#I’m only just now noticing I got the eyes wrong on the not warriors icon?

[zodistars]

Awareness Knifht (and a friend!)

some commissions for my friend from a while ago :)

[ab1tofsp1ce]

A Warmer Refuge

Chapter 6: The Bearer of my Stories

Masterlist HERE

A/N: Hi everyone! I’m in the process of getting a masterlist together, which I’ll hopefully post soon. Also, I’m totally open to requests etc if anyone’s interested :)

Pairing: Din Djarin x Fem!Reader

Words: 2.5K

Warnings: Angst, fluff and brief mentions of violence

I was sitting on a crate in the hold when the Mandalorian came down from the cockpit, the ship safely in hyperspace. I was leaning up against the wall of the ship next to the ladder, staring at the wall opposite me and trying to catch my breath and slow my heartbeat. He climbed down the ladder and stood at the bottom next to me, watching me but clearly giving me a moment to regain my composure.

“You did well,” he said when I finally looked up at him. “That was quick thinking, with the dagger.”

“I’m glad you gave it to me,” I admitted with a breathy laugh.

“So much for not knowing how to use it,” he said, with a slight smug note to his voice. He suddenly seemed to stiffen up, catching sight of something on me. I realized it was my hands, and this sudden reminder of them made me feel the pain they were in. I looked at them, seeing they were even more scraped and bruised than they had been before.

“I’m – I’m sorry. That was my fault, I threw you too hard.” He strode past me to a cabinet in the wall, which he took a medpack from before bringing it back over and kneeling in front of me.

“No, it’s okay,” I said, trying to get the words out without letting them be swallowed by my nerves. “You did what you had to do. You acted very quickly.”

He took my right hand and sprayed it with a bacta spray. “Not fast enough,” he murmured.

Maybe it was just the shock, but my mind retreated far away from everything, only focusing on what his face must’ve looked like under his helmet. More often by the day I found myself asking this question. If I was less flustered and overcome I may have winced at my shamelessness in this moment. But right now, I saw nothing else. The pain, the sound of the ship, the trembling of my body, the blaster shots ringing in my ears, it all faded away like white noise, and all I felt was his ungloved hands on mine. Maybe he noticed the sudden steadiness of my hand, or felt my gaze on him, because he looked up from his work at me. It sent a shiver down my spine, as he looked at me in that way he always did – expecting an answer to a question he didn’t even need to ask.

“Déjà vu,” I explained, gesturing with a gentle nod of my head to the way he was kneeling in front of me, working on my wounds. He looked back down at my hands with a quiet chuckle.

“For the record,” I began, “I was incredibly impressed with your speed. You saved my life. And how were you supposed to know there would be more of them?”

“The language those crooks were speaking was Huttese,” said the Mandalorian, not looking up from his work.

“Which… you understand?”

He finished bandaging my left hand before he looked up at me. “Poorly, but yes.”

I gave him a reassuring smile, trying to soften the harshness of his tone. I could hear it; he felt guilty. But my hands would heal, and so I felt anything but resentment. I was impressed, actually, that he played along so well. I never would have guessed he knew what they were saying.

I wished I had the strength to tell him how I felt; how grateful I was that, despite this messy, mournful, and painful life I was living, I was glad that I had him.

I must’ve dazed out again, because when I came back to my senses he was walking over to a room at the front of the hold. He stood with his back to me for a moment, before looking over his shoulder. “I’m going to rest for a bit – now we’ve got the chance. Let me know if you… need anything.” Then the doors slid open and he disappeared through them, leaving me on the floor with a slowly elevating heart rate.

There was something about water that helped me think clearly; maybe it was because the water washed away all the other distractions, or that the sound drowned out everything else. Admittedly, it wasn’t often that I got to use a shower on Yak’ish Temeen, so I reveled in the feeling knowing that I shouldn’t waste the water, and allowed myself a moment alone with my thoughts.

I reflected on what I had thought before – that if I had the strength, I would tell him how I felt. Which was ridiculous, right? What was there to feel? We were… he was a business acquaintance, at best. He does a few mutual favors and shows you a sliver of human decency and you…? There’s nothing to consider, I thought, because I don’t feel anything. And even if I… even if I did, I’m going to stop this stupidity right here, right now. The last thing I need right now is to be disoriented by… whatever I was feeling. Which was nothing, I thought decidedly. From this moment, I was going to feel nothing.

I dressed in fresh clothes before taking a moment to look in the mirror. With my hair wet and face clean I looked almost like a different person. And I felt like one, too – compared to who I had been just a week ago. I pressed my fingers to my cheeks, stretching and molding my skin almost as a grounding exercise. But my brain was empty, devoid of anything else. It was the first time in a long time I was unsure of my feelings – I’d spent so long feeling so obviously grief-stricken and scared that I almost didn’t know how to function without that actively looming over me. I gave one last sigh at my reflection.

I didn’t see him for almost a day after. I spent most of my time in the cockpit, except for when I got sick of seeing the stars whiz past in beams of light, and so went into the hull. During this time, I forced myself not to think about him, even going as far as to indulge in my grief if it meant distracting myself. But he didn’t stay in his small room forever.

It was the sound of his boots clunking up the stairs into the cockpit that woke me up from my nap. I was in the passenger’s seat, curled up and probably drooling slightly, and quickly regained my composure as he walked past me and to the navcom.

“How are we going,” I asked, still groggy from my sleep.

“Good. Still on track. And the ship isn’t falling apart. You did a good job with the repairs.” I felt my heart beam at the praise.

“Although,” he said, analyzing a screen in front of him, “I think there’s something wrong with the thermoregulator of the hyperdrive navigational system.” I felt my pride being swallowed at those words, but I ignored the feeling and stood up to look at what he was gesturing to. It was nothing serious, a small little flashing icon on the dash that warned of a protentional overheat. He turned his head to me, still leaning on the dash. “Do you think you could take a look at it?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said. “It shouldn’t take long.” I lingered for a moment, hoping he would offer to come down with me. But all he said was “thanks, let me know if you need help,” before sitting down in the seat behind him.

It took me all of five minutes to fix the fuse that was broken, taping up it’s a small tear and putting away the tools afterward. But, as I did so, I found myself drawn to the doors at the front of the hull – the room where the Mandalorian had locked himself up in for the past day. Once everything was packed up, I walked over to the door, hesitating with doubt. Well, he never said I wasn’t allowed in there. In fact, he mentioned nothing of the sort, and curiosity was getting the better of me. So, I pressed the button at the side and the doors slid open.

The room was surprisingly bigger than I would’ve thought – probably about the same size as the cockpit. Opposite the door was a large locker, and on the right was a small bed built into the wall of the ship. There were some crates lying around, mostly empty, and that was really all. I suppose it was a bedroom of sorts. I walked over to the locker, and it sprung open, frightening me. It was full of weapons – blasters of various shapes and sizes, grappling hooks, and a whole number of other machines I couldn’t recognize, let alone name. It sent a shiver down my spine – I wondered how many living things had been killed with the items in this room. I shut the locker quietly.

I looked over the bed, which wasn’t made, and something folded between the sheets caught my eye. I went over and pulled it out to see it was a book, a real one made of paper with a thick brown cover. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen a book before, obviously, but I was aware that they were becoming less and less common – even amongst us Gra’tanars, who usually avoided excessive technology. When I opened it, however, it was in a language I’d never seen before, made of thin, sharp lines in neat horizontal lines.

“It’s Mando’a,” said a voice behind me, and I spun around with a yelp, almost toppling over into the bed. The Mandalorian was leaning against the door frame, watching me expectantly as I stood there in absent-minded shook. “Oh, right! The book!” I said, catching my breath. I put it down hastily. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

He seemed to take no notice of my stuttering, walking over to me coolly and picking up the book from where I had discarded it. He was beside me now, close enough that I could’ve sworn I heard his breath through the modulator of his helmet.

“I don’t get to speak it very often anymore,” he said, staring at its cover. “It’s nice to… to read it.”

“What’s it about?” I tentatively turned to face him more. He didn’t look at me.

“Legends, mostly,” he said. “Stories about our people, our best warriors.” I scanned his face. There was something melancholy in his voice, that stung of pain and loss. I knew from just that tone that he was as equally alone in the world as I was.

“Teach me something,” I said. He looked up at me with what I imagined was an expression of surprise. Then, unexpectedly, he let out a light chuckle.

“Okay. Let’s see, we can start simple. Su cuy’gar.” The sound of that word sent a shiver down my spine. The language thickened his voice, making it sound even deeper than it had before. I swallowed hard.

“Su – Su cuyargar…”, I managed.

“Close, close – try again. Su cuy’gar.” He said it slowly for my benefit.

“Su cuy’gar,” I said.

“Good. Well done.” He had turned to face me now, and I was acutely aware of how close he was standing to me.

“What… what does it mean?”

“Hello,” he answered, settling on the bed. I sat next to him, slowly. I was aware how there was an underlying discomfort in this gesture – he wasn’t used to this intimate civility. Frankly, neither was I.

“Teach me another,” I said, more confident now. “Vor Entye,” he said, almost hypnotizing me. “Thank you.”

“Vor Entye,” I repeated.

“N’eparavu takisit.”

“N’eparavu takisit.”

“It means ‘sorry’,” he clarified. “Ret’urcye mhi.”

“Ret – Ret’urcye mhi,” I said slowly. “What does that mean?”

He paused for a moment. “Goodbye.”

My heart fluttered. I stared at him, at the small gap of a visor in his helmet, searching it hungrily. I wished he felt more familiar.

“Let me teach you something in return,” I said, adjusting my position to face him more.

“I didn’t know Grat’anarians had a language,” he admitted.

“It’s mostly derelict now,” I admitted. “Only really used in traditional ceremonies or rites. But we all had to learn it growing up.

“Okay,” he said. “Go ahead.”

I thought for a moment, searching my mind for the most meaningful words I could think of. “Jet’ach,” I said.

He repeated it flawlessly, putting my previous stuttering to shame, then looked at me expectantly. My gaze fell to my lap because the sound of him saying that word, a word no one had called me in what felt like a lifetime, pulled something in my chest and I had to fight to suppress the tingling of my eyes. “My grandfather called jet’ach,” I explained. It was hard to find the words to elaborate.

“What… what does it mean?” He was so cautious, so sensitive in the way he asked, that I could’ve sworn he wasn’t wearing his helmet.

“It roughly translates to ‘the bearer of my stories’,” I said shakily. “He called me that because – because I’m the one who will tell others about his life when he’s gone. It’s a very – a very important role bestowed by the patriarch to the eldest child… a responsibility that I owe to his memory.” I felt the tears well up in my eyes. “I just don’t know if I… if I have the strength to tell them. I’m such a… a disappointment,” and my voice cracked on that word. Tears slowly slid down my face.

He reached up, cupping my face in his hand and shifting my eyes to his. I was so taken aback I lost my breath, and he held my face there as he spoke.

“I couldn’t think of a person in this universe who would be disappointed to have you as their granddaughter.”

My body turned to water, and I could feel the blood wash through my body. I couldn’t even stop the next words tumbling out of my mouth.

“I wish I could kiss you.”

Maybe I should’ve felt embarrassed at how easily and brashly I said it, but I couldn’t find it within me to feel any regret. I felt a hundred pounds lighter.

The Mandalorian drew his hand away from my face, and I felt my heart fall into my stomach. I just looked at me for a long, agonizing moment, and then he… he reached up to his helmet. Before I saw anything, and without even really thinking, I shut my eyes. I heard the sound of beskar thump on the metal floor, and I could feel his breath on my face.

“You… you don’t have to close your eyes,” he said, the sound of his voice, his real voice ringing in my ears. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

“I know,” I confessed, before realizing how rude my abruptness could be interpreted, so I added, “but it might be a bit weird if I was staring at you the whole time.”

He chuckled, sending electric shocks up my whole body that were only numbed when I felt his lips on mine. His lips were so soft, not like you’d expect, and warm, and when his tongue slipped into my mouth I couldn’t hold back my quiet moan.

When he drew back, he lingered close to my ear, and I shivered when he whispered that his name was Din. It made so much sense.

[theowriteswhatever]

Zuko Story With No Title Part 5

Hey guys! I really appreciate all your support for this story and hope I don’t disappoint those of you who are enjoying it. Thanks for reading!

-Your pal, Bubbles

I was all alone in the deep tunnels of the forgotten crystal catacombs and was extremely bored. I had tried every way to Sunday to find a way out and nothing was working. I wished more than ever that I was an earthbender, but I knew that wishing would change nothing. 

