childish" side.

#charlie and the chocolate factory #catcf #milk chocolate #retelling #charlie bucket #violet beauregarde #mike teavee #augustus gloop #veruca salt #miranda grope #clarence crump

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moonsofmars-writes · 4 years ago

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From the darkness below (life can still rise)

Fandom: 七つの大罪 - 鈴木央 | Nanatsu no Taizai | The Seven Deadly Sins - Suzuki Nakaba (Anime & Manga) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Diane/Fairy King Harlequin Characters: Fairy King Harlequin, Diane (Nanatsu no Taizai) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff, One Shot, king feels guilty about lots of stuff, diane doesn't like that, king and diane dancing!, Dancing, Romantic Fluff, Zine, written for the SPECTRUM zine

Summary: King visits the ruins of the old Fairy King's Forest for the first time in years. The last time he went there he was a criminal and racked with guilt, and he couldn't do anything to save the forest. But this time, Diane is with him. And this changes everything.

Notes: here’s my piece for the Spectrum zine @spectrumnntzine ! I got the prompt “black” and wrote some Kiane. King suffer a little here but luckily, Diane is with him.

Enjoy!

When he lands, a cloud of ashes and dirt rises from the ground. King clenches his mouth as dust covers his shoes and pants with a thin dark layer, then starts to fall, slowly, to the earth. Around him, the ground is covered with black mud and rubble, all that’s left of what were branches and leaves. King shivers and forces himself to look around, letting his eyes wander over the desolation surrounding him. The burned forest hasn’t changed since last time he was here. Somehow, the trees still stand, raising their slender branches to the sky. The wood is dark and dry, and King feels like it would crumble into ashes under his fingers if he touched it. Below, the twisted roots sink into the arid ground. Dirt and cinder cover the earth, almost obscuring the spider-web of cracks stretched across it. In his mind, the resemblance is disturbingly fitting. After all, this wasteland is a place of death and misery - death of the vegetation that once ruled it, death of the wildlife that made its home here, death of the Fairies he failed to protect. The place is the rotting cadaver of his beloved forest. Nothing but a monument to his own failure.

“Harlequin?” Diane’s voice is as soft as the gentle touch of her hand on his cheek. He breathes in and looks down to meet her eyes, loosening his grip on her. He was holding her tighter than he realized.

“Sorry,” he mutters as he buries his face in her hair. It feels nice and smells like flowers and hills, and it gives him an excuse to look away from the grim landscape around them.

Her head shakes slightly as she answers, “I’m fine - are you alright?”

Continue on AO3

He swallows before glancing around again. The scrawny trees look back at him like a jury of the dead. There used to be colours in their bark - light and dark brown, red, grey - sometimes almost invisible under the green mass of moss. There used to be colour in the earth where their roots sink - the light green of the grass, the hundreds of shades of the flowers; and in the air too, where butterflies flaunted their vibrant wings and birds flew from branch to branch with a beat of their vivid feathers. Nothing is left. King imagines them melting together as the fire consumed the forest, leaving behind only this nauseating, burned black.

“Yes,” he answers slowly, looking away, “I’m fine, don’t worry.”

Diane raises an eyebrow but says nothing as he lets her go. She eyes her surroundings, a hint of uneasiness in her violet gaze. Not for the first time, King wonders why she insisted on coming with him. He told her it wasn't necessary, that the sight was hardly worth the trip, but he knows better than pushing her when she makes up her mind. She can be very stubborn, he thinks, a faint smile curving his lips.

Truth be told, he doesn’t know why he wanted to come here. The new Fairy King's Forest is home now. He knew nothing waited for him here. Yet the desire to return had been growing in the back of his mind since the war ended until it was impossible to ignore. Maybe, he admits to himself as some he takes hesitant steps between the trees, he hoped something had changed. When he last came, he was still a traitor, wanted by the kingdom for a crime he didn't commit. Even to him, it feels like ages ago. It was easy to convince himself that it was worth visiting if just to check whether some semblance of life had returned. But on the ground he sees no sprout, and on the trees, no leaves. The entire place looks frozen in time, framed in the aftermath of its destruction. King clenches his jaw as he approaches a tree. After a moment, he finds the courage to touch its trunk. It doesn’t crumble under his fingers as he feared, but he can feel no life within its burned shell. It’s only a matter of time before it rots, leaving no trace of its existence but ashes scattered on the ground.

“We should leave." His voice sounds stiff and low, but he is grateful it's not trembling.

