#Quixotic: Air

[bloodiegawz]

the

The.

[chokopoppo]

Fandom: Band of Brothers (TV 2001) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Lynn "Buck" Compton/Donald Malarkey Characters: Lynn "Buck" Compton, Donald Malarkey, Joseph Toye, Edward "Babe" Heffron, Bill Guarnere Additional Tags: Post-War, Grief/Mourning, Dysphoria, Substance Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Police, Red Scare, Lavender Scare, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Period-Typical Transphobia, Rimming, Gender Role Fetish, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, gender euphoria Series: Part 2 of Pin Drop.

“It’s a bit of a stereotype,” Don says, doubtfully, “you know. About inverts, getting off on dressing up as women. You know, perverting marriage, or whatever.”

So, it’s a fetish. Of course, it’s one he would have, Don thinks bitterly, that would be his luck.

He turns it over in his head, looking at it from every angle. He probably shouldn’t, but it’s like a loose tooth in his mouth, something he can’t stop drifting back to. There’s something magnetic about the idea of it. There’s a stirring, a waking excitement, an irritatingly physical response that denies him control.

[little-lanterns]

do you think dad quixote prepared the fireworks for these special occasions

[sivavakkiyar]

wait there’s a statue of Don Quixote & Rocinante at the intersection of Avenida de Mayo and Avenida 9 de Julio?

[nymphofrubies]

I can't believe i'm going to see Marianela Nuñez as Kitri in a couple weeks, i'm watching her solo on loop day dreaming of the day i'll be sitting in the teather! And i'm going to be so close to the stage too! i'm so excited!

This is what life is about!

[melonisopod]

I need to clean up my art sideblog cause I cooked these past couple days and I will cook some more.

[ghstyles]

Game night | Windows facing

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The Sigma boys host a monthly game night and you’re tired of Harry’s bragging

Windows Facing Masterlist

Main Masterlist

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The evening air buzzes with excitement as students stream into the Sigma house for the monthly Greek Life Game Night. String lights illuminate the spacious living room, now rearranged with tables for various board games and card tournaments. A whiteboard near the entrance displays the night's schedule and championship brackets.

Y/N hesitates on the porch, second-guessing her decision to attend. She adjusts the strap of her messenger bag, which contains her "secret weapons": a deck of cards she's practiced with and her personal Scrabble dictionary.

"You can still back out," Maya says beside her, reading her roommate's expression. "We could go get ice cream instead."

Y/N shakes her head, determination setting her jaw. "No. I've listened to Harry brag about being the undefeated champion for months. I can't take it anymore."

Last week in their shared Literature seminar, Harry had been particularly unbearable, regaling anyone who would listen with tales of his strategic brilliance at the last Game Night. When Y/N had rolled her eyes, he'd turned his attention directly to her.

"Problem, psychology girl?" he'd asked with that infuriating smirk. "Jealous you don't have what it takes to compete?"

That had been the final straw.

"Let's do this," Y/N says now, straightening her shoulders and marching through the front door.

Inside, the party is already in full swing. Fraternity and sorority members mingle around game tables, plastic cups in hand. A cheer erupts from the far corner where Niall appears to be dominating at beer pong.

"Well, well, well," comes a familiar voice, and Y/N turns to find Harry leaning against the wall, a golden championship sash draped across his chest reading "GAME NIGHT CHAMPION." "Look who decided to grace us with her presence."

He pushes off the wall and approaches, his confident swagger making Y/N's competitive spirit flare.

"Nice sash," she comments dryly. "Does it come in adult sizes?"

Harry chuckles, seemingly pleased by her barb rather than offended. "Custom-made, actually. Had to accommodate all this winning energy." He gestures to himself with a flourish.

Maya snorts beside Y/N. "I'm going to find Louis. Try not to murder each other before the games actually start." She disappears into the crowd, leaving Y/N alone with Harry.

"So," Harry says, his eyes sparkling with amusement, "what brings our uni’s most dedicated student to our humble game night? Finally decided to see how the fun half lives?"

"I heard there was an insufferable champion who needed dethroning," Y/N replies sweetly. "Thought I'd volunteer for the job."

Harry's eyebrows shoot up, a delighted smile spreading across his face. "You're here to compete? Against me?"

"Is that so hard to believe?"

"No," he says, studying her with newfound interest. "Just unexpected. And entertaining."

Before Y/N can respond, Liam's voice booms through the room. "Alright, everyone! First round starts in five minutes. Check the board for your assignments!"

Harry gestures toward the game tables. "After you, challenger."

Y/N moves past him, aware of his eyes following her. She checks the tournament board and sees she's assigned to start with Monopoly, not her strongest game, but she's come prepared.

The night progresses through a series of elimination rounds. To her surprise, Y/N finds herself advancing steadily. She demolishes Zayn at Scrabble (her 'QUIXOTIC' on a triple word score leaving him speechless), outmaneuvers a Beta Theta Pi senior at chess, and displays unexpected ruthlessness during Settlers of Catan.

After each victory, she makes a point of finding Harry in the crowd and offering him a small, challenging smile. His initial amusement gradually shifts to something more complex: surprise, respect, and a growing competitive edge.

By midnight, the crowd has thinned to spectators and finalists. The tournament board shows only two names advancing to the final round: Harry Styles and Y/N.

"Looks like it's just you and me, psychology girl," Harry says, joining her at the refreshment table where she's refilling her water. "Impressed?"

"With myself? Absolutely," she quips. "With the competition? The jury's still out."

Harry laughs, genuine and warm. "You know, when you walked in tonight, I thought you might make it past the first round if you got lucky. I never expected..."

"That a non-Greek, bookish psychology major could actually be good at games?" Y/N finishes for him.

Harry shakes his head. "That anyone could keep up with me." There's no mockery in his tone, just honest surprise and something that sounds almost like admiration.

"Final round in two minutes!" Liam announces. "Harry and Y/N, center table!"

The remaining crowd gathers around as they take their seats. The final challenge is revealed: Ultimate Poker Showdown—a high-stakes variation combining elements of Texas Hold'em and Five Card Draw.

"Hope you brought your poker face," Harry says, shuffling the cards with practiced ease.

Y/N meets his gaze steadily. "I never leave home without it."

The game begins, and the atmosphere grows tense. Harry plays with confidence born from experience, but Y/N holds her own, her analytical mind calculating probabilities and reading subtle shifts in Harry's expression.

They trade victories back and forth, neither gaining a significant advantage. The onlookers grow increasingly invested, with Louis and Niall providing colorful commentary from the sidelines.

"She's got him on the ropes!" Louis exclaims after Y/N wins a particularly crucial hand.

"Don't count him out yet," Niall counters. "Harry's got more comebacks than a boomerang factory."

As the final hand approaches, they're nearly tied. Y/N feels a bead of sweat trickle down her spine, but her expression remains neutral. Across the table, Harry studies his cards, a slight furrow between his brows the only indication of his concentration.

"All in," Y/N says finally, pushing her chips to the center.

A murmur ripples through the crowd. Harry looks up, searching her face for any tell. Y/N meets his gaze calmly, allowing just the faintest hint of a smile to touch her lips.

After a long moment, Harry nods. "Call."

They reveal their hands simultaneously. A collective gasp rises from the spectators as Y/N's full house beats Harry's flush.

For a moment, silence reigns. Then Liam steps forward, raising Y/N's arm. "We have a new champion!"

The room erupts in cheers and disbelieving exclamations. Maya rushes forward to hug Y/N, while Louis claps a stunned Harry on the shoulder.

"Wait! She's not even in a sorority!" Harry protests, though there's more bewilderment than actual outrage in his voice. "This is Greek Life Game Night!"

Niall shrugs. "Should've thought of that before you let her play, mate."

"Yeah," Zayn adds with a smirk. "No one to blame but yourself."

As the commotion continues, Liam presents Y/N with the championship sash and a small burlap satchel. "The spoils of victory," he explains. "Bragging rights, the sash, and the pot. Everyone chips in five bucks each game night."

Y/N accepts the sash with a gracious nod, draping it over her shoulder. When she reaches for the satchel, however, Harry's hand darts out, snatching it away.

"Hold on," he says, holding the bag just out of her reach. "I think we need to discuss the eligibility requirements here."

Y/N narrows her eyes. "Are you seriously going to be a sore loser right now?"

"I'm just saying," Harry continues, a hint of his usual cockiness returning, "there are traditions to uphold. Non-Greek participants should have to...I don't know, earn their winnings differently."

Before he can elaborate on what that might entail, Y/N lunges forward and grabs the satchel from his hand in one swift movement, surprising both Harry and herself with her quickness.

"I earned this fair and square," she states firmly, though there's a playful glint in her eye that matches his. "But if it makes you feel better, I'll spend some of it buying you a consolation drink."

The tension breaks as Harry laughs, shaking his head in amused defeat. "I underestimated you, psychology girl. It won't happen again."

"Good," Y/N replies, a genuine smile breaking through her competitive facade. "Because I plan to defend my title next month."

Harry's eyebrows shoot up. "Next month? So you're making this a regular thing?"

"Why not?" she shrugs, enjoying the way surprise and pleasure mingle in his expression. "Unless you're afraid of losing again?"

"Me? Afraid?" Harry scoffs, but his eyes dance with excitement at the challenge. "Sweetheart, I'm already planning my comeback strategy."

The crowd disperses as music resumes and the after-party begins in earnest. Y/N finds herself surrounded by sorority girls curious about her poker techniques and fraternity brothers offering congratulatory fist bumps.

Later, as promised, she buys Harry that consolation drink. It’s a ridiculous concoction with an umbrella that makes him laugh when she presents it.

"To worthy opponents," he says, raising his glass to hers.

"And unexpected victories," she adds, clinking her drink against his.

As the night winds down, Y/N realizes she's had more fun than she's experienced in months of studying. Even more surprising is the realization that a significant portion of that enjoyment came from her interactions with Harry himself. From their competitive banter, the mutual respect that developed as they recognized each other's skills, and the undeniable chemistry that seems to crackle between them whether they're arguing or collaborating.

When she finally prepares to leave, Harry walks her to the door, leaning against the frame as she steps onto the porch.

"You know," he says, his voice softer than usual, "if you wanted to spend time with me, you could have just asked. No need to orchestrate an elaborate gaming victory."

Y/N rolls her eyes, but she's smiling. "Don't flatter yourself, Styles. I came for the glory, not the company."

"And yet," he observes with a knowing look, "you seem to have enjoyed both."

Before she can formulate a suitably dismissive response, he continues:

"Same time next month? I'll be practicing."

The invitation and the challenge send a small thrill through her.

"Wouldn't miss it," she replies, turning to go with the championship sash still draped proudly across her shoulder. "But don't bother practicing too hard. Some people are just naturally better than others."

Harry's laughter follows her down the steps, warm and genuine in the cool night air.

"We'll see about that, champion!" he calls after her.

