#Swan lake au

[rhapeseuhans]

A friend and I watched different versions of the Swan Lake, so this was born 🥰

[The duck in the pond] [The frog and the mage]

[starlightwayfinder]

the royalty 👑

[scary-grace]

still life, with hope - a shigaraki x f!reader fic

You're an art student with a crippling fear of birds and an assignment to create art from life, so when you're assigned to study swans, you're pretty much dead in the water. And there's something strange about the swans you find on a secluded lake, something all too human. As your artwork grows increasingly surreal and your suspicions about the swans continue to build, you can't help but ask yourself the question: Are you losing your mind, or have you walked into the middle of a fairytale gone wrong? Whatever it is, you'd better figure it out fast. Seven lives depend on the answer. (cross-posted to Ao3)

This is for @shigarakislaughter, who requested this prompt from my winter prompt list: hear the fallen and lonely cry out / can you fix me up, can you show me hope. I apologize for how long this took, and the fact that it'll be in multiple chapters, but I really hope you like it! Swan Lake AU, modern setting/no quirks, art student!reader. dividers by @cafekitsune.

Chapter 1

You look down at the piece of paper you’ve drawn from the hat with more than a little dismay. “SWAN?”

“Swan,” your Capstone 1 professor says, smiling warmly. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” you say at first. He raises an eyebrow. “Can’t I pick something else?”

“I didn’t get to pick something else,” one of your classmates says from behind you. His piece of paper reads SLUG. “I’ll trade you.”

You don’t want SLUG either. This is the first year of your MFA program, and in order to advance to the second year, you have to create an exhibition that speaks to both your versatility with multiple mediums and your own signature style. This year’s Capstone 1 exhibition is going to be held in the building that’s going to house the campus’s collection of fine art, and if you or any other student does well enough in it, your pieces will earn a permanent place in the gallery. You and your classmates have been drooling over the prize ever since it was announced.

But it wouldn’t be a grad program without a twist of nonsense involved, and in order to set everyone on an equal playing field, the professor in charge of supervising your work for the exhibition set down rules. You’ll each create an exhibition centered around a subject from the natural world. You must spend at least two of each week’s five workshop periods creating art from life – i.e., observing whatever your subject is in its natural habitat. And the subjects will be assigned by drawing from a hat.

Your classmate who drew SLUG got a short straw for sure, but there are plenty of classmates whose subjects looked pretty bad until the second you unfolded yours. Somebody got WASP, which will be a nightmare to observe from life; your roommate got ANEMONE, which means she’ll be spending a lot of time in tidepools for the foreseeable future. The person who got DANDELION has hay fever, and the person who got SQUIRREL is nearsighted. The only people who are happy are the people who wound up with things like TREE and STONE and FIRE. And you were ready to suck it up and create the best exhibition the school’s ever seen for any subject you got, right up until SWAN.

“There will be no trading,” the professor says. He turns to you. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I don’t like birds,” you say. The guy who got SLUG snorts. “I mean it! When I went on vacation to America, a bunch of Canada geese tried to drown me because I wouldn’t give them my sandwich –”

The classroom erupts in laughter. “It’s fortunate, then, that your assignment is SWAN,” your professor says. “And you are more than welcome to observe them from a safe distance.”

There’s no safe distance from a giant bird that wants to kill you. You wander back to your seat, miserable, while the only classmate who hasn’t drawn yet stands up and pulls SPARROW. So there were two birds in there – a big one, and a small one, and you had to draw the big one. Just your luck.

And your luck gets worse, because your professor assigns the rest of the class period to research your subject and where it might be observed, and you learn a certain fact about SWAN that leaves you absolutely dead in the water. You wait until the rest of the class is filing out, then make your way up to your professor. “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“I’m supposed to draw swans from life,” you say, and he nods. “Swans migrate.”

“Indeed they do.”

“They’ve migrated,” you say again. “It’s already getting cold out. They’ve all flown away. And I looked at the zoos around here – none of them have swans –”

“I admire your diligence! You certainly used your research period well,” your professor says. He’s happy. That doesn’t help you. “You’re correct. Swans are migratory, and it’s autumn. The vast majority of the wild swans are gone for the winter, and the local zoo is poorly stocked with swans. But that doesn’t mean there are no swans to be found.”

You were hoping he’d agree that you needed a different subject. You’re desperate enough that you’d even take SLUG. “Do you know where I can find some swans?”

“I’m glad you asked. There happens to be a small population of non-migratory swans at a lake not too far from here,” the professor says. “Most people aren’t aware of the lake, as it sits on the old estate. You know the one?”

You can only think of one. “With the signs on the fence about shooting trespassers?”

“The owner is rather protective,” your professor says. He smiles at you. “He’s allowed the preserve to grow wild, and his predecessor did the same, until it resembles a nature park more than anything else. The signs are to discourage hunters or hikers. You, on the other hand, will be behaving as a naturalist. You are there to observe and document – and given your apparent fear of swans, there’s no risk that you’ll interact with them.”

“No,” you admit. “Still, um – will you let him know that I’ll be there? So he doesn’t shoot me?”

“I already informed him that one of my students would be paying visits to the lake,” the professor says. You can’t decide if that makes you feel better or worse – better about not being shot, worse about getting out of this without spending the next six months on SWAN. “He’s quite enthusiastic about the idea of the birds being documented. And he was kind enough to provide a map.”

You’re doomed. “Thanks.”

When you exit the classroom, you find SLUG guy waiting, face pinched above his surgical mask. “He’s not going to let you out of it,” you say. “He wouldn’t let me out of mine.”

“SLUG is objectively worse than SWAN,” your classmate argues. “Both Western and Eastern traditions feature swans as a symbol of grace and beauty. There’s not a single classical painting that features a slug.”

“We have to draw from life,” you remind him. “Slugs don’t migrate. Swans do.”

Your classmate’s thin eyebrows lift. Does he pluck them? “It seems you’re fucked.”

“Yep,” you say, and sigh. The map folded up in your pocket looks like it was written in the eighteenth century. Even if you can read it, there’s no guarantee it’ll be accurate. “It sure does.”

You’re only mandated to spend two of each week’s workshop periods observing from life, but you figure you might as well bite the bullet. Most of your classmates are doing the same, according to the cohort group chat. Kaoruko, who drew SPARROW, found herself a cute little coffee shop to sit in, with a tree and a bird feeder right outside the window. Your roommate Shoko is headed for the beach in search of tidepools, bundled up for the weather with a determined look on her face. SLUG guy, whose name is apparently Kai, is complaining that he can’t find any, and the group chat is collectively dunking on him.

They were going to find someone to laugh at. You’re glad it’s not you. Still, you feel a little guilty, enough to message him privately. Go up to the arboretum and walk around on the trails. They’re all over the place.

He doesn’t respond. Fine. You tuck your phone into your backpack, hop on your bike, and start the half hour’s ride out to the old estate in search of swans.

You go over your research in your head as you ride along the network of trails through town. Swans are the biggest species of waterfowl in the world, even bigger than geese, which is just your luck. They come in multiple varieties – trumpeter, mute, black-necked, black, tundra, and whooper. Most of Japan is temperate enough that the swans migrate here for the winter, but it’s just your luck – Hokkaido is just far enough to the north and just cold enough to mean that the supposedly non-migratory swans at this lake are the only swans around.

What else did you learn about swans? Classically, they’re symbols of grace and beauty, just like Kai said; colloquially, they’re known for being assholes. They’ll attack people, just like geese will, and unlike geese, they’ve succeeded in murdering an uncomfortable number of people. Sure, those people were usually a little too close to the nest, and you’re not planning to get anywhere near that close, but the possibility is there that your Capstone 1 project could actually kill you. The only fact you learned about swans that wasn’t completely off-putting is the fact that they raise their cygnets together, and they apparently mate for life.

That’s not much for you to go on. By the time you drag your bike through the hole in the fence marked on the map of the old estate, you’re already frustrated with the whole thing, and your mood doesn’t improve as you hike along the world’s faintest trail up into the woods. According to the map, all the trails lead to the lake eventually, but the scenic route doesn’t do much for you except make you wish that you’d gotten TREE or ROCK or FIRE. You’d even have taken MOSS. Or FUNGUS. All of those things are abundant in the woods, and none of them are able to drown you.

The hike up to the lake is supposed to be a mile long, but the trail is so winding that it feels like longer, and you’re beginning to wonder if the professor sent you out here to get lost in the woods when you spot light coming through the trees. You pick up the pace, around the last few curves and over a downed tree covered in moss and mushrooms, and find yourself on the rocky shore of a lake.

It’s not a small lake. You were thinking it would be small, but it’s not. It’s big and crystal clear, so clear that you can see exactly where the lakebed drops away into nothingness, and although the sun’s out and the temperature’s above freezing, you know you’d freeze to death if you fell in the water long before you drowned. When you look across the lake, to the other side, you can see places where the slope to the shore is steep, and low bluffs that would lead to a nasty drop into the icy water. All the trails lead to the lake – sure. Some of them lead right into it. You set down your backpack, dig out an old, crusty highlighter, and mark the trail you took today in bright green.

You don’t see any swans just yet. There’s mist rising off the water and the sun’s still high in the sky, and as you get settled on the shore, you find yourself wishing you could just draw the lake instead. There’s so much to look at here, so many aspects of the landscape you could explore. You could sketch the pebbles on the shore, the broad, flat rocks you’ll probably sit on the next time you come out here. You could get here early, find a good spot, and rip off Monet by painting the water at every hour of the day. If you wanted to get here early, you could paint the sunrise. The mist looks pretty now, but first thing in the morning –

It’s not mist. Sure, there’s mist, but there are shapes drifting through it, and the shapes are creating the shadows that entranced you, leaving faint ripples that travel the length of the lake to brush along your side of the shore. You see long necks, folded wings, narrow beaks. Swans.

Your professor was right. There are swans here – seven of them, all paddling smoothly through the lake, in no hurry to get anywhere, least of all south. You fumble your sketchbook open in a hurry and grab for the first medium you can find. You brought half a dozen in your backpack, unsure of what you’d need, but any of the five others would be better than the chalk pastels you come up with. But you’ll work with what you’ve got. You can’t let this get away.

It’s not the swans that are the focus of your first attempt at observation. It’s the sun and the mist and the water, all bright and bold, washing your page in color. The swans are almost an afterthought – just seven grey-and-white shadows, weaving between the columns of light. Maybe this is how you can get through this project. The landscape is what attracts you, and the swans are part of it. You don’t have to ever deal directly with the swans themselves. They haven’t even noticed you, and as far as you’re concerned, it can stay that way.

When you’ve finished with the rough piece in chalk pastel, your hands and your jeans are smeared with color. You spray fixative over the sketchbook page and set it aside to dry, then take out your phone. You can take a few pictures, maybe get one of the swans in them, and call it good for today.

You discover quickly that you can’t get just one swan in the picture. They travel in a group, and the longer you look at them, the more you observe slight differences in size and plumage. There’s one swan that’s smaller than the other six while still being full-grown. Is that one a female? You’re not going to check. One of them is preening, and two others are helping, while another one pokes along the shoreline. Another one bobs against a stand of rushes, its head tucked beneath its wing.

So they do come up on shore sometimes. You’ll need to keep an eye out, and make sure you know where they are at all times. You do a quick bird count, coming up with six, although you could have sworn you counted seven earlier. There were seven. Where’s the –

You see movement out of the corner of your eye and almost drop your phone in the lake in your haste to get back from the water’s edge. So much for keeping an eye out – the seventh swan was practically on top of you before you realized it was there, and now it’s staring you down with murder in its red eyes. You didn’t think swans had red eyes. This is probably a demon swan, and it’s going to drag you into the lake and kill you. You back away a little further.

The red-eyed swan doesn’t follow you. It just watches. And watches. And keeps watching, until you’ve packed up your things and crept back into the forest. You got one usable sketch, and you’ve also got a demon swan. You need to stop thinking that anything about this project is going to be easy. No matter how good you feel about it, something’s always going to go wrong.

“Can you believe this?” Shoko rolls up her pantleg and pulls down her sock, showing you the mark from the jellyfish tentacle that wrapped around her leg. “I thought it was safe, but apparently they can still sting even if they’re dead.”

“And it was in the tidepool with you?”

“No, it was on the beach while I was walking back. A wave came up and swept it right into me.” Shoko sits down at the studio station next to yours. “Just my luck.”