I would starve down here if nothing changed soon. My friends were spread all across the planet and I couldn’t just summon them unfortunately. 

I began to lose hope and sat down on the one rock I found that wasn’t covered in glowing blue crystals. I pulled my legs up to my chest and put my head down on my crossed arms.

I imagined the worst and couldn’t get it out of my head. I would die, my friends would lose to Azula, Ba Sing Se would fall, and the world would soon follow. Like a stupid pathetic domino. A weak domino compared with the strongest tap. And all because I was too stupid to realize what was really happening. I really couldn’t see how convenient it was that 3 Kyoshi Warriors came to protect us right now? I felt like an idiot. A soon-to-be-dead, end-of-the-world-causing, gullible idiot. 

Suddenly, a tunnel opened from above me and Zuko came tumbling down. He crashed to the floor and quickly sat up.

“You can’t treat me like this! I’m the prince!” He yelled at the Dai Li traitors. 

“Yeah, we know.” One yelled back before he slammed the tunnel closed once again. Zuko groaned in annoyance and pounded his fists into the dirt ground once just for good measure.

“Are you ok?” I asked in almost a whisper. I knew I was probably one of the last people he wanted to see right now, but it would be impolite to just stare. 

“Of course you’re here.” He muttered before pulling himself up and walking away. I stood up and chased him, because he was the only other person I had seen in a couple days and I truly wanted to make amends.  I grabbed his wrist and turned him around to face me. He finally saw the mark that Azula gave me and for a second, just one, he looked at me with pity. But he quickly changed it back to his regular scowl.

“I know you’re mad and you have every right to be, but if you would just listen-” I started, before being ironically interrupted.

“I don’t want to listen to you.” He seethed before turning to walk away again. I walked around him to stop him once again. I needed him to forgive me. To understand why I did what I did. I couldn’t die with him hating my guts. 

“You don’t have anything else to do down here, so you might as well.” He sighed and made a gesture with his hand to go ahead. I cracked a small smile at him and I could tell he was retraining himself from returning it.

“When I came into the slums looking like that, my intent was not to find you. But when I did, I stopped and decided to give it a shot. I truly believed that you deserved a second chance and someone to talk to. It’s obvious that you don’t have many people to open up to, other than your Uncle, and I just wanted to help.” 

“Why should I believe you?” 

“If I didn’t want to help, then I would have told everyone you were in town and would have gotten you arrested. But I didn’t. I never said a word to anyone and even risked getting in trouble to go see you. I care about you Zuko. You mean alot to me.” 

He looked at me and I finally saw his small smile return. I didn’t realize how much I missed that tiny smirk until I finally got it back. It was practically a cryptid. Rare, but the most amazing beautiful thing when you finally got to see it. 

But I didn’t just miss his smile, I missed him. I missed talking to him and sharing tea with him and laughing with him and simply existing with him. Everything seemed good again and I knew this was probably a bad thing, but I didn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.

I hadn’t even noticed that he had bent down to kiss me until he pulled away. It was too late to kiss back, but not too late to kiss him again.

“Did I do something wrong?” He asked quietly. I shook my head and he smiled once again.

I leaned up and kissed him again before he smoothly wrapped his arm around my waist. I could tell he was smiling and I couldn’t help but do it too. 

He finally took his lips away, but continued to lean his forehead against mine. I wrapped my arms around his neck and just stood there to look at his amber eyes as he looked at mine. His smile grew the widest I have ever seen and I giggled at how happy he is. 

“What is it?” He asked with a hint of fear and sadness.

“Nothing. I’ve just never seen you so happy.” 

“Don’t get used to it.” He sassed. I laughed again and he laughed a little too. We went back to silence when we heard footsteps approaching from around the corner and quickly let go of each other. 

Katara, Aang, and Iroh rounded the corner and smiles automatically grew on their faces. Katara and Aang ran towards me and wrapped me in a large bear hug. I wrapped my arms around them, but watched over Katara’s shoulder as Iroh wrapped Zuko in an identically large hug. 

We smiled at each other during our separate hugs but then quickly looked away when they pulled back.

“What happened to your face?” Aang asked. “And your arm.” Katara added as she grabbed my wrist to get a closer look. I hissed a little at the pain and Katara quickly let go. “Sorry.”

“It’s ok.” I said as I cradled my arm once again. “It was Azula.”

“She burned you?” Zuko and Katara angrily asked simultaneously. They exchanged a look of disgust before looking back at me. 

“Just a little.” I squeamishly answered. 

“Why?” Aang asked while coming closer to my face and inspecting it.

“I spit in her face.” 

Katara and Aang laughed and Zuko smiled. Even Iroh looked a little pleased at my answer. I guess even if we were “enemies” we could bond over our mutual hatred for that psycho.

“We need to get out of here.” Iroh announced. “It won’t be long before Azula and the Dai Li find out that we came to rescue you two.” 

We all nodded and let out murmurs of agreement before Iroh gestured for us to follow him. He led us through several little catacombs of beautiful blue crystals before we came to an opening with a beautiful waterfall on the other side. It must be the way out through here. We began to run through the clearing with Iroh close behind, before we were rudely interrupted.

“Going so soon? You’ll miss the fun part if you leave now.” That iconically evil conniving voice said from behind us. We turned around to be met with the evil witch herself along with her two henchmen. 

She gave us her signature evil smirk before turning to Zuko.

“Zuzu, don’t tell me you’re going with them. You know father would never even consider restoring your honor if you leave now.” Zuko gulped in thought, but only for a second before crystals shot up around Iroh trapping him in place. The Dail Li approached from the shadows and surrounded us.

“If you come with me, you’ll have all the love and honor you’ve ever wanted. You will be the prince once again and you will be glorified like the rest of us. Come back with us Zuko and live like a king.”

“Don’t do it Zuko.” Iroh warned.

Aang and Katara had made their way to the waterfall to escape, but I stood there and watched it go down. I wouldn't risk losing Zuko. Not when I just got him back.

“Zuko-” I began before a dome of earth was suddenly formed around me, trapping me in an air-tight chamber. “Zuko! Don’t do it!” I yelled, but I knew it was in vain. There was no way he could hear me. I couldn’t hear them. Just faint murmurs and possibly footsteps. 

I sat there in silence for who knows how long before the dome was gone. I was face to face with Zuko, but no longer with love in his eyes. He had only one thought on his mind and that was himself. Him and his stupid honor. 

He shot fire at me and I quickly dodged. I pulled water from the nearby lakes and extinguished everything he threw at me. I wouldn’t hurt him. But I wouldn’t let him hurt me either. He had already done that enough.

“Zuko, what are you doing?” I yelled as he continued to throw flames towards me. It was like he was a different person. Maybe 20 minutes ago his lips were on mine and we were smiling and happy. And now he was trying to kill me. 

Suddenly, a large flash of light spread through the room and I heard Katara scream. I looked to my right and Aang was lying on the ground lifeless. I had looked too long and Zuko pinned me to the ground. I knew he could kill me right then and there, but instead he just kept staring with flames swimming around in his hand. 

I mouthed the words “I’m sorry” before conjuring water from the lake and wrapping it around his waist. I threw him across the room into the wall before running over to Katara who was crying over Aang’s corpse. 

“Get out of here. I’ll hold them off!” Iroh yelled as he broke through from the crystals. He began to fight, but neither of us cared or paid attention. Katara picked Aang up and I used the water of the waterfall to fly us out. 

We made it to Appa after what felt like years and Sokka quickly climbed off in panic mode. Katara and I ignored him as we got Aang on to Appa and climbed on ourselves. Sokka climbed back on and continued to panic even as we flew away.

Katara took out her water tribe healing water and spread it across Aang’s back and held it there. He eventually woke up, but immediately passed out again after a few seconds. But that was all the reassurance we needed to know there was a chance he was alive. 

We flew over the burning and dying Ba Sing Se and I heard Sokka mutter something, but I didn’t care to listen. 

I watched the town as we flew away, knowing somewhere in there Zuko, the person that I thought I loved only an hour before, was acting like his same villainous self. I wanted to believe he was just confused and scared, but he made his choice.

I just didn’t expect it to hurt this much.

@vintageroses1014516 @rintheemolion @shephard17895 @aphrodites-perfume

[we-rate-tmnt]

I request: Leonardo. Please and thank you 🙏.

Idk if everyone loves Leo or if my header and avatar just remind everyone about this amazing blue boy. (This one’s super silly btw. I’m just sillier as time goes on. Character development I guess?) 

The iconic leador Leonardo (1987)

Bro idk why but I loved this Leo. I have a tiny memory, especially with this version but I clearly remember that I thought he was the funniest and the coolest. I mean, he had swords, what was I supposed to do as a 7-year-old. NOT like him??? Anyway, while Raph was the best at insult comedy, I think Leo had the best puns and punchlines. I really like how nonchalant this Leo is compared to his iterations, going along with really silly ideas and having fun along the way. But because of this, his leadership is a little forced at times, he seems like such a chill and fun dude that when he gets serious, I have to squint and ask ‘are you Leo? Or were you just putting on act a moment ago?’ Or my perception is entirely warped over time. Either way, good turtle boy, could have used some work tho. 5.7/10

Here comes grumpy lad wooo this is all read very monotone btw Fearless Leader (2003)

What. What the fuck happened. I was actually so confused when Leo turned really angry and serious and almost manic. I thought that episode when he popped into Casey’s window and was like ‘Hey bitch lets go beat the shit out of some lowlifes’ I was WOAH THERE BUDDY BACK UP BACK UP BACK TF UP. It was so sudden to me and when it was finally explained, it made some sense??? Like yeah, character development is great an’ all but this ain’t it chief. I can’t imagine what it was like having to wait for these episodes to release one at a time. Bc I watched every episode back to back on Youtube and I was genuinely bamboozled. But when you have an experience like that where guilt is weighing down on you from a situation you couldn’t control, it would’ve been HELLA HELPFUL to have at least a flashback, like a line saying ‘I was so useless!’ at BARE MINIMUM. Like right after Shredder is booted off to Planet Zula, Donnie would notice that Leo didn’t seem all that happy and would ask why and Leo would get upset and yell at Donnie saying that ‘You wouldn’t understand’, ‘You don’t know how I felt, how I feel because of that’, etc. Like you don’t even have to say he felt guilty or helpless, just give us something to grab onto. We’re merely six-year-olds who thought they could climb the YMCA rock wall in easy mode but instead the script riders harnessed us up on the hard one and wouldn’t let us come down until we rang the little bell at the top. I think that is the only problem I had with his Leo. The sudden change of calm and decisive to angry and irrational was so jarring that it felt unnatural without that crucial context. If you want a surprise reveal, at least hint at the reveal (like just about every Disney movie with their ‘twist’ villains) not wait until the very last moment. I think this might be my least favorite Leo and I think the season where he stood out the most and seemed the strongest was Fast Forward (Which was GOOD FIGHT ME), especially in scenes with Dark Leo, his clone. He sees so much of himself in Dark Leo but he also sees something he had once grasped (AKA the poorly written character arc, I CANNOT stress how bad I thought it was). Although, I honestly think he’s a really good character and he’s a pretty neat guy. However, this score is entirely held up by Fast Forward and his connection with Usagi, sword bros to the end of time. 3/10 (2 for FF and 1 for Usagi)

And now a Leo that makes me genuinely feel UWU Leo (2012)

I cannot stress how much I like this guy! Like his design is so appealing, his dedication, his obsession with Space Heroes, like I FUCKING LOVE IT. And everyone knows, that shit with Karai, at first when they didn’t realize they were related, I can let slide but kajsdflksadf what even like why did the writers feel the need to add in more ‘love interest’ implications like yuck yuck yuck. The only two interactions with Leo and Karai that I really like are when Leo defeats her using the healing hands technique and when Leo has a goth/emo/punk/idk I’m new here phase and they team up and EXPLOSIONS. He was introduced to us as being incredibly naive and his idea of leadership is from some old cartoon that’s basically star trek but ethically questionable. After his fights in season 1, to the finale with the technodrome, you can see his growth. He’s able to formulate plans and make life or death decisions. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. When Leo got hurt, I felt like the oof sound effect mixed with some tears I normally shed at some Shojo manga bs. While the episodes following were super weird, it was a nice way to help Leo recover, not only physically but spiritually (Although I don’t remember the spirit arc at all except the epic Raph vs Fishface fight, so we’re skipping that). When Master Splinter really died, you could tell there was a huge impact on Leo, but he had to remain stoic and lead the family now. A lot of heartbreaking moments in this series came from Leo and I’m glad they took at least some thought into developing him. Tiny head Leo will haunt my nightmares, but the giggly fanboy will warm my heart constantly. 6/10