As Y/N walks back to her dorm with Maya, she finds herself already thinking about strategy for next month's rematch. And if she's also thinking about the way Harry's eyes lit up when she challenged him, or how his genuine laugh makes something warm unfurl in her chest—well, that's just an unexpected side effect of victory.

One she might not mind experiencing again.

Taglist: @hisparentsgallerryy @toosarcastic03 @practistyles @sstylezzz @sassamanda77 @wheredidmyeyesgo @pbandnutella @triski73 @angeldavis777 @ivegotthecinemaa @bethiegurl19@spinninc @spargelhund

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: When I Win the World Ends

(For my previous Making Of post, see The Making Of: Cleveland Quixotic.)

I. 1999

It was the year of the cubicle movie. It was the year of Fight Club, of Office Space, of Being John Malkovich, of Three Kings, of The Matrix, and of American Beauty. It was the year of suburban malaise, of eternal sunshine, of ceaseless normality. A year of United States hegemony; a year whose chief terror was that THIS WAS IT.

Before the millennium turned and the towers fell, there was an initial challenge to this order, a completely inconsequential one made consequential by a newly minted 24/7 news media machine running out of noise to fill dead air now that people were sick to bursting of the Clinton impeachment. This challenge came not through war, revolution, or violence, but through entertainment. Children's entertainment.

And I was a child. Unaware of any cultural context, I knew only one thing: I loved Pokémon. I really, really loved Pokémon.

I owned Red Version, Blue Version, Yellow Version, Pokémon Pinball, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Snap, Hey You Pikachu, a Pokémon Tetris sort of puzzle game, even the Pokémon TCG game for Gameboy. I had ten to fifteen strategy guides for the games, an encyclopedia of the 151 Pokémon, a choose your own adventure book, an I Spy-style book. I had Pokémon figurines, Pokémon plushies, toy Poké Balls, toy Pokédexes. I had Pokémon stamps and Pokémon stickers and a deck of Pokémon cards. Not trading cards, just a standard 52-card deck with Pokémon pictures on it. Of course I also had the trading cards. A complete set of the first three runs, plus a special Mew card you could get from I dunno Toys R Us or something as part of some promotion. I had a guide for the card game that explained which cards were good or bad even though I didn't even play the card game. I had a Pokémon Tamagotchi and Pokémon pencils and Pokémon erasers and Ash Ketchum's hat and I dressed up as Ash Ketchum for Halloween. Of course I watched every episode of the anime, and in notebooks I drew doodles of existing Pokémon and came up with names for new Pokémon. My father had died that year.

My father was a sports fanatic. Traditional sports. He, too, collected. Sports memorabilia, baseball cards, figures of famous stars. When I was an infant, he drove me on a cross country road trip to Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I became a part owner of the Green Bay Packers. He had always wanted me to grow up and pursue professional sports. When I was born, the doctor apparently said to start looking for football colleges, a quote he saved in a scrapbook of baby photos. He had played sports himself, in college; he was a baseball catcher, until a hitter accidentally struck him in the head with a full force swing.

Almost everything I personally remember about him involves him dying. He was sick for a long time, and I remember hospitals and hospital beds and strange smells and gauze. And then one day my mother told me he died.

He was a charismatic man, very social and very popular. He had many friends and a lot of family, all of whom had constantly been around our house. Once he was gone, they stopped coming around. Then it was just me and my mother, who was not a fanatic for anything, except maybe her job as an elementary school teacher, which consumed her time as she assiduously prepared lesson plans and graded tests until late at night. When my father died, she got into some argument with his side of the family, the details of which I still don't fully understand, and afterward they no longer spoke. Her own family lived far away, out-of-state, seen only at Christmas. The house became quiet.

And I… played… Pokémon.

II. The Electric Tale of Pikachu

Toshihiro Ono was a mangaka primarily known for shotacon and futanari hentai. His credits such as Innyou Megami and Anal Justice made him a no-brainer pick for the officially licensed Pokémon manga, Electric Tale of Pikachu, as it too would feature a 10-year-old boy as the protagonist.

This manga would be the foundation for my conception of what Pokémon was, narratively. Though I also had the Pokémon Adventures manga that ran concurrently and which has by now long outlasted it, Electric Tale left a significantly deeper imprint on my memory.

In summary, Electric Tale is a retelling of the first two seasons of the anime. Ash Ketchum is the main character, he's accompanied by Misty and later Brock, his rival is Gary, and Team Rocket harangues him.

What sets Electric Tale apart is its tone, which is far more adult than Adventures and the anime. Obviously, part of this comes from the author's primary area of expertise being hentai. Even in the censored English version, there is a sense of sexual playfulness in how every single female character is an older woman who likes to tease Ash about his romantic interests.

But there are other elements that creep in unrelated to sex, due to the perspective of someone only used to speaking to adults who suddenly has to speak to children. Ono doesn't really get the childish fantasy of leaving at 10 being normal in society, so he introduces an element where Ash can only get a one year deferment from school and will have to return unless he hits it big. Team Rocket are former competitive hopefuls who flamed out and then, with no education or work experience to speak of, had no choice but to turn to crime. The Pokémon are depicted more realistically, often eschewing the toyetic mascot elements of their designs.

And the landscapes are often wistful, even apocalyptic in their presentation:

This more sedate, mature, realistic depiction of Pokémon became what I wanted Pokémon to be, what I projected onto an original Red and Blue version that left everything open to interpretation, and what would increasingly frustrate me with the series as it deviated more toward bombastic villain groups with goofy destroy-the-world plots. (Which was what put me off Pokémon Adventures.)

Amid all this, one panel stuck with me in particular. One panel I would think about ever since I first saw it as a child, that would turn around in my head and keep coming back. That panel would eventually—over two decades later—become the basis for When I Win the World Ends, the seed from which an entire story grew:

III. The Unkillable Demon King

But in the interim, the seed remained dormant. 1999 fell away. I grew up. I played later Pokémon games and increasingly lost interest by around Gen 4 and 5. Then I went to college.

That's when I started playing League of Legends.

I was something of a psychopath in college. I operated on a strict schedule and did not deviate. Wake up, read 50 pages of classic literature, write 2,000 words, go to classes, study, and then by about four in the afternoon all my obligations were done and it was League of Legends until midnight.

I wasn't actually interested in the League of Legends esports scene in its infancy. In 2012, I was actually invited to attend its World Championship in Los Angeles and refused. (When I received this invitation, I had just finished reading Homestuck for the first time, and was caught in a month-long haze in which I could do little but bask within what I considered the greatest artistic achievement I'd seen in my life. It was this month that inspired Modern Cannibals.) I only liked playing the game and watching Dunkey videos.

It wasn't until the next year, when a girl I was interested in recommended I watch, that I tuned in to my first professional League of Legends game, at the 2013 World Championship. It was there that I got to watch this new, hyped, upcoming Korean player who had apparently taken the pro scene by storm that season. That player was Faker.

It has seemingly become essential to the narrative of any sport that there is "the man who always wins." American football has Tom Brady, and the moment Brady retired, he was replaced by Patrick Mahomes. Basketball has LeBron James, picking up the mantle from Michael Jordan. It's as if someone being "the best" validates the skill-based promise of the sport, the fundamental top-down fairness of its premise, the idea that the person who wins is the best and deserved it. Faker would become the backbone of League of Legends esports and his ascendance correlated to that of the sport itself, from its humble roots at small-scale tournaments in places like Jönköping, Sweden, to max capacity arenas in the biggest cities in the world.

It's surprising, though, how the legend of Faker had already begun even before he won his first World Championship. League of Legends was designed as a clone of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a popular mod for Warcraft III that emphasized competitive play. In its infancy, the competitive scene was mostly dominated by players who had migrated from DotA to League. They were older, winning thanks to a fundamental conceptual understanding of the game that was superior to everyone else, and frankly not very good in the aggregate. As League of Legends esports exploded in popularity from 2013 to 2015, these old pros would get filtered out swiftly, with even the biggest and most popular names retiring after only a couple of years in the scene.

Even once the new generation of League-grown talent ascended, though, careers were nasty, brutish, and short. The best players only remained on top for a season, as game patches dramatically changed viable strategies. Internationally the sport was dominated by Koreans, with the Korean regional league sometimes being seen as more difficult to win than the World Championship, where Koreans often breezed through uncompetitive Chinese, European, and North American squads.

This possibly affected the demographics of the professional scene. South Korea has mandatory military service, and leaving the pro scene to join the military was basically the end of a Korean player's career. This meant that it was rare to see a Korean player older than 25. Retiring in your early 20s was and remains common. Korean organizations, which had an infrastructural leg up on other regions due to the popularity of StarCraft 2 esports in the country, became adept at scouting promising players at 15 or 16, building them into top level competitive pros, wringing them dry for a few seasons with brutal training regimens, and spitting them out.

Faker was the exception. Though he had been discovered young by SK Telecom, a major Korean telecommunications company that did esports on the side, and gone through the training regimen, he refused to be spit out. He simply didn't stop. He won in 2013, then with a completely new four-man squad around him won again in 2015 and 2016 before narrowly losing the 2017 finals in a nail biter. Given League of Legends esports had only existed since 2011, he basically accounted for half of the championships up until that point. Nobody else, except for his teammates, had won more than once. And it was like it was known he would be this juggernaut the instant he manifested ex nihilo. Like it was known, even in 2013, that he would always win.

Then, Faker stopped winning.

By 2017, League of Legends esports was a titan. Venture capital firms, seeing the millions of eyeballs, thought that this was the next NBA in its infancy, and decided to get in on the ground floor. Multiple millions of dollars were pumped into the scene as even mediocre players in weak regions like North America pulled seven-digit salaries. In China, where League of Legends had become the national pastime, the nation's richest oligarchs ran teams for fun and vanity, outbidding Korean organizations for top Korean players in pursuit of a trophy that had gone to Korea every year since 2013. Riot, the studio developing the game, pumped tons of money into creating a professional sports product, with skilled announcers, dedicated arenas for regional leagues, live performances by musicians like Imagine Dragons and Lil Nas X, and all the other bells and whistles one might expect from a program watched on ESPN.

In this milieu, it seemed like Faker had finally reached his limit. He was still good, but not the best. Even as an individual, while everyone still considered him the "greatest of all time," he was considered outmatched by newer pros like Chovy and ShowMaker. 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 passed with no championships. In 2022, on a team of mostly rookies, he reached the world finals, but was ultimately beaten. Korea's stranglehold over the sport had been shaken by China, which had finally strung together some championships. People wondered if Faker would retire, although he had managed to avoid mandatory military service by representing Korea in the Olympics-esque Asian Games. He'd dealt with wrist injuries and his level of play dropped year over year. He just didn't seem to be that good anymore, potentially holding back his team of talented young players rather than leading them to victory.

Then, in 2023—

And in 2024—

In the end, never count out Touchdown Tom. 11 years of professional play, 5 world championships.

From this longwinded explanation, you might have realized that after watching that game in 2013, I became a League of Legends esports fanatic, fulfilling the prophecy set before me by my father though perhaps in not the way he would have expected.