“Just your luck,” you echo. “Did you get any pieces you’re happy with out of it, at least?”

“I got a few,” Shoko says. She hoists out her sketchbook, followed by a pile of polaroids, then aims a sly look your way. “What about you? How was SWAN?”

“It’s SWANS, actually. Seven of them,” you say, and Shoko nods, looking impressed. You wish she wouldn’t. You barely have anything to show for the week’s check-in. “They’re even scarier than I thought. I –”

“Did you know that some human beings are allergic to slug mucus?” Kai drops his bags at the studio station on Shoko’s other side and slumps down in the chair. “Neither did I. Until yesterday.”

“Oh my God,” you say. Shoko is laughing. “You weren’t supposed to touch them!”

Kai’s broken out in hives, and he’s glaring at you. “You told me where to find them.”

“Where to find them. Not to touch them!”

Shoko wheezes. “What, did you pick it up and give it a kiss? We’re not supposed to interact with the nature unless the nature starts it.”     

“Shut up,” Kai says. His face is turning red. “What happened to your leg? I hope you didn’t choose to urinate on it –”           

“That’s an urban legend. And you’re a moron,” Shoko says. She leans out around Kai to look at you. “Tell me about the swans.”

“Ooh, there was more than one SWAN?” A classmate drops into the seat on your left, carrying a big cardboard box. You can see a row of canvases sticking out of it, and you grit your teeth. “How did you make it out alive?”

“Hi, Keigo,” you say. Keigo ignores you and walks away, only to come back with another cardboard box full of canvases. You try again. “Did you get inspired?”

“You know it,” Keigo says. He sits down with a satisfied sigh and starts paging through his canvases. “I’ve been painting all week. I moved my easel next to my bed so I can paint when I wake up in the middle of the night. How have you guys been doing?”

He looks from you to Kai to Shoko, mild concern crossing his face. Kai glares at him. Shoko raises an eyebrow. “Really, birdbrain?”

“There’s only one birdbrain here,” Keigo says, and he winks at you.

Before you can protest, the professor strides into the room. “Welcome, students! I hope you’re all prepared to share the results of your first week’s efforts.”

You thought it was going to be a basic show and tell, but the professor’s not letting anybody off easy. Everybody gets quizzed about how much time they spent observing their subject, as well as why they chose the mediums they used, and it doesn’t take long for you to realize that you and Shoko and Kai are about to be in trouble. You have the misfortune of following Keigo, who gets glowing reviews on the thirteen canvases he’s done so far of FIRE. Just your luck. When you stand up, you’re braced for the worst.

“I spent about six hours total observing the swans,” you say. That’s about average for the class, and you had to hike to get to yours. “And I have three pieces –”

“Only three?”

“Yeah. There were, um, complications.” You pick up your first piece – the chalk pastel sketch of the swans from the first day. “This is kind of my first impression of it. Them. And then this one –”

Your second piece is a watercolor. You were planning to do something more detailed from the pictures you took, but something was wrong with the photos. They were blurry, almost psychedelic, and you decided to just go with it when it was time to paint. “So these were done from a photo, not from life,” the professor says. You cringe. “Why not?”

“I don’t think the swans liked me very much,” you say. “There was this one – it snuck up on me –”

Your classmates are snickering. Your face heats up. “Tell us about the last piece,” your professor says. “This one has more detail than the others – but it’s missing something. Why is that?”

The third piece is an ink-on-paper sketch of all seven swans, drifting across the water in a line. You thought you’d soft-focused all the swans, but when you look at the piece, you realize that you didn’t. The swan in the middle – the red-eyed one who jumped you the first day – is a shadow, or a blur. “I don’t really know,” you say. Your classmates titter, Keigo the loudest. “It kind of just happened.”

“Mm.” The professor studies the last sketch. “Your technique is clear, but there’s no life to it. You need to observe in more detail.”

“Get closer to them?” you ask. Your professor shakes his head. “I don’t know –”

“Think about it. You have seven potential subjects to work with,” the professor says, “and unlike some of your classmates, you have subjects with complex social structures and behavior patterns. Get to know their personalities a little more. I want to see that in your next set of preliminary works.”

You collect your three pieces and sit back down, while Kai, his four pieces, and his hives make their way up to the front of the room. Your critique wasn’t actually that bad. The professor complimented your technique, and that’s the foundation for everything else, so you’re not starting from nothing. He just wants a little more observation. A little more detail. A little more time out at the lake with the swans.

It’s not the worst thing. As you listen to the professor trying to figure out just how Kai managed to give himself hives while taking photos of a slug, you remind yourself that it could have gone a lot worse.

Your alarm goes off, startling you out of a dream that’s still clear as you get ready to leave. You were at the shores of the lake, and the light was fading, a cold wind skipping across the water. The swans weren’t there, and you were worried. Not because of your project, although you’ve had dreams like that, too. You were worried because it was cold, and it was getting dark, and you couldn’t see a place for them to shelter. You could hear howling in the woods behind you, but you weren’t scared for you. And then something moved in your peripheral vision, something drew up alongside you – and your alarm went off before you could see what it was.

It’s just before dawn as you move through the small apartment you and Shoko share. Shoko’s asleep at the kitchen table, her miniature easel propped up in front of her with a line of acrylic tubes open and waiting beside her palette. You take the time to close them before you head out the door, and take a look at her canvas as you do. Shoko’s the best acrylic painter you’ve ever seen, and she’s painted an anemone with incredible detail. Shoko’s going to get a good critique this week. You’re sure of it.

In fact, everybody’s critique’s improved, except yours. Your professor still doesn’t think you’re trying hard enough to get to know the swans, and today, you’re taking matters into your own hands. By the time you get to the lake, it’ll be just past dawn, and you won’t leave until you’ve captured something about each of the seven swans on paper. Or until sundown. Whichever’s first. No matter how unworried you were for your own safety in the dream, you don’t want to be caught in the woods after dark.

The ride through town is quiet, and so is the hike through the woods. You’re familiar with this path by now, and you’re getting better at hiking. The air is crisp and cold, and you can see your breath. It’ll be a cold morning until the sun crests the mountains. When you break through the tree line onto the shore, you find the lake completely still and quiet. Only faint shreds of mist. No swans in sight.

Maybe they’re sleeping in. You’d be sleeping in if you had the choice. You lay out your blanket on the flat rocks on the eastern shore of the lake, sit down, and take out your sketchbook to look through what you’ve done already. It might not be coming through in your artwork, but you have gotten to know the swans fairly well. At first you couldn’t tell them apart, except to pick out the one that’s smaller than the rest, but now you know them all by sight and behavior – and sound. The first rays of sunlight brush the lake, and like clockwork, the swans drift out of wherever they spend the night. As they travel across the lake, you look them over. You need one piece for each swan by the end of the day. Which of them should you start with?

You’ve been observing them long enough to have nicknamed them, and to have assigned them genders for no reason other than vibes. The one in the lead this morning is the one you call Silly, because most of the time he’s doing what you can only call clowning around. You know that’s projecting, that you shouldn’t impose human behavior on a bird, but that’s what it looks like he’s doing. Silly might be a good place to start, but then again, Silly’s not great at holding still. Gorgeous might be a better bet.

Swans are pretty. You had to admit that at some point, and while the swan you call Gorgeous is roughly as pretty as the other swans, Gorgeous is the only one who acts like she knows it. Gorgeous isn’t particularly scared of you, but she’s also not aggressive. More than a few times she’s come right up to wherever you’re sitting and frozen in place in the middle of your eyeline. The first time it happened, you thought you were getting into a staring contest. Then it occurred to you that Gorgeous might be posing for you.

It’s a crazy thought. It’s projecting, again, but you will admit that Gorgeous has an uncanny ability to find good light. This morning, Gorgeous is up to her usual tricks, waddling out onto a rocky outcropping in the middle of the lake and freezing in place, her wings folded neatly. In direct sunlight, there’s an undertone to her white feathers – brown, or maybe bronze. That’s going to be hard to capture without metallics, but you’ll give it a shot.

Gorgeous is a whooper swan, you think. Or a trumpeter swan. She has the same strident, sonorous call as the swans in the videos you watched on YouTube as research, and she’s talkative with the others. As you try to capture the metallic sheen of the sunlight on Gorgeous’s feathers, you keep an eye on who’s talking back. Gorgeous reliably gets responses from Silly, who responds to everybody, and from Sooty, whose call sounds like what would happen if a trombone smoked a pack a day for twenty years. It would be nice to get a feather study of Sooty, who earned his nickname thanks to the char-like markings on his plumage, but Sooty doesn’t venture out into full sun very often.

Spinner is almost always in the sun, though. If there’s even a patch of sunlight, Spinner’s in it, even if it means that he’s paddling in place and rotating slowly in a circle. If there’s no sun, like there has been one or two of the days you’ve come to the lake, Spinner huddles up with whichever of the other swans is holding still, feathers puffed out. You’re hoping you can draw Spinner while he’s out of the water. He’s more graceful on land than the others.

You take your time sketching Gorgeous – you’ve got all day – and when Gorgeous gets bored with sunning and sidles off the outcropping into the water, you set down your pencils and pull your watercolors out of your backpack instead. You have a new medium. Now you need a new swan, and as you’re looking around, weighing your options, Needles darts through your peripheral vision and nominates herself. You might as well try to capture her in watercolors. You’re not going to get her to sit still for a serious sketch.

Needles is the smallest, the fastest, the most agile, and the most energetic. She’s also the only swan who’s actually attacked you, when you reached for a feather that had fallen to the rocks and she clamped her beak down on your finger. You almost called her Toothy, but you remembered from your research that swans don’t have teeth, and the sharp points of her beak felt more like needles anyway. You lay out your watercolors, pick up your brush, and wait for her to swim back into view.

But it’s hard to paint Needles just by herself. She’s usually interacting with the others, so you resign yourself to painting Silly, Needles, and Sneaky all at the same time. It’s probably the only time you’re going to get a good look at Sneaky, anyway. Other than Spooky, he’s the swan you lose track of most often.

There was really no name you could give to the red-eyed swan other than Spooky, and although Spooky’s never come close to you again, you haven’t forgotten the look of almost hatred in his eyes. You’re more scared of him than you are of Needles, who actually bit you, or of Sooty, who gets aggressive if he decides you’ve been looking at him for too long. You decide to save drawing him for last. You can half-ass your sketch and use the fading light as an excuse to get back home.

You don’t feel inspired by the swans, necessarily; it’s more that you’re completely absorbed. There’s something captivating about them, and at the same time, something odd. You’ve watched videos of swans on YouTube, and from what you can tell, they travel in mated pairs, with cygnets. You don’t see any cygnets, and none of the swans interact with each other in a way that would make you think they were mates. They act like – friends, maybe. Or like family. Whatever it is, it’s not easy to look away from.

You manage it, though, at least long enough to get something down on paper, and you start to lose track of time. It’s only when you notice how the shadows are lying that you check your phone and find that it’s well into the afternoon. You’ve done a piece for every swan except Spooky, and your stomach is growling. You decide to fortify yourself before you try to deal with Spooky again and go digging in your backpack for snacks.

The first thing you encounter is a package of trail mix, but before you can even open it, a swan’s beak clamps down onto the other end. Sneaky’s lived up to his name; he’s come all the way onto the rocks with you without you noticing, and now he’s doing his level best to yank the trail mix away from you. You’re more affronted than scared. “Hey, give it back –”

It occurs to you vaguely how stupid this must look – you in a tug of war with a swan, which has unfolded its wings and is flapping them to try to gain traction. You know you’re not supposed to feed wildlife, and you don’t think trail mix is good for swans, and you’re worried about them eating plastic by accident. At the same time, Sneaky’s putting in a lot of effort trying to get the package away from you, and he’s attracting a lot of attention. You don’t want to get swarmed by the others. You hesitate for a second, adjust your grip the wrong way, and the package tears open, scattering trail mix across the rocks.

You’re expecting Sneaky to lunge for it and start jamming peanuts and Cheerios into his beak, trying to eat them all before the rest of the swans notice. Instead Sneaky steps back and honks – or hoots – or something. You haven’t heard any of the swans make that sound before, but all across the lake, you see heads pop up and swift shapes moving through the water. They’re all headed your way.

