#Let's be real he'd never take the hat off if he had cat ears

[socially-anxious-wizard]

Oh shit now I'm thinking about Mihawk with cat ears...

Shanks is this you on Anon.

[ghost-proofbaby]

Some more headcanons for you 😌

- Eddie is not a "You like that band? Name 3 of their songs 😠" kind of dickhead, he's actually super thrilled when people like the same music as him. And when someone he has a thing for likes it, he's so excited to have something to connect with them on, and it makes them just that much cooler to him.

- He's an absolute expert at the "Quick, pretend to be my boyfriend so this creep will leave me alone!" game. He'll do it for his friends, for a total stranger, for a girl, a boy, anything, and at the drop of a hat. He gets real theatrical about it, too, the dramatic little shit. But he never forgets to make the person he's helping out feel safe.

- (this one is really indulgent self-projection but) Eddie l o v e s a good Renaissance Faire. Strong chance he would work at them when he grows up (just trust me on this, it's where the Eddie Munsons of this world go). And yes, he absolutely wears a kilt as part of his costuming.

- He is a raging bisexual, and I am prepared to die on this hill. The crush he has on Kirk Hammett can only be matched by the one he has on Elvira.

- He is incredibly impressed by any kind of home-cooked food. He doesn't know how to cook (although I bet he'd be good at it if he learned), so he mainly subsists off TV dinners and takeout. Someone could make him box brownies and he'd think it was the best thing ever.

- When he reads to someone (of course he loves to read his favorite books out loud to people), he always does the voices, and sometimes he gets excited and he acts a scene out.

- This is a cat man. He loves cats, and cats love him. There are a bunch of strays, I'm talking at least 6, that he feeds around his trailer. He can't bring them inside because his uncle has allergies, but he makes sure they all have flea collars, and he sets out nice boxes and soft pillows and blankets for them to sleep on. They all have names. His favorite, the one he would bring inside if he could, the one he'll probably take with him if he ever moves out, is an old, scraggly orange boy with like one eye, ⅔ of one ear, a mouth full of snaggleteeth, and a cropped tail. He calls him Tom Sawyer, and he CLAIMS it's after the Rush song, not the Mark Twain character, but he's lying.

- He's a switch and a verse. And he's all about service. I said what I said.

- He's an absolute sucker for a classic cheesy fantasy movie. Dark Crystal, Willow, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn, all of that stuff. I know people think he's a horror movie enthusiast, but they simply don't understand his love for Legend 😩

- He loves vegetables when they're still crunchy, hates them when they're cooked into mush.

- His uncle had more of a hand in raising him than his parents ever did. *Sally Field Aunt May voice* He is HIS boy!!

That's all I've got for now. I could keep going forever tho 😂😂😂

honestly i'd let you keep going forever these are GOLDEN

all of these are so near and dear to me, but that ren fair one? as someone who is going tomorrow again - you're fucking right. all i do when i'm there is think "this is eddie core, that's so eddie core! oh, EDDIE CORE!" he absolutely would go, and he absolutely would work there. he'd be amazing at it. it's also the one place where he's not worried about bullies. there was a fic once i believe that pointed that out - it's too nerdy for him to worry about bullies showing up there because they wouldn't be caught dead attending! he'd love dressing in character and would find it all so endearing. he'd be a sucker for all the girls in corsets, for all the little stores and all the neat attractions. at mine, there's a little attraction where there's 'mermaids' and i just know he'd probably be besties with the mermaids, hanging out with them and bugging them nonstop. he's cool there. he's respected there. i just know our boy would thrive.

[songofmadness]

I recently fixated on a very nice hat I saw in passing as I doomscrolled on pinterest... at 3 in the morning, stubbornly fighting off my prescription sleep meds - which I pay money for, and take so that I can sleep - just like a real, proper adult. Hunted the hat down on etsy - which took a little bit, as no one links the damn creator on pinterest- and discovered that it was significantly out of my (tiny) budget for cute hats.

Instead of putting down the damn laptop and letting my (paid for) sleep medication do its damn job, I spent two hours on ravelry trying to find an acceptable hat pattern so I can make the desired cute hat. It is now 5 in the morning. Not a single pattern perfectly matches this damn hat.

This was clearly the time to give up right? Right? But no. I climb out of my nice warm bed - it's winter and my house is poorly made so it is very, very cold. My window is also open at all times unless the rain is actually blowing sideways directly into it, because otherwise it feels like I'm going to suffocate. I am aware that this is ridiculous.