I only have one word for this Leo (Heroes in a Half Shell: Blast to the Past)

This is a super crazy bad idea accent on the super crazy bad part have I mentioned it’s also a really terrible idea/10

Okay, spoiler alert, didn’t really think this Leo was that grand Leo (2014/2016)

Painfully average. He didn’t stand out that much, Raph was part of the focus and had that touching scene at the end, Donnie was ICONIC and Mikey (with his weird-ass eyes) was super lively and funny! Leo? Uh, I don’t remember a single line he said. Because he never really grabbed my attention, I don’t have too much to say on this version. The Raph and Leo fight felt forced and the whole ‘keep this stuff that could turn us human a secret’ was pretty pointless and was added just to cause drama, I don’t even remember what that Splinter and Leo conversation was about. Design-wise, really neat! You can see some more traditional Japanese clothing/style mixed with modern (I’d feel a lot better about this assumption if some could tell exactly what the heck he’s wearing, but I get traditional Japan warrior vibes from it) in his look which was super neat! Other than that, if you like him, please tell me why because I don’t get. He was just kinda eh. 5/10

AHHH MY BOY YASSS WHOOO!! Neon Leon (2018)

Okay, I loved Ben Schwarts already from Parks and Rec but like him being Sonic AND Leo, like DUDE. He’s super funny by himself but teamed up with this shows writing and animation, it makes it hilarious. I literally love this Leo so much, maybe because we’re alike but honestly, he’s amazing. I love his design with the red and yellow crescents accenting his skin and livening up his color pallet. He has a very healthy and natural dynamic with his brothers, he’s the first to know what’s wrong and tries his best to make up for his actions. This is really prominent in the most recent episodes, along with the episode portal jacked. In both, Leo is separated from his brothers. Portal Jacked is in a more literal sense, while Air Turtle handles in more of an emotional sense. While both are brief, Leo sees his error and tries his best to make it up to them. I love his dynamic so much and it’s so nice to see something like this compared to the unnecessary drama and tension between the brothers in the previous series. It’s refreshing and this is something a younger audience needs to see; instead of fighting, it’s better to work together and improve yourself along the way. Improvement is a big theme for Leo here. He’s a goofball, makes jokes at every opportunity and isn’t quite skilled at fighting or using his weapon. But he grows over time, he learns to manage his power and he’s working on mastering it. He’s trying to put aside his narcissism more and focuses on his family. I think the approach they took with him rising to leader rather than slapping it on his forehead was the goddamn best decision they could make. He’s making plans, finding loopholes, helping out and getting out of his comfort zone. I cannot stress how well this show has handled Leo, along with the other characters. I can’t wait to see more episodes about his growth and I am awarding him with one of the greatest honors I could give... 10/10

Storytime: I drew a super cute 2012 Leo, you should look at him. Shameless self-promo, but you should follow me on my main blog bc I’m nice and I draw pretty pictures. Also. I have a little 2012 Leo Happy Meal toy??? I think??? guarding my window and he’s been there for YEARS. I need to bring him in and refresh his paint job.

Wow! I didn’t expect this many requests for Leo, so the blog will be momentarily spammed with the requests, but it shouldn’t be too much! Up next should be the last turtle (Mikey) and then we can get to some REALLY great requests I’m eager to answer. As usual, please comment and reblog! I’d love to hear your opinion!

[ladykateofledfordpark]

All the Time in the World (Dan x MC)

This fic is inspired by day 24 of the Choices July Challenge hosted by the amazing @kinda-iconic under the profile @choicesjulychallenge !

Dedicated to @mariaoz and @lady-kato , my wonderful friends who helped me so much in this fic!

Tagging also the wonderful @jlpplays1 @itsbrindleybinch and @desiree-0816 ! You’re the best! =D

Day 24 Prompt: Memories

Pairing: Dan x MC (Jade)

Summary: Prom arrives, and Jade has no date. Is this the perfect opportunity to do something?

Unedited.

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Somehow, after everything they endured, prom arrived. Dan didn’t know what to expect from it, but he hoped this time he won’t end up staring at Jade the whole dance.

If he was honest, he didn’t really know how exactly it happened. After the terrible ordeal in Mr. Red’s house, Dan found himself growing closer and closer to Jade. He may have been closer to Stacy beforehand, but life changed the both of them. Stacy started hanging more and more with her cheerleader friends, while he drifted away from them. Jade was so kind, so welcoming, Dan quickly realized how much he missed her in all those years they were apart. Somehow, he felt like she was the only one who understood.

So he opened up little by little, until one day he reached an unsettling realisation.

He trusted her. More than the others of the group, more than his family, more than anyone else. Jade was the first person he would turn to when he needed help, and he hoped she saw him the same way.

“Hey,” Dan approached Jade once the dancing started. She sighed, but didn’t look at him immediately. Her posture was stiff as if she was standing in the spotlight, one of the worst experiences Jade could ever experience. He traced her gaze to Lucas, who was dancing awkwardly with Ava. She didn’t look heartbroken, but rather bitter.

“I could’ve been there. At least then I would have someone to dance with,” Jade pouted. Dan smiled, and when Jade’s eyes met his a similar one bloomed on her face. 

“You’re acting as if being single at prom is the worst thing that can happen to a person.”

“Almost as bad as being Prom Queen.”

“At least then you don’t have to dance alone.”

Jade laughed. “True.”

They watched the dancing couples, and something about the sight made Dan itch to do the same. A part of him urged him to do that, while the other whispered for him to run as fast as possible somewhere safe and Jade-less.

He decided to go with a compromise.

“Let’s head outside.” 

It wasn’t a strange request. In their friendship, Dan and Jade spent many evenings outside, sitting and talking about whatever they wanted. They both preferred that simple quality time over anything else, and these meetings were Dan’s favorite moments of the day.

But if he was honest with himself, every moment with Jade was a treasure.

They walked outside and sat on a cold bench. Usually, Dan was very at ease with Jade, but now he fidgeted. Not every day could he find himself sitting in a tux next to a beautiful girl in a shimmering gold dress. This situation was familiar yet still strange, almost as if it was a dream he once had and forgot. And maybe he did. Ever since Winter Formal he’d been hoping for this moment, in which he would take Jade’s hand and ask her how she felt.

And he would totally do that... at some point. Which was not today.

Dan gazed at his surroundings. Behind him stood the whole school structure, while ahead of him lay the fairly-packed parking lot. To his right was the forest, and to his left the town. Just like always he sat there, wondering what he would have done if he was here so long ago. How would it have been to watch the skeleton monsters attacking homecoming?

Maybe, if he wasn’t under Redfield’s control, he could have… no, would have come. Maybe, in this moment, he wouldn’t be shifting uneasily because Jade would already have given her answer.

However, that wasn’t the case. Something, maybe some force up in the sky, decided then that he needed to be a weird zombie version of himself. He did get the short end of the stick, for sure, but his moment with Jade, deep in that forest, made one thing clear. They shared something special between them, and Dan was lucky he had the opportunity to explore it further.

“It’s nice out here. Cool and comforting.”

Dan met Jade’s eyes, and at that moment he wished he could capture her in a photo. The way her eyes shined, as if she was a brand new person, set his heart pumping faster than he knew was good for him.

Somehow, she succeeded in making his body act like that. Just like, so long ago, she managed to help him escape from Redfield’s control.

Jade really was something special, undoubtedly.

“Doesn’t it bother you seeing Lucas like that?” Dan found himself asking. He shifted slightly, and somehow his arm brushed hers. A strange rush of warmth passed through him, but he forced himself to act nonchalant. The last thing he wanted to do was to give Jade any unease.

She shrugged. “We parted on good terms, and it was fairly mutual, so… no. We’re still great friends, but more like Lily and I. Nothing romantic there.”

“Really?”

Jade didn’t answer immediately, as if she was weighing her words carefully. “Honestly, we’ve been more like friends for quite a while now.”

Dan studied Jade carefully. She shied away from him, refusing to meet his dark eyes. What was she trying to say? Was he wrong to hope that maybe-

“That’s why you broke up?”

“One of the reasons.”

Before Dan could say something else, Jade changed the subject. “I’ve missed you, you know. Back then, with Mr. Re- I mean, Jane.”

“When, exactly?”

She blushed. “Well, I’m not sure exactly. Maybe ever since you entered the hospital, and the rest of us got to know one another better. Maybe… later.”

Dan swallowed. Why was there suddenly so much tension between them?

“Later?”

It was strange to see an uncomfortable Jade. If Dan himself wasn’t nearly as flustered, he may have reveled in it. “Later as in…” she released a heavy breath, “um… homecoming.”

“Oh.” Would she have asked him out if he was awake then? “I wish I could have been there.”

Jade swallowed. “Yeah, but… you’re here now.”

“I am.”

She turned, so she was once again looking into his eyes. Her shoulders were set like that of a warrior’s, and her eyes were more exasperated than ever. “So… do you want to dance, as a way to make this up to me?”

Was it him, or was her voice still slightly uneven?

“Alright, if you’re sure.” Dan hesitantly answered. He got up and held out his hand, as if he actually knew what he was doing. Jade smiled before she put her hand in his. Her body was still tense, but her steps were confident, as if she knew exactly what she wanted. She led him far away from the bench, so they had enough room to comfortably dance.

“So, what exactly are we dancing?”

Jade’s eyes sparked. “Let me pretend, for one moment, that I’m not single.”

He swallowed. “Slow?”

How did his heart manage to pump even faster?

“Got it in one.”

“Alright.”

Jade’s arms circled his neck, and Dan forced himself to wrap his own arms around her waist. Somehow they started swaying to nonexistent music, almost as if they were rehearsing for a big scene at the end of a play.

This was strange, but since when was his life not unusual?

“Not bad,” Jade smirked, “almost lets me forget that I still don’t have a prom date.”

Was it too much to say that he wanted to be her date?

“Don’t look so tortured,” Jade laughed, “there’s more to this dance.”

“Of course,” Dan smiled weakly, and Jade’s smirk immediately disappeared.

“Are you uncomfortable? Because if there’s someone else you want to dance with, it’s okay. I was only joking.”

Dan didn’t know what to say. “No! This… is nice. Like really nice. I-”

A slow smile gradually rose to Jade’s face, and she daringly pulled Dan closer. He could swear that at that moment his heart beat as if he just ran a marathon, and his breaths grew quicker and shallower. Did she notice his strange behavior?

“I have one more question.”

Dan nodded uncertainly. “What is it?”

The mischief twinkled in Jade’s eyes, and once again Dan was struck with how beautiful this girl was. He needed to come closer, but there was no way he would force himself on her like that.

So he forced himself to stay put as Jade’s warm breath touched his ear, her lips whispering words he never thought he’d hear.

“Kiss me.”

Dan froze. He blinked as all the doubts in the world rose inside him. He was probably just hearing things. There was no way that-

“Of course, you don’t have to, but it will help me. And friends help each other, don’t they?”

“Yo-you’re absolutely sure?”

She pulled him so close that their heads were nearly touching. Jade smiled, the sight sending strange tingles down Dan’s whole spine. “Positive.”

She gazed at him expectantly, and a small smile rose to Dan’s face. He gently cupped her face, his thumb rubbing gently on her cheek, before he lowered his head. His lips carefully brushed hers, and suddenly Jade kissed him back. It was strange, this feeling, but Dan dreamed of this moment for years, and he wasn’t going to let anything ruin it. Not his doubts, his worries, his messed-up life. Nothing.

Once they parted, Jade beamed at him. She searched his face for something, and once she found it her smile grew even larger. She laughed wholeheartedly, and Dan gazed at her with all the affection he could muster. This was so amazing, the last thing he wanted was this all to be a means for escape.

“I’ve waited for this for quite a while,” Jade smiled.

“How long?”

“Longer than you, I’m sure. You know, I broke up with Lucas because of you. It’s just that Lucas and I weren’t much of a couple anymore, and… well, I started having feelings for you.”

“Really?”

Jade nodded. “You never take a hint, do you?”

“Well…”

Jade laughed. “No, you don’t have the guts. I had to do it all, huh?”

His cheeks heated up. “I’m sorry. I should have-”

Jade’s warm hand tilted his head so he looked right at her, her eyes so much darker and deeper than before. “You’re cute when you’re flustered.”