And the things I become a fanatic about, I want to write a story about.

IV. Modern Cannibals

There's a deleted scene in Modern Cannibals, as Maximillion is driving Z. and her friends through the Utah desert. He starts to talk about Pokémon.

"I bring it up because my university thesis was about Pokemon in particular how Pokemon has basically trained an entire generation of children to think in a completely different way than preceding generations my generation for instance our fad was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now I don't know how much you know about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but from an educational standpoint we're talking absolute bankrupt complete and utter goose egg but Pokemon now Pokemon you see it's more like there's some substance to it you know that refrain Gotta Catch Em All right?" "..." "Well to most parents it looks like a marketing gimmick you make one hundred fifty-one characters and structure a game around collecting them the merchandising potential is astronomical kids buy one hundred fifty-one trading cards stickers coloring books figurines uh collectable lunchable toys I'm sure you've got some yourself."

He continues:

"But really you look at the game itself before the big toy explosion the game itself the focus is placed less on the collection and more on the catalogue you're given a blank encyclopedia to fill and you fill it by capturing one hundred fifty-one Pokemon but the goal is to create a complete database of each and every one and this is what I argue is the educational core of the Pokemon series." His hands left the wheel to conceive of his idea in the cool air of the car, which remained steady on its ever-forward path. "Our modern era is no longer one of singular isolated knowledge it is one of the catalogue the database which is most clearly personified in the advent of the internet because now all knowledge can be at the fingertips of any one human being all that is needed is someone to go and put the catalogue together and presto whiz bang it's there think about it Z. when you catch a bunch of Pokemon where do you store them?" Z. didn't need to think long to remember the game's mechanics. "In the PC." "Exactly now isn't that odd consider it in real life terms you have real life creatures made assumedly of flesh and bone and yet you store them in a computer how does that make sense you'd expect a farm or a holding pen but no it's the computer and that too prepares the budding portion of the millennial generation to become cognizant of the linkage between the computer the encyclopedia and the database structure of knowledge in a new era." "So," said Z. "So you're saying Pokemon taught kids how to think in the digital age?"

There's also a deleted character in Modern Cannibals. Well, mostly deleted—he still shows up, unnamed, in a couple of pages. He is Cole Coulter, Z.'s older brother, a popular League of Legends streamer. Before I deleted him, his role was to accompany Mrs. Roddlevan and Frederick in an attempt to bring Z. back home. He had POV scenes that gave insight into the weirdness of his cotravelers, but ultimately, I decided he didn't add anything to the story and removed him almost entirely.

Even then, though, I was already considering the future of Cole Coulter as the protagonist of a story about League of Legends esports. Playing under the ID MadKing, he would be a North American professional top laner, once known for his aggressive duelist style but recently forced into playing boring tanks as the esports metagame became more sophisticated and tactics-based.

The story would be simple, something I envisioned as a "sports story" only about esports instead of regular sports. It would start with Cole's team being relegated from the league, only for Cole to get a last chance signing to a new team with two promising Korean imports. One import, the mid laner, would be a charismatic and eccentric player in the mold of Doinb/Ganked By Mom/Huhi, while the other, an AD carry, would be introverted and pissy and elitist, in the mold of Piglet. The team would initially struggle, cultures would clash, then a mid-season replacement to sign a psychopathic Tyler1/Tarzaned style streamer as jungler would revitalize the team, put them on a major run, and get them to the World Championship. Though they would eventually fall after a miracle run, Cole would get a moment to truly shine on the biggest stage when he won a pivotal game by aggressive split pushing rather than tank play.

Thematically, the story would be about two things. First, a counterpoint to the idea of American exceptionalism, featuring a league where Americans are particularly bad compared to Korean or Chinese players. Second, an exploration of what it means to be exceptional at all. Cole would be an all-around mediocre person. Middling at school, at (real) sports, at the various popularity contests of being a teenager. League of Legends, this niche sub-sport, is the one thing he truly excelled at, the one place where he was good, better than 99.9 percent of all players, and yet even within that statistical greatness he wound up, ultimately, in a professional scene where he was once again mediocre, relegated to "tank duty," to facilitating other players to carry.

What does it mean to be the best? How can someone be so, so good, only to reach a level where they were still nothing special? Is there any way to win if you're not "the man who always wins"?

I remembered that panel from Electric Tale of Pikachu. The last people filtered before the final champion. It's certainly no walk in the zoo!

This idea was pretty detailed for a story I never wound up writing, something I mostly blame on the years 2018 and 2019, when a lot of bad things happened to me and in retrospect I consider it a minor miracle I managed to finish Chicago at all. As a human being, I would be decimated for the next three years, and so a lot of stories I might have written in that time never came to fruition.

Meanwhile, League of Legends esports reached a peak, then the venture capital bubble burst as investors realized there was no monetization scheme in place for any interested party except Riot Games. Money hemorrhaged out, Riot shifted resources to Valorant, and a sport that had been overinflated based on projected exponential growth in perpetuity fell back down to earth.

Also, Players came out.

Players was a 2022 mockumentary about a fictional League of Legends team competing in the North American league. Conceptually, it was doing a lot of what I had planned for my story: following a single team on a rags-to-riches run, focusing on the interpersonal drama of the team members, asking questions about greatness and its pursuit. It's a pretty good show if you're familiar with League of Legends esports at all, with a lot of on-the-ground fidelity that gives it an authentic feel, which is exactly what I had been hoping to use my esports fanaticism to accomplish. It completely took the wind out of my sails; it was like my idea had already been done.

So by 2022, the idea of a League of Legends esports story was dead. But there was still a drive to create something with that spirit, that would delve into those themes.

What remained after all these years of sifting the sieve, letting sand slip through, was that one panel from the manga. The number of people pursuing greatness slowly filtering until only one remained. And if I wasn't going to pursue that idea through League of Legends, maybe I could pursue it through another vehicle. Maybe the vehicle through which the idea had originally been exposed to me. Pokémon. It all came back to Pokémon.

V. Everything Evolving Into Crabs

I knew immediately that if I were to write a Pokémon fic, it would be a tournament arc. This was the natural evolution of my esports story idea. Also, if I were to write Pokémon, I wanted it to be a story about utopia, immersed within Pokémon's near-future ideal world, where everything is clean and healthy, where society is neat and ordered.

This idea caused me to remember the novel Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley, which I had read a few years back. A mostly autobiographical bildungsroman written on the precipice of World War II, the novel ends with the young protagonist on a journey to Central America, where he meets an idealistic doctor who believes sport to be a proper substitution for war. He tells the story of two tribes locked in internecine conflict through generations, able to replace that violence with soccer matches.

And wasn't that what the world of Pokémon was, a utopia revolving around neutralizing weapons of war by using them for competitive sport?

This tournament, I envisioned, would not simply be about deciding who was best, but an ideological battle for the future of the Pokémon world. To that end, I imagined a war between an entrenched trainer class, who competed as philosopher-warriors, intense individuals with deep connections to their Pokémon, and an upstart commercialization that sought to replace the ideological underpinnings that made their society so safe and prosperous with economic accumulation. It was from this kernel that the character who would become Aracely Sosa arose: charismatic, appealing, human-empathic, and propped up by a support staff who did all the hard work of teambuilding for her.

I imagined the story having an ensemble cast, focusing on nearly every competitor equally, with the Aracely character not having any especial focus until her improbable rise to the top. I imagined a final round where she faced off against "the man who always wins," and though she would lose to him, she would seem to have won the ideological battle, altering the course of society as major corporations scrambled to employ her formula for success at a much grander scale. The story would end with this realization of the earth-shattering importance behind her run, only for Aracely to sink in disappointment. Because in the end, all she really wanted was to win.

The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked the idea of an ensemble cast. The ensemble cast element of Chicago hadn't gone over very well (though I like it), and I figured it would wind up inflating the length of the story considerably. I was coming to the end of Cleveland Quixotic, after all, and once more wanted to write something smaller, tighter, and denser.

So I oriented my thinking to instead have the story revolve around Aracely and one major rival, to give an interpersonal mirror to the ideological war being waged. Thus, Toril came about as an antithesis to everything I had imagined Aracely to be: gruff, antisocial, independent. Their rivalry would culminate in a semifinals battle, before Aracely went on to fight "the man who always wins" in the finals.

I forget exactly when the gender theme came into the equation, but it evolved as an outgrowth of (once again) my competitive League of Legends expertise, where women are essentially nonexistent despite there seemingly being no biological blocks against them. This dovetailed nicely with Pokémon, a world where women seemingly could be powerful competitors, but where—in the anime at least—none ever are. For instance, look at this chart of every major tournament in the anime:

Every known winner is male. Every known finalist and semifinalist is male. Only a handful of female characters have reached the quarterfinals. What possible in-universe justification could there be for that?

This question was actually far more prominent in early planning and drafting than it wound up being in the final work. Initially, I had Aracely's personal motivation revolve around a drive to be the first female trainer to win; this would increase the ideological conflict between her and Toril, who attempted to ignore that she was female altogether. Over time, this theme would see diminished importance in face of the last piece of the thematic puzzle: cults.

It came from reading Underground by Haruki Murakami, a nonfiction journalistic account of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks carried out by the cult Aum Shinrikyo under the direction of its leader Shoko Asahara. Japan in the 90s was experiencing its own End of History, one taken literally by those disaffected with modern society's grand narrative. The prophecies of Nostradamus became fashionable among the young, who believed that 1999 would be the final year before the world was destroyed. Murakami interviewed both survivors of the gas attack and members of Aum Shinrikyo, collecting worldviews of people who simply thought they were "different" and who were willing to give everything in their lives to the one place that seemed to accept that difference.

The 1995 attacks were a watershed moment in Japanese culture. In their wake would come pivotal works of Japanese pop media, like the titan of otaku culture, Neon Genesis Evangelion:

(What's scary about Nostradamus' prophecy is that it might not come true. A year whose chief terror was that THIS WAS IT.)

Pokémon, whose first games released in Japan in 1996, also emerged within this post-Aum world where fixation on the minutiae of pop media was becoming a primary pillar of meaning for the youth, and it's hard not to see echoes of cultism in the evil teams that dot the series' landscape. Even Team Rocket, originally more modeled on organized crime than occultism, veers that direction in Gold and Silver, and afterward the organizations and their world-ending plots become increasingly absurd, to the point where it starts to become unclear why anyone would ever follow, say, Lysandre.

As I mentioned earlier, my personal interest in Pokémon was at odds with these clownish, Saturday morning cartoon villain organizations, but Murakami's account of the Aum attacks recontextualized them for me, made them make sense even within the framework of a "realistic" utopian world. The last elements snapped into place, and I knew my main character would be the member of one of these cults. A cult dedicated to, what else? Evolution. A core element of the Pokémon series, a perfect metaphor for the frustrating lack of movement of the End of History 90s. I imagined a cult leader as a surrogate mother figure for Aracely, who would have a strained relationship with both of her own parents, and deciding on that, the idea of making Pokémon's canon evil mother Lusamine the villain was a no-brainer. I imagined a post-SuMo Lusamine, unable to move on from her experience merged with Nihilego, languishing in Kanto after being sent there to consult with Bill, who had his own experience being merged with a Pokémon... It didn't take long to figure out how all these pieces connected.