So anyway. Winter. 4 degrees celsius in my bedroom - I checked. And I'm wandering around the sewing room hunting down supplies so I can devise a pattern for this bloody hat. I don't have thick enough wool. Fine. I wind a ball of four seperate colours and weights, green/grey/black. The colour is pleasing and the weight seems sufficient. My feet are like blocks of ice. It is 5-30 in the morning, I have not slept, my sleep meds have given up entirely. The sun isn't up yet, I reason vaguely, I have not yet completely failed as an adult.

I have to teach my spawn maths the next day today. I have to clean my house, and buy groceries and walk the dog and basically function like a sensible 31 year old woman, a single mother, a homeschool teacher. All these things I am supposed to do. But the hat.

I curl up in my bed, scattered with wool, and needles, and books, and inhalers, and cats. Open the curtain - the sky is still black out, and the wind is freezing and I am an idiot. I'm so dumb and I can't stop. I knit a hat. And then frog it and knit another hat, because I reached for the pretty handcarved needles instead of a pair that matched the gauge. Because I'm tired now and I still can't stop.

I reknit the hat. It doesn't look right. I frog it again, have a brief sleep deprived cackle over the term frog, because my little brother loved frogs, he'd rescue them out of the toilet cistern when we were kids - 'Straya! - and I miss him so much and I knit the hat again.

I stare at the grainy etsy photos. None of them are at the right angle for me to make sure I've done it right so I dig through previous purchases until I found a photo taken by some person I have never and will never meet - a person who could afford a $270 knitted hat, who took a photo wearing the coveted hat that they had paid for - I find this photo after fighting off the sleep meds that I pay for and -

I realise that I have definitely knitted the wrong hat. There isn't a seamline there. I swear and frog and start again. I go to youtube and relearn how to do a provisional cast on. I knit the hat. My hands are cold, and my nose and ears are cold and the cats are sleeping. The dog has checked on me three times because I'm not meant to do this and he knows it as well as I do. The sun comes up by slow degrees - we're far enough south that the position of the rising sun changes signifigantly over the course of a year. In winter it rises behind my neighbour's house.

The sky is freezing clear. The sunrise is glorious, amber and rose and I am so tired and I can't sleep because the hat. And anyway, I can't sleep now, because the spawn will be up in an hour and he wont eat unless I hand him food, he'll take his meds and then he wont be hungry anymore, and I worry about his weight. The cats are purring. I'm so tired.

I finish the hat. It is lovely and warm on my half frozen ears. The cats are purring, the sky is no longer painted with the amber sunrise. The spawn is making sleepy noise in his room. I need to get up and make coffee and stagger through the day. Sometimes I can - like the terror-fueled last minute scrawlings that earned me A's and commendations in english class a million years and five minutes ago, sometimes my stupid broken brain can pull off miracles. Sometimes I half ass everything, and snap at people, and just generally act like a sleep deprived asshole. Those are not good days.

Either way it goes, I can't stop myself from fixating on the hat [insert stupid thing here]. I have medication that helps me stop, but I can't take that at night because then I can't sleep. Also if I take it to last 24 hours a day my heart will explode or something idk. Sometimes I can fore myself to stop, to lie down and try to rest. I don't, I just run through the ways I could hypothetically construct the [insert stupid thing here]. I don't sleep.

I am really really sick of this. I have a hat, and sleep debt, and a broken brain. I haven't been writing because that requires higher brain function and I only have that for random stupid hats and explaining maths principles through provisioning for a zombie apocalypse. Hopefully, this will be just yet another weird cycle and it'll stop and I'll be able to act more like a normal person again soon.

Or maybe this is permanent? Maybe this is what post thirty ADHD looks like for me. If it is, I'll just have to figure out workarounds for it. But yeah, in conclusion, tired, not writing, have a cool hat now.

[nautilusopus]

Cloud adopts a cat. Or vice versa

for monkey's paw askbox fics

fuck you you KNEW where this was going to go this is selection bias

or

what's the opposite of that. coercion. bottlenecking. something. it's that.

fuck it, two birds one stone

The draft I wrote this on is named "fuck you kaley" just so you know

Cloud stared into the mirror and grimaced at what Cid had called "some kinda space puberty", which was entirely too generous of a word for it in Cloud's opinion. He had to actively work to keep his ears from flattening against his skull in order to take a look at them. 

A few days ago he could've hidden them in his hair, or worn a hat. Now, though, the large, fuzzy triangles sitting atop his head were far too noticeable for what they were. To say nothing of his tail. That he now had. Apparently. He had a tail now. 

