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starlitink · 3 years ago

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Stop The Presses

I wrote this story for English class, and I figured “hey, if it got an A, it’s good enough to post on Tumblr, right?”

All characters mentioned except for Kid Blink, Racetrack Higgins, Spot Conlon, Morris Cohen, and David Simmons are a product of my imagination. The events mentioned here (apart from the strike in general and the ‘editor’s notes’ (written within the story in italics)) are also a product of my imagination.

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NEW YORK SUN Newsboy Fight On Wall Street: What Actually Happened?

July 29, 1899

By A. Kelly

The following is based on an audio recording of Jacob “Patches” Booker’s account of Tuesday’s events. I have reviewed and edited to include details that Booker might have left out, as well as definitions of certain slang words Booker uses. In most cases, I have used the nicknames that Booker uses to address various mentioned newsboys/newsgirls/etc.

So y’all wanna know what happened with the fight down on Wall Street the other day, an’ since I’se was there, the Times thought I would be best-suited to tell the story. Dunno why though, ‘cause all I did was get Queen Parker an’ Spades Campbell out of the fight before they got soaked bad enough that they had to go to the hospital or somethin’. [‘Soak’, in this context, appears to mean ‘give a severe beating’, as the recipient of the ‘soaking’ is usually soaked in blood after, hence the name.] Honestly, them Brooklyn kids jist dunno when t’ stop fightin’.

[Please stay on topic, Mr. Booker. What happened that day?]

Well, I got up that mornin’ an’ got ready to sell my papes [newspapers] like usual. Diamond Jefferson - he’s the leader of us Queens newsies - he’d told us the other day that we wasn’t gonna strike with Kid Blink an’ Racetrack [Louis ‘Kid Blink/Blind Diamond’ Baletti and Ed ‘Racetrack’ Higgins, the leaders of the Manhattan and Brooklyn newsies respectively, and the leaders of the strike], even though a lotta other newsies said we’se should. Diamond’s logic was that we have about 50 newsies in our borough, an’ since we make less than $5 a day, we can’t afford to not sell papers without goin’ hungry.

Rags Miller an’ Jumper Laurence tried sneakin’ out t’ strike with the Brooklyn newsies the other day, but Diamond an’ Bee Johnson - they’s Diamond’s second [second in command] - caught 'em an’ almost soaked 'em. Me an’ Bee’s little brother Stitches had to pull ‘em offa Rags an’ Jumper before they would stop.

Anyway, I was about t’ leave an’ go get my papes when Skids Lee had to open his big mouth an’ tell Diamond that his brother was strikin’, an’ why couldn’t he go strike too. Diamond got mad an’ said that if Skids wanted to starve because he wanted to go off an’ play at bein’ on strike with Kid Blink an’ Racetrack, then that weren’t any skin offa his back. Then Diamond dragged me into the mess an’ told me that he’d sell my papes for me if I took Skids to Brooklyn. I told him I didn’t want Scribbles an’ Foxy Davids to steal my sellin’ spot again, an’ he pulled me aside an’ told me, “Patches, you’se is the only one I trusts t’ take Skids an’ keep a level head ‘stead of gettin’ caught up in the strike”.

[Here, Booker went on a ramble about how it was nice to be trusted by Diamond, especially after being yelled at the previous week for getting in trouble with the ‘bulls’, or police, for an unknown reason.]

Anyway, Skids an’ I went to the Kosciuszko Bridge. We met up with some of Skids’ friends from the Bronx, an’ then we went across the bridge to Brooklyn an’ joined all the other newsies in this big open square. The crowd there was huge, I’se is tellin’ you. Newsies fillin’ up the whole square, with some little’uns [younger newsies, usually around the age of seven or eight] standin’ on barrels or crates so’s they’se could see what was happenin’. Kid Blink, Racetrack, Morris Cohen, David Simmons, an’ the other borough leaders was standin’ on the base of this statue of some famous guy in the middle of the square so that everyone could see 'em. They’re only about my age [Booker guesses his age to be about fifteen, but he does not have an exact number], but they’re in charge of this whole thin’. They’se the ones who went an’ thought up the idea, they’se the ones who organized the strike - this whole thin’s all 'em. It’s kind of amazin’.

Everyone was talkin’ to their friends, or goin’ up to Racetrack or Kid Blink an’ talkin’ to 'em, or somethin’ like that, until Switch Sullivan [leader of the Harlem newsies] gave a loud whistle an’ yelled “EVERYBODY SHUT IT,” then all of us quieted down real quick.

Kid Blink started off by thankin’ everyone for comin’ out an’ joinin’ the strike, an’ how the newsies of New York City was strikin’ for fair pay because the World an’ Journal had upped the price of papers to somethin’ we couldn’t pay. [Some context: the newsies must buy the newspapers themselves from the newspaper companies before they can sell them. A week ago, the New York World and New York Journal raised the price the newsboys buy at from 50 cents per hundred papers to 60 cents per hundred, meaning the newsies would have to sell 10 more papers every day just to earn the same amount as always. This is a price the newsies cannot afford to pay without going hungry, and thus the strike started.]

Then he talked about how we all had to stick together an’ not let anyone keep us from gettin’ what we want. Then Racetrack got up on the statue an’ told us to gather into groups of four or five, an’ for the little’uns to stick with a big’un [older newsboy, around the ages of eleven to twenty-one] or two, an’ then the leaders would come ‘round an’ tell us what we was supposed to do.

I ended up in a group with Queen, Spades, an’ their friend Sketch Carson. Then Spot Conlon - he’s one of the Brooklyn newsies - anyway, he came over an’ told us that we’se had to go 'round an’ find scabs who are sellin’ the World or the Journal an’ try an’ convince 'em to join us. [‘Scabs’ seems to refer to people who break the strike and accept pay to sell the newspapers, since the newsies refuse to do so.] We had to be nice ‘cause Cammie Clifton [leader of the Bronx newsies] was concerned about how us fightin’ the scabs might look to people - they all thinks of us as street rats, an’ if we fight each other, we’re just provin’ 'em right an’ we’re givin’ 'em an excuse to throw us in jail with all the other rats. So we had to try an’ be diplo… diplo… that thin’ where you try an’ be calm an’ make peace.

Yeah, that. Spot said we had to be diplomatactics an’ get the scabs on our side. If we saw any other kids goin’ to work or on their lunch break or comin’ home from work, we gotta try an’ convince 'em too, ‘cause we need as many kids as we can to join the strike or else Pulitzer an’ Hearst ain’t never gonna take us seriously.

Someone from another group pointed out that they ain’t never gonna take us seriously anyway an’ that maybe we should just give up an’ disband the strike, an’ Spades told him to shut up an’ stop bein’ such a downer.

“‘We’se gotta stick together an’ not let the scabs an’ the bulls or Pulitzer an’ Hearst or anyone else keep us from getti’g the fair treatment we’se deserves, ‘cause if we’se don’ stick together an’ fight for this, then we’se pretty much given up an’ told ‘em that they can do whatever they wants to us’,” Sketch quoted. “That’s what Race said, right? An’ now that’s what we’se is tryin’ t’do.”

[Here, Booker almost went on another ramble before I reminded him to stay on topic, tell us about the fight, and not get distracted by talking about his fellow newsboys.]

Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on. I’se gettin’ to that part. I’se tellin’ the stuff that happened before everythin’ so it all makes more sense than if I hadn’t.

[Do you mean context?]

Yeah, that. I’se givin’ context. Anyways, Spot told us that Kid Blink said to head towards Wall Street, since his boys saw a few scabs down there sellin’ the other day. Problem was, nobody told us that the scabs had moved over a couple blocks, an’ now there was a bunch of ladies sellin’ papers on the corner where he’d sent us, so we couldn’t soak 'em if thin’s went south. A fellow can’t soak a lady. It just ain’t right. It’s fine if someone tries to soak Queen, ‘cause she’s a newsie an’ she don’t care about bein’ clean an’ proper-like, an’ she’ll probably beat you in a fight with one hand tied behind her back anyways, but you can’t just hit an innocent lady. I mean, you could, but then any decent newsie is gonna soak you for it.

Anyway, the ladies tried to offer us some papers, but we told 'em no an’ asked 'em to join us. They refused, when “diplomacy failed”, as Sketch put it, Queen got mad an’ started yellin’. A bull noticed an’ grabbed Queen’s arm, tellin’ her she was under arrest for harassin’ these nice ladies. That’s when Spades decked him square in the face, an’ all hell broke loose.

Obviously, me an’ Sketch got the girls away from the fight first so they didn’t get hurt or somethin’ before we went back to go try to break it up. I told Sketch to run back to the square an’ get Race or Spot or someone who could calm Queen an’ Spades down, an’ they took off runnin’, an’ I went back to the fight. By the time I got there, the cop had a shiner [black eye] in the makin’, Queen’s lip was bleedin’, an’ Spades was down on the ground curled up in a little ball with the cop hittin’ him an’ Queen tryin’ to get the guy offa him.

I managed to haul Queen offa the copper, an’ Sketch came back with Spot, plus a couple of other newsies from Brooklyn. Between me an’ the Brooklyn boys, we managed to pull the cop off of Spades an’ get him away from the cop. Once Spades was safe an’ sittin’ on the curb, Spot started chewin’ Queen out for tryin’ to soak a cop, while one of the newsies checked out Spades’ injuries an’ told ‘im his ankle was twisted. Last I saw of 'em before the other Brooklyn newsie took me to find Skids was Queen an’ Spot shoutin’ at each other an’ his friend helpin’ Spades up off the curb while Sketch was talkin’ with the cop - probably apologizin’ for their friends an’ askin’ him not to arrest anyone.

Anyway, someone called the news an’ told 'em what had happened, but the way the guy told the story an’ the way the Times ran the headline, we’se was a bunch of street rats harassin’ some nice ladies, an’ when the cop told us to leave 'em alone, we all jumped on him an’ soaked him, six to one. Sketch an’ Spot went to the Times to complain about how that’s not what happened, an’ how none of us ever touched the ladies, an’ the cop was the one beatin’ ‘em up, an’ Spades an’ Queen just wanted to make sure neither one of ‘em was hurt, an’ the rest of us was just tryin’ to break up the fight. The Times didn’t want any of th’ Brooklyn kids tellin’ what happened, ‘cause Queen an’ Spades was in the fight, so they had a… that thin’ where you ain’t fair about tellin’ the story ‘cause you like one side better than the other.

Yeah, a bias. That thin’. They didn’t want Queen an’ Spades tellin’ the story ‘cause they was in the fight an’ the Times thought they was gonna be biased about it an’ talk about how they was innocent an’ the cop was beatin’ ‘em for no reason. Spot an’ Sketch couldn’t do it, either, ‘cause both of 'em was gone for most of the fight an’ they didn’t know what was goin’ on, an’ then Sketch had the bright idea of volunteerin’ me, cause I was there an’ I saw the fight, but I weren’t in it.

Anyways, that’s the whole story, every last bit of it, at least that I can remember. Mighta forgot a few bits an’ pieces, but they’re probably not important. Oh, an’ Spot says that Kid Blink says to tell the people readin’ this to not buy the World or Journal or any of the other papers we’re strikin’ against until they roll the prices back to where they was before all this happened, please ‘n’ thank you, sirs an’ ma’ams an’ anyone else in between.

[Editor’s note: the Newsboy’s Strike continued until August 2nd, 1899, when Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World, offered a compromise - the price at which the newsboys would buy papers would remain the same, but the newspaper companies would buy back any papers the boys did not sell during the day. The newsboys agreed to the compromise, and the Newsboy’s Union was disbanded.]

#newsboys strike of 1899 #starlitink #writing #creative writing #short story #aster writes #newsies #but not really #its about the actual strike and not the disney-fied version #keep that in mind #no period-typical homophobia #spades is trans and sketch is nonbinary #stop the presses #bee is also nonbinary

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tomaturtles · 4 years ago

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Some things for content creators regarding posting on Tunglr Dot Com

Hi hello this is just a small collection of notes re. Posting Things on this site for fellow content creators cause I know we’re all just trying to Get Noticed out here. Some are based on stuff i’ve read about and have been keeping to and some are based on my own experiences

Put in the relevant tags to search for your work first! Only the first five tags in a post were searchable for a while and I believe it’s been since updated to the first twenty tags, but regardless get the tags people might search for like fandom or characters out of the way first! And if you’re into tag rambling, save those for last.

Make sure your post actually ended up in the tags! Tumblr clowns a lot so it’s always good to make sure your post ended up in there. This is important so that anyone searching through the tags can see it; otherwise it’ll be limited to those looking at your blog or reblogs of the post. Look up one of the first tags on it, set the search to “most recent” and see if your post is there! (it helps checking the tag before you post so you know where your post would be)

You don’t have to delete the post and make a new one if it’s not showing up in the tags. Sometimes taking out or tweaking some the tags can fix it and make the post show up properly. I usually experiment with removing rambling or unnecessary tags and saving until the post ends up in the tags, and messing around with readding them until it continues to stick. Yes it’s still annoying, but it’s helpful if your post’s already gotten engagement by the time you notice it’s not in the tags. (i am specifically making this post cause i’ve been posting art here for 5 years and only found this out this week)

If your posts consistently don’t show up in the tags, there might be an issue with your blog on Tumblr’s end. Shadowbanned? Marked as explicit? I dunno what the problem is called, but if in addition to that you’ve noticed you can’t seem to search for anything on your blog and you don’t appear on the notes of posts you’ve interacted with, your blog might have been wrongfully flagged and it may be worth sending tumblr support a message about it. (it happened to me once and they fixed it!)

Linking to websites outside of Tumblr is iffy. I’m unsure if it’s been confirmed that linking outside of Tumblr always results in your post not appearing in the tags or if it’s a dumb luck thing, but it seems to happen a lot so better safe than sorry. Tumblr links are fine, so an option if you want to add a link is including it in a reblog of the post and linking to the reblog in the op!

Edits to the original post now carry over to its reblogs! Or at least that seems to be the case since a recentish update. If you’ve noticed a mistake in your post that’s bugging you but you don’t want to repost the whole thing, this is an option!

And lastly, for those who browse content this time: The mobile app and XKit on desktop both have a quick reblog option! On mobile it’s there if you long press over the reblog button, and on XKit it’s under the One-Click Postage extension. Both are handy to make reblogs speedier and share content you like.

These are probably varying degrees of well-known by most users but no harm in repeating for newer people, hope it helps someone out! If I missed anything feel free to add to this also

#art tips #art help #tumblr tips #artists on tumblr #for the one who made this post i have no idea what to tag this with huh #i typed this up on desktop so hopefully its not a giant brick of text on mobile #still losing my mind over the fact you can just fiddle w tags until the post shows up in the tags #then again ive been posting p niche content for a good while until i got into batman recently so i just didnt pay much attention to tags #i dunno if theres a science to why they dont show up sometimes or if its just random but who knows #ANYWAY hope i havent clowned on any of these and also hope thesell help fellow artists out yeehaw #toma talks

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eterni-ki-moved · 3 years ago

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i got tagged by @pyroklutz thanks for the tag firey :D

1. why did you choose your url?

ngl it just randomly popped into my mind when i was helping @gyuville come up with a url. and then i made a carrd that fit the mari-kigold url so i used it!

2. any side blogs? if you have them name them and why you have them.

i have 7. how i can handle them all, i dunno

@inaccurate-enhypen for incorrect enhypen (its dead af)

@into-the-incorrect-iland for incorrect i-land (this one’s prolly deader)

@yang-cinnamowon for enhypen/i-land moodboards and edits and stuff (atm the only sideblog i’m regularly active on)

@drunk-dawn for enhypen theories (i haven’t made any in a while but shh-)

@euijewels for i-land members + justb (i’m gonna change my layout to either geonu or jimin because the ej one is pissing me off slightly)

i have a blog for vents (won’t put the tag) and a blog for my seon brainrots (it’s a mess there, you don’t wanna see it)

3. how long have you been on tumblr?

for 10 months (love, love)! i have something planned for my 1 year anniversary hehe

4. do you have a queue tag?

i have four

q: cinnamonwon spam for when i rb from my sideblog, q: artzy is a lil shit for when i was being a lil bitch (proud) and making sure everyone on the dash saw joy’s fever!hee set, q: u underestimated my reblogging power for if someone underestimates the power of my reblogging and q: spam for my frens if my friends need recognition for their content!

5. why did you start your blog in the first place?

i started it for i-land because i felt more comfortable joining tumblr as opposed to twitter or smth

6. why did you choose your icon/pfp?

it’s nishimura riki how could i not?

7. why did you choose your header?

i don’t have a header

8. what's your post with the most notes?

my post about fever and flicker rarely getting any recognition (its outdated now lmao) and also my enhypen friend group post (i’m still not over how EVERYONE agreed that it was accurate)

9. how many mutuals do you have?

over 200--

10. how many followers do you have?

413. why-

11. how many people do you follow?

606 people

12. have you ever made a shitpost?

the REAL question is, when have i not?

13. how often do you use tumblr each day?

too often, i’m on it way too much

14. did you have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

i try to stay away from discourse because 1) stressful and 2) i’ll probably lose

15. how do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this’ posts?

i dislike them, and i’m gonna be reblogging them less like the ones that say “if you don’t reblog this you’re a terrible person” and the superstitious ones like “reblog this or else you’ll be cursed with bad luck forever.” some of those posts can make users anxious, and if i do reblog a superstitious post, i’ll tag it “superstitious rb” (i keep mispelling it im sorry)

16. do you like tag games?

yes!

17. do you like ask games?

yes ofc, i love to answer them! i kinda wish i got more of them but what to do lmao

18. which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

@pyroklutz @dads-back-from-the-store @ ALL the kpop gif/gfx creators

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

yes but shhhhhhh

20. tags?

uhm... @arsonist-twink @many-gay-magpies @just-a-demi-bean @midnightswordsdance @gyuville @gyukai @little-cold-hands @yrsun and anyone that wants to do this!

#long post #tag game

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actualaster · 4 years ago

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1, 2, 3 (Fiery Angel or Bookstore), 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15. Fanfic Ask Meme! (Alternatively you could do them all because I am infinitely curious!)

M(Fics mentioned in responses can be found on AO3, main account is named KageSora, a handful are from an alt account that’s kink-dedicated. You can find that one by poking around on my main if you care to search for it.)

