#Listening Ears AU

[childotkw]

when was the turning point in listening ears au that dumbledure realized he f-uped with harry

I would say it’s probably the ““disappearance”” of Umbridge that finally, finally clues him into how badly he fucked things up.

Because students going missing at Hogwarts was an unfortunate and accepted occurrence. It’s gossip worthy and will become a cautionary tale in a generation, but it’s not uncommon.

But a professor vanishing? The Undersecretary to the Minister disappearing? That is not so quickly brushed aside.

Not by the Board and not by the Ministry.

The whole school goes into lockdown as the investigation cracks down. Everyone is interviewed, every potential lead run into the ground.

And, naturally, everything Umbridge was doing comes to light.

The detentions. The torture. The quill and illegal potions.

The collar.

The media have a field day.

Dumbledore doesn’t know for sure who spoke to the reporters, doesn’t know who let that detail in particular slip - but when reaches the papers that Harry Potter was forced to wear a collar that suppressed his creature nature?

Shit hitting the fan doesn’t even cover it.

Harry might be a polarising figure right now, he might have been having strips torn off him for months - but he was still famous, still a child, and this incident seemed to be the thing that finally reminded them all of it.

After all, the world loved the tragedy of Harry’s life. They loved to hate him and hated to love him. He’d saved them, and though that gave them the unfair belief that they were owed an opinion in everything he did, this time it worked to Harry’s advantage.

Muggleborns openly cried at his horrible experience. Purebloods demanded retribution in his name. Halfbloods shouted about the indignity, the injustice.

Dumbledore heard it all and saw it all.

And he watched from over the rims of his spectacles as Harry, with a blazing rash around his pale neck, calmly stared back.

The office was quiet, the air still and anticipatory, and for the life of him Dumbledore didn’t know how to ask.

Did you do something? Did you hurt her? Did you kill her?

The questions curdled on his tongue, refusing to leave his mouth. He…he couldn’t ask. Couldn’t shatter the deniability he was desperately clinging to.

Umbridge had gone to the Slytherin common room before she disappeared. The portraits reported her entering, and then leaving alone, shaken and uncomfortable. They lost her after she left the staircase, when she entered the second floor where there were no painted eyes to track her further.

By all accounts, she had stepped onto the second floor alone and vanished.

The second floor, where the Chamber of Secrets lay.

The Chamber of Secrets, accessible only to a Parselmouth.

Harry Potter, a Parselmouth and the current owner of the invisibility cloak.

Dumbledore couldn’t bring himself to ask and he realised, with a gaping pit forming in his stomach, that he couldn’t read Harry either.

The collar - different than the one he originally commissioned, but not so different that Dumbledore didn’t feel sickly guilty just looking at it - sat on the desk between them.

Harry didn’t even blink at it, didn’t seem surprised or bothered or even upset at being near the device used to torture him.

He just continued to stare at Dumbledore, quiet and reserved and wary.

That was the moment he knew he had broken something precious and fragile years ago, and he hadn’t even known it.

[kyri45]

Sometimes you just need to break all your walls…

Shadowpeach Bio Parent AU (PREV / FIRST / NEXT )

Mac is just- I'm not normal about this character. I think for a long time, he felt like he had to always be the voice of reason, the one who always stopped his companion into stupid situation, the helicopter mama when it comes to MK, the mature one between him and Wukong. Probably as a way to stand out of Wukong shadow, trying to compensate the areas he lacks, or to try to hide what he thinks are weakness

While, most of the time, he's just- so scared. like a little kid. I feel like sometimes, he just needs to be held.

[hypewinter]

The Titans set out to investigate a town rumored to be haunted. There they find a ghost boy tirelessly defending his town alone.

[talkativeanonymous]

Fine okay you can have more Mastermind Whit!! SIGH!! I guess!! /silly Transparents under the cut as usual <3

[fudgecake-charlie]

I am very good at doing what I need to do! You all get even more cosmic harbingers but this time it's Grian :] (Redraw from under the cut of this ask about a year ago.)

[sweetybaty]

Flaky exposed!!1!!1!!!!

[dreemurr-skelememer]

Headcanon: what if Nightmare secretly had the paper of his AU from the doodle sphere in his book before he ate the apple in dreamtale?

Also second Head-canon, what if the other Nightmare had that same book that helped him gaining knowledge of other universes by taking their papers away?

i really really really like this idea.

.........so much so that i doodled a multiverse guardian nightmare.

this was going to be a tiny ask post but i went.......out of hand. thank you so much anon, you genuinely fueled something that SPIRALED OUT OF CONTROL

i LOOOOOVE this idea.

i like to imagine that he has a book that he stores the pages in.

and upon the discovery of the multiverse pages, he either asks ink to store them in his book for him instead of being scattered around, or..........

this is his multiverse now.

alternatively: i think that nightmare running off into the multiverse in curiosity and adventure because of this will cause him to leave dream behind and fend for the tree by himself,

making a whole new variant of a swapped dreamtale.

teehee anyway here's the designs side by side :3

[relgnira]

why are they… “like that”

[fangirltothefullest]

Yeah, I'm a missing link of this illusion I am not really here, I'm an intrusion I don't swim or sink, I just float I don't need gravity, I just need growth

Tumblr hates gifs oh well. Stills under the cut for infinitely better quality.