Before you can move, they’re already out of the water – Gorgeous, Spinner, Needles, Sooty, Silly. Silly gets there last and lunges at the trail mix, only for Spinner to hiss at him, at which point Silly turns and hisses at Sooty, who hasn’t moved. You’ve never seen wild birds do anything like this. It looks like they’re waiting for something. You do a bird count out of habit and realize that Spooky’s missing. Sneaky repeats the honk-hoot-thing from before, and this time the others pick it up, so loudly that you clamp your hands over your ears. While you can muffle the noise, you can’t keep out the certainty: They are waiting. They’re waiting for him.

For one insane moment, you think you hear human voices amidst the cacophony, calling for the one friend who’s always dragging their feet. The impatient jostling reminds you of kids at a birthday party, waiting for the birthday kid to take a bite of cake so the rest of them can eat. Spinner half-unfolds a wing in an odd gesture, and your mind summons the image of one person beckoning to another. You’ve been out here too long. You must be losing it. They’re just birds.

Spooky’s arrival should dispel any notion that there’s something human about the swans, but there’s no way to describe Spooky’s demeanor as he waddles up onto the shoreline as anything other than pissed. He keeps rustling his wings and he’s holding his neck at a funny angle, and he hisses at the other swans even though they’re already making room for him in the huddle around the trail mix. Maybe Spooky’s in charge, and the others have to let him eat before they can. That would make sense –

But that’s not what happens. Once Spooky’s in the huddle, all seven swans bow their heads and start eating together.

A chill goes down your spine. You could write off the voices your brain conjured or the gesture your eyes sketched, but this isn’t your imagination. Sneaky stole your trail mix, then called the other swans over to share, and they didn’t touch the food until all of them were there. Swans aren’t supposed to behave like this. Wild animals don’t behave like this. Even domesticated ones – you’re a dog person, and you’ve never had a dog that would wait for another dog to get there before it started eating.

This is – you don’t know what it is, but you know something’s off. And you’ve done enough observing for today. You need to go home and look at actual humans and stop losing your mind. You start packing up your things to leave, hoping to get out before the swans remember you’re there. But with seven swans, your single-serving package of trail mix goes fast. You’re just zipping up your backpack when they raise their heads and turn to you.

“Um, hi,” you say, like an idiot. You should just get up and run. “How’s it going?”

You’ve never tried to get within more than thirty feet of any of the swans before today, working out of a healthy combination of fear and respect, but the swans swarm you with absolutely no shame. You don’t have a prayer of warding them off. Before you can do anything more than haul your backpack and sketchbook out of range, Silly and Needles are right up in your personal space, Silly pulling at the sleeve of your jacket while Needles pokes you with her beak. Gorgeous is bothering you, too – she’s pulling on the hood of your jacket, picking up some of your hair in the bargain.

If you’d even come close to them, they’d have drowned you. “Can I help you?” you ask, exasperated. “I didn’t – hey, get out of there!”

Sneaky’s trying to pull down the zipper on your backpack, probably looking for more snacks. In your quest to not get in trouble for feeding the wildlife, you neglect your sketchbook for a split second, and Sooty snatches it. You let it go out of shock, which probably saves it from tearing, only for Sooty to drop it right away when Spinner bites him and hisses. Sooty hisses in response, flares his wings, and you seize the opportunity provided by their disagreement to rescue your sketchbook. There’s a beak-mark on the cover, but it seems okay.

The sketchbook’s okay, but you aren’t. A shadow falls over you, and when you look up in search of the source, you find Spooky standing directly in front of you, a strange, coughing hiss issuing from his beak.

“Hi,” you say again, even more awkwardly than before. It’s hard to be anything but awkward when you’ve got chills running down your spine. He doesn’t respond, although you don’t know why you thought he would. He’s a swan. You’re not even sure he’s a he. “Sorry to bother you. I’m just going to grab my things and –”

Spooky stretches his neck towards you and pecks your sketchbook, hard. Then he waddles back a few steps and goes back to staring at you. If you activate the part of your imagination that pictured Spinner waving Spooky over, it’s not hard to imagine that Spooky’s giving you a meaningful look. Over what? You move the sketchbook, and Spooky tracks it. His head turns from the sketchbook to you, then back to the sketchbook, and back to you again.

He wants you to draw him. The thought’s absurd, but you don’t know how else to interpret Spooky’s behavior. You’ve been coming here to draw and paint for weeks now, and today you’ve spent time trying to sketch every other swan but him – so now it’s his turn. He’s hissing at you again, rustling his wings in a way you can’t help but read as threatening. He quiets down as soon as you open your sketchbook. “Are you ready for your close-up?” you ask nonsensically, grasping for a drawing implement blindly and coming up with a ballpoint pen. Spooky doesn’t answer. Because he’s a swan. “Okay. Just, um – act natural.”

The other swans have been indifferent to your observations, or if they’ve noticed, like Gorgeous always does, they’ve cooperated for at least a little while. Spooky’s the first one who’s visibly uncomfortable while you draw him. He keeps pacing back and forth and rustling his wings and changing the position of his neck, and when he does hold still, it’s when he’s staring at you straight on, which isn’t a particularly flattering angle on a swan. You can make anything work, but it would be great if he picked something, or at least stuck to the same few behaviors so you can draw one of them. This is a mess.

Someone honks in your ear and you almost have a heart attack. It’s Sooty, who’s been looking over your shoulder at your drawings, which is so what the fuck enough to overpower your fear of swans and push you into frustration. “Hey, no peeking,” you snap. “Go away.”

Sooty backs off, but he’s rustling his wings in a weird way, bobbing his head strangely. If he was a person – which he isn’t – it would almost look like he was laughing. The way Spooky reacts makes you think it’s laughter, too – Spooky starts hissing and flares his wings out, which looks sort of majestic, you guess. You start sketching that, outlining it in quick motions of your stupid ballpoint pen, as Spooky chases Sooty off. It’s a decent sketch. But it’s also not what you want from Spooky. You turn the page and wait to see if he’ll come back.

Spooky wanders back into your field of vision looking sort of downtrodden, and this time, he settles down on the rock a few feet away from you. “That’s perfect,” you say, the same as you’d say to a person whose portrait you were drawing. He glances towards you, then looks away. “No, I mean it. Hold still.”

He doesn’t move, so you swap out your ballpoint pen for charcoal at high speed and get to work. At this range, you can see details you couldn’t capture on the other swans. The texture of his feathers, not just the color. The way the weak late-autumn light reflects dully off his beak, and the smoothness with which it fades into the feathers on his head and neck. When he’s not hissing at you, when he’s calm, you can appreciate how striking Spooky’s red eyes are, and an idea for a much larger piece pops into your head. You can take the sketches you’re doing now and paint from them, a full canvas in shades of black and white and tan and grey – except for the crimson you’d use to paint Spooky’s eyes.

If you do that, you’ll give people nightmares. Spooky’s already been in some of yours. But it’ll be striking. Hard to look away from. And if it’s in people’s nightmares, it means that they’ll have taken some part of it with them, and while you’ve always wanted your art to stick with people in the positive sense, you’ll take haunting them in a pinch. Between you and Spooky, you can get it done.

Spooky slowly unfolds one wing, and you turn the page in a hurry. One wing folded, one partially extended, the elegant curve of his neck and the angle of his head – talk about striking. Gorgeous might be consistently easier to draw, but when Spooky cooperates, he’s compelling on a different level. But still awkward about it. You can tell, and you find yourself talking again. “This looks amazing. I’ll show you when I’m done if you want. Or if you – wow –”

Spooky’s unfolded his wing all the way, and although your research gave you the dimensions of a swan’s wingspan, seeing five feet of flight feathers stretched out in the sun is really something else. You sketch fast, wishing you could linger on the details but worried that you’ll miss something when he lowers his wing again. Spooky keeps it extended as you sketch from the base of his wing to the tip – and then you see what Spooky’s really been trying to show you. The last few feathers at his wingtip aren’t smooth and full like the others; they’re skeletal. Someone’s clipped his wing.

You think of how Sneaky always keeps his wings folded, how Sooty will try to take off from the water only to fall back down after gaining barely a few feet in height. You’ve been wondering on and off why the swans don’t migrate, and now you understand. “You can’t fly,” you say, and Spooky lowers his wing at last.

Only part of the way, though – he turns his head and starts yanking at his remaining flight feathers. “Don’t,” you protest, reaching out – but Needles snaps at your fingers, warning you to pull your hand back, and the other swans close in around you. Unless you feel like punching a swan, you’re not getting out of here until they let you. “I’m not going to hurt him. I just want to help.”

Help with what? You can’t regrow Spooky’s flight feathers, or any of the others’. Maybe you can find out what swans eat and bring them some food, because now that you know they’re stuck here, you can’t imagine them doing anything but spending the winter on the edge of starvation. But they’re birds. They must want to fly. And you can’t fix that. “If I could help, I would,” you say uselessly. “But I don’t know how.”

The swans part from in front of you, suddenly, revealing Spooky. His wings are folded again, and there’s something clenched in his beak. He comes right up close to you and drops whatever it is on your sketchbook, and when he lifts his head, the two of you are face to face. You don’t understand what you’re looking at. A bird, obviously. You’re looking at a bird, but you’re paralyzed all at once by the thought that it’s not just a bird you’re looking at. You’re looking at something else, too.

Before you can think any harder about it, Spooky turns away and heads for the water at high speed. The other swans follow him, Sneaky taking one last shot at your backpack before he plunges into the lake, and vanish around a curve in the shoreline. They’re so fast in the water. It’s hard to believe they can’t fly. Hard to believe that anyone would take that away from them.

Your eyes start to burn, and you look away from the water in a hurry, down at your sketchbook. A jolt of adrenaline runs through you. The swans don’t leave feathers lying around. Needles bit you for even reaching for a dropped feather before. But lying across your page of sketches is one of Spooky’s flight feathers, freshly pulled from his wing.

taglist: @shigarakislaughter @deadhands69 @f3r4lfr0gg3r @minniessskii @cryptidfuckerofficial @lvtuss @issaortiz @evilcookie5 @aslutforfictionalmen @lacrimae-lotos @xeveryxstarfallx @stardustdreamersisi @koohiii @cheeseonatower @shikiblessed @warxhammer @agente707 @handumb @boogiemansbitch @baking-ghoul @atspiss

[circenatomy]

GUYS GUYS HEAR ME OUT

Odette as Scylla and Odile as Circe

[luxmoogle]

Swan Lake AU concepts for Odile!Vanitas

[yandere-wishes]

SWAN SONG (Yan! Baron Von Rothbart x Reader)

𝜗𝜚🦢 ࣪˖ ִ𐙚 Written in collaboration with my lovely @umgatochamadopercyval ~💝

𝜗𝜚🦢 ࣪˖ ִ𐙚 Swan Lake Ballet OST

𝜗𝜚🦢 ࣪˖ ִ𐙚 One Rothbart on the rocks coming right up

But I love you more than words can say, I'm sorry things ended up this way~💜

He's been trapped in his melancholy lately. Glaring daggers at haughty snowflakes from his frosted study window. The snow, no matter how nostalgic and periodic it may be, fills him with a sense of anguish.

But why the snow? Why the very milieu of his upbringing?"

Oh just cause. Just cause it was snowing when he first caught sight of a peculiar swan down by the lake.

At heart, Rothbart is and always will be a conqueror. It's such a shame that Princess Odette's kingdom had to learn that the hard way. He doesn't regret his decision, doesn't regret the curse. But sometimes, just sometimes in the silent dead of night, he can't help but feel that maybe, just maybe he was a bit too hasty.

Odette may be queen.

The sovereign of the lake.

But there are other swans. Other wedded towed white feathered birds, that shapeshift into pretty girls at night.

Maybe Rothbart was too hasty in picking his obsolete bride.

It's easy to forget a curse when you have enough distractions. It's easy to forget a skinned knee when you're staring at a sunset. Odette calls you angry, delinquent, rebel. Every word that can never be used to describe her. The forest is a landscape under your feet, a haze of greens and whites. The cold bites at your wings, knawing between the feathers.

It's easy to forget a curse when you have enough of a distraction.

There's a piercing clangor that calls for a landing. A loud clamor of something memorable yet foreign. You hear the frightened squeaking of your kind, their screams of terror reverberating through your ears. You glance at the sky as you descend, the sun has all but set you should be regaining your true form soon.