The full form of the story had taken shape.

VI. Showdown

I knew immediately I would be following Showdown rules for the battles. No alternative even crossed my mind. I had dabbled in Showdown a few times over the years, first in Gen 3 OUs, then later in Gen 7 OUs, and I knew from experience that Pokémon is a monumentally more interesting competitive game when operating at a high level compared to either its depiction in the anime (shounen logic, mid-fight evolutions) or the general playing experience (spam your best move on your overleveled starter). I knew I would use competitive rulesets before I even considered the thematic or worldbuilding aspect I would eventually take in the story itself (i.e., that the specific rulesets prevent battles from becoming bloodsport and enforce order on the world). I simply thought doing battles this way would be far more entertaining.

To prepare, I started playing Gen 9 OUs under the guidance of a few friends who were into the competitive scene. I grinded the ladder for months, eventually getting a good enough grasp on the metagame to reach 1500 Elo on the Showdown ladder, which is not very good but generally higher than someone can reach with dumb luck.

Crafting the tournament format and rulesets used in the story wasn't difficult. I modeled the tournament format on the League of Legends World Championship, with region-based seeds (having been selected due to performance in regional tournaments) competing in four groups before the highest performers advanced to a single elimination bracket. Initially, I envisioned a 32-competitor bracket instead of the 16-competitor bracket that would appear in the final draft, but otherwise the format came quickly and easily.

In terms of the rulesets and available Pokémon, my considerations were made primarily in terms of what would be most entertaining to read. I decided to include Mega Evolutions and not include Z Moves, Dynamax, or Terastallization, because Mega Evolutions are cool and those other gimmicks are not. The bring-9-pick-6 format, while unusual in Showdown rulesets, is similar to the rules in Pokémon Stadium and VGC tournaments, and also adds a level of intrigue to which Pokémon each competitor uses. (It also enabled Red's Zapdos at the climax of the story, which was something I knew I would bring out from very early on.)

With the help of one of my friends who knew competitive Pokémon, I scripted out each battle assiduously before I wrote them. Every battle was tested using Showdown itself, with only a few turns mocked up to account for luck. For instance, in Aracely versus Jinjiao, Slowking is meant to stay asleep for three turns. Rather than rely on luck to ensure Slowking actually slept that long during the test, I could give Slowking a useless move and have him use that instead to simulate being asleep.

The only thing that couldn't be tested in Showdown was the 7 PP Kingambit trick Red uses at the end of the story, because it's impossible to set a Pokémon to have fewer than max PP in Showdown. This led to one of the bigger mistakes of the story, as it turns out that Encore would simply wear off if Kingambit ran out of PP, rather than forcing him to use Struggle like I assumed. Luckily, even if this were the case, it wouldn't change the outcome of the battle, so it's not an error I lose too much sleep over.

Character teams were chosen to thread the needle between a few considerations. The team needed to be competitively viable, reflect the character's personality in some way, and be distinct from other teams for the sake of variety. (Variety is somewhat unrealistic in real top-level competitive Pokémon, where you'll often see many almost identical teams in the top ranks. But that would be boring.) Some lack of optimization was allowed under the conceit that actually training these Pokémon to peak form would take a lot of time in the real world, compared to Showdown were optimization can be determined quickly due to the ability to immediately adjust stats and builds.

I also tried to give some preference for Pokémon that would be more familiar to layman fans, though this was difficult because Gen 8 and 9 have outrageous power creep and many popular early generation Pokémon have been completely phased out. (Using Megas helped with this issue.) It was this consideration that led to Azumarill being Aracely's ace. There was also an innate challenge to imagining what the competitive scene would look like without legendary Pokémon. Zapdos and Landorus-Therian have been inexorable staples of the competitive scene for generations. What happens in a world where they aren't used at all?

In the original 32-person bracket, I imagined Aracely competing against Jinjiao in the first round, then minor characters Adrian da Cunha and Jacq Ray Johnson in the next two rounds, before facing Toril in semifinals. I imagined Adrian da Cunha as a "hometown hero" whose team wasn't great but he was plucky with a lot of grit, and Jacq Ray Johnson as a self-aware heel who liked to use cheesy strategies and gimmicky Pokémon like Smeargle and Ditto. Condensing from 32 to 16 occurred around the same time I had settled on Lusamine as my villain/cult leader, which led to replacing those two with Gladion. I developed full brackets for both the 32-man and 16-man iterations, with character names and regions, just in case I ever needed to mention them.

All that was left to do was write the story.

VII. Unbroken Line of History

I began writing in September 2023 under the tentative title Unbroken Line of History, which I would later change to simply Lines. In the original drafts, I opened the story with a modified version of the panel from Electric Tale of Pikachu detailing how people are filtered over time in their pursuit of being the best, this time starting with all 8 billion people in the world until only one remains. The story then cut to Aracely's perspective in the restroom as she mentally prepared for her final group stage match.

At this point I was more set on Aracely being the clear protagonist of the story, so she had a few facets of her personality designed around that. First, as I mentioned before, there was a feminist angle where she was motivated specifically to be the first female trainer to win the championship. Secondly, I threw in some more generic nervousness/fear of failure. The other major difference is that I did not lead with the cult prophecy of the world ending. I originally envisioned the cult reveal to be a mid-story twist, and only obliquely hinted at it.

The scene still played out with Toril appearing and the two getting off to a bad start. Then, Cely's father tried to talk strategy with her while she ignored him, before the battle transpired in much the same form as it does in the final draft.

I showed this early draft to my friends and most disliked it. My girlfriend at the time told me Cely sounded like an edgy 13-year-old boy, while my neuroscientist friend whose aspirational idol is Bondrewd from Made in Abyss wanted to know more about the oblique hints of a cult, finding everything else boring. Another friend said it was stupid that there were 30 seconds between turns during the battle and that the Pokémon should just go at each other; nobody would actually want to watch a battle that was paced so slowly. (I vehemently disagreed with that take. Basically every popular sport balances between slow-paced moments of strategy and fast-paced moments of action and execution.) Some people I showed it to did enjoy it, though. Gazemaize, the author of Chili and the Chocolate Factory, was especially enamored by the Brittany/Gardevoir reveal and the Bud Light Analyst Desk, and implored me to keep both of those elements at all costs. 7th, one of my friends who helped me with the Showdown stuff, was so into it she drew fan art of all the characters (which I've posted before) and also wrote eight pornographic short stories about them.

I rewrote the same opening scene several times across October and November, though these were minor iterations without significant adjustments. Frustrated with the lack of progress, I decided to take a break from writing to simply think about the story for a few months.

During this time, to fix Aracely's edgy 13-year-old voice, I decided to lean into her being from Pokémon Los Angeles (with her native region, Visia, being a play on "visual" as a reference to Hollywood) and gave her a Valley Girl accent. To prepare for this, I listened to hours and hours of ASMR videos of people speaking like Valley Girls and took notes on their inflection and syntax. It was here where I decided on Aracely's underlining quirk, as a way of capturing the unique style of emphasis Valley Girls used.

This also made me realize I needed to adjust Aracely's personality. Despite the tone of her voice, she was still acting antisocially. She didn't want to talk to her father, she didn't want to talk to Lachlan Nguyen, she didn't even really want to talk to Toril. Toril herself was a lump of coal. My own misanthropy kept leaking into the characters, even when I conceptually didn't want them to have it. I thought back to Cleveland Quixotic, and how what made the Jay and Viviendre romance work was that they actually both liked each other, and figured—even though I didn't have explicitly romantic plans for Aracely and Toril—that I needed to do something similar to make their rivalry truly pop. Rather than avoid people, Aracely would lean into talking to them, even if they were annoying. Although Toril remained frigid, there would be a part of her yearning for emotional contact, a way to coax her out of her shell.

I also thought deeply about the structure of my stories in general, and my inability to come up with good hooks. It was around this time that someone I knew was reading Chicago. They pointed out that the plot of Chicago doesn't really start until Chapter 26; that I was "burying the lede." I considered this. My logic, when writing Chicago, was that the Empire moving to take over Washington would be a twist, something that would shock and excite people and change their perception of the entire story.

But did that make sense, when really the story was "about" that twist? Didn't that just make everything before the twist harder to get into for a reader? Chicago might look radically different if I revealed the Empire's goals immediately, but it would also probably be a more immediately engaging work. I'm a big fan of delayed gratification in storytelling, but had I taken it too far?

This was a major revelation for me, and immediately I understood what I needed to do for my Pokémon story: move up the cult plotline. Place it front and center. Name the whole story after it even. I decided on framing the opening scene from Toril's perspective, depicting Aracely initially more as an alien other, emphasizing the fact that she was in a cult rather than hide it behind foreshadowing. This could also lead to Aracely and Toril having more of a dual protagonist setup, which would make my planned two-half finale (one half where Aracely battled "the man who always wins," one half where Toril got involved in stopping the cult's doomsday plot) work even better.

Confidence resurged. At the end of January 2024, my girlfriend of seven years  and I broke up. A few days later, I started writing the sixth—and ultimately final—draft of When I Win the World Ends.

VIII. When I Win the World Ends

Now it's the part of the Making Of where I actually make the thing I'm supposed to be making, but there's a lot less to say about it. Once I have a plan, the actual writing of the story is the easy part, and most of what I wrote—with a few exceptions—looks similar to the story as it exists now.

There were some oddities. I wrote the first seven chapters (everything up to the end of the Jinjiao battle) and then had to take a two week break to write a short piece for a writing contest I had entered in December as part of an effort to stop overthinking WIW. After this interruption, I returned to WIW writing perhaps a bit more perfunctorily than I usually would, leading to an original version of Chapter 8 (the chapter where MOTHER makes her first real appearance) that was short and abbreviated. Later, in editing, I would rewrite most of this chapter.

A few ideas emerged while writing, like the motif of serendipity/Logos, which I felt tied nicely to the ideas of evolution and history. It was also in this draft that I introduced Cely's friends Haydn and Charlie, as a nod to an earlier work of mine also featuring a fashion-obsessed girl from Los Angeles. (Speaking of nods to earlier works, in the original 32-man bracket, Cole Coulter featured as one of the competitors, but he didn't make the 16-man cut.)

The process went smoothly. I finished the draft at the end of May, a little under four months after I started it. I had envisioned the full story as being about 70,000 words, but the draft ended up closer to 115,000. Underestimating story length is just an essential element of the trade, though.

A few days after finishing the draft I went on a four-day Oklahoma Darkness Retreat where I had access to zero electronics. The goal was to think about my story deeply and how it could be improved in the editing process.

In this time chamber, where I did nothing except complete crossword puzzles and read The Recognitions by William Gaddis, I came to a realization. There was one element the story needed that wasn't already there.