[mispatchedgreens]

more from the reincarnated band au in the form of: sometimes you're just a girl who wants to have a nice lunch date w your partner, but then her incredibly rude coworker stalks in (bc he stalks everywhere) and then you realise you've miscalculated bc the shop is one block away from the gym and his appearance makes sense, he does leave the gym at this hour (you're annoyed that you know ouyang's routine). Some random jockman is trailing after him and ouyang appears as pleased as he is desperate to evade him, and they both sit down with you and you end up eating your noodles next to some sweaty guy you just met, while zhu and ouyang bicker gleefully at each other about music.

[strelitzien-gewaechs]

i really like to think that the life series is about martyn and the rest of the members being stuck in a tragic death game loop while the watchers feed on their emotions

and also that etho clone #3068 is just there to do his job (read his lines, be quirky and die) :)

[childotkw]

For the Listening Ears AU, how does Snape react to Harry's abilities? Does Snape still hate Harry even though he's in Slytherin?

Snape’s never hated Harry, but he’s always been suitably freaked out by him in this AU. Harry being a Slytherin puts an immediate stop to a lot of the canon bullshit behaviour we see Snape aim at him - if anything, Snape just pretends Harry doesn’t exist unless there’s a way to leverage his skills for an obscene amount of points for Slytherin.

Harry, for his part, doesn’t like or trust Snape the same way he doesn’t like or trust any authority figure beyond the orphanage matron.

Harry’s abilities do bother Snape, but he’s not affected by them because his mental defences are so top-notch. A siren’s voice can’t affect Snape.

But he’s rightly concerned over what Harry could potentially do with it, at first. Despite Harry being reserved and selectively mute, Snape still makes the mistake of assuming he’s been spoiled rotten. In the first year, he doesn’t know Harry was with the Dursleys, he doesn’t know about Dudley’s accident, or that Harry ran away and is now at an orphanage.

He thinks he spent his childhood being the prince of the wizarding world, and him having an ability that could literally force anyone to do anything unless they’ve specifically trained their minds to resist it? Yeah. He thinks Harry would abuse the fuck out of that.

He is, originally, supportive of Dumbledore’s idea to…suppress Harry’s ability while he’s outside Hogwarts. At least in the school he can be monitored and observed. Out in the wild though there’s nothing they can do to keep Harry from hypnotising every little person he comes across.

Snape refuses to see that Harry doesn’t talk. He refuses to think of why everyone he speak to - Draco, the first years, the older Slytherins, the teachers - all say they’ve never heard Harry say a word that wasn’t a hoarse, uncomfortable whisper.

His indifference leads to several misunderstandings - up to and including when Draco approaches him about the collar. Draco’s still young, caught between wanting to help his friend and not betraying his privacy until Snape agrees to help.

Only Snape hears ‘Harry’ and ‘suppressed’ and ‘acting strange’ and thinks ‘Potter’s complaining like a brat about having his special toy taken away from him’, and so shuts Draco down.

They never go to him again.

It’s only towards third year that Snape finally catches a clue as to what Dumbledore actually meant by suppress, and that his students have been trying to find away around a fucking collar that damages a young boy’s throat and vocal cords and magical core if he tries to use any aspect of his creature side.

He’s…disturbed.

Even more so when he finally, finally approaches Harry for a talk only to find an incredibly blank-faced, jaded young boy that stares at him with Lily’s eyes and a complete lack of trust in anyone but a handful of other children.

Because Harry’s long past asking for help when every adult has smacked his reaching hand away again and again.

Because Harry’s sick of giving second, third, fourth chances to people who always show up (finally, finally he’s so sick of finally) too fucking late to do anything.

[kyri45]

The chilly season is coming, they both need their living stove/pillow

(Yes, this is happening in the AU a couple of days after the recent update. No, I don’t know how I am surviving with these 2 still not together)

[bonefall]

I'd absolutely love to see a hearing disabilities herb guide!

I'm deaf in one ear, so now I'm curious if there are any cats in the rewrite like me? I imagine they might avoid Gatherings because HEARING IN CROWDS UGH.

I need to pick a bunch actually! At some point, I plan to just toss more sight, smell, and hearing disabilities onto the various cats. It should be SUPER common, actually.

Especially in RiverClan.

Like... when I get around to these, RiverClan is going to keep coming up as having a notably higher proportion of deafness and scentlessness. Rivers are filthy. Their ears and snouts are going to be dunked full of gunk ALL the time, they develop a ton of infections. I'm guesstimating that around 15% of RiverClan should have some degree of hearing and/or scent loss, especially as they get older.

Also; Clan cats should be protecting their noses like tools. The same way that you might get scolded for misusing gym equipment, mentors should be chiding their apprentices for doing things like;

Sticking their noses in mud or snow

Eating food that is too hot (damage to the Jacobson's organ)

Sniffing ripe puffballs or other spore-forming mushrooms

Hanging out in dusty dens or unclean, musty spaces (this one wouldn't actually do anything bad, just makes a good superstition.)

But anyway! That's SCENT loss, which should be a waaaaaay bigger disability for Clan cats, but in humans we just don't really take as seriously. In WC, blindness should not have the same weight and scentloss should be a lot heavier.

For hearing loss in one ear, so far, there's just Strikestone, who canonically can't hear out of one of his ears. I will be casually throwing this onto more cats.

[rottentricks]

Yeah,,you,,,I'm working hard for you (I'm making a comic pls, and hanging on my remaining sanity)

[concord-and-cliches]

some more roleswap! feat. @brainrotdotorg's designs (look at her version of my swap designs here NOW !!) and a scene from my silly lil fic lol [id in alt!]