He knew Hojo had done a lot more gene splicing with him than just Jenova, but he'd sort of figured that meant taking a gene that helped him produce more or less of a certain chemical, or improved his resistance to cold. Not... whatever this was. 

The ears he could sort of understand -- with them now much wider and on top of his head, able to swivel independently, his already enhanced hearing improved that much more. What advantage did the tail possibly offer, though? Aside from making chairs harder to sit in, or getting caught in doors, or making everyone stare at him because it was obvious they were absolutely dying to touch it, to see if it was real.

He could cut it off, probably -- but then, due to his healing factor and the fact that this was apparently coded into his DNA, it would just grow back. His ears were another matter; they wouldn't migrate back down to the sides of his head if he cut those off. And taking a blade to something attached to his head was just asking for trouble.

He glanced back at the bathroom door. He'd been locked in here for two hours, after Tifa had given one an experimental scratch and he'd leaned into her and actually started purring, to his complete and utter mortification. He'd have to go back out eventually. Someone was gonna have to use the toilet or something. 

It wasn't just the ears, though. Or even the tail. Nanaki had a tail and he managed just fine -- even gave Cloud some tips to help him keep it out of the way of slamming doors. Going out in public with cat ears and a tail wasn't the worst thing in the world when he already got looks for going out in public with his freak eyes. He'd been getting stares from disapproving strangers as long as he could remember. And at the end of the day, his family certainly didn't seem to mind. (Barret and Tifa had been entirely too enthusiastic about them, in fact.) They were either neutral or in-denial-about-not-being-neutral-leaning-towards-positive about the whole thing, and those were the only opinions he cared about anyway. 

They'd been neutral-to-positive about the skirts, and he'd been way more anxious to let them find out about that. In isolation, a tail really wasn't that bad.

But...

It was his body. It was his body, he'd fought tooth and nail for years to be able to say that. What would he look like in two years? In ten? Would he even be recognisable? At least Sephiroth had been born looking the way he had. 

It was the principle of the thing. He had purred earlier: How much of his body had changed internally to allow that without him even realising it until the tail had sprouted? Could he still eat fruit, or was he an obligate carnivore now? Even after all these years, he still didn't know exactly what had been done to him.

Maybe he could just decide to look different, the way things infected with Jenova could. But he'd never tried before, and there was no one left that could teach him, the way Nanaki could teach him how to have a tail. 

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with a heavy sigh and allowed his ears to flatten. And now he was thinking about the lifespan thing, and he really, really didn't want to have to think about the lifespan thing. 

It didn't do any good to think about the lifespan thing, he forcibly reminded himself even as he continued to think about it, when he was still young and wouldn't be visibly aging that much anyway. If he was lucky, he'd get to grow old along with his family the normal way. If he was a bit less lucky, he'd either die young from cancer, or after two or three centuries, both as a result of the enhancements as well. If it was the former, well... he could make his peace with that. If it was the latter, he'd get to keep Nanaki and Vincent company for a while, before eventually returning to the Planet to rest. 

Worst case scenario, he wound up like Jenova Herself, and just kept going. Until his loved ones, even Nanaki and Vincent, grew old and died, until he didn't even recognise the world anymore, much less himself. Until they were both too warped by time and all the hidden defects in the building blocks that made them up to be anything he could call home. Until the Planet itself crumbled into dust. Until -- 

One of his ears itched. Without even thinking, he flicked it a few times before reaching up to scratch it. Like a cat. Like a fucking cat. 

He took a deep breath, and let it out, and immediately felt stupid. Maybe he'd gradually devolve into a pile of meat over ten thousand years and maybe he wouldn't, and in the meantime he had no way of knowing and he was standing here in a bathroom panicking over his ears. 

He could deal with them first. Maybe Nanaki had tips. Though, Nanaki didn't bother to hide half his body language around them, since not many of them knew how to interpret a tail.

His own was puffed up and curled down between his legs, he realised. And, more to the point, he was going to have to cut holes in a lot of pairs of pants, unless he wanted to resign himself to the discomfort of sitting on it. 

That might not be a bad idea, he mused. Definitely an improvement over broadcasting how stressed out he was. 

"You're not coughing up hairballs in there, are you?" came a voice from outside the door. Cloud grunted. Yuffie. Figures it'd be her. 

"Yeah, laugh it up," he shot. "Out in a sec." He straightened up, and did his best to relax his tail, and then the rest of him. Just ears. Just a tail. Just more parts of his body.

Then he adjusted the collar of his maid outfit and stepped back outside.