That element was Sabrina. In the original draft, Sabrina was not present during the scene where Aracely meets the Old Man. She was mentioned obliquely a couple of times in conjunction with Aracely's "psychic powers," but it never really built to anything. There was still a scene where Aracely was interrogated due to her relationship with MOTHER, but only by nameless goons, and the scene lacked tension as it was clear Aracely could talk circles around them.

When I returned from Oklahoma, I prepared for my conception of Sabrina as a character by writing an 8,000 word short story from her perspective, which hashed out an entire backstory for her. Then, I started editing the draft.

For me, a lot of editing is just polish. Usually, cutting out needless sentences and fixing clunky ones, as well as emphasizing a few of the more understated themes and motifs. For instance, during editing, I made slight additions to emphasize the thematic connection between Aracely's suicide attempt and the global war that almost destroyed the world, as well as the connection between the moon and cyclical insanity (lunacy, etymologically, being related to the moon). I made the Old Man more of a Walt Disney-esque figure (from my notes: "a dying Disney"), rewriting much of his dialogue to either be direct quotes or to evoke his ideals. I also expanded on several of the scenes where Toril and Aracely interact to make their relationship more complex and nuanced. I gave MOTHER some new dialogue, including her speech in Chapter 18 about loving a child for the potential it promises, while also paradoxically wanting it to remain a child forever.

The largest changes were in the three chapters I almost fully rewrote. The first was Chapter 8, which as I mentioned earlier was overly terse. In the original draft, it depicted MOTHER as more pathetic, more dependent on Aracely. I decided to make her a more threatening figure, and incorporated a few references to the Moloch sacrifice scene from Valle Verde to make her seem more like a false idol. Similarly, I rewrote Chapter 12, which was originally a very short chapter that focused solely on a conversation between MOTHER and Nilufer that ended with the order to kidnap Aracely. In rewriting the chapter to include Fiorella, I gave myself more opportunity to flesh out the respective philosophies of her and MOTHER (including some of the story's most salient discussions about why cults exist), as well as give more of an insight into the inner workings of RISE as an organization. And lastly, I fully rewrote Chapter 19 to include Sabrina.

The last changes I made in editing were to the final chapter. When I finished the final draft of the story, I sent it to several readers, many of whom had looked at the original drafts of the first chapter, as well as julirites, the author of a Fargo fan fiction called London. There was an immediate and minor backlash to the final chapter, which was originally much more pessimistic, from most people who read it. In the original version, Aracely and Toril were not still in communication. (Fiorella was also dying of cancer instead of jockeying to replace the Old Man.) The finale had a much more somber, sedate, tragic note. Juli and 7th disliked this sad ending, while Gazemaize wanted me to cut the final chapter altogether. I felt confident that the final chapter was necessary, though, and revised it to its current version, which was much better liked.

And then... the story was finished, near the end of July. I crunched the numbers and realized that if I posted two chapters to start and then did a twice-weekly posting schedule, I could end the story serendipitously on October 12. So I did.

IX. Names and Special Thanks

In my Making Of post for Cleveland Quixotic, I had a fairly extensive list of where I got all the character and place names from. The list is a lot less extensive here; most names I constructed for the purpose of sounding evocative, rather than taking them from someplace specific. For instance, I chose the name Aracely Sosa because it sounds like whistling with its repeated S sounds, compared to Toril Lund which is a lot harsher with its consonants. You can see a similar rationale behind names like Fiorella Fiorina, Yui Matsui, and even some of the background characters, like Jacq Ray Johnson, Jr., where there is a lot of emphasis on alliteration and rhyme.

There are a couple of exceptions. Jinjiao is the in-game ID of a longtime Chinese League of Legends pro of middling notability. He picked the name (which means "Golden Horn") as a reference to the Golden Horned King, a villain from Journey to the West.

Lutz, Fiorella's cameraman, was named after an extremely minor character from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, who is not playable and only appears in a singular cutscene before being killed. They are so irrelevant that despite naming a character after them, I actually forgot their name, which is Lotz, not Lutz.

Haydn is named after the famous classical composer.

Special thanks to 7th and Elick320 for helping me with the teams and battles. Thanks to Gazemaize and julirites, among others unnamed, for reading and providing feedback. And thank you all for enjoying the story.

[cosmichorrorsarestillnicerthanme]

Practice And Theory-Faust X Reader

Faust was… an acquired taste.

Most people figured that out within a few seconds of meeting her.

The way she would look through you, how she would make wild declarations such as “Faust Knows All”, how she referred to herself in the third person, how she spoke in riddles when it was most inopportune to do so.

Dante knew this all very well.

On their better days, she was an eccentric, but valuable and hard working subordinate.

On their worse ones, she was a constant pain in the neck that made their head ache which is a feat considering their complete lack of one.

Still, despite all of her… lets be charitable and call them personality quirks, she was probably the closest they had to a real right hand outside of Ishmael, or… maybe Meursault if Dante could remember to ask him for his thoughts on a subject that most would automatically speak about without prompting such as the weather in the city which ranged from miserable to only vaguely bearable depending on how acidic the rain was and how difficult it was to breath at any given moment.

Now they were getting off track.

Perhaps their current scatterbrained state had to do with the baffling request that Faust had just slid onto their table without any form of awkwardness, hesitation, or even the slightest change in her demeanor.

“You… wish to bring your spouse aboard Mephistopheles?” Dante ticked and tocked away, the sounds coming out stilted and almost as if their gears were grinding against each other and overheating in a vain effort to try and comprehend what they were reading.

“Like Faust has said three times previously: yes, Faust wishes to bring her spouse on board Mephistopheles. Faust’s spouse has already signed their papers and received permission from the higher ups and now only needs your signature to bring them aboard.” Faust answered simply and without any fanfare, as if it was common knowledge that the ever strange Faust who rarely gave a straight answer to anything had a significant other of any sort.

This was not helping Dante’s melting mind, in fact, it was making it worse.

Was it in bad taste to say that they would prefer fighting Don’s father all over again?

The clockheaded being let out a long, low hiss of air that could be considered equal to a sigh for Dante as they grabbed their “Fancy Pen” as Charon called it and placed its tip upon the paper before quickly scribbling their name down.

A moment later, Faust gently grabbed the paper off of Dante’s desk.

“Thank you Dante. Faust hopes your headache abates soon.” the white haired genius said in order to comfort the red clad manager who was massaging their nonexistent temples.

“Thank you Faust, I hope you and your spouse are happy.” The manager quietly ticked away as they turned their attention back to their paperwork in an effort to try and regain a sense of normalcy and control, both of which they have long since lost in their life.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

“Vroom Vroom will commence in ten minutes.” the intercom crackled with Charon’s voice.

“Cor Blimey, the lass is given us quite the tick this time ain’t she?” Heathcliff groaned as he shuffled out and into the aisle behind Hong Lu.

“I wonder what put her in such a generous mood? Perhaps our guide gave her some fancy candy?” Hong Lu Mused with a smile.

“U.N.” Ryoshu grumbled as she lit another cigarette.

“Unlikely Numbskull.” Sinclair helpfully translated.

“Truly! Lady Charon’s generosity knows no bounds!” Don Quixote happily declared with a hearty laugh.

“I… agree.” Outis grumbled through gritted teeth as if agreeing with Don Quixote physically pained the older woman.

The other sinners continued to mumble and grumble as they all filtered off the bus to stretch their legs and to try and get rid of any unpleasant cricks that were made by being jostled around by Charon’s… unique driving style.

However, in the middle of their small break from the madcap adventures of everyday life, Don Quixote broke the silence.

“Hark friends! One of unknown origin approaches!!!”

In an instant, the entire crew sans Faust was alert and holding their weapons aloft as someone carrying two suitcases rounded the corner and stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of eleven heavily armed people pointing their weapons at them.

“Uh… hi! I’m looking for Limbus Company’s Bus division. Is that you guys?” the person carrying the suitcases asked, despite looking like they would very much like to run back down the street at the moment.

“Correct. Faust welcomes you aboard.” the white haired genius clearly declared as she walked around Rodya who looked all too ready to throw her axe right between your eyes.

“Lady Faust, dost thou know this person?” Don whispered.

“Hmm… Faust would hope so. It would be considered strange to be betrothed to someone Faust does not know.” was the white haired genius’s response to the question she was posed.

This response caused several of the sinners to whip their heads towards faust with such speed it was a miracle that they did not snap their necks.

“W.T.F.”

“I… wha- y-you’re married!?”

“Ooh~! Miss Faust is engaged? Fascinating!”

“Faust? Jumpin the broom? Can’t say I ever thought THAT was possible…”

“Lady Faust! Art thou truly- Oh! This is a wondrous occasion!”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The bus was filled with questions, a handful even coming from Vergilius himself as he was rather disturbed by the fact that someone as… unique as Faust was married to anything outside her research.

“Please! Do tell us of how thou and Lady Faust came to fall for one another!” Don’s infectiously joyous voice exclaimed.

“I’ve gotta admit, that’s somethin that’s been doin me in too.” Heathcliff muttered as he continued to struggle with connecting FAUST of all people with the concept of marriage while the rest of the bus sans Charon turned their eyes to you.

“Well… it all started with a little bit of practice, and a little bit of theory.” you began as you turned your mind to recall how you first met Faust.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Faust sat in a well worn office chair as she glared at the whiteboard filled with equations, chemical compositions, and mad scrawls across from the large table she was sitting at.

“Hamhampangpang is better fresh than leftover.” you muttered as you sat down at the table and opened the paper bag to pull out dinner.

Two sandwiches, two drinks, and two bags of chips alongside one side for each of you.

However, despite the heavenly smell of Hamhampangpang, Faust continued to focus on the board, as if staring at it for long enough would give her the answers she wanted.

All this drew from you was a bemused sigh as you picked up your chair and moved it next to her before unwrapping both sandwiches and holding one out to Faust’s mouth while you raised your own to your mouth with the other hand.

Immediately, Faust took a bite out of the almost perfect culinary miracle as she continued to glare at the board.

The two of you continued to eat in silence until you reached the end of your sandwich and muttered something that was, as far as you were aware, something completely inconsequential.

“The more we do this, the more we look like a married couple.”

These words which had no true meaning behind them, sent Faust leaping to her feet and made her eyes shoot open.

“That's it!” was all Faust said before wheeling around to grab you by the face and give you a kiss that could only be described as violent before she shot out of the room like a bat out of hell and left you to fall out of your chair in confusion with a blazing red face.

You have no idea how long you were on the floor as your mind rushed to try and keep up with what just happened.

However long it was, it was long enough for Faust to return and pull you upwards with strength that her more lithe form wouldn’t suggest she had before dragging you along with a look in her eyes that usually meant she was dead to the world as she tore away at the hidden truths of the universe.

Just like every time you saw her like this, you wanted to call her beautiful.

Unlike every time before, this was the only time you didn’t bite your tongue and did so.

“Save the well deserved compliments until you see Faust’s genius.” was all the manic scientist said in response as she practically kicked the door to the workshop open and revealed the thing that had been giving her such a headache for so long.