The wood crunches under your toed feet. Your muscles ache in this layout, you roll your shoulders back trying to ergo the tension. You hear the screaming again and run towards the sound.

Don't think, don't dream, just act.

You see the bodies before you notice the men with the guns. Bloodied morbid on the ground, white feathers marred with red. This was to be expected, wasn't it? The noise must have been a gun, a bullet racing through the air. You watch as the men exchange salutes, some descending from their steeds. In the last silver of light, you notice one of the swans twitching, a weak noise emitting from her orange beak.

You rush in, gathering her in your arms. You hear the men scream, holler in surprise at a wild woman appearing from the trees. You don't listen, don't care you just run, run back to the lake.

There's a split second when your mind blanks. The next thing you register is the weight in your hand and then a pained cry that paints you in satisfaction.

It's easy to forget a curse when you have enough distractions.

It's easy to remember a curse when it starts to kill you again.

You meet Rothbart a day after the hunting party. See him descend from the sky in all his fiery glory. He's nothing less of a phoenix, nothing short of frightening. He melts the snow at his feet, turning it into an eerie mist. He's here to check on the queen, to make sure she wasn't the young swan that died. He can not permit her such satisfaction.

Even though you fight with Odette, you love her deep down, if she’s the queen you are her second, brave enough to leave the lake sometimes and live in the wilderness, bringing exotic flowers and trinkets back to the lake. 

That’s one of the reasons that makes you shield her from his looming presence, ready to duel your captor.

“She’s not feeling up to see you, Baron” You block his passage.

The chill should be familiar by now, biting, harsh, but familiar. You shouldn’t shy away from the frost in his eyes. “Your loyalty is commendable, maiden” he all but spat. 

You laugh, truly you think it’s his obsession that’s commendable. Deranged, twisted, malicious, but commendable to some extent.

You stay in a staring contest for some time until the weight of his gaze is too much to hold onto.

“What are you doing here?”

"I was here to see my bride."

"She isn't your bride..." Vemon leaks from between your lips lacing pre-practised words. This has to have been the umpteenth time this conversation has played out. Exact same in every way, with snowflakes descending gingerly upon your head and his icy eyes memorizing your every feature. No doubt to remember who to slaughter later.

"Just bring me-" he's cut short by the loud echo of the gun. The sharp chirp and moans of thousands of rudely awakened birds fleeing into the air.

"They're back" Someone screams and before he knows it the lake is almost desolate. White feathers litter whiter snow, as a group of half-swan, half-girls huddle in a corner whispering machination. Rothbart cringes as he hears Siegfried's name thrown around with zealous hope.

He watches you transform and depart above the canopy.

Hear the gunshots disturbing the moon and stars.

He doesn't wait around to see if you return.

Rothbart knows he isn't lucky enough to witness your demise.

People are stupid that way, aren't they? Believing that ends come so easily? That death is such a deliciously easy thing to hold in the palm of your hand and kiss whenever one pleases. No death is just another hard-earned badge from life. And you, his darling little swan are a little too far from earning such a delectable pleasure.

Rothbart mocks a bow at an inraged Odette. Laughs in a tone too sadistic to name and promises he'll be back. He leaves out the part of just 'who' he'll be back for but he doubts Odette ever pays that much attention to his little speeches. Doubts she caught the little sparkle of wordplay.

He's here again next midnight. Winter coat made of reddening feathers and redder flames still. You turn from your seat on the river rocks. Legs bent as you try to see if you can stand on point with a bullet wound in your thigh. Maybe those showy flames could be useful for once, maybe they could cauterize the wound.

"You do not dance" Rothbart dares to ask. He studies your frame trying to find an imperfection, a sign of last night. You simply sigh tongue in cheek, choking on river air. The younger maidens dance under the moonlight pas de chat's with their arms crossed, they look too serene to be here. Too used to the feathers and beaks. You motion vaguely to your leg, ballet shoe platform flat on the ground. Rothbart knees before you, delicately tracing a warm hand over your powerful legs. Hicking up your tutu ever so slightly. His thumb runs over your thigh pressing gently into the wound. Scratch really, the bullet narrowly missed and yet left too deep a mark. His finger digs deeper and deeper, you stifle an icy moan bubbling in your throat. You throw your head back tenderly as his eyes pierce your neck. Rothbart summons his flames, they burn the scarred tissue and ravage your muscles. You choke on a sob and yet...

You haven't felt this warm in years...

"You see what you've done to us." Odette preaches, she's seated by the river bank. Rothbart tower's over here, eyes glued over her shoulder. Some of the other swans are helping you dance. As if it's such an important thing. As if you need to pirouette and Plié to breathe. "You do not listen, Baron," Odette says, voice low and depleted. "Oh but I do my dear Odette, And I've come to offer aid." The queen snorts, half a honk and half a laugh. "I suppose your aid would be to turn us into carnivorous wolves? To rip and tear these hunters apart."

"Those hunters are royal born. The party is run by a duke's son. I could perhaps persuade his parents that the forest is too dangerous your their wayfarer heir." Odette simply rolls her eyes. "What do you want" she mumbles defeated. Rothbart sucks in a breath, straightens his spine, and watches as Odette flinches at the sound of crackling bone. " I'd like to take one of your swans home with me."

No, the answer had simply been a no. Of course, followed by a slew of vulgar accusations. Ones that Rothbart didn't even know the sweet swan princess Odette would know. "Simply permit (y/n) to keep me company in my castle and I shall free you from this obnoxious threat."

Odette curses again, making sure they hit close to home. The last one is particularly bold. The monster she says and for a split second Rothbart almost feels cruel. In a spiral of flames, he is gone. Leaving Odette to cry, tears melting the snow...

It's a few moons before Rothbart sees you again. He'd been isolating himself in his library, watching the snow and reading poetry he pretended to understand. He'd always thought himself stronger than this. Always invincible.

He hears a tapping at his window, the forest view blocked by the white of a swan's body. Rothbart is quick to jump to his feet, to push the window apart and permit the bird in. It's you, he can tell by the angry way you wobble about his library. He finds it rather cute how you shake your feathers to dry yourself, before curling by the fireplace, glaring daggers at him. Rothbart returns to his seat picking up the ancient book about princesses and genies. He'll have to wait till moonbreak to understand what this is all about.

"I heard your proposal to Odette...I'm here to solidify the deal." You're still curled by the fireplace. Point shoes and feather tutu. He thinks you look quite adorable like this, stubborn little pet. "Does your queen know that you are here?" He asks, the cadence of his voice a little too playful. "Yes does, or well, she will once she reads my note." Rothbart rolles his eyes. " Great, so I should be expecting an army of swans at my door any minute now."

"No" you sign looking out the window with a glint of hope twinkling in your eyes.

"No?" You refuse to elaborate, "Will you save them from the hunters" you finally plead. Rothbart summons you to stand and come forth. He then pulls you onto his lap, fiery lips nipping at your pretty throat. "Yes, I suppose I will."

Your back is to Rothbart's chest as his hands wrap around your waist. Head turned at an odd angle as he kissed you deeply. The letter to Princess Odette and Prince Siegfried's wedding lies on the carpet forgotten. "You little swan" Rothbart breathes between each kiss. You like the lilt of his voice, like tender flames dancing in the hearth.

"May we please go to the wedding." You plead, chasing his lips, desperate for his addictive, acidic taste. "We shall see," he murmurs, pressing stars into your hips. Rothbart, kisses your forehead, relishing in the way you nuzzle into him. Desperate for his warmth, his touch, him...

Maybe he'd been a bit too hasty to offer his heart to Odette.

But then again he had won, his cruelty and depravity had been rewarded with his own little precious swan. His darling lover who tasted of moonlight and Oenothera. You were his, all his, trapped with him forever inside his castle.

Rothbart kisses you again deeply, softly. Savoring your sweet moans between his teeth.

[wolfie-bee]

Well, here it is! I'm excited to finally unveil my mayhem fic titled:

ripples in the lake (a swan lake fairy tale)

It's my very first supercorp AU written for @supergirlmayhem in the spirit of trying something new.

And please check out the art from my amazing artist @luxcanaryfox here:

ripples in the lake (a swan lake fairy tale) ART

[mahounormalguy]

im going insane if anyone needs anything

[beardedbaobei]

Swan King Lan Zhan and Black Swan Wei Ying.

The adaptation of Swan Lake we all secretly craved, I'm sure. A human prince falls in love with the beautiful White Swan and begins to court him. The Black Swan grows jealous, afraid that the Swan King will be successfully wooed, so in an act of jealousy, he begins to seduce the prince himself. The Swan King too becomes jealous. Neither seem to realise they're in love with each other until an embarrassing amount of time later.

Who is this human prince? Idfk, Wen Ning probably lol destined and beloved 3rd wheel

[braziliankiyotaka]

JUST A STUPID DRAWING OF SWAN LAKE AU TAKA

[eglantinesandtea]

I’ve been thinking about making a barbie swan lake inspired meljayvik au & I have the bones for it done but writing it is the hard part,,,

But like. Hear me out: Jayce as Odette, Viktor as Rothbart/Odile & Mel as prince siegfried

Viktor is the Swan Herald of the enchanted woods, he took the position over from Singed after Singed damaged the forest & he’s now working tirelessly to fix everything,

Jayce isn’t from the Enchanted Woods but he’s definitely Of them, as the pseudo-son of Heimerdinger. He has a fascination with Piltover and goes there frequently

Mel is the recently elected Queen of Piltover, having earned the position through diplomacy & hard work. She’s the banished heiress of the Medarda Family from Noxus, and thus is trying to make a name for herself

The story isn’t too figured out, but it will most likely have two Act’s with one following how Jayce gets turned into a swan, Viktor’s descent as he tries to keep a handle on things and Mel’s introduction to the enchanted woods, and the other following how to turn Jayce back from a swan & Mel and Viktor realizing they might not be so different after all

[kawaiichibiart]

Okay, WxS Swan Lake AU. Someone's gotta do it, might as well be me (because I was literally asking for it in a different post).

More under the cut O3O

For context:

Tsukasa - Odette

Rui - The Prince (if we go by the Barbie names, Prince Daniel, I can't remember his name in the animated Swan Lake movie, maybe it was Derek?).

Hinata - Fairy Queen

Harumichi - Rothbart

Emu, Nene, Kohane, Akito, Ena - Fairies

Emu: Squirrel ((I changed it because I wanted to reference her and Nene's costume from Nene's On the Stage of Dazzling Lights untrained card) Flying Squirrel)

Nene: Bird (Canary)

Kohane: Mouse (Small Field Mouse)

Akito: Fox (Red Fox)

Ena: Bird (Japanese Bush Warbler)

A quick FYI, I'm heavily basing this off the Barbie movie because that's the Swan Lake I know the best and is therefore my favorite version.

As I mentioned in the tags above (note I only shared the tags because the post was literally just me going "WxS Swan Lake" over and over), Hinata helped Toya escape from his father and the Enchanted Forest. Toya then gets taken in by the Tenmas, who run a bakery.

Harumichi is furious the Fairy Queen, Hinata, helped his son escape. He's been jealous of the younger fairy due to her being chosen to rule over the Enchanted Forest instead of him. Because of that and the fact she helped Toya get away, he's cursed the forest and it's inhabitants. The fairies who work closest to Queen Hinata are turned into animals. And everyone else are turned into plants or statues made of stone, such as Keisuke and Shousuke, the Fairy Queen's elder brothers who he keeps in his "palace" as trophies.

Hinata's magic isn't strong enough to fix everything, she can only turn his fairies back into humans once the sun sets. But once it rises, they turn back into animals.

And Harumichi is completely in the belief that one day Toya will return. And when he did, he'd curse him as well and turn him into an animal. Hopefully one small enough to keep in a cage or a jar that he can keep close.

But the first person to step into the forest wasn't his son, but a rather loud blond boy. Harumichi was going to dismiss him until he heard him say his son's name.

He referred to him as his brother, he spoke about him and the rest of his family. Harumichi didn't really care for that, only paying attention to the boy when he spoke about his son.