Fanfic Ask Meme

1. What is your favorite fic you have under your belt?

Hrm, that’s a hard one... I honestly don’t know if I can pick, because I like a bunch of them for entirely different reasons. I’m pretty fond of “Demon Lord”. I’m also pretty fond of “Love Thyself”, that collection of RataEmi drabbles. ...If we’re talking alt account, “Warmth” definitely is up there at the top

2. What is your favorite snippet of dialogue?

Oh, this one’s SUPER easy. XD (From “A Little Too Curious”)

“Aster, if you’re so determined to get yourself killed, just tell me and I’ll save you the trouble of finding an inventive way to do it.”

3. What inspired [insert fic]?

Uhhhh... Lessee... IIRC, “Fiery Angel” was a fill for a fic prompt meme on Tumblr. I can’t for the life of me remember about “Bookstore”, though.

5. What’s your favorite headcanon you use in fics?

Crap, I’m not actually certain--I don’t really think about it enough to pay attention to when I’m leaning into headcanon or not, much less to do so regularly. Maybe if I could get my ass together to write more often...

6. What’s the detail you wait on bated breath for readers to notice?

Ahahaha... None, actually. I. Don’t really put that much thought into it. XD I’m. Not that deep of a writer. THOUGH OKAY I DID WONDER IF ANYBODY WOULD CATCH THE HASTY PLOT HOLE REPAIR IN “WARMTH” THAT EXPLAINS WHY THEY COULDN’T JUST USE A FUCKING BLANKET. I dunno if anybody actually caught that or not, which if not that’s good bc it means I fixed it well. XD

9. What’s the fic you like the least?

Hm. That one’s also hard to say. Might be “Addicted” because I was really hoping to get something out of trying to put the stuff going through my head down into words and it just... Didn’t really work, wasn’t able to work through anything with it like I’d hoped. Sometimes that happens. But it’s helped at least one other person out there, though, so I don’t regret giving it a shot.

10. What would you change if you had it all to do again?

I have a handful of fics that I’d largely keep the same but have some notable changes in terms of wording and such that I’d change because I feel like they’re not... Great. I mean they were from like almost 10 years ago so. (I keep meaning to go back and make changes but also. So much effort...)

I’d probably also change how I went about linking a few fics between accounts, ahahah. I mean I could edit it up anyway but. Like. Uh. They’re some of my more read fics so. Uh. Yeah. I’d also probably have posted one of the fics to my alt account even if it didn’t technically fit in with the rest of what I write over there because it’s close enough and it’s still kinky so. XD

11. What’s a fanfic idea you haven’t done yet?

Well, a “dark” version of “A Little Too Curious” is still rotting on my HDD lmao. I. Have some serious changes I’d need to make before I can even continue it because going back over it I’ve now got notes on it that are like “what the FUCK????” and “DUDE WHAT THE HELL NOT OKAY” lmao. I. Am really wondering why past!me didn’t pay attention to the details of “well that’s actually pretty fucking messed up” in some areas. LIKE YEAH IT’S MEANT TO BE KIND OF DARK BUT NOT. T H A T.

I also wanna fic Werewolf Aster AU in some capacity at some point. I’ve got a handful of other crackfic ideas but they’re ancient and would need absolutely ridiculous revising to even be worth considering lmao.

I DEFINITLY AM STILL HUNTING AROUND FOR INSPIRATION FOR A NICE RATATOSK/ASTER FIC IDEA. I WANNA WRITE A NICE ONE FOR THEM WHERE THEY’RE. LIKE. WHERE IT’S NOT FUCKED UP DARKFIC.

12. What’s the hardest thing to write for you?

Anything mutlichap. I just cannot multichap to save my life. There’s a reason the only two multichaps I’ve got (aside from a drabble collection and one absolutely ancient one on an FFN account that wasn’t a coherent thing but was just a cracky mess of an actor au concept with unrelated chapters) are on indefinite hiatus. ;_; and why all my original stuff is one-off snapshots of events and characters

15. Give us a snippet of something from your WiPs

Hmmm... asdlkfjasdf oKAY THIS ONE’S. I’M TRYING TO WRITE IT BUT IT’S. I’M NOT SURE HOW TO WRITE IT FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS including it takes forever to write smut because i have to bury my face in my hands every few lines MY FILE IS SAVED AS “MEMEY HATEPWP CRACKFIC TRASH” FOR A REASON LMAO

It started with a stupid argument--Richter, frustrated about Emil breaking up with him to date Ratatosk saying “The hell is so special about your dick that he doesn’t even want mine anymore?”

Ratatosk, not being one to ignore an argument to be had, countering with the very convincing “Because I’m a better fuck than you could ever be.”

Emil, sensing an opportunity, offered “W-well, I’d be happy to judge.”

Things did not, however go Just According To Keikaku [author’s note: “keikaku” means plan]

And since u said u were curious about the others anyway...

4. Do you prefer writing long or short fics?

Depends on how you define length, I like writing in the 1-5k range or so I guess? Or at least that’s what a fair number of mine turn out as. Mostly I just prefer anything but multichap orz

7. How much do you like symbolism in your fics?

Eh, if it happens it happens. I don’t usually try to write in any intentionally--honestly I can’t think of a specific time I did. I enjoy reading it in stuff but I’m not great at figuring out how to put it in myself.

8. How often do people catch onto your little details?

IDK, not super often usually for the simple reason that I don’t usually put a lot of tiny little details to be caught in? Probably be a different story if I wrote longer stuff, but I just mostly don’t focus on that--I’m also, like, absolutely abysmal at telling when I’ve got a fun little detail or something in my own writing. XD Other people are more likely to discover it than I am to realize I included it lmao

13. Do you have a favorite character to write for?

Aster, probably, or Emil. :3

14. What’s your favorite shipping fic you’ve written? Favorite gen fic?

For shipping fic... Damn that’s also very hard because almost all of what I write is shipping so you get the same problem as question 1. XD TBH, probably the same answer as I gave for #1.

For gen stuff, though, “Cooking Problems” 100%. #letemilsayfuck2kforever :p

#fanfic ask meme #lengthy post #goron-king-darunia #questions for kage

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redxblueihateloveyou · 4 years ago

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Hi, it' me again (coming back and forth just to talk about AkaKuro lol). Tumblr hides your response again, and I dunno what to say at this point X.X Anyway, I dunno what it is like in Russia, but in my country, the AkaKuro fandom is still alive. People still write fanfic and translate stories and doujinshi so it is quite nice XD Your AkaKuro video is very popular among us btw. Thank you for making such wonderful edit XD

Hey, my sweet akakuro anon;) hehe I’m gonna answer in parts:) in Russia I know couple of Akakuro people who are still alive haha but mostly it’s just me haha I’m so happy you liked the video and OMFG I still can’t believe it hot over 600K FUCKING VIEWS and 34K likes! asdfhgfdsasdnfd I haven’t gotten such amazing feddback in a while. I’m also really happy that bc of the vid I’ve hooked up many new people on them hehe yes

Someone thinks that Kuroko doesn’t notice Momoi’s crush????!!!! LMAO you kidding me! Of course he knows, that’s just what you do, when you don’t want to encourage this, plus they showed his real feelings through the Nigou lmao More than that, he definitely knows about the fact that Momoi is oblivious to her real feelings for Aomine and vice versa.

Haha Kuroko and Kise are so much alike tbh, they’re both sneaky AF, but the difference is that one pretends to be stupid/easy going and another one pretends to be innocent. Both hiding behind the masks, but both know that the other one is dangerous haha they’re probably my 2nd fav dynamic in KNB, it’s just hilarious to watch them pretending to be clueless lmao

I’m 100% sure that Akashi is well aware of all Kuroko’s manipulations, he just likes to watch him play. I mean, I think that’s exactly the reason why he’s so infatuated with his since the beginning. Bc he’s basically the only one, who can “mess up his shogi board” haha *wink wink*

To me Bokushi is actually the least scary part of Akashi, since he’s the most vulnerable one. And he’s like always offended lmao He’s basically just a book with a super scary cover, but inside there’s a romance novel xD I mean, in all seriousness, as soon as they switched and Oreshi came in play, have you seen what he did??!

Kuroko is also scarier, because Akashi’s “manipulations” are coming from his super intellect as he searches for the right tactics to win, cause you can’t do it without outsmarting your opponent, Kuroko on the other hand reminds me of a kitsune, bc he likes to trick people into doing what he needs, but he’s also making them think that it’s what they want. And he takes different forms for each one of them. I mean, depending on his needs, he can act like a complete gentleman or be a complete asshole or pretend to be sorry and make puppy eyes, and hell, and I’m pretty sure he pretends being physically weak at times too.

But I find all of this hilarious, too, especially when he loves to see ppl suffer cause it’s funny lol Like do you think that was an accident when he put himself his own curry, while everyone else were eating the ones that Riko served them? HA HA NO

And the one who can fully read him is the mister emperor and the funniest of all this is that he actually encourages such behavior lmao he’s always like “yes, kuroko is allowed to do anything he wants”, “kuroko? Idk what you’re talking about, he’s an angel!” lol

Like remember when they were “looking at pictures” and said that they can’t wait to play with each other again and Kuroko smiles and squints at Akashi. It’s like he knows, that he knows what he knows xD And they do it all the time. About Akashi’s personalities,considering the fact that Kuroko immediately noticed “whole” Akashi during the fucking game, I’m honestly scared lol

Yeah, also GOM listens to Akashi bc they respect him and intimidated by him. But Kuroko has the whole GOM o the palm of his hand for a entirely different reason.

Yup, same, I dont think anyone else could’ve handled them honestly, that’s why I think they’re so perfect for one another, besides the fact that they’re both each other’s weaknesses and strengths. I mean not only they see each other for who they are, they openly admitted that they like each other the way they are. So I hope, they keep doing what they’re doing and be happy, since they make each other so happy haha

And I still think it’s the sweetest how Akashi can make Kuroko so jealous, because it’s so unlike Tetsuya to lose his face like that. Not to mention Kuroko’s speech. Like FUCK “I've wanted to say this to you for a while now, but I never had a chance. This goes beyond happiness and the person who’s the cause of all this is before me, it’s all thanks to you, Akashi-kun.” Not only this sounds like a wedding vow (lmao), but just in all seriousness coming from a person like Kuroko it’s worth a lot. He’s so prideful.

Akashi santa? It was a comic in a Jump! magazine:)

P.S. that’s so nice to talk to someone, who sees characters for who they are, not like “kuroko is so cute and seirin is the most imporant to him and just friendship and unicorns” lmao

#answered #anonymous #akakuro #KNB #Kuroko no Basuke #akashi seijuro #Kuroko Tetsuya #knb has one of the most amazing and interesting characters ever seriously #that's why I'm such a huge fan #Akashi Seijūrō #akashi x kuroko #kuroko no basket #Kuroko's Basketball

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fleurlibelle · 4 years ago

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BLOG IMPROVEMENT - The End of Llama Drama! [ Fixes and Lot Updates]

Hey lovelies,

Have been quiet for a reason👀. I took the time due to the fact that a bunch of my files had errors and I needed to fix most of them, dang it! I want to make sure that you guys don’t face any longer the ‘Llama Drama’ in your library because my mindless stupid ass somehow managed to deliver messed up files.

I dunno how I managed this. I honestly thought I was careful but two incredible Nonnies 🤗❤️ (Thank you million times, guys 🥺) were pointing at me that in fact I did mess up a bunch of my own files. 🙄

While fixing those files I also figured out to remove some old too dark pictures and replace them with fresh ones. They were just ugly as hell and too dark! Fixed Mess Keep in mind that I did replace all lots with a new fresh copy of “Tray Files” so if you faced a ‘Llama Drama’ with a lot you wanted to have, please re-download the lot of your desire, again. I fixed them all. Emptied my tray folder and saved each lot separate and fresh. This should do the trick and it has to work now, LOL.

Check following posts, if you’re interested. Those links contain now better pictures of my first builds I posted on this blog back then when I named this blog maliapixie and started to post stuff. Maybe one or another didn’t spark your interest before because it was too dark, looked ugly etc.. 😅😅😅 You might find another gem within my older posts.

Lot Overhaul I want to show dem off again after doing an overhaul:

Bachelor Abode [ cool place for a Bachelor Challenge]

Noble Goth’s Manner [ an adequate makeover for the Goth’s Fam]

Passion’s Kiss Gardens [ Romance in Air with a wedding spot]

Alternative Download Next to the Gallery I will also provide from now on an alternative in case SFS does not work for you. Mediafire is my second choice. But remember there are certain Tumblr Exclusive builds. Those will be only via SFS and Mediafire downloadable and won’t be up on the Gallery. I tried to be as accurate as possible but in case I still messed up? Pretty please, send an ask (use the anon function, if you want) but let me know. That’s the only way how I can fix it for you guys, again 😅.

Last but not least. With that out of the way story posts are coming, some edits and a new build are on my ToDo list 👀, yay! Fixing is such a pain in the butt, LOL Now I’m dancing like a Llama.

#maliatalks #blogupdate #i love my nonnies #thank you ❤️#gif #nonny

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dvp95 · 5 years ago

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can’t breathe when you touch my sleeve - chapter 4

pairing: dan howell/phil lester

rating: e (eventually)

warnings: none

tags: alternate universe, slow burn, fluff & humour, tiny bit of inner turmoil wrt sexuality but trust me it’s not that deep, eventual smut, idiots in love

word count: 3,122 for this chapter (15,775 total)

summary: Dan keeps making a fool of himself in interviews, to the point where it’s basically a meme. Now he’s got to sit down for the better part of an hour and sell his show to the YouTuber he’d had a massive crush on when he was a teenager.

read from the beginning on ao3 or on tumblr!

read this chapter on ao3 or here!

i want to die

Aw, what happened? Did you give SugarScape spoilers?

Despite Dan's horrible mood, that makes him snort. no you buffoon 1 sugarscape has been dead for yrs, much like how i would like to be 2 i don't say spoilers ever 3 it's WORSE

I may be a little out of the loop. You gonna make me guess? I'm sure it wasn't as bad as you think it was.

phil, Dan sends on its own for emphasis. i touched my coworkers tit on live telly and now i can't look her in the fucking eye

Jaime hadn't actually cared much. She'd laughed at him, made some jokes about how Dan's spatial awareness hadn't developed yet, and then moved on with grace. Meanwhile, Dan had been having a mild panic attack on his side of the sofa because all he'd meant to do was brush a distracting piece of lint off Jaime's shoulder and, somehow, drastically missed.

It was all of ten seconds of his life, and Dan is still freaking out about it. He's been pacing his hotel room since they got back, hasn't even bothered changing out of the nice shirt he'd worn for the interview.

Like accidentally? Phil finally replies on Dan's third lap of the room.

no phil i need to grope people on camera to finish. what kind of person do you think i am. YES ACCIDENTALLY.

I dunno what you're into. I'm sure she knew it was an accident?

Yes, Jaime knows it was an accident, but that's not the point. there will be gifs phil

Phil sends him some emojis, only some of which make any sense in context. Dan isn't sure why that calms him down so much. He sits on the edge of his bed and sighs, waiting for Phil to stop typing. It takes a while, but eventually Phil says, Then you'll deal with them. It honestly can't be worse than you falling off the Jimmy Kimmel stage? I swear I saw that gif for months before I knew who you were. And if you're worried about people saying you did it on purpose, tell Jaime. You can talk about it like adults.

It's all laid out very clearly, and while it does make Dan feel better, he doesn't think he's finished being dramatic yet. He checks the time and sighs heavily.

dont suppose you'd be up for a late lunch/early dinner to distract me??

Sure! :), Phil responds immediately. The quickness of his agreement makes that part of Dan's brain start shouting again. I'm actually filming today though. I'll be done in like half an hour if you want to meet me here? Then we can either get takeaway or go out?

It's truly fascinating to Dan how practiced Phil seems to be at giving someone options and pretending like either one is fine rather than just offering his own opinion on the matter.

After assuring Phil that he'll be there, Dan considers getting changed. He's only got fifteen if he wants to get to Phil's place on time, and he isn't exactly known for his quick wardrobe decisions.

In the end, Dan just swaps his nice shoes for some sneakers and rolls his sleeves up. He's a little overdressed still, a McQueen button-down maybe a little too fancy for just hanging out with a new friend, but. He doesn't want to be late. Besides, he looks good. Maybe he likes the idea of Phil being surprised, looking him up and down, having the interview as an excuse to be so dressed up.

The part of Dan's brain that exists to remind him that men are attractive has been so, so loud this week. It's been impossible to ignore.

Dan messes with his straightened fringe until his phone beeps, telling him his Uber is outside. He remembers where Phil lives, in the very vaguest sense, but has to get the exact address from Phil.

He's glad that Phil's front door is painted a specific sort of blue. It would be just Dan's luck to knock on the wrong narrow brick building.

Thor barks, somewhere inside, and Dan shoves his hands in his jean pockets as he waits for Phil to answer the door.

"Hey!" Phil greets him before he's even fully opened the door, beaming. To the great pleasure of Dan's ego, Phil's eyebrows raise as he looks Dan over. "Y'know, you could have changed. I wouldn't have minded waiting a bit."

"Feeling underdressed?" Dan teases.

"A little," says Phil. He pushes his glasses up and gestures at his own graphic tee and slippered feet. "If I'd known there was a dress code, I'd have put on a sports coat."

"You look fine, I was just impatient," says Dan. He waits for another beat. "Uh, can I... come in?"

Phil is giving him a smile, the one with deep eye crinkles and his tongue trapped in his teeth, but it drops as he realises that they've just been standing in his doorway. "Oh! Yeah, sorry, come in. I'm actually not done filming just yet, Thor distracted me. Shouldn't take long."

"What are you filming?" Dan asks curiously, his heart pounding a bit as he follows Phil inside and then, surprisingly, downstairs. "Wait, you're the basement flat? Your video lighting is so good, though!"

"Mostly artificial," says Phil. He sounds wistful. "Someday I'll have a place with a glass window, just you wait."

"What are your windows made of now?"

"What? They're made of glass."

"Then why would you need to wait for one?"

"What did I say?"

"Glass window," says Dan, fighting back giggles. They reach the basement door and Phil lets them in, giving Dan a sheepish sort of smile over his shoulder.

"I meant a glass wall. Like a wall of windows, y'know? That's the dream."

"Yeah, it is," Dan agrees, but he's distracted by the fact that he's in Phil's flat. He kicks his shoes off among the pile next to the door and looks around. "It feels super weird to be seeing this place in 3D."