“Oh? But we just got here!” He hears Diane’s approach behind him, her soles crushing tiny pieces of burned wood. “Didn’t you want to take a look around?”

He shakes his head. “It’s useless. I … I was hoping that I would have been able to fix this, now that my wings have grown,” he admits, finally turning towards her. "But this place is ... well, look at it. It’s dead. If anything survived, if only a single bud sprouted, I could help it grow, but I can't bring what is dead back to life.” If he could, he thinks bitterly, he wouldn’t have lost so much, would he?

With his foot, he traces a line in the dirt. It stains his shoe with sludge, black like the charred wood and the burned bones he knows he will find if he looks well enough between the roots. Some are so tiny and thin and can’t come but from small animals. Others are bigger and King doesn’t even want to think who they belonged to.

"It was foolish of me to come here - and to bring you with me,” he mutters. “I should know by now that I can't erase my mistakes."

Diane gasps and King closes his mouth, pressing his lips together, though he knows he can’t take his words back. She hates it when he speaks like that about himself. He glances at her and tries to find something to say as he waits for her to berate him. But she doesn’t speak. She stands silently instead, her head tilted and teeth sinking in her bottom lip; she stares at him with thoughtful eyes, then, suddenly, she moves. King's brow furrows as he watches her walk around, eyes fixed on the ground. Near a tree, she stops and taps her foot on the soil, once, twice, making the dust lift and float. King hesitates, unsure how to ask what she is doing, and his eyebrows rise suddenly when she crouches and reaches for the earth with her hand.

"Diane! You shouldn't touch -"

"Of course you can't erase your mistakes," she says without looking up, "that's not how it works."

King sucks in air and closes his mouth, baffled. That’s … not how she usually answers him, when the argument comes up. The change doesn’t quite upset him, though he feels his stomach clench. She loves him, but if she starts to see how much a failure he was -

"But you can't deny," she continues, pressing her palm against the dark soil, "that you’re trying. You are doing what you can to be a good king, and you are Harlequin. I, our friends, your people, everyone thinks so. Yes, you made mistakes in the past, but you’re trying to make sure nothing like this will happen again. This is the only thing you can do, now.” When she turns towards him, a little smile has formed on her lips. “And anyway, you’re wrong. You can help this forest.”

King frowns. “No, I can’t."

Maybe she can't feel the sense of death that filters through the cracks on the trees' bark, but she is not blind. Her bond with the earth must be telling her there is no hope for this place.

"You know I can't revive these plants," he says through his teeth. "There is no life left inside them, I ... checked, the first time I came here." Those moments are etched in stone in his mind - fear and disbelief taking his breath away, his mind refusing to process what he saw, to acknowledge it was real. He looked for his sister first, then for the other Fairies, and when he couldn't find anyone he had examined the plants, stumbling from one to the other, desperately looking for something alive. "Nothing survived the purgatory fire," he finishes, bitterly.

Diane hums softly before beckoning him with her hand. "Come here,” she orders.

King frowns as he walks towards her, curious to see what caught her attention; as soon as he is close enough, she grabs his hand and pulls him to crouch at her side.

“You have to stop blaming yourself for everything that happened here,” she whispers. “It’s distracting you.”

“How can I?” His eyes drop to the dirt that now stains their shoes and calves. "I was the king of this forest and I left it unprotected." He smiles bitterly, shaking his head, "I can't even bring myself to regret it. I couldn't abandon Helbram and - and leaving led me to you," he adds softly. "No, I could never regret my decision. But when I remembered, when I realized that I abandoned my people for centuries, I chose to stay away. I thought it was for the best to surrender myself to the humans and take the blame for what Helbram did. The truth is that it was an easy option.” He swallows, feeling like there is dust in his throat. “One that didn't require me to face my people after I failed to protect them, after I left them, after what I let happen to Helbram -"

“Harlequin.” Diane’s grip on his hands becomes tighter. “Look at me.” Reluctantly, he meets her gaze. Her eyes burn like violet flames. “You know you had to stay. You told me.”

"If I came back -"

"You would have had to fight a war against humans. Many people would have died - more than the ones who lost their lives in the fire. You would have brought death here,” she gestures at the forest around them, “to your people, and to the humans who would have fought you. You saved lives when you decided not to come back.”

“But I should have been here to fight that Demon!”

“You couldn’t know about the Demon.” She squeezes his hands tighter, so abruptly that he has to hold back a groan. “You did what you had to stop what was threatening your home. You acted like a king.”