His son, who was doing peasants work. Baking. Cooking. The nearby kingdom's village was enamoured with him. A boy who had just, run into the village one day, seeking shelter. A boy who would stay inside for days on end, afraid someone would come after him. But after weeks went by, and no one showing up, he began to get out of his shell. And they saw the sweet young man for who he was. Someone who was sheltered by a cruel parent (him? The Harumichi Aoyagi? The true ruler of the Enchanted Forest? Cruel? Ha!) and was eager to learn things he wasn't allowed to learn. He left behind his fancy clothes for simpler ones. When he wasn't working at the bakery, apparently he worked as a waiter in a tavern with some lowly girl and even more lowly girlfriend.

The boy eventually left with Hinata's younger sister guiding him. Harumichi took this time to attack.

He turned into a vulture and flew after them, gaining on them before he surpassed them and blocked their path. He turned back into a human and demanded the boy bring him his son.

But the boy was stubborn and refused, saying he wouldn't bring Toya back to him. There was nothing he could do that would get him to change his mind. He then turned to Emu, who without needing to be asked, jumped from his shoulder and onto a tree nearby, clearly showing him a way around their roadblock.

And just as the boy is about to cut through the forest and go around Harumichi, Harumichi strikes him with his magic, ignoring the attempted attacks on him by the youngest Otori. If the boy is so adamant that there's nothing he could do to get him to change his mind, fine.

When he stops his spell, a swan lays where the boy once stood. He stands over him, telling him he'd reverse it if the boy just brought Toya back where he belonged. But still, the boy refused and before Harumichi could consider attacking him again, he flies off with Emu on his back.

Harumichi glared as he turns into a vulture and chases them again. They managed to dodge him and arrive back to where Hinata and the rest of the fairies were. Seeing what happened, Hinata gives the boy something that would protect him (part of me wants to go for the magic crystal tiara but part of me wants it to be the star jar necklace from Tsukasa's Wendy 3 star card).

And just in time as well because Harumichi arrives and demands one more time. His son in exchange for the boy's humanity being returned to him. And once again, the boy refuses. But this time, Harumichi's magic doesn't hurt him.

Harumichi glares at him before leaving, promising to return one day. And when he did, he better hope was still able to protect himself.

Some additional points that I'll incorporate later:

• Similarly to the Swan Lake animated movie, we see three times Rui meets with someone he'll potentially marry. The difference is rather it be the same person, it's three different people, with each one ending the same way: no marriages being arranged. I'm thinking of using NPCs as the princesses he'll be introduced to.

• The tavern Toya works at is Weekend Garage. He works alongside An and Kohane.

• The Tenma Bakery is run by Tsukasa, Saki, Toya and Minori. Tsukasa is the the one in charge and the one who runs the bakery overall. Saki works as a delivery girl for their village, but will sometimes head further into the Kamishiro Kingdom to deliver their baked goods. The only times she isn't allowed to is when her illness affects her (meaning she's stuck in bed, sometimes with their, hers, Toya's and Tsukasa's, older sister and her partner, a nurse named Mafuyu, and sometimes just with Mafuyu). Toya and Minori are the bakers and decorators. It used to just be Minori, but once he picked it up, Toya began to help.

• Minori isn't a Tenma in this story, she's just an employee. She's treated like family but ultimately is just a really close friend with them all.

• In this AU, Mafuyu has already escaped their mother's grasp. They learned healing and became a nurse. They're mostly known as the Tenma's nurse because it's well known that Saki is ill. And while they do work with others, most of the village doesn't need their healing as often. And while they're known as the Tenma's nurse, they're mostly just a stand in for Honami.

• Alongside Mafuyu, Honami is also a nurse. But she's still being trained where Mafuyu had finished. There wasn't much left to do, but she wanted to be a personal nurse for Saki. Knowing her friend would feel lonely on the days her illness bound her to her room. As soon as her training ends, she's going to move into the Tenma residence in order to care for Saki.

• While Saki's illness doesn't affect her everyday, when it's bad, it's bad. She be stuck in bed for as little as a day to as long as a few weeks. It hurts because she never knows when it'll affect her. If she's lucky, she'll be at the bakery, where Tsukasa might be. But the worst time for it to happen is while she's running deliveries (which has happened). Sometimes it feels like she's a burden and should just live in a hospital, rather than at home where she'll make everyone worry.

• That all being said, Saki has more good days than bad. Mafuyu being known as the Tenma's nurse has more to do with them being Kanade's partner. It was meant to be a joke, because of how often people saw them enter the Tenma Bakery, but it got carried away. So when they leave to go work at the palace and Honami becomes Saki's nurse, the joke comes to a stop.

• Harumichi cannot be bothered to learn Tsukasa's name. He refers to him as "the boy" or simply just "boy" the entire time.

• Hinata's magic is strong, however Harumichi is older and has a lot more experience. So in comparison, her magic is weak. Because of this, she can't do anything until Harumichi's spell is broken. It's heartbreaking for her because she lost her family. Her parents were trees, her brothers trophies in Harumichi's "palace" and her sister was turned into a squirrel. And even though Emu was still be her side, she couldn't break the spell off of her permanently. Just temporarily, like she was able to for the rest of her fairies. So when Tsukasa is cursed as well, she's only able to partially help him.

• The village has no idea Toya is from the Enchanted Forest. They really do assume he was running away from an abusive person, possibly even family. Because he knew so little about chores and the basics of living (such as cooking), it was very endearing to them when he began to come out of his shell and let his curiosity shine. And it was easy to tell when he wanted to try things, but didn't because of what he was likely taught. He's a noble, a maid can cook for him. He's a noble, he should read books written by scholars, not fairy tales and myths. But here? In their village? Damn it, they were going to teach him everything he wanted to learn. After all, they do say it takes a village.

• Toya, Saki and Minori definitely notice when Tsukasa's missing. They spread out to search for him, with Kanade and Mafuyu joining the search later on.

• Toya has a suspicion as to where he is, but if he is where he thinks he is, it isn't safe to go there. A fact he hates to admit, but they all agree to have it be their last resort. Hopefully he just forgot to tell them about a delivery that was far away that he chose to deliver himself.

• Harumichi definitely lures Rui in so he can kill Tsukasa. But once again, his plans are stopped because Rui can't bring himself to kill a bird that, to him, is absolutely breath taking.

• If Rui thought Tsukasa was beautiful as bird, he was even more stunning as a human. Rui had heard about falling in love at first sight from his parents and his friend, and personal guard, Mizuki. But he didn't think he'd ever experience it. But, standing here, with this strange boy...oh and the boy has friends!! How lovely.

[starlightwayfinder]

🦢 ✨

+ my reference for Aqua !

[scary-grace]

still life, with hope (part 2) -- a shigaraki x f!reader fic

You're an art student with a crippling fear of birds and an assignment to create art from life, so when you're assigned to study swans, you're pretty much dead in the water. And there's something strange about the swans you find on a secluded lake, something all too human. As your artwork grows increasingly surreal and your suspicions about the swans continue to build, you can't help but ask yourself the question: Are you losing your mind, or have you walked into the middle of a fairytale gone wrong? Whatever it is, you'd better figure it out fast. Seven lives depend on the answer. (cross-posted to Ao3)

This is for @shigarakislaughter, who requested this prompt from my winter prompt list: hear the fallen and lonely cry out / can you fix me up, can you show me hope. I apologize for how long this took, and the fact that it'll be in multiple chapters, but I really hope you like it! Swan Lake AU, modern setting/no quirks, art student!reader. dividers by @cafekitsune.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

“Well, we’re toast.” Shoko slumps against the wall with a sigh. “He’s going to fail us.”

“He can’t fail us if we complete the exhibition,” Kai says, but even through his mask, you can tell he’s demoralized. “We’re simply out of the running for the actual prize.”

You remember when you thought winning the prize and getting your exhibition added to the museum’s permanent collection was attainable, instead of just something you have to watch Keigo or Mirio or one of the professor’s other favorites get. “I don’t understand why he’s mad at us. What did we even do?”

“You and Kai complained about your subjects,” Shoko points out. You grimace. “But there’s no way he’s this mad at me just for hanging out with the two of you.

As far as you can tell, you and Shoko and Kai have been following the instructions for the Capstone project to the letter, but in the eyes of your professor, the three of you can’t do anything right. His critiques run one way in a given week, then the opposite way in the next, and by the third week you’re in trouble for not including them both. He never picks on technique for any of you, which you guess is a good thing – but, to quote your professor, “It takes more than technique to be an artist.” You never leave the critique period feeling anything but dispirited.

This week’s criticism, leveled at all three of you simultaneously, was twofold: First, that you don’t have enough finished pieces, and second, that you don’t have enough variation in the mediums of the insufficient number of finished pieces you have. Kai is griping about it as you walk to the library. “Seven finished pieces is perfectly reasonable. It takes some artists half a year to complete one work they’re happy with. I should have asked him what he thought an appropriate number would be.”

“He’d have said Keigo’s number,” you say glumly.

“Keigo could sneeze on a canvas and the professor would like it,” Shoko says venomously. “Of course Keigo has a billion pieces. Keigo doesn’t have to work.”

“And he doesn’t have to hike to encounter his subject,” Kai says. “And he can afford all the materials he wants.”

The unfairness is starting to get to you as you climb the steps. “So we’re in trouble because we don’t have enough pieces and they aren’t different enough, but workshop hours are limited, and we can’t even use all of them because we’re supposed to go observe – and we’re supposed to do mixed media with equipment we can’t afford in all the time we don’t have?”

“That’s correct.” Shoko mimics the professor, and Kai snorts behind his mask. “We’re screwed. What are we doing in here, anyway?”

“I’m picking up something. I used that library chat thing and asked one of the assistant librarians if they could help me find a book about swans.”

That’s not quite accurate. You asked if they could find a book on fairytales involving swans. You look around for the librarians. “It should just be a second. They said they would –”

“I am here with the stories you requested,” a deep voice rings out, and you, Shoko, and Kai all jump as the head librarian emerges from somewhere in the shadows. “My apologies for startling you. I understand you spoke to one of my assistants, but he had to leave early. He left me to make the delivery.”

The librarian is smiling. You can tell he’s trying to be friendly. Unfortunately, his friendly is yours and everybody else’s terrifying, and Shoko and Kai both take noticeable steps back. You hold your ground and try to smile back. “There is no book pertaining specifically to swans, but my assistant and I collected all relevant stories and printed them here for you,” the librarian says, holding out a binder. “I heard the three of you discussing artworks. Are you participating in the Capstone exhibition?”

“In theory,” Kai says.

“Not if the professor has anything to say about it,” Shoko mutters. “He’s way more of a hard-ass than I thought. All his Rate My Professor reviews were great. Wasn’t there that one about how his smile looks like Buddha’s?”

“That one was really weird,” you say. You take the binder from the librarian, trying to ignore the way his eyes bore into you. He towers over you, scrawny like a scarecrow. “Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

“Might I offer a suggestion?” the librarian asks. “If you are unable to find workshop time during the day, why not find it overnight?”

“That’s not allowed,” Kai says. Then he frowns. “Is it?”

“Check the rules,” the librarian suggests. “The building remains open if anyone is in it, and I believe it’s possible to reserve a space in advance – and of course, while in a school workshop, the supplies and equipment are free to use.”

Kai whips out his phone to check. “It is possible,” he reports. “The only day available is next Thursday.”

“Critique is on Friday. That’ll work,” Shoko says. Her eyes brighten. “We could do it.”

“At least then if we get in trouble again, we’ll know we gave it a shot,” you say. “Book it.”

Kai books the studio, and you turn to thank the librarian for the tip. He’s already gone, faded back into the stacks, and Shoko pulls you out of the building in a hurry. “This could work,” she says to you. “If we have a really good idea of what we’re working on going in, and we make sure we have the materials we need –”

“We should bring food and stuff. So we can just keep working even when we’re hungry.”

“I can bring something to assist as well,” Kai says. He sighs. “As you said. When we’re eviscerated in front of the class next week, at least we’ll have tried.”

You and Shoko head home. You live close enough to campus that you can walk instead of bike, but the air is so bitterly cold that you wish you’d taken the three-second shuttle ride to the edge of campus instead. You’re shivering even after you’ve been inside for fifteen minutes and chugged half a cup of hot tea. “I wish we had a fireplace,” Shoko says. “You know, those giant ones they have in castles.”

“That would be bigger than our whole apartment,” you say. “Not disagreeing, though. I hate thinking about how cold it’s going to be up at the lake tomorrow.”

“You’re going up again?” Shoko gives you a weird look. “That’s not a workshop period. And I know you’ve got tons of sketches and small pieces already.”