Somehow, they started dancing again. Dan sunk in the sea of his thoughts, until one floated to the surface. “So what are we now? Are we still friends?”

Jade shook her head. “I’m friends with Lucas, Dan. But you… well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go out on a date.”

“I’d be happy to.”

Jade’s cheeks reddened slightly. “Good. At least I won’t be single anymore.”

Dan smiled at her, and she winked at him. A strange sense of content settled on both of them, and so they continued dancing like that. Slowly, yet as if they had all the time of the world in their fingertips.

And at those moments, Dan could’ve sworn that really was the case.

[flyswhumpcenter]

Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card! (Red cross is the completed prompt, character headshots are prompts I’ve already filled. I don’t have any request left, so feel free to send in suggestions for this card!).

I have no idea what I'm doing and I must scream about my friend's OTP

*bangs pots together* I HEARD THIS FANDOM NEEDED MORE SICKFIC SO I CAME HERE TO PROVIDE With angst too! It's simple, even simplistic to a fault in fact, but I'm kind of happy with it? The beginning especially, man I love writing the literal equivalent of suffering. The ending may be a letdown, but I hope it's decent anyway.

also yeah can we all stan my good pal @chess-of-flowering-kingdom's writing in the chat because she's much better than me at this FE3H thing, she’s like an icon or something in this fandom

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Thanatophobia

Summary: [thanatophobia: noun. Literally, “fear of death”; a feeling of dread, anxiety or sollicitude when thinking of or faced by death or the process of dying. Derivated fromthe Ancient Greek "θάνατος", death, and "φόβος", fear or anxiety.] Ingrid almost loses someone again. 

Fandom: Fire Emblem: Three Houses (post-timeskip) Ships: Ingrid/Sylvain (pre-relationship)

Wordcount: 2.8K words

Event hosted by @badthingshappenbingo

AO3 version available here.

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Her vision was blurry from the water flooding in her eyes, her hearing by the sobs she was trying to keep inside, her thoughts from the swirling concerns and confusion hitting it at once. Her head ached, so did her heart, and her stomach was hardly able to keep up with the nauseating worry she was finding herself to be the victim of.

Yet, and it only hurt further to admit it, even the best training in the world couldn’t have prevented this, so all she could do was not let herself get eaten away by her sorrow, as looking like a mourning widow would do nothing to improve the absolutely abhorrent situation that was unfolding right before her helpless eyes.

 It wasn’t like it was her fault, she knew that. She couldn’t have prevented it even if she had tried her hardest: in a way, this was bound to happen, but that train of thought only made it worse. What, was she supposed to just stay here and do nothing because this was always going to end in some tragedy one way or the other? Was she supposed to believe there was fate above all of their heads menacingly staring at them and waiting for the first opportunity to cause them misery to happen?

As it stood, Ingrid hated being unable to do anything, always wanted to do something and be of some use whenever things turned sour; yet reality was forcing itself on her, itself and its terrible sides and toll. It was telling her that no matter what she did, no matter what she was trying to do, no matter where she went, no matter how or why, it was a superior face on her soul bound to its realm by her flesh and blood.

If reality wanted to pain her again and make someone die on her for a second time, it could, and it wanted very desperately to show her this without any possible contestation on her part.

 Perhaps it hurt her even more to know this would eventually happen, no matter what she said or did. Ingrid had always watched over Sylvain ever since they had known each other, had gotten to know every side of his personality to the point she could predict every single thing he was about to go through with. He was a free spirit, someone who took his life lightly, a true skirt-chaser, someone who listened to her and stared into her eyes without ever considering if her words could have an impact on his life.

Ingrid had always found him to take his existence too much on the light side of things, and Glenn’s demise had only enforced his feeling, but she could only confirm that to a whole new extent she had never wished to behold today.

 They were fighting alongside on the battlefield, the two of them, against the enemy forces. She was the prideful knight, he was the free-thinking monk, and they worked better than she’d have expected coming him and his seemingly lack of seriousness about anything that involved life-or-death stakes. Both on the battlefield, sharing a portion of land as decided by their strategist, weapons out and senses sharp, focus undefeatable as she defeated her foes one by one on her fierce mount.

At least, it was in her case, because Ingrid couldn’t stop spotting in the corner of her how sloppy her battle partner was. Usually, and that was one of the qualities she could give him, he was more than competent when fighting, He’d usually slipped in a couple teases and flirtatious lines of banter between two battles, yet all she heard are pants and wheezes coming from his side, her moves slow and unprecise, the absolute opposite of what a warrior was supposed to be standing for in her eyes.

 But the battle was raging on, so she ignored it at first and just made it out to be a minor thing. Must have been because he had been chasing skirts all night again, without thinking of tomorrow’s battle (even if that seemed too easy of an explanation). It was a day like any other, even if the taste of blood wasn’t as strong as it’d have usually been. Nothing wrong to report on, truly, or so she thought (or tried convincing herself of? It wasn’t clear, not even in the heat of the moment where lucidity of the mind was key). And, in her point of view, it all looked fine and usual until she noticed she was alone killing off the last of the enemy’s forces.

As it stood, meddling with the dried leaves of the early autumn metamorphosis, crimson poking out from the light browns and oranges, was the unconscious body of a childhood friend.

 The assault had stopped for them, in the far-end part of the battlefield; yet the feeling of dread wetting her back in cold sweats didn’t give in, nourishing itself from the misery plaguing her mind. Ingrid got off her mount, her stallion’s reins firmly enclosed between her fingers, approaching the suddenly shapeless form of who could have only been Sylvain if she squinted enough with heavy steps and a heavier breath.

She slowly crouched, feet trying to avoid stepping on the leftovers of the battle, until her available hand could touch him, the other gripping harder on the reins as soon she realized what was wrong. A clump formed in her throat, her stomach twirled, she felt like she was about to get sick from the sudden rush of worry nausea taking a hold of her system like a demon possessing her body. Without uttering a word, she put him on his back, finally able to see his dirtied face and harsh breathing, skin paler than the corpses around them, red splattered across his cheeks like blood on a soldier’s attire.

 Ingrid didn’t waste words trying to wake him up, but her hands burned when she let go of the rein to put him on her mount and escort him back to safety, back to their base while she walked, in silent, with a troubling vision and sobs threatening to exit her chest if she wasn’t careful to them even for a moment. Her feet crushing the dirt and leaves, three breathes of different intensities and faraway cries were the only things she accepted hearing for the time being, careful that none of these breathings stopped all of a sudden and forever.

She was sniffling worry in. This was happening, under her eyes, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She was no healer, no priestess of any kind. She didn’t know how to beg a deity for someone’s wellbeing, all she knew was fighting and court codes, in the end. Despite the toll of the battle on the enemy’s forces and her army’s victory, her heart couldn’t scream any cry of war, couldn’t sing a hymn, because it was busy crying while her mind was busy not to let herself do the same.

 And, in this time of great mental distress, sorrowful Ingrid realized something: for the first time in her life, no matter what had happened before since they had been children, no matter what she could say or even think of uttering, she couldn’t do anything for Sylvain.

 The rest of things was a blur from then on. She brought her horse back to the base, couldn’t explain what had happened aside from the idea that he had collapsed while she was looking elsewhere to fend against the enemy, and watched events unfold while her hands went unoccupied and her legs restless. Her entire body turned into lead jelly, stiff like metal yet tender from her weaknesses striking at once. Healers tried their best, but only words of apology came out from them: they had spells for injuries, not illnesses, and they were as helpless as she was.

When she was invited to see him after a more formal exam, shortly before the battle ended with her army’s flawless and stainless victory, Ingrid turned down the offer. She wasn’t ready to face the situation, not at first at last, and went for a walk outside instead to calm down the nausea and stop her thoughts from becoming a tornado inside her skull.

 The air had gone cold since the battle had ended, the warmth of her companions and blood pouring on the floor having given stead to night’s silence and comfortable judgement. Nobody could see her now, all inside either celebrating or getting concerned, maybe both; but even her hunger had gone missing, buried under the thick layers of concern she kept putting on because of her own uselessness.

Her hands rubbed against her arms, her breath emitted clear smoke against the black backdrop of the night embracing her, her feverish skin finally calming down to a point where she felt like she could face her friend again, even if this entire fiasco made her doubt her own feelings’ nature. Perhaps staying for too long in the dark quietness of the deserted paths only accelerated her uncertainties, so she went back inside, the warmth of a group reaching back to her right as her skin was shivering.

 Her heart was wavering with the intensity of a typhoon, even as her footsteps echoed in the corridors as she made her way to the infirmary. She knocked once and entered without waiting for a reply, not expecting any considering it was already fairly late in the evening. The silence of the room reminded her of the outsides, which eased her heart into entering the room, even if immediately the sight of Sylvain in this bed, left to devilish devices, stung her deeper than she’d have thought.

Her hands were fiddling together by themselves as she sat on the chair that was already there, eyes unable to face it. She wanted to weep at last, let her sorrow run free; but that’d have been disgracing Sylvain, disgracing all the cautious words she had ever told him and all the messages she had tried to drill through his skull as much as possible so he wouldn’t ridicule himself again, so she wouldn’t suffer second-hand embarrassment from him.

 Her heart was pounding. In truth, she wasn’t confused about her feelings, more than she wanted to deny them: really, falling for her childhood friend wasn’t something she wanted. It was even worse if she considered how he was such a skirt-chaser, flirting with everything that moved or had a pulse, from her grandmother to their female colleagues: it was going to end badly for her if she truly stopped lying to herself about it, if something made her stop rejecting what she shouldn’t have felt in the first place.

The problem was that this something had already come around. No matter how much she told herself this, seeing Sylvain in this bed was like watching herself lose Glenn all over again: it started small, it always ended terribly, this much she had been taught and she had learnt over the years, throughout her experiences and connections with people. She was afraid of losing someone else, so she denied their value to her and tried keeping her tears inside, even if she knew it was all a lie, even if she was fully aware it had been nothing but a charade of refusal and unhealthy denial.

 Yet, even with all of her efforts, Ingrid was crying, tears rolling down her face and sorrow finally making its way out of her airways, pouring in thoughts and tears. How ungraceful, how weak coming from the woman who had wanted to become Dimitri’s most fellow knight, the one who grief and death shouldn’t have scared like a little girl whom the world had deemed to forever be lost in the eternal penumbra whose last beacon of light had been engulfed by the shadows.

At least, she was alone, unseen from the world, with the only witness being an unconscious man. It was the only consolation she had, the one thing fate had decided to keep her away from being shame and dishonour, but it was minor compared to the pain raging in her chest.

 Until she felt a trembling finger stroking her cheek, stealing a tear away.

 With her vision now restored, Ingrid saw the impossible: Sylvain, awake, the faintest smile he had given her on his face, whose finger was indeed against her cheek despite the weakness she could tell came from it. For a moment, a short moment, time stopped, until he broke down coughing and her heart started stinging again.

“’nice to see you, Ing,” he slurred as he looked at her, breathing still as heavy as it used to, glass-eyed and disgraceful all around. Yet, even in this moment of vulnerability on his part…

“…nice to see you too, Sylvain,” she tried to ignore that fact and hide her relief to see him conscious enough.

 It meant that, in another sense, she could finally do the one thing she should have done all along.

“Never, ever do that again. I don’t want to escort you out of the battlefield after harvesting your body like rotting wealth.”

“That’s not a… nice thing to say…”

“Do you think worrying me was a nice thing to do?”

If she couldn’t have hidden the tears forever, she surely couldn’t have pretended like she wasn’t blushing from embarrassment after dropping such a line. In fact, like a foolush beginner, she had stolen her own speech away from herself. Talk about a bad move on her part.

 “I… I made you worry…?” His voice was unnaturally groggy and low, as if gravel had infected his airways. It was like speaking to someone else altogether if she didn’t focus on his face.

“…of course you did. We’re friends.”

“Ah…” His expression was genuine, this much she could tell, but his sudden solemnity weirded out in some measure. “Sorry… I thought it’d do the opposite, but…” He coughed, yet smiled, and it confused her even further. “’was wrong.”

“You sure were…”

 They fell into some kind of constantly broken silence, wordless moments interrupted by coughing fits she had never wanted to hear and desired to see gone for the rest of their existences. Her heart continued aching against her bones, fatigue never truly coming to her senses, until Sylvain put her hand away from her face and she missed his undesired hotness.

“Y’know, I’ve always l’ved you, Ing…” He slurred, his face’s flushing making her unable to tell if it was genuine, just a delirium kind of side effect, or a plain joke. Considering the context, she scratched the last theory out on her quick mental list.