"Oh, probably," Phil laughs. "You want some slippers? My feet get so cold down here, I've got like a dozen pairs."

"I'm alright."

Phil's flat has less natural light than Dan had expected - or, evidently, than Phil would prefer - but the sheer number of lamps, string lights, and scented candles scattered around the place give it a soft glow that Dan is a big fan of. There are bright colours on every surface and every wall, and the overall effect isn't as overwhelming as it could be. Dan still thinks it could be edited down, but. It's very Phil.

To his vague surprise, he sees Phil's bed pushed against the far wall, a backless bookshelf the only divider from the open living space. Box lights and camera are all set up at the side of his bed.

"If I didn't know what you did for a living," says Dan, gesturing at the setup.

Phil grins at him. "Yeah. My landlord still doesn't believe that I don't make porn. You want a drink?"

"Sure, whatever you're having," says Dan. He spots Thor, curled up on a fluffy dog bed in the corner, and immediately starts cooing. "Oh, there you are! Hello!"

Thor perks up, cocking his head to the side, and Dan gets on the floor to call him over. Within seconds, he ends up on his back with an armful of happy puppy, and he giggles helplessly as Thor licks all over his face.

"Thor, down," Phil says from somewhere above them, sounding amused. Thor backs off, winding through Phil's legs a couple of times before he trots back to his bed.

"I love him," Dan informs Phil, still flat on his back. It's not the most flattering angle to look up at Phil, but he can deal.

"So do I," says Phil. He holds up a glass. "Ribena?"

"Please," says Dan, standing back up to accept the drink. He suddenly feels very weird, standing in the middle of Phil's lounge slash dining area slash kitchen slash bedroom. "Er, you've still got to finish filming, yeah? I can just... sit."

With a small grin, Phil waves at his sofa. "Make yourself at home. Just try not to rile Thor up too much? He's already made my blooper reel longer than the video itself."

"I think I can handle that."

Dan cannot, in fact, handle it. He brings his Ribena to the floor so he can sit next to the dog bed and scratch all of Thor's favourite spots. He finds one of Thor's toys as he listens to Phil wrap up a story that sounds maybe ten percent true, and then - well. It progresses to a tug of war before Dan can even entertain the idea that this might be distracting to Phil.

"Dan," Phil says, in this tone like he's trying to sound stern but can't stop smiling. "Are you growling at Thor?"

Yes. "Maybe."

"Maybe? I'm literally filming right now."

"He's just so cute," Dan whines.

"I know he is," says Phil. "I deal with this struggle every day of my life."

Dan sighs and lets Thor have the rope, watching wistfully as he zooms off with it. "Sorry, I'm really not trying to be a dick. I know this is your job."

"Hey, no," says Phil, suddenly sounding much closer. Dan looks up from corgi-watching to see Phil leaning against one side of his shelves, hands in his pockets and a soft smile playing around his lips. Butterflies erupt somewhere in Dan's belly. "I'm not bothered, really. I think it's cute. I just also, y'know, would like to eat sometime today."

"Why don't I just order something?" Dan suggests.

"Alright," Phil hums. "I'm lactose intolerant and hate mushrooms, but the intolerance can be ignored for pizza if that's what you want."

If that's what Dan wants. "What do you want?"

Phil blinks. "Oh, whatever."

"No," Dan presses. He knows it isn't very good manners, but he wants to see if Phil will actually offer an opinion of his own instead of walking that thin line of indifference. "I will quite literally eat anything. You pick."

It's quiet for a moment while Phil thinks it over, only the hum of the refrigerator and Thor's little huffs of breath for background noise. Dan has to admit that the small basement windows have an upside - less traffic din is able to get through. Coupled with the way Phil has lit his flat, the atmosphere makes Dan feel comfortable, like he could curl up here and just stay.

The rug under Dan is soft, the Ribena is perfectly watered down, and he's got a cute dog and a cute boy to stare at. He really could sit here forever and be content.

"I feel like Chinese," Phil says eventually. He's chewing on his lip, and Dan realises he hasn't seen Phil look so... anxious.

"Chinese sounds great," says Dan. "I'll order."

Phil seems relieved that he hasn't accidentally made a horrible choice or something, and he goes back to filming while Dan fucks around on different apps to find the best Chinese place in Phil's area.

"You never actually told me how you managed to grope someone."

Dan, who had gotten all wrapped up in chow mein and MasterChef and had forgotten his hellish morning by this point, chokes on air.

"Oh my god, nooooo," he groans, covering his face with both hands and sinking further into the sofa. He hears Phil laugh. "She just! Had some fucking, like, fluff on her shoulder. Like lint. I was gonna brush it off."

"How did you fuck that up so hard?" Phil asks. He sounds so amused that Dan wants to keep hiding, but the curse has him peeking out between his fingers curiously.

"I've never heard you swear," says Dan.

"I don't," says Phil, "on YouTube."

Unfortunately for Dan, the sound of Phil swearing is very hot. He groans again, overdramatic to cover up his very real blush, and gesticulates wildly. "My limbs are not friends with my brain, okay, I've got very big hands and I misjudged where I was putting one of them."

"Yeah, you do." Phil's eyes track Dan's hands with an intensity that makes Dan's gut constrict. Then he blinks, meets Dan's eye again, and the look is gone. "That sucks. I get it, though, my body and brain are not on the same frequency at all."

Dan thinks, a little hysterically, that this is a very good reason not to try and have sex with AmazingPhil - he doesn't want to end up in A&E.

There are roughly a hundred other reasons, too. Dan's uncertainty about his own identity, the fact that he's only in the UK for another two weeks, and the very real bond that they've been forming as friends are all at the forefront of his mind. Even so, it helps to make a joke to himself about it.

"Have you ever touched a tit accidentally?" Dan asks dryly.

"I've never touched a tit at all," says Phil. He's drinking coffee despite the hour hurtling into evening quickly, and Dan has to wonder if he ever sleeps. "Not really my wheelhouse."

"They're fine," Dan says, with much less enthusiasm than he normally would. He can't sit here and talk about his boob opinions with Phil, though, because that way lies madness. So he changes the subject, talks loudly about the episode of MasterChef they're on.

He's not ready to come out properly to himself, let alone to someone he barely knows.

Well, okay. It would be more accurate to say 'just met', because Dan feels like he does know Phil fairly well at this point. At least as well as he knows Jaime or Patrick. And maybe that's more of a commentary on how shit a coworker he is, how bad at making friends he is, but whatever. The point is that he likes spending time with Phil a lot, and he wants to do it more, but he can't have that conversation yet.

Dan knows he's attracted to guys. When he was younger and had an even worse handle on himself, that attraction would either lead to fumbling, fearing for his safety, or both.

Right now, specifically, he is attracted to Phil. This feels different, because he's got no reason to fear Phil or to immediately jump him, he's just comfortable sitting next to Phil in the dim light and letting the warmth of the feelings settle in his chest.

Maybe someday he'll be ready to tell Phil that he likes guys. Maybe that'll even go somewhere. For now, Dan is going to trash talk the chefs like he knows what he's talking about and settle into Phil's sofa and laugh like he belongs there.

Dan gets a little too comfortable. He has no idea what time it is when his eyes start to droop, but he's sure it's unreasonably early for someone who goes to sleep in the wee hours of morning most of the time.

A hand on his shoulder jerks him back into full awareness, and Dan blinks over at Phil. "Whuh?"

"Hey," says Phil. He's smiling and his voice is low. Dan can feel the slight chill of Phil's palm through the thin material of his dress shirt.

It's overwhelming, suddenly, how much Dan wants to lean in to Phil. The itch under his skin that he would feel ten years or so ago, the restless, guilty want that had him falling into bed with whatever bloke would let him, is thrumming through him with an intensity he hasn't prepared for. Dan's tongue feels heavy, and his gaze drops to Phil's mouth before he can stop it.

"Hey," echoes Dan, a beat or two late.

"You're falling asleep," Phil says. There's something about his tone that Dan can't quite place, so focused on his own emotions as he is. "You wanna stay over?"

Dan really, really does. But he really, really, really shouldn't.

"I can't," he says, not bothering to hide how regretful it makes him to turn the offer down. "Breakfast telly or whatever in the morning."

The loss of Phil's hand on Dan is one that he thinks he'll be feeling until Phil touches him again. "Of course. You probably have to wake up ridiculously early for that, huh?"

"Unfortunately."

Dan orders himself an Uber and slides to the floor with Thor in order to stop himself from giving his body what it wants in the short amount of time before it arrives. Thor likes the attention, and when Dan glances up to see the soft, unguarded look in Phil's eye, he thinks that Phil probably doesn't mind being ditched for his dog.

They chat about MasterChef and Dan's upcoming interview for a few minutes, safe topics, and Dan is disappointed when his phone beeps with the notification that his driver is close. He doesn't actually want to leave, he just knows he has to.

"We have to do this again before you head up to Edinburgh," says Phil. He walks Dan to the door, which is a little pointless - it's a total of eight steps away.

"How'd you know we're going to Edinburgh this weekend?" Dan asks, distracted from the process of getting his shoes on.

"Been in the business a while, lucky guess."

"Right. Well, then, I'll have to see what I'm doing on Friday."

"Yeah, just message me," says Phil.

There's a moment after Dan gets his shoes on where they're both just standing there looking at each other, and Dan's heart starts pounding like he's getting chased.

"I'll see you Friday," Dan says quietly, even though he isn't sure that he's free. He just needs to say something. His phone beeps again, probably telling him the driver is outside, and Dan is both relieved and annoyed.

Phil opens his mouth to say something, but Dan's racing heart and anxious mind doesn't want to hear whatever it is. He steps forward and wraps his arms around Phil's waist in a tight goodbye hug. It's the sort of embrace he'd give any of his friends, nothing overly intimate, but he knows he'll be thinking about it later anyway.

When Phil's arms drape over Dan's shoulders and his thumb brushes deliberate circles over the back of Dan's neck, it hits Dan very suddenly that if he were to try and kiss Phil right now, Phil would let him. That kind of knowledge is intoxicating, the surety of it making Dan's head swim.

But. He still doesn't know for sure what he wants, and his Uber is waiting. So he just pulls away, says goodnight, leaves.

#phanfic #phanfiction #dnp fic #phan #words words words #can't breathe when you touch my sleeve

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httpetras · 5 years ago

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Saying goodbye to AM

“I don’t want you to remember us giving up. I want you to remember us as kids that made it happen”

Well, I was thinking a lot how I should put my emotions and thoughts of the show’s final in words. In real life it’s more easier as I can cry, scream and my sister understands my exact feeling because she also lived through the end of her favorite series (it sounds so dramatic lol) - the point is that, right now, I’m a crying mess.

I had found Andi Mack a few episodes before the second season ended. I was made to watch by seeing ‘tyrus’ trending on tumblr and they looked so cute plus it was summer and I had nothing better to do so I looked up for it. At first I read on wikipedia what Andi Mack was about and OH BOY. I was like WHAT. HER SISTER IS HER MOTHER? ONE OF HER BEST FRIEND IS GAY? THE OTHER ONE HAS A MUM IN MILITARY? DISNEY? I was in shock. Honestly, I think I started watching it because I was sure someone had hacked the wikipedia page and none of the aforementioned information is true. After all, it was allegedly a disney show and well, I thought it would be something like... dunno, Hannah Montana. (I love Hannah Montana! I was thinking of the laugh track, the funny and not so serious plot something which seems cool but could never happen in real life, therefore you can’t really relate to any situation or character).

However this series quickly became one of my favorite ones. Andi Mack was groundbreaking for disney as well as for me because this was the first series I watched without subtitles (when your second language is english, it’s a huge achievement), I wrote my first english fanfictions because of tyrus, and although it’s not first time, but in this fandom I found my first internet friend whom I’ve been talking with almost a year. Despite every drama and fight in the fandom, it was actually a nice community and was a good escape from the school, stress & winter depression. I felt like I belong somewhere as we were theorizing about Cyrus’ love triangle with the blonde boy (lol) or tried to survive the hiatus while we were busy making new fanfictions, edits and fanarts. At this point I don’t know what’s the name of the fandom anymore as there are a lot of varients going here. Whatever. It doesn’t change the fact that we were blessed with so many talented and inspiring artists who contributed to the fandom by writing, drawing, even fighting with haters or just being a fan of the show. Sometimes it’s enough if you genuinely love&care about the show and support artists, don’t forget that.

So yeah... for me Andi Mack was the change itself, a second home, a motivation and inspiration to wake up every morning and keep on going. Although I got criticism for my love for a kid’s show, I want to tell you: Andi Mack was braver than any other kids or adults’ show. They dared to talk and present real life situation, issues and people. Andi Mack is a first step toward the change. It will be a part of the history decades later.

To sum up:

We were here

I was a part of it

And I’m so thankful for that

(To all those people who “I don’t watch the show but I think/ship they’re cute... etc” I don’t care what you ship or think. Watch the damn show. It’s not on me if you miss this gem out of your life)

Thank you Andi Mack!!

#andi mack #goodbye #random petradity

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steve0discusses · 6 years ago

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Yugioh S2 Ep 33: ᵇˡᶦᵐᵖ ʙʟɪᴍᴘ BLIMP ԀꟽI⅂ꓭ

I usually don’t really do these during weekdays but lets just say today was a day where I felt the need for a healthy distraction.

Ah, it is episode 33. There are...so many episodes in a Yugioh season, guys. I was just not aware. But, here we are at episode 33 and we are finally going to start the finals.

For reals this time, no one’s going to get engaged, no one’s going to randomly murder a bunch of people. We are officially starting the finals this episode.

Sort of.

Man, Kaiba and his butterfly-wing shoulderpads. Sometimes it just looks like he’s just going to gently flutter away.

Also in this stadium with Kaiba and Mokuba is Marik and Odion, who is just as confused as to where the hell everyone went and why the hell Mai just flew by being carried off by a ninja in a jet pack. The hours it must have taken to wait for Yugi’s crew to walk 2 single blocks was enough time for Marik to formulate yet another back-up plan. I want to say this is plan #9.

It’s a good thing Pharaoh can’t read anymore, considering that Marik’s just walking around in a crop hoodie with a tattoo that just reads “SEASON 2 SPOILERS, PHARAOH, DO NOT READ” in hieroglyphs.

But if you wait long enough, even Yugi and his friends will accidentally wander the correct direction and actually show up.

(read more under the cut)

Not a joke, this is actually an unfinished public works project, congratulations, Kaiba Corps, there is nothing that Kaiba won’t try and then fail at, at least once.

Anyways, this shady-as-hell unfinished stadium seems kind of like a good place to get murdered and then tossed into a cement slab. Which honestly, would have been a very likely end to this season, considering what we have been through so far.

Marik decides to sneak around the bleachers, probably on all fours so no one would spot him, jump out a window, and then come in through the front door like he’s not been here this entire time. As he did, apparently he made everything very, very windy. In fact, everyone with a millennium item brought with them a spooooooky gust of wind except I think Yugi, who is probably too short to pull that one off.

Yugi did manage to get the vibe of “something bad is coming” before Marik entered the field, but like...there’s so many bad things at this point, Yugi. So many people that could be. It feels like that might be half the cast. You could say that at any given moment in this season and be absolutely right.

So, after possessing Tea for a second, for...some reason? Did she need threatening? Anyway, after doing that, Namu is in with the gang because literally nothing will prevent Yugi from becoming a friend with you, especially if you are trying to hide the fact that you just tried to kill him by drowning him in the ocean.

Funny how instead of them asking how the hell Namu got away from cultists, they have to fixate on the mystery of “is Bakura good at cards!?” because, and I kinda forgot about this, I guess they don’t remember the last time they saw Bakura play. How far up their own ass is Yugi and Joey to assume that just because Bakura doesn’t brag about cards all day, that Bakura hasn’t been equally good at cards? They kind of deserve this.

Yeah and PS Kaiba absolutely did not check the satellite to get the DL on why the hell Bakura got so many cards. Dayjob Saruman I guess went home for the evening so...although that shadow game was definitely being recorded on a computer, we’ll never know what that mess looked like on Kaiba’s end. Like there’s just three duel disks covered in ectoplasm hanging out in the cemetery and no one seems to have noticed?

Like for a competition that was huge about security and tech, they only seemed to watch the God Cards players and then Mokuba randomly monitored Joey Wheeler for some reason. That was it. That was all the people the Kaiba’s cared about.

So although Marik and Odion and Bakura could probably take on everyone right now. Like riiiight now. They decide not to because, well, I nearly forgot about someone that I was really looking forward to seeing again, that’s right, my favorite boy!

AW THERE HE IS!

to quote one of my actual favorite earworms,

youtube

Where has this big boy been hiding!? He’s freakin ginormous, but apparently he was just hiding behind a soft cloud or something, in anticipation of this grand reveal in a very sketch unfinished stadium that’s probably being used to bet on bum fights.

Mokuba gets excited for the first time since...I don’t remember if Mokuba’s ever actually been excited before. Like I’m digging through my memories here and no, Mokuba’s been mostly abducted, angry, bored, or scared, this is the first time he’s exuded that pure pre-teen energy.

PS a blimp’s max flying height is 1500 ft, and what surprised me the most about this was realizing that this entire time we’ve been watching this show, we’ve been getting measurements in US metrics. Didn’t realize that before today.

Also, on my wikipedia deep dive into blimps, I found out that like...this is probably not a “blimp,” but actually a semi-rigid airship but...I’m gonna keep calling it a blimp. Don’t @ me, blimp fandom on tumblr.

It’s so good to see more Blimp. Even though...probably the worst place to throw a tourney? Like...how many people are you even gonna fit in there? Like...is this televised? I mean I don’t know how Kaiba’s marketing works for this, honestly, he took over every TV in the city to get people to join this tourney, and now that it’s in full swing no one can watch it?

Whatever, it’s a blimp.

Duke Devlin is still here, despite the fact that I don’t think he’s going to do anything for the rest of this season. I guess they had to promote that gameboy game so his face will just be in the background always although as a dice player he um...he has no purpose here.

In fact it makes no sense, he works with Pegasus who straight up killed Mokuba and Kaiba like a month ago, why are they just letting him on their airship? Whatever.

I dunno, maybe there’s more that Duke will do eventually, but he just seemed like a replacement for Bakura at first--and Bakura’s back now, so why’s he still here?