The Chassis of Mephistopheles.

She had long since worked out the engine, and the energy source, but the physical form was becoming a struggle to make work thanks to a myriad of issues.

Yet, it seemed she had figured it out if the brilliant madness in her eyes was any indication.

You were flung into the chair as Faust ran to the wall length whiteboard filled with equations, papers, and magnets.

Without any hesitation, Faust tore the papers and magnets away as she erased countless hours of her time before snatching up a marker and scrawling something out, something so simple it was taught in most basic science classes.

Something so simple, so obvious, you slammed your head into the table when you saw it.

It was the answer the two of you needed to figure out how to make the physical form of Mephistopheles work.

Gravity warps time and space.

Gravity defines life, gravity controls the flow of time, gravity is a constant.

Gravity rules above all else, and with gravity, a few feet of space can become infinite, or… fit the infinite into a few feet of space.

Before, the two of you had been trying to find a way to put an end to the infinite.

Now? All that was needed was to put simple theory into practice.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

“-and that’s how Faust and I first got involved.”

“Ooh! The two of you were Co-workers?” Rodya cheerily asked, desperate for details.

“We were also Roommates.” Faust added on helpfully.

Don let out a gasp before squealing.

“A.T.W.R.” Ryoshu mused with a laugh.

“And they were roommates? W-what does that mean?” Sinclair asked as he raised his eyebrow in confusion.

[trans-luis-serra-navarro]

OP I sincerely hope you don’t mind me writing an essay in the tags cuz I have Luis Serra autism this is like. My jam ABDBWHBEHDNDHX

So here's the thing. I do think Luis worked on Project Nemesis in the remake timeline. I tried double checking the in game evidence around this statement, and it's still a little vague but why not. At the time he is in his early 20s which, for a lot of people, is a very high pressure time of growth. Navigating adulthood, figuring your personhood out, and feeling like there's an invisible timer to accomplishing something important are pretty common experiences for that age range. Not to mention just trying to survive at all when living and supporting yourself is being balanced with the rest of that nonsense.

Before the project, I do think Luis was working on standard over the counter medicine. I think his genuine goal was to make something that hadn't been done yet. He wanted to make something there was a need for and he failed. He kept failing utterly at it, and his self-esteem took some heavy hits during this process. This meant when he was offered to start working with his team named on his lighter, he goes for it. He's also good at it. Great at it. For some reason, working with parasites comes completely natural to him. He makes a lot of breakthroughs, and the praise he receives in return diminishes the self-deprecation he might've been lumping on himself for past failures. He's pretty sure he's found his calling until he gets to see what they've made together.

And it's horrible. It's the opposite reaction of what Wesker has with the completed Tyrant. He's terrified. He's confused. He's maybe even angry with everything but especially angry with himself, and he knows what happens after this. He knows with a success there'll be more. He knows with a success they won't stop, so he runs away. He puts a lot of effort into vanishing since he knows he's the key to keeping a smooth manufacturing process, and he's right. They can only make the one, and the issues he theoretically could solve for duplicates he is no longer there to solve.

He probably mopes for a while, tries to tell himself there was nothing more he could've done, and he goes home to see the people he knew falling ill. With parasites. That's his thing! That's his thing he can do!!! That's his thing he can fix!!! The leaders, only one of which he did trust, gave him the gracious opportunity to fix it. To save people. To save the people he knew, and he succeeds. He makes something to save those people only to find out it was a lie. All of it.

It's not like the first time where he chose to make something horrible for the sake of needing a win only to run away from the consequences. This time he went in with good intentions to help people and stop a plague only to become a tool in progressing it. No wonder he was so desperate to help when we see him interacting with Ada in the DLC. He's trying so hard to do everything on his own terms to get the results he wants because the failure of upholding his code of ethics led to the production of a weapon of terror and the success of upholding his code of ethics led to the production of a weapon of terror, so when does it end!!!!! When do his intentions actually have the effect he desires? When can his mind, his skills, his abilities actually help people for once? And then Leon and Ashley appear, and his work helps them like he wants it to help people, and he never gets to bask in that accomplishment!!!!

[lamanchalandfamily]

hello dad quixote

Dad Quixote.. I quite like that! Like Don it shows my role and superiority while adding an air of warmth and comfort! I shall inform the family to begin calling me that immediately! 👑

[aro-of-argentum]

Red Dahlia- Chapter 6

WC: 4,336

Notes: Jason is injured again and so so SO touch starved, Reader patches him up and answers questions, a stab wound and a bunch of stitches for it, Red gets an armor upgrade, Jason's unchecked temper, sibling bickering, Jason is a SAP and we love him for it

Beta'd by: @teaspacebar

Previous Chapter, Masterlist, Next Chapter

Chapter 6:

Gotham General Hospital was busier than ever this time of year. There was an increase in patient volume, typically due to ice and snow related injuries, and there was a staff shortage on nearly every shift as many of the employees used their vacation time for the holidays. Because of this, it was an incredible and rare opportunity for you to take an entire day off work; when you got one, you relished it. You’d spent most of the day running errands, cleaning, and cooking for the week, before you’d finally sat down with your book. Today it was a copy of “Persuasion” by Jane Austen, which had appeared on your windowsill two nights ago.

It had become a habit of yours to pretend you were on the phone as you told Red Hood about your day on your walk home. Sometimes, that included your thoughts on whatever you’d been reading. Prior to the book currently in your hands, it was “Don Quixote,” and when you’d announced to thin air that you’d finished it, the new-to-you Austen work had shown up the next night. You were four chapters in when your bracelet lit up.

“Red?” you asked the empty room as you sat up on your couch. You marked your page and set the book aside before tapping the bracelet’s face to activate the proximity indicator. A quick turn of the disc put up the small projection of a map above your wrist, and you saw that he was only about a block away. He closed the distance in no time, and just as you crossed the room to your window, he dropped gracefully onto your fire escape. You flinched- as you assumed you probably always would when an enormous man appeared from nowhere in front of you- but opened the window anyway.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” The smile you gave him disappeared almost instantly as you realized he had his right arm tucked in as closely as he could get it to his side. You moved out of the way and ushered him inside before sliding the window and curtains shut. You turned to him, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I uh,” He sounded out of breath as he answered. “Asshole had a big knife.”

“Okay,” You nodded and directed him to sit on the couch, then quickly retrieved your kit. You pulled a pair of gloves on and set out everything you’d need on the coffee table. “Here.” You held out your hand and waited for him to offer his. When he finally placed his hand in yours, you unwrapped the strip of fabric wound around his arm and saw the gash on the side of his forearm that stretched from the base of his thumb to the inside crease of his elbow. A long sigh left your chest as you collected your thoughts, and you continued to stare at the wound as you spoke. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Good news would be great.” He forced out, discomfort and pain lacing his tone.

“It’s not super deep, and it’s a very clean cut. The bad news is you still need stiches.”

He shook his head like it was no big deal as he shrugged out of his leather jacket. “Sounds good, whatever you need to do.”

“Okay,” you whispered to yourself and nodded, getting your head right for the task at hand. You sat next to him on the couch and pulled his hand into your lap so that you could more easily pull off his glove and roll up his sleeve as gently as possible. As soon as the fabrics were out of the way, you worked on cleaning the wound. It was already clotted, which told you he’d had it for a while before coming to you. “When did this happen?”

“Just over an hour ago,” He answered while watching you work. “I had to wait for GCPD to show up to make sure the guy didn’t get away.”

You nodded. “Hold this,” You waited until he used his other hand to apply pressure to the gauze you’d placed, then got up to retrieve the healing compound from its table. “Anyone I’d know?”

“Probably not,” He responded as he listened to your footsteps return. “Just some thug who thought robbing a convenience store without a gun was a good idea.”

A snort of a laugh left you as you sat back down on the couch, and you went back to work. “I’m glad your sense of humor isn’t broken, at least.”

Jason froze when he saw you open the bottle in your hand. “Don’t.”

You looked up at him, confused. “What?”

He shook his head, “You don’t need to use that. It would be a waste; it’s just a cut.”

“If I don’t, you’re going to have stitches all the way down your arm for a week at least.” You refocused on the cut and moved again to tip the bottle.

“Y/n.”

As your hand stopped, your gaze landed directly on the eyes of his helmet. “Red, please… Just let me do this for you.”

Jason struggled to swallow the lump in his throat but after a moment of staring at you through the lenses in his mask he relented and nodded at you. He watched as you tipped the bottle over with your finger over the top to wet the tip of the glove, then carefully ran that finger over the inside edges of the cut. He drew a hiss through his teeth at the discomfort.

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m almost done.” You repeated the action on the other side of the wound before capping the bottle and setting it down. “Now just the stitches. This should be the easy part for you, yeah?”

A hollow chuckle left him. “Yeah.” He kept his right hand relaxed so you could work but clenched his left against the pain.

You noticed each time the needle pierced his skin he flinched but was careful not to move the arm you were working on, and soon you had finished the entire row of knots. You laid gauze over the whole cut and grabbed a bandage to wrap his arm. Even once it was secured, your hands lingered by his. “You should be able to pull those stitches the day after tomorrow, but you should keep it covered while you’re out in the field for at least three days.”

He nodded and responded with, “Yes ma’am,” and his heart warmed at the smile it drew from you. “Hey, question.”

“Yes?”

“Why non-dissolvable threads?”

“Oh, um,” You adjusted the way you were sat on the couch and pulled your hands away from his, busying yourself with cleaning up as you answered. “The compound eats through them too quickly. You heal faster with it, but you still need the stitches to hold everything together while it works, and the compound just breaks them down way sooner than the wound finishes healing usually.” You took a breath and looked back to him with a smile, now having everything packed back away in your kit or tossed into a bag you’d take to work to dispose. “Just safer this way. And less scarring, actually.” You gave a small shrug as though to punctuate the sentence.

He snorted. “I’ve already got plenty of those.”

“Right,” you said, sitting cross-legged on the couch, now with your back against the arm rest so you could face him. “So, you don’t need me adding any more gnarly ones.”

“With your stitching, Sweetheart, I doubt that would be an issue anyway.” He turned to face you as you spoke, right arm moving to rest on the back of the couch, one boot still on the ground.

Your cheeks heated at the endearment and the compliment and found yourself looking anywhere but at him. Your eyes landed on “Persuasion,” still sitting on the coffee table. “Oh! Thank you for the book by the way, I really like it so far.”

“Oh good, I hoped you would.” Jason was just as grateful for the change in topic as you were, fearing he had overstepped. “I saw you were reading “Pride and Prejudice” the first time we met, I thought you might like another Austen.”

A true laugh bubbled out of your chest. “Red, the night we met you were unconscious the whole time.”

“I was referring to the following day, actually, but I digress.” He ran his left hand down the side of his leg as though he was nervous, and started picking at the glove he still wore on that hand.