Not like she’d have possibly had the wittiness to reply to that in her usual fashion, not when she had feared for his life merely an hour ago all evening.

  “I…”

He’d forget that by the time morning rolled around, right? Someone like him wouldn’t have normally laid down his feelings like that. She could, maybe just this once, maybe because he was alive and she was more than happy about this fact, allow herself a confession of her own.

“It may have been reciprocal for a longer time that I thought.”

 Her response must have rendered him speechless, because all she saw him do was blush even further and almost faint on her.

“Hey, are you alright?!” She yelled without really realizing about it. “You should rest, that’s the only way you’ll win against this thing.”

She still didn’t know what the nature of the illness was exactly, but for now, she’d do without that piece of information. It wasn’t like she had dared asking or even thinking about it, it could have sent her into another wave of choked sobs if she had.

“I… s’pose you’re right… See ya later, Ing…”

“See you. Take care.”

 She waited for him to completely fall asleep before leaving the room, her heart still heavy from the concern, exhaustion of the day and sudden revelations that had showered on her out of the blue. It really hadn’t been the right moment to have those, this much was for sure.

Yet, tomorrow seemed a bit more promising now. She still felt helpless, useless on the surface, and her chest ached from seeing such a dear friend (this, she couldn’t deny anymore) in such a pitiful condition. Nonetheless, she left his room before she could give him the one thing he didn’t quite want in her opinion, her pity, and thought sleep would clear everyone’s minds out of whatever had bothered them during the day and made them endlessly stir.

Yeah, she just needed a good night of sleep and for him to be alright. It was a lot to ask for, but she’d be caught red-handed trying to get that to happen nonetheless.

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By the time day rolled around, even if the fever was still clogging his brain, Sylvain hadn’t forgotten about their conversation.

Ingrid didn’t quite know what to make out of that realization.

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jokes on everyone (that includes me, a clown) I know very little about the game, it was just to make my good friend Azure smile and write even more angst

As such, I want to formally apologize if anyone is OOC beyond recognition.

[not-a-space-alien]

Into the Unknown, Part 8:  Beneath A Purple Sky, or: Crowley’s Adventures in Wonderland

Prologue | Dramatis Personae | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Series masterpost

On AO3

“Fuck!  Shite! Fuck!  Fuck!”

Anyone within a mile of Crowley would have been able to hear the stream of curses pouring from his mouth.  But he was up in the stratosphere and plummeting like a comet, yelling into the empty sky.

He tumbled head over heels, utterly disoriented, his vision a blur. He burned all over.

He hadn’t burned like this since he Fell.  He registered dimly it was the same pain as Falling, God’s presence burning you to Hell, the same pain as the time he had been in Heaven under the protection of angel dust that had rubbed off.

It was at this point that he made the connection that Falling hurt so much because you had just become a demon, but were still in Heaven and in contact with the Divine Aura until you nose-dived out of it into Hell.

And what he felt right now was a little like that, except God had been right there, and touching him at that.

Crowley had no idea how he had survived, or where he was at the moment. The stinging sensation of God’s holy aura had been overpowering for a single, terrifying, painful moment, then it had just…disappeared.

Maybe he was in the process of dying.  Somebody, he hurt all over.  It was fading, though, as he got further from the source.  Or maybe as he just continued on with dying.

But no, that couldn’t be right, because he could still feel things.  Over the dwindling stinging in his demonic core, he felt the wind rushing past him.  He wasn’t Falling, just falling.

Priority number one was to stop this free-fall that had consumed him somehow. He could almost feel the atmosphere’s friction rubbing him like a comet at terminal velocity.  His vision started to return, fading back in to show him a view of the earth spinning beneath his feet, a whir of land and trees alternating with a clear purple sky—

Wait, the sky was purple.  Why was the sky purple?

Crowley phased his wings into existence and tried to snap them open, but they shrieked in pain as he moved them.  He grit his teeth and steadied himself, splaying out like a skydiver.

A second glance confirmed that the sky was indeed purple.  Despite the direness of the situation, Crowley couldn’t help but stare upwards at it for a few moments.  His tie flapping up and hitting him in the face jarred his attention back to the situation.

Crowley tried easing his wings open slowly and had a bit more success. In the end, he was able to slow his fall enough to look at the ground below him and determine where he was.

Somebody, he was so high up.  He had barely noticed the air was too thin to breathe.  For a moment, he could’ve sworn he could see the curvature of the Earth.  A huge carpet of rugged waves hurtled towards him as he fell, and he realised he needed to take evasive action or land in the ocean.

He didn’t know exactly where he was, but he was able to steer himself so he would land in what he thought was Great Britain, at least.

He landed heavily in a tangle of trees, snapping branches beneath him and thumping into a carpet of pine needles in the dirt.

He just lay there with his wings askew beneath him, spread out looking up at the sky.

It was purple?

Crowley groaned, feeling the aches from the descent racking his body on top of the burns the Divine Aura had inflicted.  His hand worked its way down his shirt and unbuttoned it to assess the damage. There was a huge hand-print of red, blistered skin wrapped around his midsection where he had been grabbed, but other than that the damage seemed to be minimal.

Thank somebody.  That could have ended very differently.

His fingers worked at a patch of raw skin on his face, and he miracled a burn salve into existence and applied it to himself.

“God,” he moaned.  “Fuck. Damn.”

A winged figure flickered across the sky, too fast for him to see who it was. Crowley collected himself and managed to get to his feet, teetering over to a tree for support.

He was still trying to catch his breath when a strange little angel appeared in the tree above him.  They had a spacey look in their eyes.

“Hello?” said Crowley.

WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? said the angel, cocking their head.  STRANGE, STRANGE.

“Um,” said Crowley.  “Space? Is that you?”

I SHOULD GO FIX THE HOLE, they said, then flitted away up into the sky.

Crowley plopped back down on the ground, exhaustedly putting his head to his knees.  He ended up sitting there for a few minutes to gather up his will to move, then set off towards where London should be if his rudimentary navigation during free-fall had been accurate.

********************

Crowley healed some of his more debilitating injuries on his own, but to save his energy he left some of them for the more thorough recovery session he anticipated once he was reunited with Aziraphale, Maltha, and the rest.

Somebody, he hoped they had escaped from the Judgement Room alive.  He had no idea what had happened.  He had to get back to them ASAP.  But going back up to Heaven was absolutely out of the question with how he had left it.

There should be somebody in London, he thought, if he could just meet up with someone to make contact, and he could decide where to go from there.  Last he heard, Botis and Kyleth were still in the hotel across town.  They might be his best bet.  At the very least, Kyleth could peek her head into Heaven and see if it was safe.

Crowley stopped in the middle of this train of thought, legs dangling and hovering in the air.  Surely this was where London was, right?  He had been there millions of times.  He had let his wings fly him there based on muscle memory.

Crowley had never gotten lost before, not in Great Britain, his home.

He flew up higher into the sky to orient himself to try and counter his sinking stomach.  Had he hurt his head somehow?

The M25 was gone.  London wasn’t where it was supposed to be.  And was Mayfair…in Ireland?

Crowley shook his head, but he traced his path around the bodies of water and confirmed that, yes, this big ol’ island under him was indeed the UK.  Frustrated, Crowley swooped lower over a large city, scanning it for familiar landmarks.

Okay, there was Big Ben.  That was a start.  Crowley alighted on the hour hand of the clock, the machinations of the clockwork rumbling behind him.

Wait, what did the clock say?  He turned back to look at it.

Big Ben only had six numbers on it.  One through six, spread out evenly over the face as though it constituted a whole day.  And in Arabic numerals, not roman.  Also, the clock face was a completely different colour.  Also, it wasn’t Big Ben at all, just some other iconic clock tower soaring above the city heights, some new and completely foreign clock tower Crowley had never seen in the hundreds of years he had lived in Great Britain.  He stared at it, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

The bell rumbled, and Crowley leapt off before the hour hand turned and the bell deafened him.

“Okay,” said Crowley, wringing his hands.  “I must have hit my head a bit in the fall.  No matter.  Should clear up soon.”

That purple sky felt all too real, though.  He felt like he just needed one thing to orient himself.  If he could just find Aziraphale….or anyone.

Crowley rubbed the silver ring on his finger, trying to activate the charm. It stayed unlit.

He frowned.  When had he used it last?  Surely it had been longer than 12 hours by now?

Crowley pushed down the pit in his stomach, swooping down to what he thought might be familiar territory.  He drifted for a while up in the stratosphere, shading his eyes with his hands and peering down below.

There, a patch of green nestled among the grid-work of the city.  It looked weirdly like St. James’s park, considering it definitely wasn’t.  And there, oh sweet someone, sitting on a bench by the pond—

Aziraphale.  Crowley dove straight towards him like a parched man after water.

The angel’s attention pricked up as Crowley approached, folding in his wings and jogging over, panting.  “Aziraphale!  Thank f— Whew, I thought I would never find you.”

Aziraphale’s stare on him was hard.  He hadn’t gotten up from the bench.

Crowley doubled over with his hands on his thighs.  “Are you okay?  Are Maltha and Noah okay?  What happened?”

“You…” said Aziraphale.  “You’re dead.”

Crowley straightened up.  “Ah…Nope…Gotta say, Aziraphale, I expected a bit more of a warm welcome…”

Aziraphale stood up, eyeing him critically.  “You’re dead.  How are you…?  I killed you.”

“A little concern?  Anything?  Wait, did you say you…?”

Aziraphale drew his sword.  Crowley held his hands out and backed up.  “W-wait, Aziraphale, it’s me. Crowley.”  It was at this point that Crowley notice the gold ring, which he had so lovingly slid up the finger of Aziraphale’s sword hand, was nowhere to be seen on the hand gripping the weapon pointed at him.

“Stay right where you are,” said Aziraphale, bringing the point of his sword up into Crowley’s chest.  Crowley held his hands up higher.  “You won’t make any sudden movements if you value your life.”

Crowley’s despairing eyes swept up Aziraphale’s weapon into the angel’s face. “Angel, I…”

Aziraphale materialised a communication device of some sort; it looked rather like an ethereal flip phone, which he snapped open.  “I need to speak to Azrael right away,” he said into it.

“Aziraphale, it’s me, Crowley.”

“I’m aware,” Aziraphale snapped.  “My demonic nemesis I vanquished centuries ago, somehow come back from the dead to haunt me.”

“What?” said Crowley, his heart growing heavy and threatening to break.

“I’m sure the warrior on patrol heard the disturbance and is en route, so don’t think of trying anything.  We’ll get to the bottom of this, serpent.”

A few humans had gathered nearby, gawking at Aziraphale’s weapon. Aziraphale dispelled them with a miracle-laden suggestion they head home and forget what they had seen.

“Can—Can I talk to—”  Crowley swallowed.  Something was terribly wrong.  Aziraphale was acting like a proper angelic asshole.  Who would Crowley have a chance of getting to who might help?  “Can you call Raphael on that thing?  Or Victoria?”

Aziraphale glowered at him.

“Anyone?  Any archangel?”

“Archangel?” said Aziraphale.

“Yes, archangel?” said Crowley.

They stared each other down.  Had Crowley been a cat, his tail would have been floofed out.

“Ah, here comes my backup,” said Aziraphale with a smug smile, and a pair of wingbeats sounded nearby.  “Looks like Hastaphael is on this route today.”

“…Who?”

Crowley nearly fainted when a second angel alighted by Aziraphale, likewise drawing his sword.  The newcomer was an angelic warrior, but the face, the aura….

“Hastur?” said Crowley, absolutely floored.  “Are you an angel?”

The warrior gave him an ugly sneer.  “What are you talking about, demon?”

“He’s not making an ounce of sense,” said Aziraphale.  “This is clearly an anomaly.  We ought to take him to Gabriel.”

“Where’s his Eye of Satan?” said the angel with Hastur’s face.

Crowley yelped nervously as the warrior angel roughly grabbed him and pulled his collar down, exposing his bare neck, then twisted his wrists to perform the same inspection.

“It’s always on the wrist or the neck,” said Aziraphale.

“I know,” the warrior growled.  “He dunt got one.”

“It was on his neck before.”

Crowley tried to lean away from the grabbing hands, but the warrior clamped a hand on his jaw and tilted Crowley’s head to peer at the other side of his neck.

“I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” said Crowley, voice muffled underneath the warrior’s hand.

“Doesn’t matter,” said the warrior.  “Only good demon is a dead demon.  Let’s run him through.”

“We should take him to Gabriel,” Aziraphale said.