Ishizu is here, and while every other time we’ve seen Ishizu, she’s been talking our ears off, the one time she should probably say something, she instead decides to lock herself inside her bedroom and avoid everyone.

I guess she was mostly avoiding Marik so they don’t have a sibling laser fight in the hull of a Blimp. That would have made things so awkward for Yugi and Bakura. Especially Yugi, who still doesn’t know that thing around his neck shoots freakin lasers.

Props the background artists who had to draw billions of small little buildings AKA the worst background in the world to draw. I will go through hoops to avoid drawing even a single building, but to have to sit down and paint just a whole page of buildings that someone’s going to smack a foreground on anyway? Mad respect. If you look closely you’ll see that this artist had to use a ruler and perspective and other annoying tools that take up time and energy. Even using editing tools like using blocks of black color to imitate the look of rooftops and crowded structures, it probably took them a few hours to make the background that went in a .2 second scene.

They’ll probably reuse these buildings later, don’t get me wrong, but oi, I feel for them in my carpel tunnel bones.

Seto keeps telling Yugi that they’re rivals but I don’t think anyone on this show other than Joey thinks of Seto as much of a rival at all. You almost feel a little bad for him, like he’s in a weird...hate triangle, but very much on the loosing end of it.

Next we get a good look at Kaiba’s interior design decisions, and much like his mansions, it’s a lot of very unexpected soothing pastels. Like this is a lot of seafoam blue. How can someone so angry make something so grandma-zen? Is it actually Kaiba’s grandmother who is just slapping down all these paint chips when he’s not looking? I mean it’s got muted pink stools even, with a makeup station.

Tea, Tristan, and Duke have no rooms to go to because they aren’t actually part of this competition, so they’re just squatting around until they’ll probably all end up crashing with Mokuba, the only other person who is not dueling in this competition. Reminds me a lot of the first week of college, where everyone is just coasting dorm room to dorm room and there’s like 10 people there who actually don’t actually go there but want to hang out with their high school friends and they just end up sleeping in your room for 7 days until they read your other friend’s diary, get hella indignant, and then storm off back to California. My apologies to my Freshman year roommate who had to put up with all that girl drama.

And because it’s this show, the men and their bottomless stomachs decide to raid the smallest little mini fridge and you wouldn’t believe what takes up about 1/4 of it

There is so many cheese wheels in this Japanese show, guys. So, I felt like doing a quick google search of Japan and Cheese and it’s just a bunch of ex-pats talking about how the European cheeses most of us are familiar with is harder to find in Japan. So, maybe that’s why? It's a status symbol that he can find round cheeses?

But even if you can only get your hands on a 30$ Swiss wheel every so often (because that really is just Swiss cheese, like lets be real.) how much Swiss cheese can one man eat??? Especially since, looking closely, there is not a single baguette here. No man can eat that much cheese without a bread!

Sorry, stuffing your face full of free cheese you pulled out of your friend’s mini-fridge is also giving me vivid flashbacks to my Freshman year of college.

Also little edit--just realized that flag is flipped 90 degrees from French so that’s probably a Holland flag? Although I looked up European flags and there is...none that have that color order so I don’t know which country they were originally going for.

YO I just realized there’s no curtains on any of these pelvis-height level windows. So, you can’t sleep because of the lights, and you can’t change into pajamas because like--the whole city will see.

Kaiba does seem like the type that would on purpose not install any curtains on any of the windows he’s ever owned, though.

Keto is gone, and now we just have Roland, who is probably too terrified to ever abduct the Kaibas by picking them up by the neck with one arm.

Anyway, in case you were wondering--since the show has decided to make a huge fuss over card prep time--how can they prep for a card game if they only have the cards they brought with them and they don’t know what the other people are even playing or which person they’re playing first?

Kaiba did nothing. He sat there and thought “If Yugi doesn’t even put that God Card in his deck this entire tourney will be absolutely pointless.”

Mai took little sips of milk. Probably paired it with Swiss cheese. Just a huge bite out of a wheel of Swiss cheese.

Odion never found the refrigerator.

Marik took a nap on this bed that looks like it’s just made of foam. Why is this the only one on the show who’s like “Youknow, I should sleep at some point.”

And Yugi’s prep involved talking to himself a whole lot, which explains why none of his friends wanted to stay here for that. I doubt very much Yugi kicked him out of the room. He was probably like “no, stay, stay” in that high pitched-low pitched voice combo until they were like “nooooo I don’t want to be present for your daily seance checkup byeeee.” while slowly backing out of the room.

Yo remember that time we were worried about Bandit Keith stealing the puzzle?

Apparently...Pharaoh could have just sort of done that dizzolving thingy and appeared right back on Yugi’s neck.

And remember that time Yugi handed that puzzle to Joey?

Apparently...Pharaoh could have just sneezed and then bam--right back around Yugi’s neck.

Like remember any time this season that we’ve been like “Oh no, the puzzle! We’re gonna lose it!” no that...that was never a problem.

I mean to be fair when it’s dismantled it might not work but um--apparently you can’t lose an item after it’s decided it likes you. At all. Which is kind of weird because Pegasus totally lost that eyeball, and aren’t all these items property of Pharaoh anyway?

I’ll try not to think about it as this rule seems to only really apply to Bakura.

Anyway, next week--I’m pretty sure the finals are indeed actually starting next week. I could be wrong as I have been every single episode but maybe--probably--the finals are actually going to start. We shall see.

#Yugioh #yugioh recap #photo recap #s2 ep33 #yugi muto #marik ishtar #odion #joey wheeler #seto kaiba #kaiba #mokuba #tea gardner #duke devlin #bakura #ishizu ishtar #mai valentine #tristan taylor #serenity wheeler

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livvywrites · 6 years ago

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11/11/11 tag

I was tagged by the lovely @waterfallwritings. Thank you so much <3

1. How do you come up with ideas for your WIPs?

I put my headphones on, pop some music on, and pace around. And then I play pretend.

No, really, that’s what I do. I pretend to be my characters, in different situations, and I just... play around. I mess with things. I put them in modern situations. I put them in my favorite TV shows/books/movies/games. I have them switch places with a character in that show/book/movie/game. Sometimes I find them narrating their backstory to their future kid, or their friends, or whoever. I dunno. All sorts of crazy situations.

When that doesn’t help, I go and read. Or watch something. Or play something. I give it a rest for a bit. Something eventually comes to me.

2. How do you get past gaps in the plot?

Same answer as above, I guess? Letting myself really feel the characters, really be them, helps me view the situation as they would. I can generally resolve gaps pretty well that way!

3. What motivates you to keep writing?

My characters.

Sometimes it feels like they live in my head, just waiting for me to tell their story. I think about it all the time.

But other than that...

I mean, I was hospitalized a bunch as a kid. I got pneumonia a lot. And bronchitis (which developed into the former). A common cold could turn into bronchitis. I was a sickly kid with a terrible immune system. So I read. I read a lot. I read anything I could get my hands on. (Word of advice: Jurrassic Park and Stephen King novels are not really appropriate novels for a 10 year old to read. Or at least not one who hates gore. Like me.) A lot of those books touched me, influenced me and how I behaved growing up. I want to do that for other people. I want to write the novel they pick up and find themselves needing.

Also, you know what?

Sometimes my writing is pretty damn good.

4. Do you do any other kind of creative writing?

I write poetry!! My favorite poems are:

Death (lightly nsfw)

Wolf-Women (feminist poetry with werewolf themes)

Lonely Ghosts (Travelin’ Endlessly)

This poem I wrote about the main character of TMQ

I also roleplay for a favorite fandom of mine, and I write fanfiction. (You can find my stuff on my main blog, which is linked in my bio.)

5. Do you have any other creative hobbies besides writing?

I like to take photos! Usually of flowers and such. I’ll reblog this with some of my favorite ones~

I also like editing photos. By which I mean throwing lots of filters on them and trying to make them look ~artsy.~

6. What do you do when you’re stuck on a scene and don’t know how to get it out / write it?

I whip out my brackets. And I write a short scene description. Here’s an example off the top of my head--

[Fight scene. CHARACTER A gets injured pretty badly and begins to sway. CHARACTER B is so absorbed by their lover being hurt that they don’t notice when CHARACTER C is grabbed behind them. By the time they realized C has been kidnapped... it’s too late. CHARACTER A dies in their arms, but not before making them promise to save CHARACTER C.]

That’s a really emotional scene, fraught with tension and violence. Maybe I wasn’t feeling it, so I skipped it. But I want to remember what I was doing, hence the summary. Then I move on to the next scene. What the next scene would be in this scenario, I have no idea.

7. How do you decide how to end your WIP?

I’ve never really tried to put it into words, but because you asked, I’m gonna try.

So the first thing I think about is what my protagonist wants. In THE MARTYR QUEEN, Alinora wants her home back. She wants her people free again, and her family/loved ones back. Unfortunately, most of said loved ones are dead. But she can still save her people, so that’s her primary goal. To save her people, she needs to defeat Kai’os, and get him off of her throne/out of her homeland.

Now, let’s look at the antagonist. Kai’os wants to end the world and start a new one. Well--he doesn’t really want to do that, but he believes it’s a necessary evil, because that’s what Fate told him. What he really wants is to keep his family--his two daughters--safe. And that’s how he can best do that. According to Fate. In order to end the world, he has to be able to get to the World Tree. And to get to that, he needs Alinora.

So obviously, at the ending, the two of them are going to clash.

But what happens during/after the clash? Well, now, that’s where I have to think about the OTHER things going on. Alinora’s personality, for instance. What her friends are doing. The “bigger” players in the game--Death and Fate. What I have planned for the next books, and what I need to have happen for Alinora’s character arc.

I hope that was a good explanation ^^;

8. When in the process of writing do you decide how its going to end? Or do you kind of just wait til you get there?

I generally know my endings before I’m even halfway through the story. TMQ’s I knew before I even started writing it. Sapphire Dreaming’s I realized pretty early in the game as well.

9. Why did you decide to join writeblr?

I have been looking for a supportive writing community for so long. I found one on a fantasy forum called Worldsmyths that’s lovely, but people are more apt to talk about the technical aspects of writing on there. Which is great, and all of the advice on there is really good and well thought out. But I also really, really like hearing about other people’s WIPs and talking about mine in turn.

So when I found out that was how Tumblr’s writeblr worked... that’s when I decided to start getting involved in the community. And I’ve found so many WIPs that way!!! And found people who like my ideas too, which was like: what? Because while I’ve met supportive people before this is different. And it’s really nice.

10. What’s your favourite food?

Favorite... food?

I have to... I have to pick?

But, but ToT I can’t.

I’ll try anyway though, I guess, because you asked :P

Let’s see... my favorite dessert is a toss up between tiramasu and cheesecake, but I also really, really like brownies.

Breakfast wise, it’s hard to go wrong with blueberry pancakes or a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. Or omelets.

For lunch, I really like sandwiches. Lately I’ve been on a subway kick, and I’ve been ordering a tomato basil wrap with rotisserie chicken, mozz cheese, spinach leaves, ranch dressing, and green peppers. It’s so good.

For supper... Oh, jeez. I eat a lot of chicken and pasta, but I also really like steak and bbq!!

I’m not a big fan of fruit, but I like blackberries and raspberries!! I also really like peaches and cherries.

I love vegetables. My favorites are peas, broccoli, and cucumbers.

...what. was that not in the spirit of the question?

11. If you had to kill off a character in your WIP, who would it be and why?

Um.

So in Sapphire Dreaming, if I had to kill a character off... fuck. I dunno. Maddock, I guess? Side characters are okay right? His death could be really fun, though it would absolutely destroy Aura.

I mean, if I had to choose a main character... I guess it’d be Chase. I love him a lot, I really do, and he is important to the story but. I can’t get rid of Aura or Melantha or [SPOILER].

In The Martyr Queen...

Um.

I actually answer that question in the story itself, so, uh.

I’m just gonna. Move on to the tags & new questions now.

I tag:@witchywrite; @marniebalboa; @quartzses; @she-writes-love; @idreamonpaper (lemme know if you want to be added or removed. yes i know this isn’t eleven people. get nervous about tagging people in things ^^;)

My questions are:

1. Do you have any ideas for future WIPs you’re excited about?

2. What’s your favorite part of writing?

3. What’s your favorite aspect of the genre you write?

4. What themes/tropes do you find show up in the majority of your ideas? (E.g. found family, belonging, love triangles, etc.)

5. Do you have a routine or ritual you do before writing? (E.g. lighting a candle, putting on a playlist, making a specific beverage)

6. What would your ideal place to write look like?

7. Do you sort your characters into, say Hogwarts Houses or Meyers Briggs Types? (Or other kinds of archetypes?) If so, which characters fall where?

8. Have you ever participated in a character chat? (An almost roleplay chat where you introduce your characters to other characters. Sometimes they’re focused around a time limit with specific questions, as on Twitter, but sometimes they’re more free form.)

9. How much prewriting do you do before you start writing?

10. What’s the last book you finished reading? Would you recommend it?

11. What’s your favorite piece of writing advice, or favorite quote about writing?

#tag games #thank you for tagging me!!!#i love this particular tag game #((i love all tag games))

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pixie-mage · 6 years ago

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#SamLives - Pt.11

[Previous|Next]

Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]

[This story has been edited and reposted on the official #SamLives Tumblr. The new post of Chapter 11 can be found here.]

(There is a big difference between the phone calls in this version and the updated version of Chapter 11. This version features Signe; the updated version features Robin.)

Jack hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he and Mark were planning on doing some collabs. In the few days that followed the initial video, they recorded a good nine or ten videos worth of content each, most of it consisting of two-player games. (Being able to record one session for two channels had its perks.) Jack still hadn’t gotten over his wariness of technology in that time. He had to steel his nerves before starting every session, had to take a breath before hitting ‘record’. He found himself frequently checking his facecam on the monitor to make sure nobody was in the background, and every flicker, every stutter, every lag in whatever game he was playing made his hands tense and his breath hitch.

Today was no different. After spending a good five minutes mentally convincing himself that his computer mouse wasn’t about to come to life and strangle him, he and Mark dove head-first into a new game of “Sea of Thieves”. It was just the two of them this time, with no time to schedule a play time with Bob or Wade or Ethan. At the moment, Jack was trying to fend off skeletal attackers while his friend dug up the buried treasure.

“Shit! Fuck! Fuckin’ bastards!” He took another swipe at the nearest skeleton, cutting it down. Another attacker was quick to take its place. “Hah! That’ll teach ye not to mess wit’ ol’ Jackaboy.”

He pulled out a blunderbuss and took two shots straight through the newcomer’s chest.

“DIE BITCHES! How’s that chest comin’, Markerino?”

Mark, who Jack now realized had been oddly quiet the past few minutes, let out only a distracted hum in response. Jack turned his avatar to look at Mark’s rather voluptuous character, only to find him standing still over the half-buried treasure chest. Jack chuckled, a little bewildered.

“Mark? Th’ fuck are you doin’?” he took a shot at another skeleton. “Are ye just waiting for it to unbury itself or–”

Thwack!

The familiar-yet-unexpected sound made Jack jump, his heart pounding in his chest as he whipped his head around to stare at Mark. The other YouTuber had turned his seat away from the desk, NERF gun in hand, aiming at the closed door with narrowed, focussed eyes.

What the fucking–

Jack swallowed thickly and took a slow breath, his panic ebbing away to make room for amused irritation. He swiped a small crocheted Sam from his desk and chucked it at the side of Mark’s head.

“Hey! What–?!”

“Don’t fuckin’ scare me like that, shithead!” Jack shoved Mark’s shoulder playfully. “What th’ hell was that for?”

“Target practice.”

Mark’s grin was cheeky and a little mocking.

Jack blinked at him, slowly, fixing him with a look that clearly said ‘Are you fucking kidding me right now?’ He snatched the NERF gun from Mark’s hand with a barely-restrained chuckle and brandished it in the other’s face. Mark took a swipe at it, pouting and trying to take back his toy.

“Hey!”

It turned into a game of Keep Away, with Jack holding the NERF gun high above his head and Mark practically falling out of his chair and climbing over Jack in his attempt to reach it.

“I’ll use you fer target practice if you don’t–”

“Jack! Give that back, you asshole!"

“–get your head back in the game!” Jack suddenly whipped the NERF gun back at Mark, who fumbled to catch it. “I’m dyin’ here!”

Mark clutched the gun tightly to his chest and retreated to the safety of his seat, pouting and hugging the toy as though Jack might attempt to steal it from him again. He stuck his tongue out childishly before turning back to his screen - and he stifled a laugh.

“Uh…” He carefully set his precious plastic weapon on the desk, out of Jack’s reach. “Not to alarm you, but I think we’re already dead.”

Jack’s focus snapped to his own screen, and sure enough, both he and Mark were now standing on the deck of a ghost ship, waiting their turn to return to the land of the living. He threw his hands in the air and flopped backwards in his chair.

“Fuckin’ DAMMIT all!” He sank in his seat with a groan, Mark’s deep giggles permeating the air around them both. “I blame you entirely for that.”

“Yeah...heh...yeah, that’s...that’s on me. Sorry, man…” Mark still hadn’t stopped giggling, his mood far too bright to be dimmed by a death in the game.

“I’m makin’ sure everyone knows it’s your fault,” Jack bemoaned from his slouched position. “I’m gonna make you buy me a fancy-ass tombstone, an’ put one o’ those shitty rhyming couplets on it…”

He held his hands out in front of him, pretending to frame the words.

“Here lies Jack Just blame his friend Whose NERF dart brought Their bitter end.”

Mark’s only response was a slow golf clap while he pretended to be tearing up.

“Beautiful,” he told Jack, voice laced with false emotion. “Absolutely beautiful. You should’ve become a poet instead of a YouTuber. Clearly you were meant for greater things than video game commentary.”

Jack almost fell out of his chair in his attempt to chuck another Sam plush at Mark’s head.

“D’you think that cop really believed that nothing was wrong?” Jack asked Mark with a mutter later that evening.

Mark had already sent the day’s raw videos from both him and Jack to Robin, and Robin was planning on doing a little bit of content cutting before passing them along to Kathryn. There were certain things that had to be cut out from their recordings that really, really didn’t need to be shared with anyone beyond their immediate group. Not yet.

“The guy from the other day?” Mark asked, looking up from his phone. “I dunno. I mean I don’t think he believed all the anonymous tips, anyway. He was trying not to crack a smile the whole time he was explaining stuff to us.”