“Did you want me to-” You gestured toward his hand with an open palm. He placed his hand into yours and you loosened the strap before removing the glove and setting it next to its match on the coffee table. You smiled, and played with the bracelet there for a moment before asking, “Better?” You looked back up at him, almost hoping to see some kind of expression, but knowing you’d find none.

Jason nodded, slightly worried that if he moved too much the moment would break, but you hadn’t pulled your hand away from where it held his in front of him. Heart hammering in his chest, he adjusted to wrap his freed hand around your much smaller one and he slowly brought them both down to rest on the couch. When you still hadn’t pulled away, he used the contact as an anchor. It had been years since anyone other than his family had touched his skin. He needed to ask the question he’d been dreading. “Are you afraid of me? I don’t want you doing any of this because you’re scared.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I saw you flinch when I got here.” There was an undercurrent of uncertainty in his tone, and you watched him shift his weight unconsciously.

“A person the size of a refrigerator landed on my fire escape, in the dark, a foot from my face. Of course I flinched.”

He visibly cringed. “Yeah…”

“No, hey,” You scooted closer to him on the couch and reached your unoccupied hand to his chest, laying your open palm over his heart.  “I’m not scared of you. I was at first maybe; you threatened to kill me, it would have been stupid of me not to be,” When he moved to turn his head away in shame, you put your hand on the cheek of his helmet to bring his gaze back to you. “But Red, I’m the safest I’ve ever been because you’re looking out for me. I’m not afraid of you.”

He could have kissed you. He wanted to kiss you. He opted instead to pull you into him and hug you.

When he pulled you forward, you adjusted your legs to sit sideways in his lap so your chest could sit flush with his as you wrapped your arms around him. You felt the weight of his head on your shoulder, helmet pressing into the bare skin at the base of your neck, and as he pulled you closer still, you felt his left hand slide under the bottom of your shirt, his open palm resting against your spine. A sharp inhale dragged through your teeth at the contrast of temperature between the cold metal and the warmth of his skin on yours, but you refused to pull away.

Jason shuddered a breath when he felt you tighten your grip on him. He relaxed into your hold, and for the first time in a long time he felt truly at ease. This was almost normal. As he held you, he let his thoughts drift into what life might look like if you were in it long term, if you knew who he was.

Without releasing him, you asked, “You wanna tell me about it?”

“Hm?” He hummed in question, coming back to himself.

“Well, you’re covered in all this body armor, Red,” You tapped you fingers lightly against the armor that covered his back, “and you’re still coming to me with some pretty rough injuries.”

He huffed and smiled, pulling away from the hug slowly as he spoke. “Yeah, maybe, but the rest of me isn’t bulletproof, Sweetheart.” He let his left hand rest on your thigh after it dragged away from your back.

You chuckled. “You should get that checked out, Red. Can’t have you dying on me.” You leaned against his chest, using his right shoulder, arm still stretched out on the back of the couch, as a head rest.

You felt his head bob as he nodded. “I’ll get something figured out.” He squeezed your leg for just a moment before he started tracing a pattern there with his thumb, the same way he’d done with your hands when you’d gone for the drive.

“How long can you stay?” You asked, cautious and trying not to ruin the calm.

He released a long sigh that ended with a grunt of frustration. “I should’ve left already.”

“Oh…” You moved to give him room to get up, sliding over and off his lap, before picking up his gloves.

Jason watched you intently as you moved, wanting nothing more than to stop you, but he knew this was the right thing to do. He stood up and offered his hand to you, gently pulling you to your feet when you took it. He gestured to the gloves in your other hand. “Would you help me with those?”

You nodded, and a small smile only briefly crossing your face before disappointment returned to your features. You slid each of his gloves onto his hands and fastened the straps, more careful with his right hand, then pulled his sleeve gently back down over the wrapping. His gaze was heavy on you as you worked, but you weren’t bothered by it. “Okay, all set.”

Jason’s heart melted when you smiled up at him, and he closed the distance to wrap his arms around you again. “Thank you,” The words were breathed more than they were said, meaning so much more than just gratitude for stitching him up.

“Always,” You replied, cheek pressed against his chest and arms wrapped around his waist. “Remember, stitches can come out in a couple days, but you need to keep it wrapped until it’s healed.”

His response was a dutiful, “Yes ma’am.”

“And Red?” you asked, titling your head back to look at him.

“Yes?”

“Maybe figure out some better armor? I need to you to come back.”

His breath hitched in his throat. “Of course,” He pulled back only far enough to gently drop his forehead to yours, the metal pressing into your skin. “I will always come back.” Jason felt himself blush beneath his mask at the admission. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Okay.” You nodded as he pulled away from you and crossed the room to the window.

He slid it open and was gone in an instant, barely even making a sound.

-

When Jason arrived back at the cave, the first thing he did was find Alfred.

“Yes, Master Jason?” Alfred turned in his chair to address the younger man, leaving the enormous computer to his right to be watched by Cassandra.

“Do we have armor options that have more coverage than what I’m wearing right now?” he asked, gesturing vaguely to his torso.

“Well, of course, Sir. Master Bruce has-”

“Too much,” Jason jumped in, “it’ll slow me down. Do we have something in the middle?”

Alfred thought for a moment before his eyes lit up with recognition. “I believe I have just the thing. Follow me.”

As Jason moved to follow Alfred away from the computer in the center of the cave, he caught Cassandra eyeing him carefully.

“What’s your issue?” He asked, almost daring her to pick a fight.

“Nothing.” Cassandra turned back to the computer in an act of surrender.

Jason squinted at her demeanor, as Cass wasn’t typically one to observe and not make observations, but continued to follow Alfred anyway. When he caught back up, he asked, “Did you already have something made?”

“Yes, quite some time ago, in fact.” Alfred pulled open the doors to the suit room, where many of the bats kept their uniforms, and made a beeline for a wardrobe in the corner, away from the display cases. When he found the correct piece, he pulled the hangar from the rod. “This,” he said, turning the long-sleeve garment already adorned with the Red Hood symbol toward the younger man, “is the same material as the one you wear now, except this has a thin layer of Kevlar all throughout, with more in places that don’t need to move as much as your joints do. The entire thing will stop a knife, which is more than can be said for your current uniform, and this one will provide additional coverage around your sides and all the way down your arms, rather than only your chest and back.” He held the shirt out to Jason, who took it gratefully with his left hand. “Would you like to try it on now?”

A panic briefly flooded over Jason as he considered that he would likely not be able to get changed by himself, let alone quickly. “Is it the same measurements?”

“Yes, Sir.” Alfred eyed Jason suspiciously, catching the glance the younger man threw to his right arm.

“Then I’m sure it’s fine Alfred. Thank you.”

“Of course, Sir.”

As Jason turned to leave with the new uniform piece, he was caught off guard by Alfred clearing his throat. He froze, shoulders raised, already knowing by the older man’s tone that he was likely going to be scolded.

“Master Jason, I’d be happy to take a look at your arm if it is bothering you.” He held out his hand, leaving no room for argument.

Jason hung the shirt in his section of the room before returning to Alfred, and carefully removing his glove and pulling up his sleeve, revealing the wrap you’d put on it only 30 minutes ago.

“Is this why you asked for additional armor?” Alfred questioned.

He nodded, “Mostly.” Jason began to peel away the bandage to show the slice beneath.

Alfred gasped. “Jason…”

“It’s not so bad. It wasn’t very deep, just long, and it’s only going to take a couple of days before it’s fully functional.”

“How can that be possible?”

“The same way that the gunshot a couple months ago took less than a week.” He cringed backward as he spoke, knowing that this likely sounded impossible.

“Am I going to get any further information from you if I continue to pry?”

Jason shook his head. “No. But I promise it’s taken care of.”

“Well, I can certainly see that.” Alfred carefully rolled Jason’s forearm over to examine it as he spoke. “In all my years in the military and taking care of this family, I never… These are more precise than mine.” By the end of his commentary, he was more talking to himself than anyone else. He spoke back up to ask, “Can I assume at least that these came from your friend?” He put an emphasis on the word “friend” that made it clear to Jason what he was implying.

The younger man nodded. “Yes.”

“Very well.” Alfred reapplied the bandage over Jason’s arm before releasing it. “I will say that I am rather impressed, and quite relieved.”

“Relieved?” Confusion contorted Jason’s features.

“I carried a great deal of concern regarding this “friend’s” intention toward you, but I can see there was a magnitude of care and attention paid to help you. My suspicions are averted.”

Jason smiled, happy to hear that Alfred was on his side about this, regardless of knowing hardly anything about the situation. It would help if Bruce ever found out and he needed defending. “Thanks, Alfred.”

“Of course, Master Jason. I am happy to have helped improve your uniform.” He nodded knowingly at the younger man before promptly leaving the room.

Just as Jason had pulled off his helmet, Cassandra popped in the door with her head cocked in accusation. “So…” She started, a fake innocence plastered across her face. “Alfred knows about the pretty little thing in scrubs then.”

Jason’s eyes locked on the wall in front of him. “What?” He growled.

“You didn’t really think none of us would recognize your bike, did you?” She knew exactly how to zero in on sensitive topics, and it ground on Jason’s nerves. “I was wondering why your patrols had been taking longer than normal, so I volunteered to work your route, and discovered her getting off the back of your motorcycle.”

“Cassandra.” Her full name through his teeth was a clear warning. She ignored it.

“And since you always take the same route, I would imagine she works at Gotham General.” Her analysis was cold and rooted in logic, and as always when she decided to investigate something, completely correct. “Do you walk her home at night?” The question was genuine, but it set him off nonetheless.

“Knock it off!” Jason’s helmet was already across the room by the time he noticed that he’d thrown it, and that Cassandra had ducked it. He stared at her, chest heaving in anger.

She stared back, eyes wide and observing every minute change in his behavior. “Touchy.”

“Who else knows?” He demanded.

“Dick is suspicious; otherwise, no one. If something is distracting you in the field then Bruce should be-”

“Don’t.”

“Or what?”

“Cass, please… Don’t.” His tone shifted as he nearly begged. He couldn’t lose you, and if Bruce found out he’d do everything in his power to stop Jason from seeing you again. “She’s good for me, and I-” he shook his head as he struggled to find the words. “Please don’t take this from me.”

Cassandra’s heart softened more than she’d ever admit at her brother’s words, and she caved. “Fine. You owe me.”

He nodded in agreement. “Sure.” He heard Cassandra mumble something about “stupid brothers” as she left the room.

Once he was alone again, Jason tried for a few minutes to get undressed before getting frustrated and giving up. He was still sitting on a bench brooding when Dick walked in the room minutes later, fresh off patrol.

He saw the red helmet on the floor and picked it up, dropping it next to Jason on the bench. “You good?” he asked as he walked by.

“No. I hurt my arm, and now I can’t even get my other fucking glove off.”

“Okay damn, little brother. Need some help?”

Jason huffed at the title, but knew he needed the assistance, so he grumbled a “Yes.”

“Sorry, what was that?” Dick questioned, snarky as ever but already walking over.

Jason scowled. “I will beat the shit out of you.”