“Yeah, but they aren’t good enough, I guess.” You were proud of some of this week’s stuff. Even knowing that the critique wasn’t of the quality of today’s finished pieces, it still stings. “Besides, I bought a bunch of stuff for the swans. They get hungry.”

“Wait, you’re feeding them now? They’re wild animals.”

“Not that wild. Somebody clipped their wings.” When you first saw Spooky’s mutilated wing, you were shocked, sad, horrified. Then you did some research, and had some nightmares about skeletal flight feathers and fingernails and toenails peeled off, and now you’re just really pissed. “They’d fly away if they could, but they can’t. They’re stuck and they’re hungry. I’m going to bring them food.”

“Okay, but theoretically they’ve been eating somehow without you,” Shoko says. “If they were at risk of starving, they’d have starved already with however many winters they’ve spent there. Don’t you think?”

You shake your head. “Clipping wings isn’t permanent. Somebody keeps doing it.”

“So let them feed the swans,” Shoko says, and you glare at her. “Okay! Sorry. Sorry. I just – since when do you like swans? I thought you were scared of them.”

“I am,” you say. “I can be scared of them and care about them at the same time.”

“Okay,” Shoko says again. Her expression takes on a thoughtful cast. “Sorry. I’ve known you since freshman year and I’ve never seen you get this committed to anything except art. Not even when you were dating people.”

You and Shoko have bad luck with dating. She keeps trying, but you’re not as good at getting dates as she is, and even when you do, there’s something missing. No matter who’s sitting across the table at the coffee shop from you or walking with you and reaching for your hand, you’ve never felt the kind of pull towards them you’re supposed to. You yearn, sure. You yearn so much that it’s kept you up nights before, or found you crying in the shower when you’ve gotten home from another date that should have worked but didn’t. You know that feeling must be out there somewhere, or people wouldn’t write so many songs about it. You’ve accepted that it’s not going to happen to you.

But that’s the weirdest thing Shoko’s ever said to you, and you can’t let it slide. “I don’t want to date the swans.”

“I’m not saying you want to date the swans,” Shoko says, laughing. “Just that I’ve never seen you get out of bed at six am to go hiking for anything else.”

You laugh, too, but the thought tugs at you for the rest of the day, until you’re getting ready for bed and it becomes crystal-clear. You change out of your day clothes and into your pajamas, and like you have been every day for the past two and a half weeks, you’re confronted with the question of whether to take off Spooky’s feather, which you’ve been wearing on a leather cord around your neck. It’s a harder question than you want it to be.

At first, you had plans for the feather – using it to make impressions on pottery, or turning it into a quill of some kind and using it to draw. But when you thought about doing anything to change it, it felt wrong. Then you decided just to keep it, to use as inspiration, and left it on your desk in your room. Then on your bedside table. And then, because you kept thinking about it while you were away, you secured it on a cord and started wearing it wherever you go.

Flight feathers are big. Even on a short cord, the feather rests along your sternum, close to your heart. You feel better knowing exactly where it is, but you feel worse for worrying about it so much at the same time. And you have a bad feeling that it’s got something to do with your increasingly weird dreams. They’re not quite nightmares, but they blur the lines. No matter where you are in the dream, you feel uneasy, unsafe. You’re always looking for the swans, but you can never find them. All you can find are shapes in the mist. Human shapes. They never turn to look at you but one of them, and you always wake up before you can see their face.

You can’t prove a connection between the two things. But when you sleep with Spooky’s feather on, you dream. When you leave it on your nightstand, you don’t. And when you sleep with it off, you find yourself awake in the middle of the night, checking to see if it’s still there.

You’ve never come up to the lake at night before, but you follow the path you’ve become familiar with, sit down on the rock you always sit, and you don’t flinch when someone settles in beside you. Some of the swans sit near you now – Spinner, usually, if you’re in the sun, and sometimes Needles – but Spooky’s never come closer to you than he did the day he gave you the feather. The feather that you don’t take off. The feather that seems to pulse with a second heartbeat, alongside your own.

You glance sideways at the swan next to you, not entirely surprised to find Spooky. He has one clipped wing unfolded and he’s yanking at his feathers again. This time, with none of the others here to stop you, you shoo him away. “Hey, don’t hurt yourself. Let me see.”

Spooky takes a halfhearted snap at you, but ultimately he lets you nudge his beak away and inspect his wing more directly. He was pulling at different spots, but your attention’s drawn to the missing flight feather, which you’re wearing. “You didn’t have to give me this. I didn’t want you to hurt your wing.”

Doesn’t matter. Spooky’s voice dry and raspy, rough in the same way his hissing is. You’ve never heard what his call sounds like, and you can’t tell whether you’re imagining it or not. I couldn’t fly even if I had it. It’s better with you.

You’re conscious, again, of the feather against your sternum, and questions flutter against your lips. What are you and the others? Why did you give me this? What do you want? None of them are the one you ask. “What happened?”

You already know. Spooky’s red eyes are locked on yours, refusing to let you off the hook when you shake your head, insist out loud that you don’t. You already know. What are you going to do?

You look hopelessly at him, and a cold wind whisks across the lake. It smells like old earth and dark stone, making you shiver and making your skin crawl, but what it does to Spooky is worse. He flinches, fluffing out his feathers. His body rattles, his neck curving at an odd angle – and then, before your eyes, something about him begins to change.

Before you can see what it is, before you can even come close to processing it, the sound of laughter snaps through the dream, and you come back to awareness all at once. You aren’t at the lake. You aren’t so crazy that you’re talking to a swan. You’re in the studio, at school, and the laughter belongs to your roommate. You and your roommate and your weird classmate reserved a studio, and you’ve been here all night. How long have you been sitting like this? The crick in your neck says it’s been a while, and the weird taste in your mouth says it’s been longer since you drank water or ate anything. You straighten up, get to your feet, and then go to check on Shoko and Kai. Maybe they’ve had better luck than you did.

They’re sitting together on the floor, much closer than you’d have expected to find them, and for a second, you’re not sure what you’re seeing. Once you figure it out, you still can’t believe it. “What are you doing?”

Kai swears and drops the palette he’s holding. Luckily it lands face-up. “Kai thought the textures might look better on a person than a canvas,” Shoko says brightly. “I’m helping.”

Unlike Shoko, who looks pretty comfortable with the fact that she’s sitting there in her bra with her arm and shoulder painted to look like the skin of a banana slug, Kai looks like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. “How does it look?” he asks.

“I mean, it looks good –” You just can’t work out what happened. “Is this what you guys were doing while I was out? Paint me like one of your French slugs?”

Shoko laughs so hard she cries. Kai doesn’t get the joke. “It’s her turn to paint me next,” he says. You were talking to a swan in your dreams; your roommate was having some weird tripped-out body-painting fantasy. Just your luck. “What did you do?”

“I made some stuff early on, but I think I got off-track.” You spent some time at the pottery wheel, making seven swan-inspired nested vessels, and you know that adding them to your exhibition will give the professor one less thing to critique you on. You look down at your hands, expecting to still be clutching an unused paintbrush, and find your hands empty and covered in red. “Oh my God –”

“It’s paint,” Kai says. He glances back at the corner where you were working. “You must have made something.”

“Yeah, a mess.” You watch as Kai helps Shoko up, careful to leave her painted arm exposed, and the two of them head for your workspace. “Guys, don’t. There’s not going to be anything worth looking at.”

It’s quiet for a few seconds. Then a few seconds more. “False modesty doesn’t suit anyone, least of all you,” Kai says – then makes an odd, winded sound as Shoko smacks him. “Come explain yourself.”

Your hands are so covered in drying paint that you can barely move your fingers. You draw up alongside Kai and Shoko and stare in shock. There’s not a mess on the floor. There’s a canvas, half-covered with a drop cloth, and it’s not even close to being the only piece crowded around your easel. There are at least half a dozen others, all finished. You blink the rest of the daydream out of your eyes and study all of them, feeling more hopeless with every passing second. “They’re all wrong.”

You painted the swans, sure. It’s clear where your inspiration came from. But every piece you’ve painted has something human about it, subtle enough that only you could catch it or so obvious that it can be seen from the moon. You might be able to lie about the portrait of Gorgeous on her favorite rock, but if the professor looks closer he’ll be able to see the suggestion of a woman, her curves outlined with careful shading and hidden beneath a swan’s feathers. The watercolor of Spinner’s wet footprints on the stone would be fine if the footprints weren’t obviously starting to morph into human ones. You’ve got no excuse for the close-up black-background oil painting of Needles’s beak, open to bite – and full of human teeth. That thing’s going to give people nightmares.

And it keeps getting worse. Everywhere you look, you see clipped wings, skeletal flight feathers, and in Sneaky’s portrait you haven’t even been subtle about the outline of a human hand within the wing. Sooty’s painting doesn’t have any creepy human elements, but you can feel fury leaking through it, so much that Kai, who’s been enthusiastically examining the tooth painting, recoils slightly when Shoko holds it up for him to examine. “Don’t use that one. It’s unsettling.”

“It’s about the only one I can use,” you say miserably. “It’s the only one that’s just a swan.”

“Hang on. What are these?” Shoko is sorting through yet another stack of canvases. Her eyes widen. “I don’t care if these look human. You have to use them.”

You know even before you look at the first one that it’ll be of Spooky, and it is – focused tightly on his head, his red eyes as the centerpiece. Except his eyes are human, with eyelids and lashes that fade into his feathers, and they’re boring right through the painting into your soul. It gets worse with every painting. No matter your medium, no matter the size of the canvas or the style you’re experimenting with, you’re seeing things that aren’t there.

Human hands caged inside ruined wings. A human body straining to run, caught within a swan’s awkward frame. A swan afloat on the lake, a human drowning beneath the surface – and then one that’s barely a swan at all. Nothing more than a man crouched at the water’s edge, wrapped in a cloak of white feathers, his hair so long and white that you can’t tell whether it ends and the feathers begin.

“This is surreal,” Kai remarks. “I didn’t know you were exploring that style.”

“I wasn’t exploring anything. I don’t remember making this.” You don’t remember making any of it, really. When you claw through your memories of the last few hours, you find yourself setting up canvases, squeezing paint onto palettes, switching out your brushes over and over again, but never sitting down and making a choice about what to paint. You look down at your hands and cringe again. “I don’t even know what I was doing with all this red.”

“Fingerpainting.”

“Says the guy who’s painting my roommate like one of his French slugs.” You ignore Shoko’s laughter and study the covered canvas. Unless you were sitting here drinking red paint with your hands, that’s the only place you could have used it. You steel yourself and pull down the drop cloth. “Oh.”

Your hands might be red, but the canvas is black. The scene hasn’t been painted on it – it’s been carved, and you can see red underneath it. You covered this whole canvas in red, painted black over it once it dried, and then etched into it like you were doing sgraffito on a piece of pottery. It would be a really cool effect if you’d drawn a swan. Instead you drew a man on his knees, his back to the viewer, his arms wrapped around himself. He’s clawing at his shoulders, and you can see his shoulder blades erupting through his skin, feathers already sprouting along their edges.

It’s the same man from the last painting you looked at, but while he’s the first thing the viewer’s eye goes to, he’s not the focal point of the piece. The focal point is the enormous, disembodied hand, emerging out of the darkness and poised to come down on him. “That looks like a nightmare,” Kai says after a long, horrible silence.

It is one. Yours. “Maybe don’t use that one,” Shoko says, and you nod. “Everybody awake?”

Awake enough to know you’re screwed. You nod again, and so does Kai. “I’m hungry,” Shoko says. “Let’s eat – and then I’m making you an anemone.”

She’s pointing at you. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, but Kai’s idea looks like fun and I want to try it,” she says. You start to suggest that she should paint Kai instead and she cuts you off. “You’re going to paint Kai. Make him a swan.”

“Why not?” You’re already dead in the water. You might as well seal the deal. “Let’s do it.”

“This is an impressive achievement,” the professor is saying to Kai, and as much as you hate to admit it when you know a blistering critique’s headed your way, he’s right. “You’ve increased the diversity of your exhibition significantly. Focusing on texture rather than milieu seems to have inspired you.”

“Yes,” Kai says after a moment, “it has.”