He wants to object, to insist he should have done better, he should have found a way to keep everyone safe and give the humans the justice they demanded. It takes just a moment to realise that he can’t. Diane is right. It’s not the first time he’s thought about this and reached the same conclusions, but this time they feel more … real. Not like simple excuses he is trying to make up to absolve his crimes.

“I … know”, he whispers, “but my sister died because of my decision. If Ban hadn't revived her ...”

“But he did. You can’t keep tormenting yourself over what was in the past, Harlequin. Elaine is alive and happy, and so are the Fairies and the Fairy King’s Forest - and that’s what you should focus on. What it is, not what it isn’t anymore.” She smiles at him. “You have to accept that you can’t change the past. But you can protect the present.”

King stares at her, the grip on his chest finally loosened a little. The guilt is still there, heavy and bitter. He knows it will never go truly away. Maybe it's alright. Maybe with time, it won’t feel like a burden to drag him down, but a push to do better. So that there won’t be more burned forests and lost lives.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, releasing a long breath as he lifts their joined hands to kiss her knuckles.

Diane beams before reaching for him; the touch of her lips on his own is quick as a beating of wings. She is gone before King can even think to kiss her back, then, still holding his hand, she murmurs, "Will you look into the earth, now?"

"The ... earth?" He blinks, tilting his head, cheeks still flushing for the kiss. "The - the roots have burned as well. I can't feel them, Diane. They’re dead too."

She shakes her head. "No, I mean - under here," she says, pressing his hand against the ground with her own. "You have to look deeper. Please, just," she adds when he looks at her with uncertainty, "just try."

Under the dust, the ground is hard and coarse and feels nothing like the soft meadow that once covered it all. King hesitates, but when he glances at Diane she nods encouragingly, a spark of excitement in her eyes. So, he closes his eyes and lets his magic flow. When he uses Disaster, he can feel them clearly - the plants, their connection with each other and the ground, whether they are going to survive or if they need to be taken down to allow other plants to grow. When he does it in the Fairy King’s Forest, the wood awakens with whispers and lights everywhere around him, the entire forest pulsing with life.

But here, King feels nothing. The world around him is silent and dark as a starless sky. Nothing seems to answer his call. Clenching his jaw, he keeps looking; Diane wouldn't be making him do it without a reason. She felt something, and now he just has to look long enough to -

It's there. His eyes snap open, but his mind stays focused on the tiny spark of life hidden in the depths of the earth. It’s a seed, King realises, and it’s not the only one. There are others around it, here under him, but also in the surroundings, under every scrawny tree. He looks up, eyes wide, and Diane grins at him.

"You saw them! I think the earth preserved them from the fire. There is still life in this forest.”

“But it's too deep," King breathes, "they are still alive, but they won't reach the surface and grow if we leave them there."

“Then we won’t. We are going to get them out.” Suddenly, Diane is holding both of his hands, looking at him with determination. "Dance with me."

It takes only a moment to understand what exactly she means. He can make the seeds into buds and trees, but with feet and feet of ground separating them from the soil, it will be easier if the earth opens for them.

"Of course," he says as they stand up together. Sliding one of her hands from his, she starts.

This is not by any means the first time they’ve danced together, nor the first time they have combined their powers like this. Yet King feels clumsy and stumbles on his feet as he follows Diane's smooth movements. She doesn't say anything and continues to dance, adapting her movements to his and giving him time to pick up the pace. His throat feels dry, his chest tight - he is nervous, more than any other time, maybe because he needs to make this right, to give this place another chance to live after he failed his duty to protect it.

He breathes in, out, trying to calm the pulse of his heart, and stops thinking about his next step, his focus shifting to the seeds. They are there, tiny and weak, and he keeps looking for them, finding more and more. His magic gently envelops them and then pours inside them, growing them slowly. Around them, the earth opens, like lungs too long contracted and finally given the chance to breathe. King is only partly aware of the way the ground trembles under his feet, but he can feel Diane's magic radiating from it as she delicately pulls the seeds outwards using her control over the earth. They are still dancing, their bodies finally moving in harmony, and when Diane pirouettes in his arms their hands touch oh so slightly - and under them, the seeds keep growing and rising until they are emerging from the ground like tiny green stars on the dark soil. King doesn't stop though, not yet, nourishing them with his magic, pushing them further - just a little more, till they will be strong enough.

And then they stop. King gasps for air, his eyes snapping open; Diane's face is inches from his, her body in his arms with their hands still connected. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes feverish, but she is grinning widely as she whispers, "We did it."