Apparently, some of Jack’s fans had taken Anti’s appearance on the stream at face value. They had believed (rightfully so) that it was real, and when Jack went silent on all forms of social media for more than twenty-four hours after it had happened, people had started to panic. While nobody knew for sure where Jack and Signe lived, the local police station in Brighton had gotten call after call after call from concerned teens and young adults who all claimed that a YouTuber named Sean McLoughlin had almost been killed on a livestream. If it hadn’t been for the sheer number of phone calls and the video proof that looked almost too real to have been edited, Jack was sure the police would have ignored it.

But two days ago - three days after the stream itself - a police officer had come knocking on the apartment door asking if a Sean McLoughlin or a Jacksepticeye lived there.

After explaining - through stifled grinning and amused chuckles - that a lot of fans thought he had been hurt, Mark and Jack had tried to awkwardly laugh it off and explain that, no, it was just a video, and nobody had actually gotten hurt.

(Jack was wearing makeup on his neck again for recording, thank god, otherwise the bruises might have brought on some unwanted questions. As it was...)

“I dunno man.” Jack sighed deeply and scrubbed his hands over his face, sinking back on the couch. “I swear he kept lookin’ at my neck. I’m sure he watched the video for th’ sake of the calls. Probably checkin’ to see if I really got strangled.”

“Ah, quit worrying. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Mark scrolled through Twitter again, reading a few more tweets before, “...and we’re sure we don’t want to get the police involved?”

Jack leveled him with a blank stare.

“Do you honestly think the police are gonna know how to deal wit’ a computer virus of a demon that came to life from my YouTube channel? I mean WE barely know what we’re doing and we’re fully invested in the lore of it all!”

Mark stifled a laugh.

“Okay, yeah good point,” he admitted. He shook his head, eyes falling back to his phone gain. “Fully invested in the lore...god, we sound like we’re trying to solve Five Nights At Freddy’s conspiracies. That’s how complicated this whole mess has become. Frankly, if anyone overheard what we were talking about in the cafe that first day I showed up, they’d probably think–”

Jack jolted upright in his seat, eyes wide and expression one of stunned realization.

“Holy shit.” He grabbed Mark’s arm and shook him a little, his movements suddenly intense and a brilliant grin splitting his face in two. “Holy shit!”

“Holy shit what?” Mark gripped his phone a little tighter so it wouldn’t go flying out of his hands from Jack’s enthusiasm.

“Mark, you’re a fuckin’ genius!”

“Well - I mean, yeah, I thought we established that, but what the hell did I say?!”

Mark was rightfully very bewildered by his friend’s sudden change of mood. He gave Jack a quick once-over with his eyebrows raised, wondering if he should be concerned.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s!” Jack exclaimed. He looked far too excited and far too proud of himself for his own good.

“...Five Nights at–”

“Dude! Don’t you get it?” Jack leapt up off the couch, pacing, and Sam - who had been dozing in Jack’s hoodie pocket - poked his ‘face’ out with a sleepy blink, wondering what all the commotion was about. “This whole thing is too fuckin’ complicated right now, right? We don’t know what exactly Anti is, or how to stop him from comin’ back. He’s solid but he’s not. He’s made of glitches but - who the hell even knows what that means.”

“Okay…?” Mark just watched the Irishman pace the room, his phone long forgotten in his lap. “Where are you going with this?”

“Anti doesn’t make sense!” Jack was grinning like an idiot. He stopped in his tracks to turn and face Mark. “We know why he’s here but that only gets us so far! We need somebody who’s used to picking apart ridiculous bullshit to find the real answers, somebody who already kinda knows what’s going on.”

“Jack, you’ve lost me,” Mark said flatly. “Who are you talking about, Signe? Amy?”

“No!” Jack was talking with his hands, talking with his entire body, like he couldn’t contain all the energy that had built up inside him. “Five Nights at Freddy’s. Crazy timeline. Bullshit lore. There’s only one person I know who was able to tear that shit to pieces and make sense out of it.”

And then it hit Mark like a load of bricks, and he was on his feet too, his exclamation coming out as a loud and incredulous question in the same moment that Jack was busting out the same words.

“MatPat?!”

“MatPat!”

“Waitwaitwait, hold on–” Mark was trying to sort out his thoughts, pinching the bridge of his nose while he watched Jack rush around in a frantic search for his cell phone. Mark didn’t have it right now and Jack couldn’t quite remember where it had ended up. “What the hell do you mean Matt already knows what’s going on?”

“Well, okay, he doesn’t know about Anti,” Jack admitted, his ass in the air while he leaned over the armchair in the corner to see if his phone was plugged in back there. “He knows about Sam though.”

“He knows about Sam?!” Mark’s jaw dropped.

At this point, Sam had abandoned Jack’s pocket to hover a few steps behind the Irishman, watching him with quiet curiosity. At Mark’s question, Sam let out a happy little squeak and nodded, twirling through the air a little.

“Did you tell him before you told me?” Before Jack could even answer, Mark had continued: “But he posted a video like two weeks ago about how Sam couldn’t possibly exist!”

“Well, duh, he posted that because he knows about Sam,” Jack rolled his eyes and shoved away from the armchair, detouring to the kitchen. He spoke up to be heard across the apartment. “He was tryin’ to throw people off. And I didn’t tell him about Sam.” Jack returned to the living room, cell phone in hand and a sheepish smile on his face. “He...er...kinda found out on his own.”

“How?”

“Tacos and Rachel Ray.”

Mark didn’t know how to respond to that.

“I have no idea how to respond to that.”

“Look…” Jack huffed and came back over to Mark, sitting on the edge of the coffee table while his friend sank slowly back onto the couch. Sam settled onto his shoulder and nuzzled up against Jack’s cheek with a quiet purr. “Sam was sick, so I brought him with me for the taco-making contest. Matt was on my team. He bumped into me, I tripped, Sam almost fell out of my hood, and Matt saw him.”

“And he didn’t freak out?”

Jack’s lips twitched into a wry smile and he looked up from his phone.

“Oh, he freaked out, but not until later.”

“Let me get this straight.” Mark watched Jack carefully as he spoke. Jack nodded and went back to shakily tapping out a message to Matt. “Just so we’re both on the same page. Sam exists, clearly. Anti exists. You, me, Signe, Robin, and Matt know about Sam. You, me, and Robin know about Anti.”

“And Signe, sort of.”

“And Signe,” Mark agreed. “And Amy too, come to think of it. Is there anybody else who knows anything else, just in case we need to recruit people for a battle of the digital age?”

“Nope, nobody else,” Jack shook his head. He paused and looked thoughtful, setting his phone aside (looking relieved to get the thing out of his hands) and tapping his chin. “...though I probably should bring up that Anti mentioned being late for a date or something last time? What was the name...something...something Warfstache…?”

Mark looked like he might explode

“WHAT?!”

“Oh my god!” Jack cackled, doubling over with laughter and trying not to slip off the edge of the coffee table he was sitting on. “Oh my fucking god your face! That was PRICELESS! You fuckin’ - Haha! - f-fuckin’ believed–” He could barely breathe he was laughing so hard, his laughter sounding a little wheezy.

Mark groaned and flopped backward across the couch, a low, pained chuckled escaping him.

”Oh, you absolutely piece of shit. Fuck you.”

“Y-Yeah, I - heh - I probably...haha...deserve that one…” Jack was grinning, wiping tears from his eyes.

Sam had bounced over to Mark to make sure he was okay and was now nestled on the American’s chest, Tim’s curious little eyes watching from the arm of the couch not even a foot away. The little box tumbled forward and landed right next to Mark’s head, patting his cheek softly in what Jack assumed was a comforting motion. Another low, rumbling laugh bubbled up from Mark’s chest.

“But no, to answer your question,” Jack continued once he could breathe again. “I think that’s everyone.”

“Good. Great. Excellent.”

Mark was absolutely done. Just...done.

“Ah, lighten up, Markimoo,” Jack snickered. “Consider it payback fer that NERF scare.”

“Considering that you were implying that Warfstache is alive too, and that he and your evil twin are getting it on–”

“Hey! I only said they went on a date!”

“–I’d say we’re far from even right now.”

“Oh, fuck off! That’s totally even!”

“And what if I tricked you into thinking your Dr. Schneep guy was alive and I caught him flirting with Dr. Iplier?”

“Oh, dude, no,” Jack groaned, laughing through it. “Nooo...I mean, yeah, Henrik totally would. He’d flirt with anything that moved. But hell no.”

“See my point?”

The living room was silent for a long moment, save for the little questioning squeaks Sam was making from his position on Mark’s chest. Then Mark heard the buzzing clatter of plastic against the coffee table. Jack’s phone was ringing, but on silent. Mark cracked open one eye to glance at Jack, who suddenly looked a lot more tense than he had a moment before.

“...you good, Jack?” he murmured, watching the other YouTuber. Jack nodded stiffly, looking a little pale. “Is it MatPat? He calling back already?”

Jack swallowed thickly.

“It’s...Signe.”

“Answer it,” Mark encouraged him evenly. “Go ahead. We’re all in the room with you, it’ll be fine.”

Jack nodded, the motion a little jerky, and he reached over to press the ‘Answer’ button. He quickly put it on speaker and withdrew his hand as though he’d been burned. The phone stayed sitting on the table.

“Sean?”

“Hey Signe,” Jack murmured.

Mark could see some of the tension melt out of the Irishman’s shoulders when he heard her voice, saw the way his lips quirked into a smile at the corners and the way his eyes softened in the moment.

“Hi! I just wanted to check in,” Signe continued, a smile in her voice. “How’s everything going? How’s Sam?”

“Sam’s great!” Jack’s grin became more genuine, and he giggled when Sam bounced over to sit beside the phone. He was wiggling on the spot in excitement. “He and Tim are gettin’ along famously. He’s been so damn happy, Wiish, I can’t wait for you to see ‘em together.”

“You can thank me later,” Mark chimed in with a smirk.

“Is that Mark?” Signe asked. “Am I on speaker?”

“Oh! Yeah, you are. Sorry. Shoulda said.” Jack chuckled softly.

“No, it’s fine!” Signe giggled, the sound melodic even through a phone speaker. “Hi Mark!”

“Hi Signe!”

“How are you doing though, Sean?” Signe’s tone had turned concerned, softer than before. “You still haven’t told me what’s going on with the whole Antisepticeye thing.”

Jack stiffened. He could feel Mark’s eyes on him, his look a knowing one. It had been five whole days since he’d talked to Signe at the cafe, and while they had texted back and forth every day since (in very brief interludes, as there were still moments Jack couldn’t even look at his own TV for fear of Anti jumping out of the dimmed pixels, let alone carry his phone in his pocket all day), not once had Jack brought up the livestream. Any time she asked about it he evaded her questions and promised to explain soon and made her promise to please don’t watch the livestream, I’ll tell you when you get home, please wait until then. So far, Signe had done as he’d asked, but he could tell she was growing concerned.

“Eh…” Jack cleared his throat and shrugged, though she couldn’t see it. “I’m fine. A little worn out, but Mark an’ I have been really goin’ hard, knockin’ out tons of videos now so we can get some free time to hang out later…”

“Sean.”

And there it was, the gentle scolding of her Mama Signe voice. How she managed to make Jack feel like a misbehaving child every time she used it was a mystery to him...but it worked. Every damn time. He sighed and let out a quiet groan.

“I’ll tell you soon, I promise,” he whimpered. “I promise I will, it’s - it’s just - I can’t–” He dragged a hand through his hair, and his gaze landed on Mark. The other YouTuber had sat up in the past few minutes and was leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his expression a searching one. He quirked an eyebrow at the Irishman.

“One second, Wiishu,” he said softly, reaching over to tap the ‘mute’ button on Jack’s phone. He watched his friend for a long moment before speaking. “Jack...I’m not gonna push you to tell her, but - oh my god, man. It’s almost been a whole week. The longer you wait, the more likely it’ll be for her to figure it out on her own. She already told you yesterday, people have been sending her tons of tweets and tumblr messages asking about you. Didn’t she ask you why they wanted know if you’re dead or not?”

Jack nodded stiffly, wincing.

“I told you I’d help you tell her the truth.” Mark smiled reassuringly. “I meant that, okay? And - hell, I can get Amy on the line, and we can have a big ol’ Double Date Egos Theory Skype Call.”

Jack snorted out a nervous laugh, shaking his head in amusement. Double date…

“Only you would see it as a date opportunity, Mark.”

“What can I say?” Mark grinned cheekily and winked. “I’m a hopeless romantic.” His grin faded back to a soft, understanding smile and he tried to catch Jack’s eye. “Waddaya say? You up for it?”

“...I eh…” Jack stared at his hands, his fingers fiddling with the hem of his sweatshirt while he thought.

Was he ready to tell Signe yet? Would she even believe him? Would she freak out, or take it all in stride? He didn’t want to worry her and didn’t want to put her in danger. He had known that, once she was home, he would have no choice but to tell her - so that had been his plan. To tell her when she got home, and let her enjoy her time with her family free of any of Jack’s current stresses. Once she was back in Brighton they could clear the air and talk about how to move forward.

But Mark was right too. The longer he waited, the worse it could get.

Jack sighed heavily. His hand was shaking when he reached for his phone, but he still pressed the ‘mute’ button to let Signe hear them again.

“Hey Wiish,” he mumbled, to let her know he was back. “You there?”

“Still here, Sean.” The usual sweet lilt was in her voice, her tone smiling and her words kind.

It helped Jack with what he knew he had to do next.

“I...eh. D’you mind waitin’ a few minutes?” he asked, wringing his hands in his lap. “Mark’s gonna get Amy on a Skype call wit’ us, an’ we can all talk face-to-face, and I’ll...I’ll fill you in on what’s been, er, happenin’ in my part of the world.”

“Really?” Signe asked, sounding surprised. “You’re actually going to tell me this time?”

“I - yeah. Yeah, I am.” Jack took a breath. His nervousness was clear with every word that left his mouth. “I’ll tell you everything.”

“Wait!”

Mark’s outburst made Jack jump and his head shot up.

“What–”

“My smoothie! I totally forgot my smoothie!”

Jack stared, and he heard Signe giggling on the other end of the call.

“Your smoothie,” he repeated, his lips twitching into some semblance of a smile. “You mean the one from after dinner? From, like, two hours ago?”

“Yes, from after dinner!” Mark rocketed off the couch, skirting the coffee table and grabbing his rental car keys as he went to the door. “It’s still in the car. This is super serious.”

“Super serious?” Jack repeated. He watched Tim bounce off the couch and hop curiously around the room in pursuit of Mark, doing his best to keep up. “More serious than Serious Shit?”

“YES! MORE SERIOUS THAN THAT!” Mark, who almost stepped on Tim in his haste to get to the door, let out a rather undignified squeak and immediately crouched to the ground beside the tiny box. “Oh, I'm so sorry! Are you okay? Did I hurt you? C’mere, my little biscuit, let’s get you off the floor. I would neeeever want you to get hurt, I would neeeever step on you…”

“Oh my god, Mark, you’re such a mom.”

“What? It’s not like you’re not the same way with Sam!”

At this, Jack chucked a pillow from the couch across the room, hitting Mark in the legs to avoid hitting Tim.

“Go get your fuckin’ smoothie!”

“Fine! I will!”

Mark flipped him off and pretended to storm out of the apartment, putting Tim on his shoulder and “slamming” the door shut (only to stop it at the last second to close it with a quiet click.) Jack shook his head with a smile. Only Mark.

“Hey...Sean?”

“Hm?” Jack returned his attention to his phone, still sitting beside him on the coffee table. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to ask...you said Anti is real, right?”

“Yeah…” His answer was a tense one, his hands coming up to fiddle with the strings of his hoodie.

“Did…” Signe’s voice trailed off, and there was static in the speaker, like she had taken a breath. “Did he hurt you, on the stream?”

Jack swallowed thickly. He was suddenly very aware of the sore bruises on his throat, and he felt rather than saw Sam land lightly on his shoulder.

“What...eh…” He cleared his throat, and Sam nuzzled up against his jaw, little waves of reassurance and worry filtering into the back of his mind. “...w-what makes ye ask that?”

“I told you I was getting messages and asks,” she told him. He could hear footsteps in the background, movement. Like she was pacing. “And I turned them off for now, because I was going to wait until you told me what was going on. And I know you’re going to! But...I’ve been tagged in a few things too. I saw some gifs of you and Anti–”

Jack closed his eyes, his jaw clenching tightly. Oh. Hands shaking, Jack picked his phone up off the coffee table and took the call off speaker, holding the mobile to his ear and getting to his feet.

“Holdin’ me up against the...eh...th’ wall?” he asked hoarsely. His movements were stiff, his footing a little unsteady as he crossed the room to pick up the pillow he’d thrown at Mark. He squeezed the edge of it tightly in his hand, lingering there by the door.

“...yeah.” Signe took another deep breath on the other end of the line, and when she spoke again her voice was shaking. “He – Sean, he was hurting you. That...th-that was real, wasn’t it? It wasn’t Robin’s editing?”

Jack’s chest felt tight, his throat constricting from both the memory and his own emotions. He took a shaking breath and dropped the pillow into the armchair closest to him, his free hand coming up to rest against his opposite shoulder. By Sam. Sam’s tail trailed down and brushed against his fingers, helping to soothe some of the uneasiness that had begun to build inside him.

“N-No, that...that was. Um.” Real. It was real. He blinked rapidly and his grip tightened on his phone. “It really happened.”

Signe gasped sharply from the other end of the line.

“Oh, god, Sean–”

But whatever Signe had been about to say, Jack never found out, because the call was suddenly filled with static and audio distortion, Signe’s words lost in a mass of broken sound that had Jack freezing where he stood.

“...Signe?” he whispered, eyes widening. “Signe...Wiish...I need to go. Okay? I can’t...I can’t hear you, but I th-think–”

The call dropped before Jack even hit the end button, the cell phone slipping from his hand and tumbling to the floor with a quiet thump against the carpet.

There was a static in the air, a crackle, an energy to it that made the hair on the back of Jack's neck stand on end. His breath hitched. The hand that still lingered near his shoulder tensed, and he could feel Sam curl closer to his neck.

"I'm not the only one feelin' that, yeah?" Jack breathed, his eyes darting around his apartment and landing on nothing. He took an involuntary step back toward the door.