You’re pretty sure that Kai was less inspired by the texture of slugs and more by the texture of your roommate’s skin, but you’re not going to argue that the stuff he made during last night’s sleep-deprived art spree isn’t good. Shoko got a standout review for her pieces, too, and both she and Kai got better critiques than the professor’s usual favorites. Keigo and Mirio still look a little shell-shocked. You’d feel bad for them if they hadn’t been so smug about it until now – and if you weren’t about to get your ass publicly kicked, too.

Kai sits down with full marks for the week, and then it’s your turn to present your work. You came up with a grand total of two usable pieces, plus your nesting vessels, and although the professor has positive things to say about the vessels, you know you’re in for it when it comes to the paintings. Ultimately, you could only really present the paintings of Sooty and Gorgeous. The others are too surreal, or too far off the subject. Seven vessels, two paintings. There’s no way you’re getting out of this in one piece.

The professor studies your paintings. “You’ve captured the spirits of your subjects quite effectively in these, and you’ve used the features of the setting to draw attention to your subjects, not to obscure them. That’s certainly an improvement from your first paintings.”

It is, but none of what he’s just said is a compliment, and you and he both know it. He’s quiet for a moment. “I rather expected more pieces, given the quantity of art supplies you apparently consumed during your overnight in the studio.”

He didn’t make Kai and Shoko justify their art supply usage. You grit your teeth. “I’m sorry.”

“Uh, professor?” Shoko raises her hand halfway, and the professor turns to look at her. “She’s got more pieces. A lot more. She made more stuff than me and Kai combined.”

“Is that so?” The professor turns back to you, and you stop trying to shush Shoko in a hurry. “Where are the other pieces?”

“In storage,” you say. “They weren’t appropriate for the exhibition.”

“Did they feature swans?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Kai says, ignoring you when you glare at him. “Swans were prominently featured in almost all of them.”

“Then I will be the judge of whether your pieces are appropriate,” the professor says. He gestures at you. “Bring them out.”

You have to make two trips, even with Kai’s help and Shoko’s – and Keigo’s, for some reason. With the too-human set of paintings added in, your output for the studio lock-in is truly absurd, and the professor goes through your canvases one at a time. He doesn’t ask you to explain anything. He doesn’t question why so many of the paintings have suggestions or outright sledgehammer blows of humanity embedded in them. His expression doesn’t start to change until you start lifting the series on Spooky into view. When you reveal the first painting, the one of Spooky’s head with human eyes, he nods. By the time you uncover the second-to-last canvas, the one where Spooky’s more human than swan, your professor is beaming.

“Marvelous,” he says. “Simply marvelous.”

“Sir?” you ask, bewildered. “I don’t understand. I made them too human –”

“Which proves to me that you’ve gained an understanding of them,” your professor says. “Do you remember when you were first assigned swans as your subject? You regarded them with fear and wished to keep them at a distance. These pieces suggest to me that you’ve found ways to connect to your subject on a deeper level, enough to imagine personhood within them.”

Enough to hallucinate personhood within them. You can imagine it perfectly fine on your own, but you would never have put it into an art piece if you hadn’t been in some kind of weird trance last night. “This new understanding of your subjects combined with your technique make this a very impressive body of work,” your professor concludes. “Congratulations, my dear. Consider yourself well in the running.”

He didn’t say that to Shoko or Kai. You’ve never heard him mention the prize to anybody else during a critique. You collect your pieces and sit down again, and when the professor turns the class loose to use the remainder of the workshop time on refining pieces or adjusting based on critiques, several of your classmates come up to you. Keigo’s one of them. “These are amazing,” he says to you earnestly, grinning. “I had no idea you could do stuff like this. I guess I should have been keeping a closer eye on you.”

“Maybe,” you say, and shrug. Spooky’s feather flutters against your breastbone beneath your shirt. “I had to catch a good critique at some point, right?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Keigo leans closer, close enough for you to smell smoke. “Either way, it’s definitely overdue.”

You’d feel more like that if you’d done this on purpose. Any of it. You know it’s your work. When you look at it, you can see your fingerprints on each piece, identify every place when conventional wisdom pointed in one direction and you went the other way. By now, your memory of making them came back completely, except for the most important part of it: Where you got the idea. All you have to go on is the vision or nightmare or whatever it was where you talked to Spooky at the lake. And whatever started to happen to him when the wind came through.

“Oh, come on,” you complain. Needles looks up at you, unrepentant. “Did you have to do that?”

Needles rustles her wings. You could swear she looks smug, but for the life of you, you can’t figure out why she’d be proud of knocking over your water bottle on purpose. And you have a rule about when you leave the lake, one you had to institute to make sure you’re not hiking through the forest in the dark. “I have to go home now. You know that, right?”

Needles honks at you. She looks towards the lake, then towards your water bottle, then back towards the lake. You’ve given up on pretending that the swans can’t communicate with you somehow. “I’m not drinking that. You guys use the lake as a bathroom.”

Needles honks again. This time she sounds offended, and when you try to pick up your water bottle, she takes a snap at your fingers. You don’t want to leave without your water bottle, and you don’t actually want to leave, period. You peer into your backpack, hoping for a spare water bottle. You don’t have one, but you’ve got a box of water purification tablets that Shoko gave you. Those would work, right? You nod and reach for your water bottle again. This time, Needles lets you have it.

While you wait for the tablets to dissolve in the water bottle, you go back to sketching. All the swans have been sticking close today, and you’ve had a chance to draw all of them, Spooky included. Spooky’s sitting still, almost close enough to touch, changing positions every so often, like he knows how long it takes for you to finish a preliminary sketch. As a trade-off for acknowledging that the swans aren’t normal, you’ve forced yourself to stop drawing them like people. There’s something about Spooky’s awkward grace that compels you, whether you’re imagining humanity in your sketches of him or not.

Lake water plus water purification tablets doesn’t taste that bad, as it turns out, and the sun is bright enough today that you’ve started feeling warm. You can feel yourself descending into a trance, sort of like the one you fell into during the studio lock-in, and you keep snapping yourself awake. You see enough weird stuff in your dreams as it is. You don’t want it translating into your sketchbook. Besides, you’d rather draw Spooky the way he is than get all fanciful with it. All of this is weird enough without believing that there might be –

A sudden wash of cold startles you. Startles you awake. You look down at your sketchbook in horror and realize that you’ve been drawing on the cardboard back panel of it for who knows how long. The panel is covered in what you can only describe as doodles – hands, eyes, feet, feathers, overlapping into an almost-incomprehensible mass. How much of your sketchbook did you ruin to get here?

You flip back through the pages, relieved to note that at least some of the drawings are potentially useful. But you’re having to squint to see them clearly. At first you wonder if it’s just residual sleepiness. Then you realize that it’s getting dark.

It’s not just getting dark. It is dark. The last shreds of light are disappearing behind the mountains, and even if you get up right now and run the whole way back to the road, you’ll still be biking home in the dark. Can you even make it through the woods before night actually falls? You grab for your backpack, try to get to your feet, but your hands hit feathers. The swans have you surrounded. There’s nowhere you can put your hands that you won’t be putting weight on somebody’s wings.

They’ve never gotten this close to you before. What are they doing? “Guys, please move,” you say. They stir, feathers rustling, but none of them move. “I have to get home. If I can’t get through the woods before the sun goes down –”

Then what? You don’t know, but the feeling of foreboding that settles over you makes your skin crawl. Rather than moving away, the swans pack themselves in even more tightly around you, Gorgeous and Silly pressed against your back, Sneaky and Spinner and Sooty hemming you in on either side, Needles in front of you to cut off your escape from that direction. And Spooky – Spooky was sitting in front of you, until you closed your sketchbook. Now he gets up, closes the distance between the two of you, and climbs up into your lap.

Your face turns bright red for reasons beyond your comprehension, and your efforts to get up fall apart as your desperation to get Spooky off of you takes precedence. You’ve been thinking a lot about swans – way more than you ever wanted to – but none of it’s ever extended to physically handling them. “I don’t want to hurt you,” you say. Spooky makes eye contact, like he can hear you, like he can understand – and then he settles in. “Hey. No. Come on –”

What are you going to do?

He hasn’t spoken. He can’t talk, because he’s a swan, and it’s only a memory echoing through your head. A memory of a hallucination or a dream, something not real, not real, not real. It can’t be real. You shouldn’t have drunk the lake water. Now you’re going out of your mind for good, and as you struggle to deal with Spooky, the last rays of light vanish, plunging the lake into darkness.

It’s silent for a moment, everything still. And then, just like in your dream, an icy wind stirs up, tearing across the lake. Old earth, dark stone, the kind of chill that settles into your bones and refuses to leave. It’s strong enough to sting your skin, more than strong enough to ruffle the swans’ feathers. But something’s happening to the swans as the wind whips around all of you, forming a vortex with the eight of you at its center. Something awful.

You hear huffs of breath as air leaves their lungs, dry-twig snaps as bones break and bodies deform, the hideous sound of living creatures being reshaped before your eyes. You’ve captured some of this in your sketches, you realize with a surge of horror – but seeing the whole process together, beginning to end, is nightmarish. You’ll never be able to un-see it. And because Spooky is in your lap, you can feel it, too.

As their mouths transform, you hear pained grunts, whimpers of agony as teeth sprout from gums and jaws re-hinge themselves. Feathers retreat back into the skin and feet slough their webbing before splitting and reforming, revealing ankles, insteps, toes. Spooky, somehow still sprawled across your lap, jerks and shudders like he’s having a seizure, his back arching as his spine elongates. The wind picks up even further, full of ice and dirt and grit, and you squeeze your eyes shut. You don’t want to see any more. Hearing and feeling it is bad enough.

The wind dies away as suddenly as it appeared, and everything goes still around you. Still, and quiet, save for the ragged breathing of the seven people sprawled across the rocks with you, all of them naked. Including the one who’s still in your lap. You open your eyes and look down into Spooky’s face. Spooky, who’s human now, white-haired and red-eyed, terrifyingly familiar. You know his face. It’s the one you’ve been drawing, any time you sketch a swan with a little too much humanity.

You recoil as far as you can go, shoving him out of your lap and falling backwards onto Silly and Gorgeous. Gorgeous huffs as air leaves her lungs, but Silly starts protesting. “Be careful! My ribs just got back where they’re supposed to go. Don’t ruin them again!”

“Forget your ribs, what about my hand?” Sooty yanks his hand from beneath yours. You hadn’t noticed he was there. His hand is scarred. Burned. “I told you this was a bad idea. And you – we told you not to sit in her lap –”

Spooky scowls, struggling to pick himself up off the rock. “We told you,” Needles agrees. You were right about her – she looks younger than the rest of them, and she’s a girl. “Women don’t like naked men in their laps.”

“Not strange naked men, at least.” Sneaky’s keeping a respectful distance while he goes through your backpack. The only other one who’s reacting normally to being naked is Spinner, who’s hunched over and facing away from you. “That assault on your dignity is exactly what you deserved.”

Spooky’s scowl deepens. Even in the moonlight, you can see a flush coming up on his pale face, spreading down along the column of his throat to his chest. “We aren’t strangers.”

His voice is the same as the one you heard in your dream – dry, raspy, quiet. You must be losing your mind. “I’m never drinking lake water again.”

“We didn’t want to make you drink it,” Spinner says. “But you had to stay. You had to see. And it only happens at night.”

“I’m cold,” Silly whines. “Can we go inside yet?”

Inside where? “I need to go home.”

“You can’t,” Gorgeous says immediately. “The woods aren’t safe at night. The beast is out there.”

“The beast?” you repeat, incredulous. “What’s the beast?”

“You don’t have to worry about the beast if it’s daylight or you’re past the edge of the trees,” Spinner says. “You’re safe here.”

“But it is cold,” Sneaky agrees. “Perhaps we should move this party elsewhere. I believe you asked at one point where we spend the night?”

You did. You were mainly talking to yourself, because you thought they were swans, and swans don’t talk. “What are you guys?”

“We’ll explain inside,” Needles says. She hops up, and you avert your eyes in a hurry. She makes an impatient sound. “Take my hands and I’ll show you. You can leave your backpack here so it won’t get wet –”

“And you should take your clothes off,” Sooty suggests, getting to his feet. The burns aren’t restricted just to his hands. His hair is white, like most of his plumage as a swan, but you can see where his char markings must have come from. “It’ll be easier that way.”