She is right. All around them, among the dead trees, saplings raise their thin branches to the sky and tiny bushes cover their roots. They are not many, yet, but it's a start. A laugh escapes his lips and he takes Diane's face into his hands before kissing her, again and again; he can feel her laugh too against his lips.

Before they leave, Diane carefully shapes the earth so that the wood will have enough water to grow while King finally lets the old trees decompose. They turn into dust under his power almost gratefully, as they were waiting for it. Part of him can’t help but mourn them, as he mourns the times he used to fly between their branches with his sister - and Helbram and Oslo and all the friends he lost. He will hold the memories dear in his heart, but finally, he thinks as the last tree crumbles into ashes, he can let this place go.

He turns back only once as he flies away with Diane in his arms. The wood looks so young, so different from the forest where he grew up, but that’s fine. It will grow into something new - something that will survive, he promises to himself. Even the earth looks healthier and softly embraces and supports the new trees, though its pitch-black colour remains. But ... maybe it’s the green of the new leaves, maybe it’s the fact that his heart is much lighter than when they arrived, but as he looks at it, King feels for the first time like the darkness of the dirt doesn’t mean death. It means life.

#nnt #nanatsu no taizai #the seven deadly sins #king harlequin #kiane #diane #nnt king #nnt diane #nnt fanfiction #spectrum zine #zine #mars-writes #why do i like making this poor fairy suffer?#but at least he got better before the end

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littleredlie · 4 years ago

Text

chaos - part one

chaos masterlist

1.5k+ words

“you don’t smile anymore,” she cups his cheek while her heart shatters to pieces, her dark brown eyes can no longer recognizing the green-eyed man that sat in front of her. “i miss your smile.” a sob dares to escape from her throat, a single tear drips down to their conjoined hands where his grip is strong and his thumb absentmindedly caresses her soft skin. she is meddling with the barely used hair tie that adorned his wrist, the one she gave him.

who was he? she didn’t know.

his eyes look empty, sad, angry, lonely, dark, all in one and it tore her apart. this was not the man she met three years ago. this was not the man she fell in love with.

“i miss you eren,” she whispers as the hum of the blimp vibrates around them. the skin of his constrained hand is cold contrasting her warm skin, which she gained from whipping around in the air for the mission they just fulfilled. the chaos of their actions dying down as they got further and further away from marley and eren’s destruction.

the couple was on one side of the room they were in, but she knew that she didn’t have much time left to talk to him. it was only a matter of seconds before hange came out of the cockpit or levi walked back over from the hushed conversation he was having with armin and mikasa. the highly skilled soldier wasn’t even that far but he wanted to give the two young adults a little space as much as possible. but it wasn’t like her lover was talking.

her darker hands abandon his touch and she stands, taking a few steps back. zeke yeager’s body finally comes into her vision and she could tell that he was listening. but she ignores him. despite eren’s plan and his importance, she did not like him. she probably got that from levi. yelena stood in between the yeager brothers, but she avoids looking the tall woman in the eye.

“i would like for you to come back,” hesitantly, her hand raises from her side to tuck a strand of his hair behind his ear. he looked like a damn mess but to her, he looked so beautiful. and she knew it was because she hadn’t seen him in so long.

the titan marks were slowly disappearing off of his face and when she pulled her hand away, her fingers grazed them softly. this caused him to finally look up at her and her full lips deliver him the smallest of smiles. he could see the small teardrops decorating her black skin and the way her eyes were filled with worry. worry for him.

before either of them could say something, levi walks over and she distances herself from the titan shifter, firmly placing himself beside the man who was shorter than her. “you should go check on your brother.” the older man says, his eyes looking at eren but addressing her. he wanted her to leave, because he knew that her admiration for eren would cloud her judgement. he already witnessed the great strength she had to use to restrain herself when he kicked eren earlier.

“okay,” she softly says, her hands clutching the bandage that was wrapped around her hand and up her right arm, blood staining the white fabric. “you would think that after all the couple of years you spent training me, i would get out of this unscathed.” the horrors of the night flash behind her eyes and she shuts them tight. so many bodies, so much blood, so much chaos.

“get better before you die.” levi bluntly answers and she looks at him to find him looking at her. she gives him a firm nod and walks towards the cockpit door. before she enters she looks back and sees eren sitting, watching her walk away while levi is still looking down at him, a steely look stamped onto his face.

she opens the door and steps in. her eyes cast on the floor as she walks closer into the cockpit. her distracted mind causes her to run into hange who is overlooking onyankopon’s ability at flying the blimp. “i’m sorry hange.” she rushes out, her heart hammering in her chest. the brunette scientist lays a hand on her shoulder and grins.