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale snapped.  “This is clearly an anomaly, though!”

“We can file a report after we—huh?”

Another pair of wingbeats approached.

“He’s got backup,” the warrior growled, shoving Crowley away and raising his sword to the sky.

“I-I do?” said Crowley.

Crowley let out a grunt of surprise as Aziraphale tackled him, pinning him to the ground.  “Don’t think about going anywhere,” Aziraphale said.

A circle of grass nearby wilted and burnt with a sizzling sound, and a demonic warrior leapt out.  His wings flared as he barreled onto the scene, shouting and sword drawn back for a blow.

“Botis?” said Crowley.

“Unhand him!” Botis shouted, flapping his wings.  “Or face a solid pounding.”

The angel called Hastaphael waved at Aziraphale in a dismissive way. “Run him through.”

Crowley let out an eep and rolled out from under Aziraphale as Aziraphale retrieved his sword, still seeming conflicted.  Crowley hit a pair of armored legs and peered up to see Botis’s ugly but familiar visage sneering at him.  “Get out of here; I’ll find you later.”

That was all the permission Crowley needed; he leapt to his feet and sprinted away.  Botis seemed to be immensely enjoying the fight as his sword clanged loudly, audible even as Crowley lost sight of the park and was swallowed up by the streets of Not-London.

***********************

So, this was some sort of alternate timeline.  That was the only explanation for everything he had seen.

Crowley had no idea where—or when?—he was, what this strange place was, but clearly he was not in his own time and place.  The landscape was different, and none of his friends recognised him.

And based on Aziraphale’s reaction, it sounded like Crowley had existed in this place, except Aziraphale had killed him a while back, and therefore his appearance had been interpreted as an unexplained miraculous resurrection, the same kind they had just been working to solve when he had been thrown out of Heaven.

Had he time-travelled somehow?  Well, it couldn’t have been backwards, because the city had been modernised.  He had seen people with mobile phones on his mad dash out—Not any brands he recognised, though.  He had seen someone with what appeared to be an iPhone, but when he doubled back to look at it again, the icon on the back of the device had turned out to be a pineapple and not the signature apple with a bite out of it.

He had been responsible for that particular bit of iconography and he was curiously sad to see it go.

Surely he couldn’t have gone forward in time, either.  There would have had to be some serious changes in the intervening years for Aziraphale to hate Crowley enough to kill him, but accept Hastur, who was, oh yeah, still an angel here somehow.

If it wasn’t back or forwards, had he gone….sideways?

Damn.  What was so different about this place that not only did Aziraphale and Crowley not get along, but hated each other so much they actually killed one another?  Aziraphale and Crowley had never even made a habit of discorporating each other, let alone going at each other with holy water and aural weapons.

Crowley found it disturbing in the highest degree.  Clearly whatever God had done to him, he had been transported to some place where the capital W-War was still on.  And in a heightened state at that, if warriors were patrolling and appearing at field agents’ sides in seconds.

Crowley had never been defended by a demonic warrior before the ineffable plan had been turned on its head six-thousand years in.  Demonic warriors were there to have a go at angelic warriors, and angelic warriors were there to keep demonic warriors from having a go at angels that were not warriors and therefore not very good at defending themselves.  The angelic warriors mostly did their job by sitting around and making their presence clear as a deterrent, and not much else.

And they had just appeared to interfere with a quarrel between two field agents seconds after it broke out…?  

Crowley had sprinted away from Botis, Hastaphael, and Aziraphale until he was too far away to feel their auras.  Then he kept going for good measure, sure that if Botis wanted to find him again he would manage to somehow, considering he had no idea how Botis had found him in the first place.

He legged it out of this strange city that wasn’t London, not stopping until he was back in the forest, because the city unnerved him.

Panting heavily, Crowley leaned against a tree and dropped down.  He curled around himself.

This sucked, plain and simple.  He had thought God was going to kill him, but He had done something else different entirely, and he couldn’t figure out what.  Seeing Aziraphale want to kill him was worse, almost.  He didn’t like this one bit.  He hated it.

Where was his Aziraphale?  That must have been a different Aziraphale. Somehow.  And how was Botis here, but not Maltha?  Or any other of his friends?

Well, Botis’s loyalty must just be a constant no matter the universe.

He still ached from the wounds he hadn’t healed earlier.  He materialised his staff and started giving them some attention, but he was interrupted by the sound of wings drawing near.

Crowley stood up and stretched his legs as Botis touched down, sheathed sword jangling against his heavy armor.  “There you are.  Are you hurt?”

“A little,” said Crowley.  “But it’s not—”

He was cut off as Botis seized his arm, inspecting him.  “Hmm….These look like holy water burns,” said Botis, with a critical eye on the injuries he had been tending.  “You really need to be more careful.  If you just followed SOP for interacting with angels in the field, we wouldn’t be in this situation.  The rules are there for a reason.  What were you even trying to do?”

“To do?”

“Yeah, lollygagging around in that park with an angel nearby.”

“I was—I was trying to talk to Aziraphale.”

“Talk to him?”

“Y—Yes?  Botis, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” Botis echoed dimly.  He still had a hand on Crowley, and he began to sort of pat him down.  “Where’s your Eye of Satan?”

“Okay, what is that?”

Botis twisted Crowley’s wrists and examined his neck the same way the angels had.

“Please fill me in,” said Crowley. “I feel so lost right now.”

Botis blinked at him.

“Eye of Satan?”

Botis held his right hand out, wrist-up.  A tattoo of an eye stared back at Crowley, nestled among a lace of occult sigils.

“O—oh,” said Crowley.  “And that’s…?”

The ink on Botis’s skin writhed and pulsed.  The eye blinked and the pupil darted up to look at Crowley.

“Ah!” said Crowley, taking a step back.

“Botis, what’s going on?” said a disembodied voice, and the eye blinked again. “Who is that?”

“Demon I had to rescue from angelic warriors,” said Botis.  “He doesn’t have an Eye.”

“What?”

Botis’s gaze moved from the tattoo back up to Crowley, mustache bristling. “Wrists and neck are both blank. Unless you authorised him to have it somewhere else?”

“No,” said the voice.  “Bring him down as soon as you can so we can fix this.  What class is he?”

Crowley wrung his hands and stepped in, determined to take back some modicum of control over the situation.  “Field agent,” he reported.

Botis glared at him and said in a strained whisper, “Don’t be stupid.”  Then he looked back down at the tattoo, the pupil of which darted back and forth between the two of them as they talked.  “He’s a healer.”

“If he’s injured take him to field encampment 27, then bring him down to speak with me,” said the voice.

“Yes, Lord.”

The tattoo fell still.

“What—What the fuck was that?” said Crowley.

“That was our Lord Satan, and you forget yourself,” said Botis.  “Show some respect.”

Crowley felt dismay weighing down his heart.  “Oh.  Of course. I-I haven’t done anything, though.  Surely Satan is too busy to pay any attention to little old me.”

“Lord Satan always makes time to pay attention to details,” said Botis.  “Now, follow me.”

Now that was something Crowley hadn’t thought he would ever hear a demon say.  Satan was usually rather lackadaisical about the details—it’s why Crowley was able to get away with not actually doing his job.  Satan paying attention to you wasn’t a good sign.

“But, look, I haven’t done anything wrong,” said Crowley, trying painfully hard to keep the whimper out of his voice.

Botis looked at him strangely.  “I never said you did anything wrong.”

“Then why am I being…?”

“Punished?” said Botis.  “Nobody said you were being punished.  We merely need to present ourselves to Satan to correct an anomaly.”

The idea that you would be summoned to speak to Satan for any reason other than if you had done something to piss him off, and therefore were in for a bad time, was utterly foreign to Crowley.  He was having a very hard time wrapping his brain around it.

“What does Satan want to…?”

“We need to get you treated first, at any rate,” said Botis.  “We can’t have you walking about with burns like that.”

And treating injured demons in the field…?  Part of the entire reason why Hell was shite was because there weren’t any healers, and if you got hurt you just needed to deal with it yourself.

“What’s wrong?” said Botis.  “You seem confused.”

“Uh,” said Crowley.  “I—Uh, um…We’re going to field encampment…?”

“Twenty-seven, yes.  It’s over in this direction.”  Botis steered him by the arm.  “Come on, then.”

“Oh—Okay.  Um, hey Botis?  Thanks.”

Botis turned back and eyed him strangely.

“For saving me back there?  They were going to kill me.”

“Just doing my job.  You can trust me to do my job,” said Botis.  “After all, it’d be a funny old world if demons went around not trusting each other.”

******************

Crowley picked up rather quickly that this wasn’t his Botis, much to his disappointment.  Gone were the “sirs” and protective exclamations about Crowley’s safety and basically everything that had made Botis nice to have around.

It was the same way that Aziraphale hadn’t been his Aziraphale. He had no idea what that meant, the full extent of what was going on, but he was reasonably smart and able to tell that something was terribly amiss.

His earlier thoughts about being transposed in time or thrown into a parallel dimension had been half in jest, but he had no way of knowing how close he was to the truth.

Botis led him to a field encampment.  He didn’t like this version of Botis very much, so he was relieved at the thought that maybe Botis would leave him alone here.

The camp was hidden by a protective miracle to keep humans from stumbling into it—it appeared to be nestled in a fold of space-time that a simple teleportation miracle would straighten out.  There was a fence made of wooden slats, tents, a gate—the whole nine yards.  It looked remarkably like one of the angelic field camps that would occasionally be positioned in Heaven’s territory on Earth.  It was bigger, though.

And did they say this one was number twenty-seven?  Heaven probably had only a dozen or so of them scattered about the globe.  There wasn’t generally much need for them.

Botis escorted him via an overly firm grip on his arm to a tent with an icon of a green staff on it.  When he pulled the curtain aside to enter, Crowley saw the interior of the tent was dominated by medical cots and demons dressed in scrubs running about madly like ants.

Crowley’s eyes widened.  “Botis, is this…?”

“The infirmary, yes,” said Botis, trying to flag someone down.

“These are all infernal healers?”

“Yes,” said Botis distractedly.  “Ramikale, I need to speak with you.”

Crowley was too overwhelmed to take note of to whom Botis was motioning. There had to be at least half a dozen demonic healers in here.  Real healers, who were created as healing class, and fell as healing class.  He could tell just by looking at them and feeling their auras.

“Botis, who are these demons?” said Crowley, but Botis ignored him, as he had finally caught the attention of one of the medical demons.

Crowley was shocked when she pulled down the mask on her face, revealing the familiar visage of his friend Ramial, except her eyes glowed an infernal red. She had the same eye tattoo as Botis, but it was on her neck.  “What is it now, Botis?”

“I found this demon wandering about,” said Botis.  “He has no Eye—”

“No Eye?  That’s an anomaly.  Satan won’t be happy.”

“I know, so I’m taking him down to Hell, but first we need to treat his injuries.  If it’d be possible to put him at the front of the queue, that would expedite things for Lord Satan.”

“Sure.”  The healing demon hovered over Crowley as Botis spoke, pecking at him with a trained eye. “Holy water burns, it looks like.”

“Ramial?” said Crowley.  “Did you…?”

The healing demon gave him an annoyed look.  “Did you get into a fight?”

“Yeah,” said Botis.  “I caught him walking right up to a principality as though he wanted afternoon tea with ‘im.”

“You know very well you’re not supposed to engage angels directly,” said the healing demon.  “What did you hope to accomplish?”

“I was…” said Crowley, floundering.  “Ah…Just trying to talk to him.  What’s wrong with that?  Are you....Rami...”

Botis leaned in to whisper, “I don’t think he’s well, you know, mentally.”  The volume was enough for Crowley to hear if he hadn’t been so stunned.  Instead, he reached out a hand to stroke the medical demon’s cheek, thereby confirming Botis’s proclamation in the minds of everyone observing.

Botis left the tent, abandoning Crowley to the clutches of the healers, two more of which had come and started grabbing at him.  They all had the same eye tattoo on their necks, and the pupils thereof would occasionally flare to life and rove about before falling inanimate again as the nurses conducted their inspection of him.

“Very intense burns,” one noted, their voiced tinged with clinical, impersonal interest.  The three of them corralled him into a medical cot, and he lay on it uneasily.

“Must have been a direct hit,” said the other newcomer.

“Interesting shape the wound has taken,” said the original healer, stripping Crowley’s shirt off.  “Almost like a hand-print.”

This was enough to snap Crowley back into reality.  Should he try and hide the source of the wound?  Even if he told them, he wasn’t sure if they would believe him, especially since they were already convinced he was daft.