"Nuh-uh. I feel it too..." Sam's worried voice floated across the back of his mind. Jack nodded. Alright. So he wasn't crazy.

A lamp across the room sparked and popped, the bulb blowing out suddenly, and even as small of an occurrence as that was it made Jack jump. The room was plunged into darkness. Wide blue eyes latched onto the deadened lamp. "W-What the hell is going on...?" His voice sounded strained, even to his own ears.

But the question he asked was one he was almost certain he knew the answer to. This static, this...tension. Electricity. He knew this feeling. It was one he was far too familiar with, one that he had experienced before.

Anti.

The room had felt much the same as this when Anti had appeared during his stream last time, when he had pinned Jack to the wall by his throat and toyed with him in front of an audience, had left him scared and shaking in a way he never expected he'd have to feel in his life. Until then he hadn't been sure if Anti was real. But now? Now there was no denying it. So the feeling in the air, the tension, the spark? It flooded him with a very real and tangible fear that wasn't without reason.

"Ďid̎ ÿo̊u m̰i͋šs̶ m̰ē?"

A voice, so close, a cold breath against his ear. Jack cried out and flung himself away from the sound, knees hitting carpet as he hurried away from his own front door now, scrambled across the living room with desperate movements, one hand clamped over Sam so he wouldn’t lose him. There, by the door, his smile just as sharp and as wicked as Jack remembered, was the glitch himself. His image crackled and distorted for a moment - Jack could see the pixels separating as he stood there - and a moment later he had flickered forward, appearing a few steps closer.

Shit...shit, shit, shit...he had half a mind to scream, to call for Mark, but at this point Mark had probably already made it down to his car and wouldn't hear anything. All he could hope for now was that he could stall long enough for his friend to make it back inside. Two on one were better odds in this situation.

"I̥ d̠on̪'t e͊v͐enͥ g̴ét a h̒e͊llo̖, J̠åc̮k̾a͈b͗ö́y?"

“Go away!”

Jack’s eyes widened and he went stiff, panic doubling. Sam had wriggled free from his spot on Jack’s shoulder and he was hovering in mid-air between the two men in the room, planting himself boldly before Anti as though he was planning on defending Jack himself.

“Sam, don’t–”

“Leave him alone, you meanie!” Sam sounded so brave, so determined, so…so angry for such a small little being. “You hurt Jack, and you made him sad, and - and–” Sam wriggled in the air and tried to make himself look intimidating. “–and I’m not gonna let you hurt him again!”

Contrary to what Jack was sure Sam had wanted, Anti didn’t look scared at all. In fact, he smiled...a gleeful smile that had Jack dreading whatever was about to happen.

“W̠e͆ll, a̒re̮n't y͞oṳ a̸ b̸ra̢v̜e lĭt͉tle t̹oa̤s̈t̤èr̔?” Anti crooned, his head tilting far to the side in a way that was eerily non-human. He held out a hand, palm-up, and the air above it distorted and warped impossibly. A worn, dark jewelry box appeared there in a flurry of pixels, its lid popped open to reveal the empty space within. “Sȯr̬r̗y t̸o b̓ur̢s̈ţ ŷou̬r͊ b᷆u̫b᷇b̍l͑ě, S̕a̺m̮my̳, b̝u᷈t...yo̔u'rē no̸t̹ ne͑e̓d̐ed f̔o͍r̈ toñḯgh̠t̡'s ća̧s̱t̎ o̱f͗ c̟har̐a͐ct̊e͓r̊s͊.”

Quicker than Jack could react, Anti glitched, vanished, and reappeared inches from Sam with the jewelry box held out before him. With one swooping motion, Anti had flicked Sam into the box, snapped the lid shut, locked it with a key and tossed the box over his shoulder to land neatly on the armchair in the corner.

“NO!” Jack sprang forward without thinking, arm outstretched as though to reach the box–

“D̹ǐd̵ I̽ s͌a̝y y̪o͚u͘ c̡o̾u͎l̦d͗ m̐o͋v̫e͕?”

Before Jack could register the giggling words, he found himself tripping head-over-heels, colliding soundly with the front of the cabinet his television rested on. A jolt of pain pulsed through his shoulder and he cried out, biting his lip, biting his tongue. Desperate fingers clutched at his aching shoulder and he gritted his teeth.

“What the fuck do you want?!” he bit out, panting and tense as he watched Anti slowly stalk toward him across the room. “You here to...to k-kill me? Hurt me? S...Strangle me again?”

“Wh͔a̠ţ d᷁ō ÿ́o̊u̖ t͔ak̓e m̉e̥ f̓or̓, a᷇ s᷀a͂di͉s͟t͊?” Anti scoffed incredulously.

Jack blinked at him, a sassy retort on his lips before he could stop himself.

“What, you - ngh - aren’t one? Could’ve f-fooled me...”

“I'̗m̺ m̛or̬e̍ ǫf a m̭a͒s᷅ochi͙s̜t̕,̘ r͖ea̪l͟l̓y,͏” Anti shrugged. Jack was surprised that Anti had even bothered to answer the question at all. “Bu͂t̢ bo͑t͐h̬ a᷊r̛e͞ p̭r̂ett͒y̎ a͘c̬c᷅u͑ra̻t̎e̍.”

Great. Good to know. Wonderful.

“N̚o̫, i͓t̋'s no͙t̘h̺i̝n᷆g s͕o̻ s͑i̔m͕pl̖e̍ as a̖l̥l̆ t᷁h̄a̓t,” Anti smirked, waving the thought away with one hand.

The air around his palm distorted and glitched, and a shining blade appeared in his hand on the way down.

Oh, fuck.

Anti was a few steps away now, and Jack scrambled backward across the floor, trying to get as much distance between himself and the glitch as possible...but he was cornered, pinned between the side of the TV cabinet and the wall, blocked in with no way out. It was starting to become a struggle to keep his breathing steady, his heart hammering away a tarantella against his ribs, his throat coarse and tight from tension.

The burst bulb from earlier had thrown the room into near-darkness, but what moonlight was coming through the living room window reflected off the sharpened blade in Anti’s hand, the light bouncing off into Jack’s eyes as the glitch knelt in front of him - close, too close - his eyes beginning to swirl with an inky blackness that Jack never wanted to see this close again.

Jack kept his eyes fixed on the blade, wide as saucers, and his breath hitched when he saw it inching closer and closer to his face. The touch of cool metal against his cheek made him tense and he clenched his jaw with a gulp. It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t painful. Anti was dragging the flat side of the knife along his jawline, and Jack could hear the sound of its edge scraping against the coarse facial hair there.

“No̫…” Anti shook his head, and the sharp grin widened wickedly, appearing to split his face in two. “No, I ẖa͗v̶e m̪ůch...͛mùch᷆ b᷆i͈g͗g᷄er p̓lan̶s᷉ foͥr᷆ yõu͕, Jaͅc̻k.”

Mark was humming to himself as he made his way down to the rental car, the keys jingling in his hand. Tim sat perched on his shoulder, one tiny hand clutching the collar of Mark’s shirt, and he was trying to hum along to whatever song Mark had stuck in his head right now.

It wasn’t his fault Katy Perry’s music was so catchy.

By the time he unlocked and opened the driver’s side door, he was well into the chorus, mumbling the words in an undertone to himself and for Tim’s entertainment.

“California girls, we're undeniable! Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock~” Tim was giggling, and the sound brought a warm smile to Mark’s face. He shifted into the driver’s seat so he could reach his smoothie easier, but not before belting out the next few lyrics at the top of his lungs.

“West coast represent, now put your hands up!”

He did so, dancing in his seat, grinning and playing it up for his little biscuit’s benefit.

“Ooh, oh, ooh! Ooh…”

Something flickered in the corner of his eye, something red...or was it blue?...and he trailed off, a crease forming in his brow. Tim was still giggling softly. Had he been seeing things? With a soft chuckle, he reached over and plucked his half-finished smoothie from the cupholder, still somewhat chilled from the cool weather of the evening.

Yeah, it was probably nothing. The whole Antisepticeye thing had been keeping him on edge since he’d arrived here in England. He pushed himself out of his seat and shut the door behind him. But when he turned to head back inside, something in the reflection in the car’s window caught his attention.

Mark dropped his smoothie.

A quiet thumping rose up across the living room, a rattling that caught Jack’s attention as well as Anti’s.

Sam. Sam was trying to get out.

Anti looked away from his victim for a moment, only for a moment, some space coming between Jack’s cheek and the metal of Anti’s blade.

A moment was all he needed.

Jack lashed out with a fist and a knee, landing a punch square across the glitch’s face and driving a knee up into his gut. Anti tumbled away from him, distorting and flickering, a static-fused snarl of pain and annoyance bubbling up from his prone form. Jack shoved himself to his feet, leaping over Anti and heading for the front door. He had to get out, had to leave, had to get Sam and go–

“I d͓O̬n͈’Ṭ t̉H͠iN̼ḱ sͅO͊!”

Static, feedback, a crackle in the air, and Anti was in front of him again, seething with fury, blocking his exit. Jack was running on pure adrenaline now, veering left and heading down the hall toward the bedrooms. The bathroom. Recording room. Anything.

“y̜O̰u̯’̒R̡e̿ N̈o̽T͔ g̓O̩i᷈N̸g̽ Ản̉Y͋w̳H̤e̦R̸ë́!̉”

There he was again, cutting him off, keeping him trapped in the same room. Shit...fuck…

Mark. Mark was downstairs. He just - he needed to stall, to wait it out until Mark came back with his stupid smoothie. He could make it that long.

Jack did a one-eighty and darted back down the hallway, the rug slipping beneath his feet and making him stumble. He caught himself on the wall and kept going, kept dodging. He could do this. Distract him. Hold him off. Something. Anything.

Green.

...green?

Something green, in the corner of his eye. Green and orange.

Jack risked turning his head, risked a glance, and he caught sight of the NERF gun - Chase’s NERF gun - sitting on the kitchen table. Mark had been playing with the damned thing for days, and for the first time since it had resurfaced Jack was unendingly grateful that Mark had found it again. He made a detour through the kitchen, snatching it up and shoving the ziplock of foam discs into his hoodie pocket.

Disc. Pull back. Load. Click. Wait for it. Be ready.

Jack circled his way back into the living room, Anti’s laughter echoing through the apartment, and he dove behind the coffee table with his plastic weaponed primed. He was ready.

He was terrified.

Jack would be an idiot if he pretended that this entire situation wasn’t scaring him within an inch of his life. He knew - he was trying not to think - that he could die at any second tonight, and that the pixelated parasite hunting him down in his own apartment was far too strong of an opponent for him to handle, with or without Sam. With Mark, maybe he had a chance, but even those odds were slim. If he didn’t die tonight, or if he didn’t at least get stabbed, he was going to drink until morning then invite every single one of his friends over to England to have the party of a fucking lifetime.

“O͗h͢,᷄ Jȁa͚a̕a̓a̻c̈́k̘~” Anti’s distorted, chilling voice echoed through the room and sent a shiver down Jack’s spine. “W͘h̅e͔re a᷇r̰e̶ y̑ou͏ hid͛ǐnͅg̤?”

Jack caught sight of a flickering black sneaker from his hiding spot and he popped up from behind the coffee table, firing the NERF gun at the center of Anti’s chest.

Anti barely flinched as the foam disc bounced off of him with a spark of electricity. He blinked - dark, void-like eyes - and stared down at the harmless green projectile on the floor.

“A̛ n᷄er̼f͈ d̑i͞sč? Ȓe͏a̧ll̐y̕, Ja͙c͂k̇?᷀”

Jack shrugged. He pretended that he wasn’t sweating buckets and shaking like a leaf behind the nerf gun in his hands.

“N-Not like I’ve got anythin’ else.”

“H̆o̲w͘ v᷁e̛ry “C̰h̦a͘s̟e B̜r̵o̦d͔y” o͈f̹ y̬öu͍.”

Somehow the mention of another Ego’s name on Anti’s lips made Jack tense up. It was surreal. It was strange. They were all fake - all of them fictional - yet Anti had somehow become so much more. The concept of the living incarnation of his once-fictional character mentioning another of his still-fictional characters so casually like that...it was unsettling, to say the least. Jack squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed. He just needed to hold out a little longer, just a little while longer, until Mark came back from the car. Keep talking. Keep going...

“W-Well...well…it’s t-technically his gun...s-so…”

Jack opened his eyes.

Anti wasn’t there.

“I̚ kn̴ơw̼ w̖h̖a̽ẗ y᷆o̠u᷄’͍r͖e do̕i͖n̖g̉.”

The chilling voice seemed to come from all sides at once, and Jack could make out flickers of pixels and static in the dark shadows of the room. He fumbled with the ziplock in his pocket, pulling out a foam disc to load his NERF gun again.

“Oh?” Jack asked, his voice coming out higher than he’d intended. “Do…” He cleared his throat. “...do you now?”

“M᷅a̪r̿k̀i̟pl̻i̘e͛r᷀ i̵sn̄’t͡ c̊o͇m̕i͝n̩g͚ to͆ s̲a͙v᷀e͎ yo̫u̥.”

Jack’s blood ran cold.

“What–”

“H᷁e’̘s̎...ă li͢t̺t͖l̷e᷄ ţie͓d᷄ u̯p̉ a̳t̀ th̪e͡ m̘oͥmȩn͇ẗ́.” Anti’s distorted giggle echoed and circled in the empty air, causing goosebumps to sprout up along Jack’s arms. His breath hitched, eyes flying wildly around the room, trying to spot any sign of his doppleganger. “Y᷇o᷅u̥ wer͖e̸ṇ’t̃ p̼l̯a̿yi̟n͘g̉ fa̯ir̤, Ja̒c̉k̩a̫b᷉o͎y…” The next words came front right over his shoulder, whispered into his ear like a dirty secret. “...s̥o̾ Į le͍veͅlèd͎ t̏h̬e͕ p̭l̎ay᷊i̹n͑g̵ fi̥el͔d͙.͝ Ġot̥ ą c̋er̒t̛a͙i͇n da̢r͍k a̭cq̑ŭa̖in͊t̮a̠n̸ce̬ of̿ m̪i̎ne t͖õ ẖęl̍p̖ m̓e̺ o̢u̟t a̲ li̫t͕t᷈l̪e.”

Mark was scared to blink, staring at his own reflection in the car’s window with his jaw clenched, a vein pulsing in his neck. A figure stood just behind his shoulder, his body outlined in a familiar red and blue, looking so familiar yet so foreign at the same time. By the time his smoothie hit the concrete and burst open, splattering the ground, only fractions of a second had passed...but it felt like an eternity. He blinked.

Dark was gone.

“Mark?” Tim’s voice cropped up beside his ear, confused and a little worried.

“...hold on to me, okay?” Mark murmured, and he brought a hand up to try and shield his familiar from whatever might happen. Whoever might happen.

“I’m not here for him, you know.”

The voice, deep and echoing and so like his own but different, startled him into turning around. He hadn’t been in the reflection, but he hadn’t actually left. His name left Mark’s lips in a strained whisper.

“Darkiplier.”

“Face-to-face, at long last,” Dark nodded. He smirked, folding his hands behind his back. “And like I said...I’m only here for you. This is all coming from your mind, Mark.”

“Mark? What’re you lookin’ at?”

Tim. He sounded so innocent and confused, so worried about Mark, and what Dark was saying suddenly registered in Mark’s mind.

“Tim can’t see you, can he?”

“Tim doesn’t have to see me,” Dark corrected, raising an eyebrow in clear impatience. “I don’t want him to see me, therefore he can’t. But you…” His head tilted to the side and he made his neck pop, his shell cracking and separating for a moment. Then he leaned forward, intrigued. “...you, I can never quite hide from. Not completely. Why is that?”

“I...don’t know,” Mark shook his head, confused. Lost. Dark was here, and he was very real, and he was talking to Mark as though none of this was odd. “Maybe...uh....maybe because I made you?”

“Y̙̭o͏̖͔͙͓̼u d͇͈̭i͎̤͉ḍ̼̠̭̟̯͡n̡͕͎̙̜’̠̹̫̦͙͡t ̝ma̟k̼͎͝e̗̗̱͈̬ͅ m̰̥ḛ.”

There was an echoing fury boiling under the words, and the air around Dark seemed to darken considerably in the moment. Mark took an involuntary step back towards his car.

“I - what?”

“You didn’t make me.” Dark’s anaglyphic image was separating, tearing itself apart, and one of his echoing reflections seemed to scream silently into the cold night air. All the while, his core image remained stern and unyielding, showing barely any emotion at all. “You destroyed me - destroyed us. You stole his body. You condemned her to hell. You drove him to insanity. You ruined their lives.”

It clicked, then, what Dark was talking about. This was exactly what Mark had been scared of, worried about, when he was talking to Jack in that cafe. This was why he was regretting the creation of “Who Killed Markiplier”...or more accurately, he was regretting the addition of the character of Mark. The Mark who was an actor. The Mark who was an asshole. The fictional Mark who ruined everything and destroyed so many people…

...Dark was under the impression that Actor Mark and YouTube Mark were one and the same.

Mark blinked, and suddenly Dark was so much closer than he had been before. The darkness that had been enveloping the demon was surrounding Mark too now, and it was absolutely suffocating.

“...but, I suppose I should be thanking you,” Dark continued, a smirk finding its way onto his face. He tilted his head to the side, regarding Mark thoughtfully. “In a way, you...are the reason I exist. Your damnation of your friends led to my creation. A part of me is furious...but a part of me is more than grateful. You set the darkness free, Mark.”

Mark’s heart was pounding, rapid, in his chest and he could feel a minute panic slowly flooding his very soul. He gulped and shook his head, one hand still holding Tim close - Tim, who had fallen strangely silent, though Mark didn’t stop to question it.

Dark wasn’t here to hurt him. Dark didn’t resort to physical violence unless he had to, Mark had written him that way. While Anti went straight for the knife, Dark resorted to other means of making his point and making his mark.

This was all in his mind. Dark wasn’t physically here.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You...I’ve been seeing you, for months, but this is the first time you’ve actually spoken to me. What changed?”

Dark’s gaze trailed off to the side, toward the apartment, before settling back on Mark.

“A friend asked for a favor.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I merely agreed.”

A cry of pain broke the odd non-silence of the evening, a cry of pain that sounded all too familiar and was coming from the apartment Mark had been trying to return to. His eyes widened.