The older Wayne only laughed as he reached for Jason’s glove. “You won’t, but okay.” He tossed the glove onto Jason’s pile. “Shirt too?”

“Yeah.”

As Jason bent down, Dick quickly pulled the shirt over his head and off. “I’m not taking your pants off.”

“Haha. Yes, thank you, Dickhead.”

“No problem.” Dick also got changed as Jason finished up, and his attention caught on the bracelet on his younger brother’s wrist. “Whatcha got there?” He nodded toward the chorded accessory as the two walked out of the room together.

He almost let out a snarky reply before remembering that Cassandra had mentioned Dick was suspicious something was going on. “It’s a good luck charm.” He offered instead.

Dick gave an accepting “Hm,” in response. He waited until the pair were back in the manor before asking, “Are you going to get something to eat or are you going straight to bed?”

Jason shook his head as he answered. “Bed. I’m exhausted.”

 “Okay.” He paused by the hallway to the kitchen as he watched Jason begin to climb the stairs. “You know I’m here if you want to talk about anything, right?”

“Thanks, Big Bird.” Jason waved over his shoulder as he continued walking up the stairs. When he finally got into his room, Jason’s bed was calling his name. He needed to shower; he was still covered in blood. He trudged to the bathroom and stepped in the shower, letting the scalding water run over his shoulders, right arm up with his palm against the wall to keep it out of the water. As soon as he was clean, he got out, dragged a towel over his hair, and pulled on a t-shirt and gym shorts. He fell into bed on his back, still protective of his wrapped arm, and closed his eyes. He expected he’d fall asleep immediately. He didn’t.

Instead, Jason’s mind wandered. First, he combed back through the events of the fight, of the feeling of the knife dragging on his arm, and the way he’d lost grip on his gun because of it. But the next feeling was you, holding his hand after you’d stitched him up, and the way your fingers curled so gently around his own. He could almost feel you pressed against his chest, and Jason found himself longing to hold you again. He wished you were with him. He imagined the way you might snuggle into his side if you were there, and how nice it would be to cook you breakfast in the morning. He wanted his family to know you, and he wanted you to know him. His heart fluttered every time you called him “Red.” Jason couldn’t fathom what it would feel like to hear you use his name. He wanted to reveal himself to you, he realized, he needed to. Because he hated that he was just a visitor you couldn’t talk about, a shadow that walked you home. But he wasn’t sure where to even begin. He needed advice, and he knew the best person to get it from. He'd talk to Dick tomorrow. He fell asleep thinking about you.

Tag List: @4rachn3, @lettucel0ver

[wormboyfriendcentralstation]

god............ don quixote truly went "i'm tired of being apeshit.................. i just wanna be nice......................................." and she threw on her mustiest pair of air jordans and chose amnesia.

[sharoo]

Canto 7 thoughts

So me and my pals finished canto 7 yesterday and just. Projmoon how do you keep one-upping yourselves. How are you going to keep one-upping yourself we still have 5 episodes of Inferno and god knows what more after that.

So like a lot of fans i'm gonna leave my thinkpiece here and try to sort out the emotions I have about it all. This is going to be rambly as heck.

Family and how messy that can be

Bloodfiend families kind of make me short-circuit when I get thinking about them. A chosen family of blood, but one with an unfortunate power dynamic, where the children cannot willingly disobey or harm their parents.

Old Don Quixote was a good guy. He was an idealist, he treated his kids well, he wanted the best of for them. But so often they did not have a choice in his antics. Sancho herself even says, during the Bloodfiend war days, that she could not leave him.

And the fall of La Manchaland involves several instances of him making choices for others without considering them. Forcing Sancho to leave when, as the story clearly shows us, DQ is in large part her reason for living and happiness; forcing the family to first live off of flavourless mush for 200 years and then locking them away to endlessly keep on starving as they're unable to die, all for the safety of humanity.

Don Quixote has the air of someone who centres his actions on what he feels is right or wrong, not necessarily considering others?

But as someone once said, any action committed in the name of love exists outside the framework of good and evil.

I do not think DQ was evil, nor were the bloodfiends. They were just trying to survive and do what felt right. And really, Don sums it up best - he was upset with them, they were upset with him. It's not black and white.

Really, the villain here is their illness and what it forces them to do to stave it off.

But also we have another family. The family of a Bloodfiend who all her life insisted she'd start none. A chosen family who forged their closeness in blood, yet do not share it.

Heathcliff's line about your coworkers being kind of like family (of course it's him saying that, seeing how the dead rabbits replaced the Earnshaws) and then the entire group talking about how much Sancho means to them, how much her bravery inspired them...

All culminating in her telling her father about this wonderful family of twelve she's acquired. God, that just killed me in the softest way possible.

Both Don Quixotes have large families of those younger than them who are ready to fight with them, who are going to support them.

Except our Don does not have the undertone of an imbalanced power dynamic over the sinners that her father had over her and her siblings.

Even just how Sinclair, the youngest of the Sinners, looks up to Don, wants to be like her, mimicking how Sancho wanted to be like DQ as described in Hero. It's so good!

Choice

During the dungeon, we had a discussion with my friends over the postulates older Don posed - that bloodfiends cannot change their nature.

I am of the opinion that you cannot change if you are not given choice or are not aware that you have a choice. And there's a difference in meaning. When people in a state of depression bemoan unchangeability, they often are blind to the tiny changes, they wish they could drastically alter themself in an instance in order to remove whatever part of them poses them trouble. That's what Don the elder sees - they could not change.

For most of the canto, Sancho denies her ability to be better too. Bloodfiends cannot den their nature, it's useless to try. Her choices were either made for her (leaving la manchaland on Rocinante) or were made in the name of avoiding pain (forgetting oneself and slipping into a dream delusion).

But in the end, she realises that the dream of Don Quixote is one she and her father shared. That he did not force her into it, but that she inherited it through choice, through interest, through being inspired, little by little.

She chooses to continue it for them both, now that her father is too exhausted to dream it. The title of Don Quixote, much like in our world for some, becomes a symbol of daring to have a dream.

The duality of "dream as delusion" and "dream as tomorrow"

I love the dual meaning here. I love how the canto is called the Dream Ending yet in its final minutes our Don's rebuttal is literally "The Dream Un-Ending". I love how it flips her "needing to wake up" on its head.

It's not the idea of heroism she has to abandon, it's her dream of escape. Sancho became Don Quixote to escape pain. But she cannot change and become better if she just leaves all choices to her amnesiac self.

Sancho's Don Quixote act really began as wilful delusion. An escape from pain into this hope that she shared with her father, really, the most valuable elements of the memories she'd be erasing.

But that "delusion" ended up genuinely inspiring others. Especially our boy Sinclair, who wants to be like her, brave and strong.

Now she's awake to actively engage with the world, to strive for the better, to consciously dream. To hope.

The line between hopeful ideal and delusion is really just... in the eye of the beholder. At what point is it alright to chastise hope?

To wake up from it, to abandon it... it's not worth it, especially in this City ready to crush you into pieces the moment you stop hoping for a better tomorrow.

The Christian undertones

They put a confessional in La Manchaland, I get to discuss the christian undertones of the entire set up. Is it thematic? Idk, it's fun for me tho :]

Of course I in no way want to imply that this is universal for Christianity, just that, depending on your religious surrounding, it can lead to such interpretations; speaking from a perspective of a former Catholic who used to be really religious, I do see this theme of selflessness at all cost emerging here.

Selflessness and sacrifices for the sake of others can, in the right amount, be necessary and beautiful and noble. The issue is where that line crosses into indirect harm.

How much happiness must you deny yourself for the sake of others in order to be "good"? Is it even worth it?

Bloodfiends, by their nature, crave blood. It's not something they can just deny themselves. It can't kill them but the emotional toll of it is not much better.

And now imagine framing that necessity as "sin". I mean for goodness' sake, they built a confessional where bloodfiends could talk with a priest about their forbidden craving. They have to be penitent for something they cannot control.

Blood is their forbidden fruit. They disobey the teachings of the Father who built them a paradise in order to taste it, and they are subsequently punished.

[aabluedragon]

Going through Miracle in District 20 again has reminded me that Don Quixote can, in fact, smell things and be offended by them

…it was a little up in the air after the whale, not gonna lie, haha!

[rpmemegraveyard]

^^ Large Assortment of Headcanon Exploration ^^

Send me a number, and I will write a headcanon based on that word.

If sending to a mutlimuse, please specify the muse you would like me to write for.

Light.

Shadows.

Truth.

Lies.

Fall.

Secure.

Purpose.

Meaning.

Past.

Future.

Star.

Sun.

Scar.

Solitary.

Penance.

Sinner.

Saint.

Unconditional.

Rules.

Tales.

Amazing.

Special.

Sick.

Exhaustion.

Choice.

Dream.

Passion.

Intense.

Soft.

Unforgiving.

Almost.

Messy.

Memory.

Forgotten.

Time.

Gift.

Red.

Yellow.

Blue.

Gray.

Sloshed.

Regression.

Laughter.

Debt.

Work.

Pain.

Hidden.

Power.

Animal.

Pretend.

Pillows.

Cigarette.

Leader.

Follower.

Ring.

Journal/Diary.

Flowers.

Tree.

Nature.

Gold.

Silver.

Games.

Foreign.

Comfort.

Music.

Air.

Water.

Fire.

Earth.

Definition.

Forever.

Never.

Learn.

Teach.

Grief.

Leaving.

Mundane.

Picture.

Crazy.

Repression.

Tragedy.

Comedy.

Romantic.

What if.

Paternal.

Maternal.

Better.

Worse.

Coping.

Young.

Old.

Crisis.

Body.

Soul.

Mind.

Reason.

Illogical.

Hypnotize.

Wisdom.

Destiny.

Groggy.

Morning.

Noon.

Night.

Coffee.

Moment.

Year.

Month.

Week.

Day.

Hour.

Glory.

Pride.

Lust.

Intemperance.

Greed.

Envy.

Wrath.

Sloth.

Holy.

Moderation.

Carelessness.

Quitting.

Observe.

Favor.

Spiritual.

Sacrifice.

Incompatible.

Obsolete.

Journey.

Beginning.

End.

Importance.

Numb.

Innocent.

Unhealthy.

Destruction.

Protection.

Love.

War.

Peace.

Name.

Glass.

Sea.

Sky.

Land.

Fly.

Outside.

Inside.

Together.

Alone.

Dead.

Alive.

New.

Act Out.

Restrictions.

Cry.

Brave.

Afraid.

Irked.

Chipper.

Quixotic.

Enthralled.

Hopeful.

Melancholy.

Classic.

Change.

Tradition.

Bolero/Waltz.

Serenade.

Requiem.

Lullaby.

Seduction.

Failure.

Savage.

To forget.

Polite.

Wish.

Alternate.

Confusion.

Pineapple.

Tarnished.

Moon.

Addiction.

Twisted.

Dance.

Fight.

Hit.

Eat.

Hungry.

Dessert.

Landscape.

Shopping.

Silly.