“no need to look so scared, i’m not going to throw you off the blimp,” that brings a smile to both of their faces. hange could see the weathered down look on her face because they also could see the obvious affection that she displayed towards eren. when he disappeared behind enemy lines, the worry manifested in her actions, and now hange didn’t know what eren’s actions would push her to.

“of course.” slightly bowing her head, she then continues to her destination and hange continues working.

“onyankopon, how long do you think it’ll take to get back to paradis?”

“a few hours.” her brother looks out to the landscape below, the hum of the blimp is louder there. “how are you doing, nyame?”

“i don’t know, kopo.” she sits in the seat to his right, assisting him with some of the buttons. “did you know he’d do this? did yelena?” her brother is quiet for a while, but nyame doesn’t say anything that could possibly accuse him.

“everything will be alright.”

“will it?” she whispers, her mind going back to times where everything was better. times where she would find her stare lingering on eren and those private and secret moments the two would find together. shy and hesitant kisses and hand holding. what has she gotten herself into?

her hand passes over her thick hair, there is blood matted into it and it disgusts her. taking the hair tie from her wrist, she wraps the curls oh her head into a bun as best as she could. the quick movements of her hands was a technique that she learned from sasha, someone who always had her hair up. nyame used to always have her hair down, but when she started learning how to use the odm gear, sasha advised that she either cut it or put it up in a practical design.

the braids must have come undone when she had to thwart the flying obstacles thrown by the beast titan. the thought reminds her of the throbbing pain emitting from her right arm. her movements were sloppy when they were put under the test of speed and it caused for her throw her body onto sharp debris. connie had helped her bandage the wound as soon as she landed in the blimp. but what she really wanted to do was discard of the black and white uniform that she still had on and wash off all the grime that was present on her body.

“don’t think like that, nyame.” her brother gives her a soft look, the only comfort he could give his little sister at the moment. “but hopefully next time you’ll listen to me when i say don’t join the military.” the teasing pulls out a chuckle from both of them.

“i had to make sure you weren’t gonna go and get yourself killed. but it all wasn’t so–” nyame’s interrupted by a commotion coming from the room she was previously in. her and her brother’s eyes meet and he gives her a nod, getting her to move out and see what it was. she moves around hange, who’s focusing on something else, and towards the door.

when she is back out there, jean is at the entrance, clutching the bodies of two bruised children. “who are these brats?” nyame is able to catch as she steps further into the room, the door to the cockpit closing slowly behind her.

“they killed lobov and used his equipment to board the ship,” there is a slight anger accompanied by sadness and nyame feels as if there is more to the story. “and then... this girl shot sasha. i don’t think there’s any hope for her...” the last of his words got softer and softer, as if falling into a void where he hoped that what he said would become false.

at that mikasa and armin run past the trio and out to where they last saw sasha. nyame hesitates, not knowing if she would be allowed to grieve with them. sure, she had gotten close to them over the years but she was still an outsider. she looks to eren and he has a look of shock on his face. but she couldn’t decipher him, which saddened her even more. and without a second thought, nyame also leaves the room, chasing down her comrades.

the sight that was introduced to her eyes is a heartbreaking one. connie passes by her towards the room she just came from. she can see the tears swimming down his face and the tension on his forehead. mikasa and armin are crying and screaming beside their fallen comrade.

sasha is gone.

all nyame can do is stare. her heart slows and her hands clenched into fists ignoring the pain that radiates from the action. her vision gets blurry as tears begin to silently escape. the sound of screams overcoming the sound of her thoughts. a pressure begins to grow in her chest and she realizes that it is her heart breaking even more. staring at the scene before her, disbelief grows at her brother’s words. everything will be alright.

and in a harsh whisper, while looking at the empty eyes of sasha braus, nyame proclaims it. “will it, kopo? because i don’t think it will.”

____________________________________

A/N okay, so this fic idea has been on my mind since i watched sasha’s death and we met onyankopon (it was easier to add another black character, not like that will stop me). and i am fucking obsessed with eren and levi. i will continue this cause i fucking love this anime/manga. i will be following closer to the manga though, so like yeah. i also had a short reiner fic in mind, but that won’t be a series like this one will be. let me know what you think

part two

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