A friend asked for a favor.

A friend of Dark’s. Anti.

“Jack!”

Mark shoved away from the car and ran through Dark’s mirage of a body, the blue and red dispersing into wisps of dark smoke. Mark only made it halfway to the stairs.

“Clever boy. But you can’t leave. Not yet.”

Dark’s voice echoed in his mind, sending a blinding pain through his skull that brought him to his knees with a shout. He clutched at his head, fingers tangling in his hair and digging into his scalp. He felt rather than saw Tim tumble off of his shoulder, falling the few feet to the ground, making Mark wince in sympathy. There wasn’t enough strength in him to free himself from the mental onslaught, let alone help his tiny friend.

But he needed to. He needed to get Dark out of his head, needed to help Jack. If Dark was out here, then Anti must be in there, and he’d already seen what Anti had done to Jack the last time he had shown up. It wasn’t pretty. Mark didn’t fancy seeing a reenactment.

Get out...get out!

“Why would I? I have a job to do, Mark. You better than anyone should know that I never put in a half effort.”

Images began to surface in his mind, horrible images, memories that had never happened...memories of his friends, his real friends, getting hurt…

Please don’t. They don’t deserve this.

“Neither did Damien. Neither did Celine. Neither did William.”

“That...w-wasn’t me!” he protested, finally finding his voice, the words hoarse and weak. “You’ve got it - ngh - wrong! I’m - y-yeah, I’m Mark, but I’m n-not that Mark! I–”

“Oh, quit with your pitiful lies,” Dark sneered. “Celine is already angry enough with you as it is.”

“No, listen! I made up that version of Mark the same way I created you and Wilford and Abe – I’m just a writer, okay?!”

“Give up, Mark. Nobody can hear you. Let’s see how long you last before you begin pleading for forgiveness. I have all night…”

Hold on, Jack. I’m coming. Hold on–

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Jack shuddered and shot to his feet, almost tripping over the coffee table in his haste to get away from Anti, who cackled in amusement from where he’d appeared directly over Jack’s shoulder. Jack rounded on the glitch and aimed his NERF gun at the glitch’s chest, not even caring that it was basically harmless.

“What did you do?!” he demanded, his concern for his friend overtaking his fear for his own life. “Is Dark gonna kill him?”

“D̙o͕n͑’̚t b͐e͟ s͋i̧lly!” Anti smirked and rolled his eyes, playing with his knife out of sheer boredom, tossing it between his hands and flipping it in the air. It was clear he was skilled with his weapon on choice, throwing it around with ease like one would a half-filled water bottle. “O᷄l’ D̜a̩rki͈e̚ do̶ẹs̨n̈́’ť ju͊st̽ ķill̔ p̠eo᷈p̰l͌e̞. O᷀r͋ hē w͈on̎’̞t k̇i͏ll̫ Ma̻r᷊kipl̮i̧er͕, an̋y̑w̩a͕y̒.”

The knife soared a good foot or two in the air before tumbling downward, making Jack tense even as he watched Anti catch it cleanly by the handle.

“Fa͐r a͓š I̩ c̠a᷊n̅ t͂ell͚ he̟’̤s̄ p͞r̃et᷇ty̚ p̝i᷅s̱s͚e͔d͐ a̤t᷆ ṱh͔e̓ g̹uy̗. Be̘en̒ t͑oy̕īn͗’͈ w̶it’ hi̛m᷆ f̦o͐r̬ m̽o᷆nt̾h̟s̞,̈ o̊ř so̊ h͍i᷉s̝ r̓oboͅt́ s̽a᷁ẏs͍.”

Robot? Jack’s brow furrowed in confusion. Dark had robots now?

“N̛a̡h᷾, Da͖r̓k̺’s͗ n̠o͊t̻ g̦onnå k̬i͗l͙ḽ Mar̃k̝. P͑ŕe̽t̩ṯyͅ s̒u̕r̾e ḣe᷇’d̈ r̯a̱the̗r dr̹i͖v̓ę h͂i͔m̃ t̰o̐ i͢n᷀s̷a͛nityͅ ḅefo᷾r̞e͓ tͅh͙a̓t ĥap̆p̝e̾ns.”

Jack swallowed thickly. Drive him to insanity? Could Dark so that? He was brought back to the conversation he and Mark had had almost a week ago, in the cafe. The first morning Mark had shown up.

“Dark’s more subtle,” Mark had said. “He works behind the scenes. He doesn’t deal with face-to-face conflict as much. He mostly sticks to the shadows. I mean, I gave him his backstory, I should know this…honestly, it makes me wonder if ‘Who Killed Markiplier’ wasn’t a horrible, horrible idea.”

Mark had been worried, beyond worried, about the concept of Dark actually making his move. Jack had noticed it that day but hadn’t bothered to ask about it. He was beginning to think that, perhaps, he should have pushed a little more.

“Bu̼t y̾o̲u̱ h᷁aͅve̕n̰’t̰ goṯ th᷁a͗t͓ to w᷁o͢r͊ry̽ ab̻o̱u̺t̍, Ja͖cͅka᷁b͐o̱y!” Anti was grinning again, and Jack would swear that his doppleganger’s teeth were sharp, pointed. Deadly. “A͟ft̸ëṙ t᷁o᷁n̎ig̙h̸t, you̅ w᷄o̓nͅ’̥t͂ b͐e̡ w̢OR̵r̈Yi͇N̞g a᷊BoUt a᷅N̡ÿ́T͒h̛i͙N᷇g͋.”

Anti’s distorted shadow grew around him, engulfing his side of the room in a glitching, pulsating, corrupted darkness, and from its depths shot out a dozen or so venom-green cords of light. At Anti’s command, they darted forward and curled tightly around Jack’s wrists, his ankles, his knees and elbows, his chest - his throat. Not tight enough to strangle, but with his bruises still healing, it was more than tight enough to hurt.

Jack gasped sharply and gritted his teeth, snarling and tugging against the green strings, fighting for his freedom. He had to get out. He had to save Sam, had to help Mark. But there was something...odd about the strings. With each tug against his restraints, Jack felt a little more of the fight leaving him, his will to rebel slowly draining away. His head was pounding, his throat was sore, and his shoulder was throbbing with pain...so...so wouldn’t it…

...wouldn’t it be easier to just give in?

The NERF gun fell from his hands, tumbling to the floor with a clatter of plastic and a muffled thump against the carpet.

“No͊w be̺ a̦ go͟õd̏ li᷅t̏t᷁l͋e᷊ pup̝p͟ét, an̂d̯ ğo᷊ t̥õ s͕le̗e̥ṗ.”

Yeah...yeah, sleep sounded so wonderful right now. Jack slowly let his eyes drifted shut.

Click.

“You let ‘im go right this fucking second, or I blow your fuckin’ brains out, bro.”

[A/N] - Woot! It's done! ^^ And ending on a cliffhanger too? Shocking! :0c

This chapter actually took a lot longer to finish than I originally intended. For some reason I was really struggling to get going on it, but once I started into the ambush, it really started rolling. Believe it or not, this chapter is about twice the length of all the others. While most other chapters finish off at around ten pages in Google Docs, this one? This one hit a solid twenty. Absolute insanity.

Anyway! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and comments and critiques are always appreciated! Ta!

Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]

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[Chapter List]

#SamLives #Sam Lives #Jacksepticeye #Sam Septiceye #JSE FanFic #JSE FanFiction #Jacksepticeye FanFic #Jacksepticeye FanFiction #Sam #Antisepticeye #Darkiplier #Markiplier

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aroworlds · 7 years ago

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Aro-Spec Artist Profile: Alex

Today I have the delight of introducing Alex, better known to aro-spec Tumblr as @arotaro and @mutant-jojos!

Alex is a bisexual, half-Puerto Rican multi-disciplinary aromantic artist and creative with severe ADHD. You’ll find her prolific fanworks on AO3 as EmeraldTrash666, writing primarily for the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fandom. Her bold, colourful art for the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Fullmetal Alchemist, Hetalia, Pokemon and Vocaloid fandoms is also available on Redbubble under the name StellaHagane.

She writes, she creates digital art and she dabbles in music, sewing and fashion design, single-handedly proving that there’s no such thing as too much creative awesome for any one aromantic!

With us Alex talks about finding the word aro, the power of fandom and creative fanworks, her love of aro Jotaro, the challenges of creating with ADHD, the struggles of being an aro gen writer in fandom and the importance of expressing our aro headcanons. Everything she says is absolutely on point, so please let’s give her all our love, encouragement, gratitude, kudos and follows for taking the time to explore what it is to be aromantic and creative.

Can you share with us your story in being aro-spec?

I guess in some ways my “story” starts out pretty typical. Got older, kept waiting for my First Crush™, never got it, started worrying and trying to force myself to develop crushes. I actually was in a relationship with another girl on a forum I was part of as a teenager, but eventually I realized that I didn’t really like her romantically, and the relationship started to become really unpleasant for me. I eventually felt so miserable that I didn’t even want to talk at her at all, even though we were close friends, but I didn’t want to break up with her - partly because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, partly because we were everyone’s “OTP” and I didn’t want my friends to hate me for ruining that. But eventually I did break up with her, and I’m happy to say she took it with grace and we’re still close friends today! (She’s ace and a great writer/artist herself, too!)

I was part of a very nice LGBTQ+ group as a teenager, but I could never figure out my identity. I felt really ashamed and alone. Whenever I brought up how messed up I felt because I’d never had a crush on anyone, everyone was like, “Oh, sounds like you must be asexual!”, but I knew I wasn’t, and that was the worst part. Even though I knew aromanticism was a thing, nobody ever talked about it. It was only ever in the context of aroaces, so I didn’t know I was aro. I thought I must have had some sort of mental illness or something, but certainly not a legitimate orientation, nothing to be proud of like everyone else.

During that time, I found myself connecting on a deep emotional level to characters like Alphonse Elric, Fujiwara no Sai, the X-Men in general (although I’ve been an X-Men fan since I was literally a baby), basically anyone who was somehow “different” from the rest of humanity, even though I never understood why, since I was a fairly privileged kid who had never experienced much bullying or anything. Weirdly enough, it was Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure that helped me realize I was aro and come to terms with it; I saw an interview with Hirohiko Araki, the author of JJBA, where he was asked what type of girls Jotaro Kujo likes, and replied that he didn’t think Jotaro liked girls. The obvious interpretation would be that Jotaro’s gay, but somehow, one way or another, I decided to go with the idea that Jotaro’s aromantic. Jotaro also happened to be a character I really related to for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, so around the time I was 18 I put two and two together and was like ... oh shit…

Please click keep reading to continue Alex’s story!

Can you share with us the story behind your creativity?

I’ve always been weird in the way I’m very creative, but tend to kinda bounce around from hobby to hobby. Other people draw, or write, or sing, while I draw for a month, and then write for a month and sew for a week and play video games for a week, and then I draw some more, and then I try out something completely new, and then I write again. I think it must be an ADHD thing, idk. In any case, I’ve just always been really passionate about making stuff, whatever that stuff happens to be.

I’ve also always been very much fandom-oriented. Ever since I was a toddler, I used to dictate fanfiction to my mom (back then it usually involved Winnie the Pooh, the Powerpuff Girls, Godzilla, and my dog). I mostly draw fanart. I find that I’m not really capable of writing original stories, but I’m great at getting fanfics in character, and I love writing them. I love taking stories I already love and reinterpreting them, seeing what it would be like if the characters were put into different situations, etc.

Because of my ADHD, I really struggle with actually finishing things. I try really really hard, I really do, and I’ve been trying to push myself even harder these past few years. I’ve made progress, but it’s still extremely difficult, so I’m very sorry for all the projects I’ve abandoned over the years. Sorry I still haven’t finished the fic that was supposed to be done in early March. I’m trying, really. I promise I’m working on the next chapter of BLaD, too.

Are there any particular ways your aro-spec experience is expressed in your art?

Of course, pretty much everything I write is gen. Even if I include romantic relationships in my fics, I never write about romance, just stories which also happen to include some characters who might be dating someone. And obviously I always write Jotaro as aro! That’s really important to me. No matter which AU I’m writing, he’s always aro. (And autistic, but that’s off topic.)

I’m also not really into shipping because of my romance repulsion, but I ship Joseph Joestar and Caesar Zeppeli. The thing is … I’ve always viewed it as a unique relationship, sort of difficult to define as being strictly romantic or platonic or sexual, just kind of their own thing that defies words. That’s how I’ve always written it. I had the sudden realization recently that this strange view on the only ship I really actually like (at the moment, anyway) is probably due to my being aro, lmao.

What challenges do you face as an aro-spec artist?

People don’t read gen fics, and people aren’t interested in aro stories. That’s just the way it is. I do have some dedicated readers, whom I love deeply, but in general… I could post something with a deep plot, something funny and dramatic and witty and touching, something I poured my heart and soul into for months, and it’ll get very few hits/comments/kudos, while someone else could post the same generic 2,000-word romance fic everyone’s seen a dozen times over, with no editing or anything, and get twice the amount of traffic my fics do in half the time. It’s really crushing.

How do you connect to the aro-spec and a-spec communities as an aro-spec person?

I dunno… The aro community feels so small. Online, I have a small circle of aro mutuals who all kind of vent collectively, and I’m part of Arocalypse and a few aro/aspec Discord servers, but I still feel like there isn’t really much of a larger community to be part of in the same way that there is for other orientations. Offline, I’ve never met another aro, or even anyone who actually knows what aromanticism is prior to me explaining it to them.

I also don’t feel like there’s a very unified “aspec community”. As an allo aro, I feel very rejected by the ace community - not to say that I feel like I should be part of the ace community, since I’m not ace, but I feel like they throw aros under the bus a lot. I mean, we’ve all seen the “asexuals can feel love, just like anybody else! … oh, except for aroaces, I guess. But the rest of us are normal, so you should accept us!” rhetoric. Both within and outside the aspec communities, aros are rarely treated with the same priority as aces, even though we’re arguably in a much more difficult position than your average allo ace.

That being said, I’m glad there is an aro community at all. I don’t know where I’d be now if I were still questioning. Probably not in a very good place.

How do you connect to your creative community as an aro-spec person?

As I mentioned, there’s a general lack of interest in gen fics or sympathy for romance-repulsed people in general. It’s really difficult being romance repulsed in fandom spaces, because nobody cares about anything other than ships. There are very few gen fics, and even less that are a decent length, not abandoned, or cater to my specific interests, so I have to write my own. I don’t often have anything good to read; most of the big fics, the ones with cool plots and long word counts and ongoing updates, are ship fics. If I’m lucky, maybe two gen fics will be posted in one week, and maybe one of them will be longer than a few thousand words. Maybe one might even have my favorite characters. But usually genfics are few and far between, and kind of random in terms of what you’ll get. Sometimes I get so bored that I read ship fics anyway, and then I always wind up feeling really awful afterwards.

I’ve written, over the course of the past two years alone, over 20 gen fics. But whenever I vent that sometimes I’d like to actually get to read something, I always get someone telling me, “Well if you want gen fics, write some yourself! You have to make the change! You can’t demand people write stuff for you!” And of course, at the same time it’s totally acceptable to request ship fics from your favorite author, and if you complain that there aren’t enough fics for your rarepair, it’s seen as relatable and totally valid.

Fandom is just … really, really amatonormative, tbh. I hate it. I’m trying to make a difference (I did organize Gen Jojo Week along with my friend Rachel last year, and hopefully will again this year), but there’s only so much I can do.

How can the aro-spec community best help you as a creative?

Aside from reblogging my art and promoting my fics? Talk about stuff. Talk about aro stuff in fandom. Seriously! I know it seems obvious that aro people would like aro headcanons and gen fics and all that, but we need to talk about them more. Nobody outside the community gives enough of a shit about us to have aro headcanons, so let’s get them popular. Talk about your favorite aro headcanons. Talk about your favorite gen fics. Talk about how such-and-such character is totally aro; talk about how excited you are to see aro characters in fics. My dream is for aro headcanons to become just as common and popular as any other type of headcanon.

Can you share with us something about your current project?

This is old news to most of the people who already know me, but my current big project that I’ve been working on for several years now is Between Life and Death, a drama/horror/supernatural JJBA fic.

(WARNING: PHANTOM BLOOD AND STARDUST CRUSADERS SPOILERS BELOW.)

The plot of the fic is that Dio wins at the end of Stardust Crusaders, and after realizing that he has no hobbies other than harassing the Joestars, he decides to bring Jonathan back by sticking his head (which… we’ll just assume Dio preserved for plot purposes) onto Jotaro’s body. Obviously, Jonathan is NOT happy with this arrangement, but it also turns out that Jotaro’s still alive, just not in control of his body. He can still use his stand, so he essentially uses Star Platinum as a sort of proxy for interacting with the environment around him, even though he only comes out when Jonathan’s alone since he doesn’t want Dio to know he’s alive.

Basically, it’s the story of a depressed vampire and a traumatized ghost. It’s a very introspective fic; most of the story consists of conflicts between Dio and Jonathan, and Jonathan and Jotaro struggling to come to terms with their new existences - Jonathan being unable to reconcile vampirism with his personal morals, and Jotaro having one hell of an identity crisis while also mourning the deaths of his friends and family. The plot is picking up, though, and there is an end goal in mind, as well as an eventual sequel!

As for where the story-in-progress is at right now … well, the next “stage” of the plot is hamon training for Kakyoin and Avdol, which will be fun. This chapter also includes several dream sequences, including an extended appearance by Mary Joestar (Jonathan’s mom), and a very serious and dark scene which I almost ruined by having dream!Will Zeppeli refer to Jonathan as his padawan. Yeah.

Have you any forthcoming works we should look forward to?

As mentioned, I’m working on chapter 9 of Between Life and Death! And working on and off on some stuff for the mutants AU. Most recently, on a whim I rewrote the lyrics to Handbeat Clocktower by MOTHY to be about Jonathan Joestar. Somehow this went far enough that I’m making an actual UTAU rendition of this “parody”, and hopefully it’ll be done sometime in the next few weeks. I’m really having fun with it and I hope people like it!

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gukyi · 7 years ago

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interconnection | myg

⇒ summary: you can never trust anything in the wizarding world. not even your own goddamn journal.