Did any of these demons know it was possible to get into Heaven?  Did any of them know about—Well, whatever phenomenon could have possibly shafted him into a place like this…?

His thoughts went back to the little angel he had seen upon first coming here.  They had mentioned something about a hole. An entrance Crowley had come through, perhaps?  Maybe he should try and find that place again, to see if there was any way of going back.

Back from where, he had no idea, though.

But part of Crowley wondered if he should be so quick to try and leave. He was surrounded by infernal healers.  These demons were equipped to understand him in a way even Aziraphale wasn’t.  Even Maltha.

“How did you get this wound?” said one of the healers, yanking his attention back to the situation at hand.

He looked at their cotton-clad face, mind drowning in so many layers of static he had no idea what to say.

“Was it holy water?” said a second, with an expectant look.

Crowley stuttered, then nodded.

“Told you,” said one.

“Hey…” he said as they began treating his wounds.  “You guys…how did you fall?  All three of you?  How many more of you are there?”

One of them gave him a dirty look.  The second simply shot up his eyebrows.  The third tutted and patted his head, assuring him they would treat his head injury as well.

Try as he might to connect with them, they treated him as a stranger, even the demon wearing Ramial’s face and aura.  Eventually he gave up and fell silent under their hands whizzing here and there and their chatter, speaking rapidly and efficiently at each other in a way only beings who have worked together seamlessly for thousands of years could accomplish.

They were faster than any healer he had ever seen.  They were faster, and better, than even Raphael.  Than Maltha.  And they had nowhere near the aural power of an archangel or archdemon.

He was on his feet again being shoved towards the exit of the tent in a matter of minutes.  He picked idly at the white cloth wrapping his wounds, trying to take it all in.

“Botis, we’re finished!” one of the healers hollered, disappearing back into the sea of beds and injured demons.  “He’s yours again.”

A shadow fell over Crowley, and he looked up from his bandages.  Botis was in front of him again.  “Now we shall go see our Lord Satan.  She’ll make sense of this.”

“Botis, I was thinking, before that maybe we—Wait, did you say she?”

“Of course.  Hell has always had a queen.”

Relief flooded Crowley.  The most likely candidate for Queen of Hell would, of course, be Maltha.

“You hit your head pretty hard, haven’t you?” said Botis.

“What’s the Queen’s name?”

“Satan, of course.”

“No, I mean—”  He broke off and took a breath.  The realisation was dawning on him that Maltha might not be the same.  It wouldn’t be his Maltha.  And it might not be Maltha at all.  If Ramial had fallen and Hastur hadn’t, who knew what side everyone was on in this place?

What side.  He hated the thought.  Two sides again.  He resolved to get out of here as soon as he could, his earlier waffling completely abandoned.  “Botis, before we go down to Hell, let’s make a stop back to…”

He paused with horror, realising he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to locate his point of entry again.  He’d thought it had been somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, but…

Botis tapped his foot impatiently.  “Back to where?”

Botis’s eye tattoo flared to life again, and the same voice from earlier snapped out, “Back to nowhere.  You’ll bring him down immediately as I commanded, Botis.”

“Yes, my Lord,” said Botis.  “I apologise.”

The tattoo became inanimate again.  Botis reached out and seized Crowley’s arm from where he had crept back away from the strange talking tattoo.  “Come on.  I’m sure this won’t take long.  Our Lord Satan is very efficient.”

Crowley grimaced at the thought, but he saw Botis’s hand resting on his sword hilt.  Surely Botis wouldn’t cut him down if he tried to run…?  But they all seemed dead set on having him meet Satan.

He squared his shoulders.  Well, he’d changed since the last time he’d seen Satan.  He’d faced Satan down and won.  And he’d probably be seeing Satan eventually one way or the other, so it’d probably be best to face it head-on.  He was already scheming his best schemes.

[thegraytalon-blog]

Nostalgia is a Hell of a Drug

Remember Chewbacca, everyone? Oh I ‘member!

Remember Stormtroopers everyone? Oh I ‘member!

Remember Darth Vader everyone? Oh I ‘ member!

Remember the Millennium Falcon everyone? Oh I ‘member!

Remember Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda on Nintendo? Oh I ‘member!

Remember the original Game Boy and Game Gear? Oh I ‘member!

Remember Indiana Jones? Oh I ‘member!

Remember Sonic the Hedgehog and the Sega Genesis? Oh I ‘member!

Remember Mario Kart, Starfox and Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64? Oh I ‘member!

Remember the Sinbad pirate movie that we all swear��exists but in reality doesn’t? Oh I ‘member!

 Above are just a few of the many vast examples of nostalgia in the form of media and entertainment for some of us who grew up in the 80’s and the ‘90’s. Now you might be asking yourself, how can a handful of random pop culture references have anything in common? The answer lies in that they all share one crucial thing that is very similar. That being they all represent a form of nostalgia for the most of us who grew up within this era. This is the era that represented the iconic heroes, symbolic artifacts and the rise of video game dominance that we all know and love today. Even such entities that do not really exist and are part of what is called the Mandela Effect, such as that Sinbad movie from the 90’s that we all swore a blood oath existed but have no concrete evidence backing up such a claim. Well, other than the fact that Sinbad himself used to dress up like a pirate and wear some really baggy pirate looking pants in the 90’s. 

So what is it about nostalgia that is such a driving force behind what compels our minds today in such forms of life as decision making and even to the point of crucial thinking? Well, let’s start from the beginning. The majority of the memories that we have stem from early childhood and carry on over into adolescence and lessen by the time we reach and are in our full adulthood. When humans are born and are children from the age of about 3 or 4 we begin to develop our brains more and begin to retain moments that transpire in the world and capture them into an ethereal bubble and store them in our memory banks to recall at anytime we want. That is, if the memory is worth recalling at all. While most forms of nostalgia are positive some memories are not always as pleasant as that moment when you picked up a Nintendo controller for the first time to play the very first level of Super Mario Bros or when you went into that creepy cave and an old man gave a wooden sword to a child because it was too dangerous to go alone into the wilderness in The Legend of Zelda. However, they are still considered nostalgic because they caused such a tremendous impact on one’s life. 

Let’s say Timmy is 5 years old and is learning how to ride a bike without training wheels. During his trials one day he happens to lose balance, fall off and cuts his knees and sprains both ankles at the same time. Timmy then decides he will never learn how to ride a bike again. It’s not a pleasant memory, but little Timmy may carry on this memory for the rest of his life as it had a big impact on his childhood. When he is older and if people ask him if he knows how to ride a bike, he can not only say no but recall the traumatic experience that shaped his bike riding fate into the present day. Now let’s say little Timmy started riding a bike with training wheels at the age of 5 and nothing went wrong and he eventually graduated to riding a bike with two wheels like a champion. Later on during his life if the topic of riding a bike came up, Timmy may not recall the exact moment when he learned how to ride a bike or even his age, just that he knew how to ride a bike and learned when he was a child. The devil is in the details so to speak and the more prominent the events that transpire in your life, good or bad, the more you will recall and retain them and with great detail. 

Now let’s shift our focus back to the positive aspect of nostalgia and what kind of effect it has on our psyches and even physical attributes over a prolonged period of time. I will be using many examples in the form of video games and media for the rest of this entry so strap in and brace yourselves for some serious nostalgic moments! 

Petey is a pre-teen boy in the late 90’s who indulges in a plethora of video games. Sometimes on a weekend he goes over to his relative’s house to enjoy the competitive elements that gaming offers in the form of racing and shooting. He partakes in numerous races of Mario Kart 64, dogfighting matches in StarFox 64 and the tactical espionage shooting of GoldenEye 64. After hours of racing, dodging shells, popping balloons, aiming true and losing friends with that infamous blue shell in Mario Kart and shooting down enemy starships in StarFox and cursing out the kid who picked Odd Job in GoldenEye (even though we said NOBODY PICKS ODDJOB IN GOLDENEYE you cheating, miserable fucks), Petey leaves his relatives house and returns home. The next day at school Petey is in class doing his assignments when he notices out of the corner of his eye a pencil about to roll off the student’s desk that is to the left of him. Immediately Petey jerks his arm to the left and catches the pencil before it falls off and reaches the floor. Petey did not realize it, but by him dodging those shells, lasers and bullets in the games he played the day prior, it allowed him to have a slight form of heightened reflexes as his brain and body worked in unison to move his arm and catch the object before it reached the floor more so than a person who did not attune their senses by engaging in a hobby that tested your hand to eye coordination like video games do. In most video games, repetition is key. By performing various tasks over and over again, a person trains their mind and body to react in ways that are almost considered unnatural by the laws of man. Now I’m not saying that gamers are all Spider-Man or Jedi Knights, but their critical thinking does improve as well as their reflex actions and allows them to think and perform outside of the box more than others from time to time. 

Speaking of critical thinking, let’s say that it’s a bright and sunny Saturday morning in spring of 1987. You are 7 years old and wake up, have your Cookie Crisp or Fruity Pebbles while you pop on some Transformers or Thundercats as you prepare for your day off from school. Then in the early afternoon proceed to your room and take out the gilded cartridge crafted with great care by the Hylian warriors of future’s past, proceed to take a deep breath and blow deeply into the bottom of the cartridge. You then insert the cartridge into your Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and start to hear the whimsical and delightful music of The Legend of Zelda. As your adventure continues across the vast land of Hyrule, you seem to discover many dungeons along your path in which require you to solve puzzles and obtain keys to open your path to venture forward. Most of the puzzle solving includes memorizing geometrical squares or blocks to move them in such a pattern that they will allow secret passages and doors to open so you can continue your hero’s journey. After spending countless hours dungeon crawling , slaying mythical beasts, solving numerous shape shifting puzzles and obtaining the Master Sword to defeat the mighty evil lord Ganon, you put the game to rest for a little while. The next day, Sunday, you go over your friends house to hang out and he has something cool to show you. His mom bought him a new puzzle game called Simon. In this game you have to remember color patterns and memorize them to not fail and go back to the start of the puzzle. Your friend, who is not into video games as much as you, and proceeds to try out the Simon game with you. He gets a score of 4 turns without failing and you happen to score a whopping 12 turns without failing. Could it be that his memory is not as attuned as yours because you just spent the previous day playing The Legend of Zelda and solving pattern memorization puzzles in a plethora of different dungeons? It is indeed very possible and almost factual. Once again, repetition is key and it shapes the mind to retain and remember glimpses of imagery that will help you in such tasks as doing well in a memorization game or exam.  

Video games such as The Legend of Zelda are prime examples of how nostalgia not only plays a factor in critical thinking but also how our minds are shaped for when we become adults and how our way of thinking is affected by experiencing games like this in the past in our childhoods. For the most part, The Legend of Zelda series is aimed at a child base with it’s whimsical characters and environments and tunes. However, deep, beneath it’s surface, those games may contain such a deep nostalgic presence in the form of a darkened and twisted tone, that it can only be harnessed and resonated years to decades later as we reach adulthood and see how we use our intellect and minds to either provide rational thought or even something as trivial as conversing with someone and describing your likes and desires. For example, why do some of us migrate towards TV shows or comics or movies with such dark messages or that have a really sick and twisted meaning? I’ll use The Punisher and Fight Club as examples here. Could it be that our love for these 2 embodiments of physical and psychological warfare on the mind, body and spirit stem from our interaction with let’s say The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy and/or The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64? I know I am singling our Zelda games a lot but there’s a reason and method for my madness here, I promise. You see, both of these games in particular in the series have a deeply disturbing underlying message. In Link’s Awakening you play as the famed hero Link who awakes on an island with no memory of how he got there so his goal is to find a way off the island and get back to his homeland in Hyrule. Now SPOILER ALERT because I am about to fast forward to the game’s ending. At the end of the game, Link encounters the Wind Fish, who is a mythical creature and king of the island that informs Link he is part of some kind of deep REM like fever dream that once he wakes up from all of the creatures and inhabitants of the island he is presently on will cease to exist and die pretty much. The game’s theme and message here then becomes somewhat complex. It twists the plot and forces one’s mind into a psychosis that cannot necessarily determine fiction from reality. The same is present in that of the film Fight Club. Again, SPOILER ALERT here as the entire movie we cannot tell what is fact from fiction as the main character slips in and out of a deep schizophrenic psychosis that plays the duality of himself with a character who he may or may not have created, Tyler Durden, who was everything the main character was not. Like seen in Link’s Awakening, the focus of the story is shifted from reality to fantasy in the blink of an eye where you, the player and the main character in Fight Club and Link as well are uncertain whether the world they are living in and characters around or within them are all real or simply part of some kind of imaginative force. Nobody can really pinpoint the truth of the matters, only that there may be multiple outcomes for their unique situations. 