“Uh, no.” You get to your feet and cross your arms over your chest. “I’m not taking my clothes off. I don’t even know what you –”

“There’s a cave we stay in at night. It has hot springs, so it’s warm. We can only get to it by water.” Spooky’s also picking himself up. He keeps his back to you. “Keep your clothes on if you want.”

“Usually, we’re inside before the sun goes down,” Gorgeous explains. “Rest assured, we’ll be just as cold as you are.”

This is insane. Everything about this is insane. You’re surrounded by naked people who used to be swans, and now they want you to go skinny-dipping in a mostly-frozen lake with them on the promise that there’s somewhere warmer on the other side. Except – you don’t have the equipment to spend the night out here. You don’t know if there really is a beast in the woods, but you do know you don’t want to find out. If you’re stuck here overnight and the swans have somewhere warm to stay, you need to take them up on it. And you don’t want to spend all night in wet clothes.

You keep your bra and underwear on, just so you won’t lose your entire mind, and you follow Needles, Silly, and Sneaky as they lead the way into the water. The first few steps down into the water are painful, but by the time you’re submerged up to your chest, it’s impossible to hold your breath. Or even to move. The cold is that intense and paralyzing. If you have to submerge all the way, you’ll drown.

“Here!” Spinner’s teeth are chattering, but he’s moving through the water better than you are. He gets in front of you and holds out his hands for yours. “Follow me. I’ll help. It’s not far.”

You put your hands in Spinner’s and follow him, putting all your focus into putting one foot in front of the other as the muscles in your legs cramp and lock into place. “Get it together,” Sooty mumbles off to your right, and you glance at him. “Not you. You.”

You don’t know who he’s talking to, but a moment later, Spinner lets go of your hands, and Spooky takes his place. You were pretty bad at coping with Spooky as a swan. Coping with Spooky as a human is a lot harder. His hair is white, like Sooty’s, but his is long, so long that the ends are already trailing through the water. That doesn’t surprise you. That’s the way you drew him, after all. It occurs to you all at once that you didn’t leave his feather on shore with your backpack and your clothes and your shoes. It’s still around your neck on its cord, floating ahead of you in the water.

“Pay attention,” Spooky says, and you realize you’ve been looking everywhere but at his face. “You’ve been looking at us for months now. It should be easier now that you know who we really are.”

“I don’t know who you really are,” you say. Maintaining eye contact, looking into his crimson eyes, feels like a lot right now. You focus your gaze lower, somewhere between his nose and his chin. “I only know the nicknames I gave you.”

“We like those,” Gorgeous says from somewhere behind you. Her teeth are chattering, too. “Most of us do, anyway. You even got Spinner’s right.”

“Wait, really?” That thought is enough to temporarily distract you from the cold, and the brittle grip Spooky has on your hands. “You really go by Spinner?”

Spinner nods. Meanwhile, Spooky is leading you around an outcropping in the rocks, and the water’s almost up to your chin. You tip your head upwards to keep it out of your mouth. Needles’s voice issues from around the other side of the outcropping, echoing strangely. “We don’t pee in the lake,” she says. “We go up on the bank. We’re not gross.”

“Sorry.” You’re so cold you can barely think. “It’s not you. I don’t want to drink this stuff again if it hypnotizes me.”

“It only does what we want it to,” Sneaky says.

“What he wants it to,” Spinner corrects. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

You reach the other side of the outcropping, and see what’s behind it – a cave, tucked between the rocks. The last stretch of water you cross is the coldest, and the deepest, too. You have to swim, your limbs shot through with pins and needles, the lake’s frozen depths sucking at you from below. But then you’re through, passing through the dark maw of the cave underwater with your eyes shut and coming up at the edge of a small, pebbly shore. When you drag yourself out of the water, the air that puffs against your skin is warm.

The cave isn’t dark. There’s bioluminescent moss and fungi growing here and there, and while it’s still dim, you’re able to see well enough to make your way up from the shore to the hot springs. The swans are gathering by the largest of the pools, stepping in one by one, and you join them. All at once the weirdness of the entire situation overwhelms you. It’s seven naked people and you in your bra and underwear, all hanging out in a hot spring in a cave, and those people were swans half an hour ago. “So, um – are you swans who turn into humans, or humans who turn into swans?”

“Yes,” Silly says promptly. “No.”

“We were humans to start with,” Sooty says, annoyed. “Now we turn into swans every morning, and we go back to being human at night.”

“Okay,” you say. “Why?”

It’s quiet for a moment. The other swans are looking at Spooky, so you look at Spooky, too. He’s facing away from the others, head ducked, shoulders hunched. You’d thought the swans were all equal at first, that none of them was in charge, but in spite of the way they were picking on Spooky earlier, they’re all looking to him now. Spooky doesn’t stir. “We’re under a curse,” he says. “It’s my fault.”

Silly punches him in the arm. So does Needles. “You didn’t curse us, Spooky-kun.”

“I didn’t stop it. And don’t call me that. You know my name.” Spooky lifts his head to glare at her, then drops it back down again. His arms are folded on the shore, his head pillowed on them. “My teacher put a curse on them, and I couldn’t stop him. I can’t break it, either. It’s my fault.”

You try to decide if you believe in magic now. If you believe in curses. You’re not sure if you have a choice. There’s no scientific explanation for people turning into swans. “How long have you been like this?”

“A long time,” Spooky says, and your heart sinks. “Someone else explain. I don’t want to.”

“Me! I’ll do it!”

“No,” Sooty says. “I’ll do it. You all can’t explain worth shit.”

Silly scowls. Needles pouts. Spinner and Sneaky and Gorgeous just look tired, and something occurs to you. “How many times have you tried to explain?”

They don’t answer. You sort of knew they wouldn’t, but it was worth a try. Sooty leans back against the side of the pool, his arms crossed over his chest. “Magic exists,” he says. “No one believes in it anymore, but it existed then, and it exists now. Most of us studied under a traveling sorcerer, until he was imprisoned. With him gone, we went looking for a new teacher. Some of us can sense sources of magic. We went looking for a powerful source, and we wound up here with Shigaraki.”

“Shigaraki?” you repeat. Sooty points at Spooky, who doesn’t stir. “Okay. You came here and found Shigaraki. What happened next?”

You learn the swans’ real names slowly as Spooky tells the story. You already knew Spinner’s, but you match names to nicknames – Magne to Gorgeous, Atsuhiro to Sneaky, Jin to Silly and Himiko to Needles. Sooty doesn’t share his own name for a while, and when he does, it strikes you as just as much of a nickname as Sooty is. Not that it matters. Whatever his name is, the story he’s telling is unreal. Unbelievable. Or it would be, if you hadn’t seen the swans transform for yourselves.

When the others came to the old estate and met Shigaraki, they met his teacher, too. They knew his teacher was cruel, but he was kind to them, so they didn’t care. They learned from him, but they befriended Shigaraki, and Shigaraki told them that his teacher was worse than cruel – that he was stealing Shigaraki’s magic to bolster his own, and he’d do the same to them if they stayed. Shigaraki told them to run. They wouldn’t leave unless he agreed to run, too.

“We tried,” Spinner says. Sooty, or Dabi, got bored a while ago and demanded that somebody else finish the story. You didn’t see where he went after he left the hot springs. “He caught us. He said that if we’d left Shigaraki, he would have let us go, but since we tried to take him with us, he’d make sure we stayed together forever. And that was when he put us under the curse.”

“That was almost a hundred years ago,” Magne says, and your jaw drops. “He returns to clip our wings, so we can’t leave.”

“We can’t use magic in our swan forms, so we can’t stop him. He always comes during the day,” Atsuhiro says. “And if we were to try to leave at night –”

“The beast,” Jin says, and shivers in spite of the warm water. “It won’t let us go.”

“The only way we can get out is if the curse is broken,” Magne says. “He gave us a hundred years to try. After that –”

“We won’t turn into people at night anymore,” Spinner says. “We’ll be swans forever, and we’ll forget we were ever people to start with. We have to break the curse –”

“And you’re almost out of time,” you guess. “If it happened almost a hundred years ago –”

“We have until spring,” Dabi says as he walks by, headed for the water’s edge. “Then it’s over.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Himiko says, speaking up for the first time in a while. She sits forward, her amber eyes bright. “We can break the curse. You can help us do it. You will, won’t you? You like us. You want to help us.”

You do. Ever since you saw Spooky’s – Shigaraki’s – clipped wing, you’ve worried about them, wanted to help them, wondered if there was something you could do. “I want to help,” you say, and Himiko beams at you. You remember your painting of her beak, full of human teeth, and shiver. “What do I have to do?”

“You can’t.” Shigaraki hasn’t spoken since he ordered someone else to tell the story. He still won’t look up. “We’ve tried before. People find their way here, and we get our hopes up, and it never works. It won’t work with you, either.”

“You don’t know that,” you say. Shigaraki scoffs. “You don’t. Why don’t you tell me what it is, and then I’ll tell you if I can do it or not.”

Shigaraki won’t answer, and Himiko fills in. Her smile has an anxious cast this time. “You just have to love one of us,” she says. “And you have to be true until spring.”

You sit there for a moment, nonplussed. “That’s it?” you ask, and the swans give you identical strange looks. “I don’t have to go on a quest or anything?”

“You don’t even have to love one of us,” Spinner says. “Just promise to be faithful.”

“And it’s not ‘one of us’,” Dabi says. He climbs down into the pool again, jostling Shigaraki on the way, and somehow you know what he’s about to say even before he says it. “It’s him.”

<- Chapter 1

taglist: @shigarakislaughter @shikiblessed @handumb @f3r4lfr0gg3r @boogiemansbitch @warxhammer @agente707 @stardustdreamersisi @koohiii @atspiss @minniessskii @dance-with-me-in-hell @evilcookie5 @issaortiz @deadhands69 @baking-ghoul @xeveryxstarfallx @lvtuss @cheeseonatower @lacrimae-lotos @aslutforfictionalmen

[faeriexqueen]

Captive Prince/Swan Lake AU

I might be in over my head by posting about this prematurely before finishing the Captive Prince series (though I’m more than halfway through King’s Rising), but the brainrot has already started with my fixating and thinking about an AU. Specifically, a Swan Lake AU. >.> HEAR ME OUT: I am obviously very biased because anyone who knows me knows that I’m weak for fairytale AUs (and especially AUs with ballets as sources of inspiration). But I cannot (cannot, I say) ignore the fact that Laurent is so, so damn Swan Prince coded it is wild, to me. (Yes, I know it’s not like he was intentionally coded that way, and I am not C.A. Pacat XD) It’s just...the outwardly iciness. The hidden fragility. The inability to trust after being hurt so deeply, and having security ripped away from him at such a young age? (Not to mention, the way the Regent tries to manipulate and control (also abuse) Laurent in a way that really evokes how Rothbart treats Odette. And that doesn’t even touch on the fact that Rothbart’s imprisonment of “swan maidens” is very much parallel to how the Regent treats young boys, only to discard them when he no longer has use of them.) The dynamic between Laurent and Damon is also very Odette/Siegfried? The way Damen, despite knowing better, is ultimately drawn to Laurent, drawn to serving him and eventually determined to protect him despite ultimately having had a hand in so much of the pain Laurent went through. (And then Laurent’s initial mistrust of Damen, the frigidity and hate, and how it slowly dissolves into something tender?)

Then, there’s the way the Regent and Damen interact from the start: the manipulation, the underhanded way the Regent tries to drives Damen into certain events (or Laurent). It’s so much like how Rothbart drives Siegfried in a lot of adaptations (thinking specifically of Liam Scarlett’s Swan Lake), yet somehow, Damen remains so unwaveringly noble? Even when pushed to error, he thinks of Laurent, how things will impact Laurent, and it’s that deep yearning and pining that is so distinctive to Swan Lake, and holy shit, there is such potential here. Anyways, my brain is reeling with ideas and that’s all I might post for now as I finish the third book. I hadn’t thought I’d write anymore fanfiction for a while after my current project, but messing with a story like this is...so tempting, ugh. </3 (If it’s not this AU, I feel like I’m going to write something for Captive Prince eventually. I’m so invested in Damen and Laurent it’s not even funny. XD) On that note, if anyone is wanting to talk Captive Prince things, send me a DM because my mind is spinning. XDDD

[jcryptid]

Decided to fuck around instead of doing my work so have some quick sketches of a Fantasy Martin from my Swan Lake AU thingy.