The Punisher and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask are also similar in their own diverse ways. Now before I continue I want to go on record for saying I feel Majora’s Mask is the copyrighted and trademarked property of not only Nintendo, but Lucifer as well. That’s right folks, this game is possessed by the devil and I can prove that with hard concrete evidence. Just Google or YouTube “Ben Drowned” after finishing this and I promise you that you will not sleep well tonight after seeing that. Now for a hefty third SPOILER ALERT here as in Majora’s Mask many feel and believe that the story takes place with Link having failed in all his endeavors to stop Ganondorf from taking over the world, Princess Zelda, who he loved, was enslaved and Link himself was dead and the game takes place in the Hylian afterlife where Link has a finite amount of time to save that world from collision with a moon face who kind of looks like he is in the middle of taking the most constipated crap known to man. Now my point is here that Link is dead, he knows his world has ended as he knows it and is now just running through the motions doing what he can to survive while expelling the evil around him, doing and making whatever he can right, until death knocks on his door. The same can be said for the Punisher. The man known as Frank Castle is dead and has been since his family’s cold blooded murder, leaving behind a shell of the former man he once was and he is just simply doing what good he can, righting the wrongs of the world, while being consumed in the hell on Earth he is living in, the same as Link in Majora’s Mask, until that fateful day when the grim reaper comes beckoning. 

Therein lies our attraction to such nostalgic elements of the past to that of the present in a nutshell. But it is only a mere taste of the many nostalgic elements of the past that carry on into our present and future, forever shaping and molding both conscious and subconscious  states of our minds determining our focus and reality. 

Now in conclusion I would like to leave you all with a disturbing thought about a form nostalgia that can pander to even the most enlightened thinkers as hazardous and demeaning. How many of us grew up idolizing Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo and Princess Leia from a galaxy far, far away? How many of us used to cherish those films and even used to dress up like those characters for Halloween or even go to extreme lengths to cosplay at shows such as Comic-Con or just for fun and create videos and role play as them for blogging purposes? George Lucas created something unlike the world has ever seen and even with his infamously criticized prequels, the Star Wars franchise was still a force to be reckoned with and like the Force itself was a powerful ally of nostalgia indeed. Now fast forward a few decades to where we are now. That nostalgia of Star Wars with what once was so illustrious and fruitful has caused us to sheepishly support the ongoing cancer of the new modern world that is known quite simply as the sequel trilogy. The soulless embodiment of corruption, greed and rape of the Star Wars franchise known to man and the majority of us continue to witness the horror, which is the equivalent to watching a train wreck I guess because some of us just cannot look away. And why you may be wondering? That devil is in the details here. Nostalgia is a pathway to many abilities, like I stated earlier, and some are considered to be unnatural. The most frightening ability nostalgia gives us is the ability to go and pay hard earned dollars to experience something that is completely unworthy, unholy and just plain unnecessarily bad for our souls because nostalgia said it was a good idea! This is not only present in such forms of media as Star Wars but in other forms of entertainment as well. How many of us saw Batman VS Superman because we as teenagers or adolescents read Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and thought it would be an exact rendition of that piece of art? Who saw Man of Steel only because they saw the Nolan Brothers names in the credits and thought it would be just as good, if not, better than The Dark Knight? How many of us flocked to theaters to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because we loved Harrison Ford in the original adventures of Indiana Jones trilogy? Give me the total number of cattle who grazed their way to the theaters to see The Hobbit after the renowned success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy? And even in video games, who ran out and bought The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask because it took place in the same world and timeline as the famed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? The same with Nintendo and their consoles can be said. How many of you owned a Nintendo Game Boy and had to wait on line for 3 hours to obtain a Nintendo Virtual Boy due to the nostalgia caused by the Game Boy? On the other side of the fence, how many countless people purchased Sonic the Hedgehog for the Xbox 360 because of their fond recollections of Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast? The list goes on and on and on. 

All of these newly released end resulted products listed above have ended in disappointment over their predecessors in some way, shape or form. These letdowns that I just stated cannot hold a candle to their nostalgic ancestral entities  of the past that brought us such warmth and joy. Simply stated, they just do not make them like they used to! So why do we continue to follow this systematic pattern? Does nostalgia alone drive our state of mind or is it something deeper and something even more psychological? I feel that there is another driving force that goes hand in hand in tandem with the nostalgia factor. I strongly believe that married to nostalgia is F.O.M.O. or the “Fear of Missing Out”, which is a syndrome created by chemicals in the brain that develop such an emotional fear that if they were ever to stop witnessing a piece of intellectual property they have invested so much time and energy into that they became terrified as to what the outcome may be, even if there would be no harm done to them physically. Emotionally speaking, these people are frightened to the point of stasis that if they were to miss out on viewing or playing or experiencing something they have dumped a large chunk of their lives to, their minds may collapse into themselves like a neutron star! It fascinates the very mind and can even warrant further study to what drives an individual to such lengths of commitment, with nostalgic fear being one of the leading factors and causes. A prime example of this would be the television show The Walking Dead, based on Robert Kirkman’s comic series. The show has been renewed for it’s 11th season and has long since lost my interest so I simply stopped watching. But I know people who continue watching even though the show has turned stale. Why? F.O.M.O! Godforbid they miss out on a morsel and crumb of walking down a barren road! And what about the next Star Wars movie? Episode IX is due out in December of 2019 and the majority of people I know are committed to seeing it even after they claimed Episode VIII ruined the franchise for them. Why? F.O.M.O!

  I will leave you all with this final thought to ponder: If one is to break away from the sheepish herd, they must first act and lead like a member of the wolf pack.

[rkwon]

✦*⋆ RKPLAYLIST: JEON WONWOO !   — ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

PART ONE — HARD TIMES !   * AKA CHILDHOOD !

HARD TIMES ♡ PARAMORE ! ( hard times; gonna make you wonder why you even try. hard times; gonna take you down and laugh when you cry. these lives; and I still don't know how I even survive. hard times, hard times. ) TW ABUSE // it only takes one glance at won to know that he doesn’t have a lot. it takes a slightly closer look to notice the bruising barely covered by the rags he often wears as clothes, the scar above his right eye, the flinch of his body whenever someone comes at him too fast— life, 'family’, haven’t been too good to won over the years. the only difference? won knows how he survived — because of who. 

LUKA ♡ SUZANNE VEGA ! ( TW ABUSE // yes, I think I'm okay. I walked into the door again. well, if you ask that's what I'll say, and it's not your business anyway. I guess I'd like to be alone, with nothing broken, nothing thrown. just don't ask me how I am. ) TW ABUSE, NEGLECT // he can’t remember when the abuse from his brothers started — since forever, he’d say if asked (and comfortable enough to admit it). his parents, the same, in a way he doesn’t realise until later. feeding him scraps, leftovers instead of meals, giving him a few thousand won for his birthday and throwing seungwoo a party, locking him in his room when they don’t want to deal with him. even now, he makes excuses to hide the truth of it, lying easy after years of practice, because he doesn’t know how to help himself. 

EMBARRASSMENT ♡ MADNESS ! ( how can you show your face, when you're a disgrace to the human race? ) TW ABUSE, HOMOPHOBIA // the words he’s reminded of every opportunity. if it’s not his parents recalling how much it costs to keep him fed and housed at their home, how he should be grateful, it’s any and everyone explaining the shame he brings to the family — that he’s a disgrace, disgusting because of who he loves. 

LISTEN TO THIS SONG ♡ ROY KIM ! ( hey you, sitting over there. hey you, with your head down low. when it feels like the world will crash down, listen to this song. ) when he had nothing else that could offload the stress, the pain, he learnt to dance. he sang and moved until his legs gave out and he felt better, if only for long enough to keep going.  

MUCH MORE BEAUTIFUL PERSON ♡ BOWLING FOR SOUP ! ( and you don't feel so lucky, but I've seen so many things in you. believe me, I know just what you're going through. so stand up and take a bow, hold your head high. don't ever let them get you down. ) it took a long time for won to realise that said treatment he got from his family and fellow students is not what he deserves. he was easily convinced that he was the scum of the earth — how could he not have been with so many people telling him so? but his time would come, and it did. now he knows he’s, at best, the scum of his neighbourhood. that much, he can live with. 

PART TWO — BRIGHTER !   * AKA PRESENT !

BRIGHTER ♡ PATENT PENDING ! ( maybe I'm crazy, yeah, a little naive, but the light at the end is brighter than it used to be. got a long way to go, but I know, I believe that the light at the end is brighter than it used to be. ) with mingyu and his family’s help, won has slowly grown to realise that he not only deserves better, but can be better — that the sun is still shining on endless possibilities for him if he works hard enough. judgement and limited resources might stop him from doing a lot of things, but it won’t stop him from trying. 

LAST HOPE ♡ PARAMORE ! ( and the salt in my wounds isn't burning anymore than it used to. it's not that I don't feel the pain, it's just I'm not afraid of hurting anymore. ) TW HOMOPHOBIA // truthfully, after a few years, with a thicker skin in his later teens, hearing the same slurs and insults day in, day out, gets old. the hatred in their eyes still hits him just as hard, but he won’t hide anymore. he’s proud to be who he is, no matter what. he’s not afraid to be himself anymore. not for the most part, anyway.

WHO YOU ARE ♡ JESSIE J ! ( it's okay not to be okay. sometimes it's hard to follow your heart, but tears don't mean you're losing, everybody's bruising; there's nothing wrong with who you are. ) another thing he’s come to realise with age is that it’s okay to admit things aren’t right; that talking about the hardships he’s been through and accepting the support mingyu and his family give him doesn’t make him any less strong — stronger, really. he’s still learning to allow them in — of course, it’s a long road — but he’s making significant progress. 

THIS WILL BE THE DAY ♡ JEFF WILLIAMS & CASEY LEE WILLIAMS ! ( they see you as small and helpless, they see you as just a child. surprise when they find out that a warrior will soon run wild. ) he has no fantastical ideas of revenge towards his biological family, but he doesn’t intend to let them feel as if the suffering they’ve caused him over the years has left any imprint on him. he is instead passionate about making something of himself, living healthily and normally — his own victory; he won’t let them control him forever.

SUPERHEROES ♡ THE SCRIPT ! ( all his life he's been told he'll be nothing when he's old. all the kicks and all the blows, he won't ever let it show 'cause he's stronger than you know; a heart of steel starts to grow. ) he’s growing still. he’s growing into a strong, passionate young man, and he’ll prove to everyone that he can survive, thrive, even if all the odds are against him. he will. 

BONUS TRACKS — BE THE LIGHT !   * AKA INSPIRATION !

BE THE LIGHT ♡ ONE OK ROCK ! ( some days just pass by and some days are unforgettable. we can’t choose the reason why, but we can choose what to do from the day after. so with that hope, with that determination, let’s make tomorrow a brighter and better day. ) written in honour of the survivors of the tohoku earthquake in japan two years on, ‘be the light’ aims to bring hope and strength to anyone around the world suffering. messages like these, that give those who are struggling the courage to keep pushing on, that help heal and unite people, are what won wants to convey in many of his own songs. it’s a topic, though not specific to natural disasters, that hits close to home for him, and he wants to help as many people as possible to remember that they are never alone — that there is always hope.

THE WHISKEY, THE LIAR, THE THIEF ♡ PATENT PENDING ! ( she bats her eyes and lies about her ring, he used the coin he stole to buy the drinks. never thought they'd find love drowning sorrows at the pub, the whiskey, the Liar, the thief! ) that being said, won also wants to write more light-hearted songs, too. he wants to write lyrics that you can sing along to as you drive down the street with the windows wide open. in regards to this track, won wants to write lyrics that tell stories. having always loved to read so he could lose himself in another world, won wants to paint a picture with the words he’s writing, have listeners fall in love with the characters introduced to them in only four or five minutes. and well, why not make it a little different? pirates, thieves, liars, villains... the bad guys have stories to tell, too. 

MIROTIC ♡ DBSK ! ( I got you under my skin. ) won is, after all, a dancer any day over a vocalist, and the cherry on the cake would be to be part of a performance as a whole that becomes even slightly as iconic as this. it doesn’t have to be anything overly complicated, or as topless preferably, but nothing sounds as rewarding and fulfilling as being the original of a song future rookies will cover as a tradition and a honour. ( BONUS FOOTAGE ! )