⇒ {hogwarts!au}

⇒ pairing: yoongi x female reader

⇒ word count: 8k

⇒ genre: fluff

⇒ a/n: all poetry in y/n’s journal written by yours truly! obviously, anything written in yoongi’s journal is written by him. also, i know the word count’s pretty short in comparison to my seokjin fic, but a majority of this fic is in messaging format, which explains both the great physical length and the shorter word count. inspired by this drarry fic, which rocks and u should read. edit (04.20.18): the poems in this fic are now formatted strangely because tumblr mobile took away the foundation for this entire piece: the indent. thanks, tumblr mobile, for absolutely nothing.

“all art is quite useless.” — wilde, 1890.

The first thing your mother bought you in Diagon Alley, age eleven, was a worn, brown leather journal, its pages tinted and stained but empty nonetheless. She got it off of the highest shelf in the top corner of the crowded bookstore, stretching her arms and legs to reach it, the last of its kind.

“What’s this for?” You asked as she placed it in your open, waiting palms.

“For you to write in while at Hogwarts,” she said. “I find that words always seem to have a better way of flowing when on paper rather than out loud. Don’t you?”

“I dunno,” you responded, shrugging your little shoulders as you placed the journal in your cauldron along with the rest of your required schoolbooks. “Isn’t it dumb to keep a journal?”

“Only if you treat it as such,” your mother replied, as sage as she always was. “Come, let’s get you a wand.”

With the mention of a wand, your mind wandered far from the beaten leather journal in your cauldron as you skipped out of Flourish and Blott’s, unaware of how significant the journal would end up being in your later years at Hogwarts.

When you first opened the journal on your first night at Hogwarts as an empty-minded eleven-year-old, the blank pages frightened you. A world of words only you could come up with was millions of miles away, and staring at the tan pages wasn’t going to make it come closer. That night, you shut the journal roughly, cursing your mother who wasted her money on a journal that would never be put to use.

Six years later, eleven-year-old you wouldn’t know that journal like you do now, know the feeling of its worn pages and smooth, wrinkling leather, what you have become so keenly familiar with over the years. Sure, this journal doesn’t hold your deepest, darkest secrets nor your wildest dreams directly, but the allusions never end, forever continuing on in each poem you write.

You’ve always been a fan of poetry, ever since your mother taught you about the greatest works of the great poets as a child. Wordsworth, Poe, Keats. They are names you know, names you admire. There was never anything spectacular about Wizard poets, not when everything is easy and everything is simply done with magic. No, people like Poe and Keats and Wordsworth wrote about life like it was a struggle, like there was always something you were missing in it. In a sense, there always is.

Perhaps your Muggleborn background is another factor in your love for poetry, but verse knows no blood status and even the greatest Wizards need to sit down and read a little bit of Eliot once in awhile, you think.

The poetry you write is mundane, nothing compared to the greats that they were, but it is home and it is an odyssey all the same, the words flowing off the page and smeared from how frantic you were when you wrote them.

You cart the notebook around with you wherever you go, knowing that keeping it in the confines of the common room will likely lead to its exposure one way or another. Gryffindors were never really good at keeping out of other people’s business. The journal is as precious to you as your wand, never letting it out of your sight.

It’s not uncommon for students to keep a journal, especially for their first couple years as they adjust to the school, to the sleepless nights and forbidden hallways. What is uncommon is the fact that you’re fast approaching graduation, merely a few months left before you’re thrust into the real world and treated like adults with responsibilities and taxes, and the journal has never left your side, staying with you through every standardized test and every Hogsmeade visit. You are, dare you say, the last of your year to hold onto something as menial as a diary.

“Are you going to keep writing in that after Hogwarts?”

You look up at the sound of the voice, knowing that it’s directed towards you. Your fingers are still holding onto the pages of your open journal, lying on the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall, as you pause, mid-browse.

“This?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“I want to keep it as my school journal. A specific time in my life.”

“But surely, if you’ve written in it for so long, you might as well want to keep going?”

“I feel like seven years is a pretty substantial amount of time to write in a journal.”

“You’ve never run out of room?” Another friend butts in, her potions homework forgotten in front of her. No wonder she’s failing the class; she lets herself get too distracted.

“I asked the librarian for spells to add pages.”

“Oh,” they say.

“Yeah,” you say.

Your journal is not often the topic of conversation between you and your friends. Your friends have long known that the journal is not theirs to look through, so they don’t bother asking, but occasionally they will have questions as they see you scribbling down something before your next class period. It’s strange to see you writing in it so out in the open like you do sometimes, since you often reserve your writing time for when you are curled up in the common room, sitting by the fire as you guard the pages from view. Inspiration, however, strikes at the most inopportune moments.

“What do you write about?” They ask you whenever they catch you jotting something down.

“Art. Love. Work. Emotions. You. Me.”

“Us?”

“All of us.”

“That’s lots of people.”

“Not everybody. Just people that interest me.”

“Who interests you?”

“Those that don’t try to.”

If there’s one thing that your friends complain about, it’s the fact that, whenever you do talk about your journal, your sentences become clipped, fragments of full phrases lacking in conjunctions. It’s not that you don’t want to make your sentences, well, actual sentences, it’s just that you never really want to say too much about your journal. It is yours, after all.

“Well, who are you writing about now?”

“I don’t know.”

Truth is, you don’t. The boy that’s caught your attention this time is nothing but a stranger, someone you’ve never spoken to, a face lost in the sea of students. From his build, he doesn’t look to be much younger than you, meaning he might even be in your year. He’s got platinum bleached hair, the mop the only thing you can make out as he snoozes on some textbook. Next to him is a boy a couple years younger—you recognize him, he’s the Quidditch commentator for most of the matches—prodding him gently with his pointer finger. The platinum boy does not budge.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“You’re a real mystery, you know that, Y/N? A goddamn mystery,” one of your friends comments, scoffing.

You chuckle to yourself, closing your journal and smiling. “I sure hope so.”

he sleeps to forget or, maybe he sleeps to remember but in his dreams he is somewhere and nowhere and he is everything and nothing all at once. zzzz… his brain says do not let me leave… for i am finally at peace.

You had originally believed that after writing about a person, a stranger, in your journal, you’d go on to forget about them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case this time. Since you wrote that single poem about the platinum-haired boy, fast asleep on a textbook in the Great Hall, you can’t help but notice him everywhere you turn. He’s in the library, in the hallways, in the bleachers of the Quidditch field. It’s his hair—or maybe it’s that soft, hazy smile he has permanently etched onto his lips—that makes him stick out, makes him so easy to spot even in the oceans of students that surround the both of you.

He’s in your year, you’ve found out that much, but you can hardly remember anything about him. You don’t remember him on the train, nor at the Sorting Ceremony, nor in any of your classes. It is only now that he’s left a mark on you, made a wrinkle in your brain that you can’t seem to forget about.

If you were brave, you would speak to him. If you were brave, or daring, or unafraid, you would approach him and say hello, introduce yourself. But you are none of those things, and so all he is is another boy you’ve written about, another student lost in the haze.

Perhaps in a perfect world.

Though, you suppose, if it was a perfect world, you would never have anything interesting to write about.

Shit begins to hit, pelt, the fan while you are eating supper in the Great Hall, surrounded by your friends as your journal lays forgotten on the sidelines, open to a blank page as you happily chat about nothing and everything in particular.

“How’s tutoring going?” You ask your one friend, the one who’s not doing so hot in potions.

“It’s going,” she jokes. “I have a good tutor, I’m just shit at applying myself.”

“Story of my life,” you chuckle.

The chatter goes on like this, friendly banter between buddies as you swallow down the meal in front of you. This is the only time after classes end that you actually get to spend socializing, before you bury yourself under layers and layers of schoolwork. It’s just another night, the days always flowing by like clockwork, no variation with each passing hour.

It’s just another night, until your ridiculously clumsy self somehow manages to elbow a discarded cup of tea, knocking it onto its side and spilling its contents all over your opened journal.

“Oh no,” you declare, not even making to try and clean up the mess, watching the liquid stain your blank pages with futility.

“Y/N! Aren’t you gonna do something?” Your friends exclaim, watching as you stare helplessly at the mess beside you.

“Me? What?”

“Y/N!”

It’s then that you finally come to, shaking your head as the panic overtakes you. You stand up quickly, rushed as you dart to the closest napkin, dabbing it on the spill to soak up whatever hasn’t already damaged your journal.

Your friends are all the help, gathering the disregarded Daily Prophets from that morning and running over. Once you’ve let the tea take its toll, you place your relatively damp journal on top of the newspaper to dry, pushing it down the table so it can get the most air, away from your scraggle of friends as you continue to chat as if the whole incident lay forgotten.

You’re knee deep into a conversation about whether having dragon heartstring or unicorn hair is more beneficial to doing transfiguration, you, a firm believer that dragon heartstring reigns supreme, when a foreign voice invades your discussion.

“Do you write all this stuff?”

You whip your head around to find a Gryffindor by the name of Namjoon, holding your dangling journal between his thumb and his pointer fingers as he shuffles through the pages with his other hand. You can see the tea dripping slowly from the corner of the cover to the newspaper below it. You recognize Namjoon quite well, he’s a tutor, sort of a know-it-all as far as you’re concerned.

“What?” You snap, beginning to feel yourself seethe.

“Do you write this stuff? It’s really good, you know. Very interesting,” he comments like it’s nobody’s fucking business. The problem is, it is very much your goddamn business.

“Were you raised in a barn?” You ask incredulously, rushing up to him and snatching your journal from his fingertips. “Who on this godforsaken Earth taught you that it was perfectly fine to fish through someone else’s journal?”

Namjoon merely smirks, and it makes you frown, disgust lacing your features. “So it is yours, eh, Y/N? Didn’t know you were so deep.”

“Stuff it, Namjoon. I never fucking asked,” you say. Namjoon’s gotten absolutely unbearable, ever since his Head Boy friend graduated last year, leaving him to completely his own devices without anyone to keep him in check. You miss that Head Boy. He was nice.

“But your journal did. I mean, it was lying out in the open, far away from any person who displayed any signs of ownership. It was practically begging to be read.”

“You’re a goddamn piece of shit,” you spit, and he chuckles at your comeback. “Go shove a textbook up your ass.”

“Not a fan of people reading your writing, I get it,” Namjoon says, hands up in surrender as he begins to back away, the cheeky smile still drawn on his face. “I, for one, think you are an excellent writer, Y/N. You should let people read your stuff. They’d like it.”

“Not a chance.”

He walks away, leaving you breathless and boiling.

“He’s such a tool,” your friend says, hand rubbing your arm to calm you down. “That’s why I didn’t want him as my tutor. I couldn’t stand being around him.”

“I think Y/N needs some time to calm down. Look at her. She’s practically overheating.”

Your friend pulls your journal from where you’re clutching it to your chest, smiling awkwardly as she places it back down on the newspaper, pushing it over to where you sit so you can have a better eye on it.

You’re never dealing with this again.

You spend the rest of the night shuffling through the innumerable books in the library, desperate to find a spell that will prevent anyone besides you to fish through your personal, private journal. Anything to prevent the Namjoon Situation from ever happening again. God, what an asshole. Has he never heard of respect? Personal space?

Admittedly, doing this instead of your homework is a terrible move on your part, because not only are there no spells designed to resolve this type of predicament—which you find outrageous, especially because aren’t wizards supposed to come up with solutions to every problem? That’s why they have magic, obviously—your search takes up a good few hours hunting through the table of contents of each library book that piques your interest, and by the time it’s nearing curfew and you’ve collected a grand total of zero spells, all of your homework lays incomplete on your bed, begging to be finished. But you are determined, and the librarian is trying to shuffle the last scraggle of students out of the room so they don’t miss their curfew, so you merely pick up the pace.

You and the librarian are mutual friends at best, since she’s always helping you out with your journal and recommending her favorite wizard poets, but when she peeks her head down the aisle and sees you frantically shuffling through a dusty old thing, she hisses.

“Ms. Y/L/N! Do you know what time it is?”

And just as it so happens, that dusty old thing that your fingers speedily flip the pages of happens to have the one spell you think will work, a little scrawled piece of handwriting that sticks out like a sore thumb in comparison to the rest of the book’s printed text. At least someone tried.

“Can I take this, Professor?” You ask hurriedly as she walks over to you, a hand on your back as she gently shoves you towards the exit.

“Yes, sure, whatever,” she waves off your request, waiting until you’re outside the library before she brutally shuts the door in your face, but you couldn’t care less.

You’ve finally found what you’re looking for.

The door to your common room creaks closed, and then the curfew bells sound, echoing along the stone walls as you sigh a breath of relief, grateful you and Filch will not be meeting in the darkness of the empty hallways tonight. Most of the other students in your house are also lounging around in the main lobby of the common room, chatting amongst themselves or struggling to work in the quietest place they can find, which isn’t very quiet to begin with—Gryffindors, to put it nicely, don’t know how to shut the fuck up—anyway. You’re pleased about this, because this means you can go straight up to your dormitory without anyone bothering you, perform this slightly sketchy spell on your journal, and begin the daunting task of finishing all the homework you refrained from doing.

“Y/N!”

You whip your head to the source of the sound and see Namjoon waving you down, nursing a bottle of Felix Felicis in his hand, a telltale sign that you should avoid him tonight. If he’s awful when he’s sober, imagine how much of a nightmare he is drunk.

In hindsight, turning around was an abysmal idea, because now Namjoon knows you’ve acknowledged him, and he’s going to capitalize off of it.

You keep walking, pushing through the conglomerations of students and making for your dormitory, hoping he won’t try to engage you any further.

There’s a hand grabbing onto the sleeve of your robe, and you’d rather die than have another conversation with him, but you look at him regardless.

“Can I help you?” You ask, trying to make your voice sound as ticked off as possible.

“I wanted to apologize for earlier,” Namjoon says, and suddenly, you’re starting to like drunk Namjoon a lot better than sober Namjoon. “I didn’t know. My friend schooled me on it.”

“Cool, apology accepted,” you spit quickly, desperate to get his grubby fingers off of the edge of your sleeve and your body up to your bedroom, where your journal waits to be protected. “Leave me alone?” Even though it comes out as a question, it’s more of an order.

Namjoon is much easier to get rid of tonight than he normally is. He backs away from you, leaving you with a pleasantly friendly smile as he makes his way towards where he was chatting with his friends, letting you scurry up to your room in peace.

Once there, you grab your journal from where it was locked up in your trunk and place it on the floor in the middle of the dormitory, since you would like to avoid lighting yourself or your bed aflame should this spell go horribly wrong, thank you very much. Shuffling back to the page in the book with the scrawled little handwriting in faded quill ink, you hold out your wand tentatively. For some reason, your hands are shaking. The professors always told you never to perform spells not taught to you, and only use the ones from a trustworthy adult or a renowned book. Well, you’re already in your last year, so what’s the worst that could happen?

You know you have to get this spell over and done with, especially because you can’t have someone walking in and seeing you screeching unfamiliar magic at your inanimate journal, so you take a deep breath, focus all your energy on the journal, and read out the words written on the page, loud and clear. A burst of purple light flies out from the end of your want, hitting the journal square in the center of the cover. For a mere moment, the journal looks to be levitating, sparkles flickering around it, before it hits the floor with a thud, like nothing happened to it in the first place.

You shut the book in your hands, throwing it on your bed carelessly as you step towards the journal, hand stretched out to grab it but the rest of your body as far away from it as you can go, just in case you happen to electrocute yourself or something. That’d suck.

When your fingers finally gloss over the leather and nothing happens, you smile to yourself, pleased. Picking your journal up and making your way back to your bed, you quickly finger through the pages, and all of your poetry seems to be perfectly in tact.

One of the other girls that shares your dormitory traipses up the stairs, significantly worn out, and you rush towards her, journal in hand.

“Hey,” you say, catching her by surprise. “Could you open this for me?”

She doesn’t even question your request—no wonder why, people ask some strange favors in this school—and does what you ask, opening the journal with no effort as all. However, before you let yourself deflate in disappointment that the spell was simply a dud, you see that all of the pages before her are blank, your words erased entirely, like they were never written in the first place.

“Is that it?” She asks you, holding your notebook out in front of you.

You take it gladly, smiling to yourself. No more Nosy Namjoon, as far as you’re concerned. “Yes, thank you.”

Only the next day do you learn why teachers always told you never to use spells not taught to you properly. You’ve been spending the whole day boasting to your friends that you found a spell that makes your journal your journal, for your eyes only, letting them bubble with friend-anger and envy, anger at the fact that now they, truly, won’t be able to snoop through your journal (though it’s not like they were evil enough to be planning on doing that), and envy at the fact that you solved your issue with a single wave of your wand, easy as that.

You’re skipping around campus, very delighted with yourself and your superior problem-solving skills—that’s what being a witch is all about, right?—when you look around for a bit too long and make eye contact with the boy with platinum hair, the one that is incessantly present in your brain, seeing him sitting on a log in the courtyard, writing his homework, probably. He looks up at the same time that you look at him, and you stop in the middle of the hallway you’ve been happily gamboling down, and you stare at each other.

It’s actually not staring. It’s more like, gazing. You gaze at each other, and he doesn’t make a move and neither do you, but you’re finally meeting his eyes for the first time and even though he’s so far away it looks like he’s lived a lifetime—no, several—already, aged and wise and experienced. It looks like he has the secrets of the universe hiding out in his irises, his pupils, and he’s waiting to find someone to share them with.

You’re a bit more daring today, so you wave, cracking an awkward smile as you raise your hand, shaking it ever so slightly. A small, puny little smile grows on his, or maybe you’re just imagining it, but that’s all you see before you turn, skipping off to the library, where you have a feeling you know what your next poem is going to be on.

the universe. it is not in the sky where it should belong but rather it rests in the eyes of a boy who is too young, too innocent to have seen such a lifetime before him and every time he blinks he sees another story, another tragic end and he hopes that the next time he closes his eyes this story will be a happy ever after.

And now, the realization that you should usually always listen to your professors because they tend to know what’s best for you soon comes to fruition, because you’re about to close your journal, when you see handwriting that does not belong to you, scrawling itself on the bottom of the page where you wrote your poem about the boy.

nice poem

Excuse me?

[you] WHO ARE YOU

[stranger] WHO ARE YOU

[you] WHY ARE YOU IN MY JOURNAL

[stranger] WHY ARE YOU IN MINE

[you] ???? this is my journal???

[stranger] i believe this is my journal.

[you] i fuckin hate wizards.

[stranger] are you a muggle?

[you] no, i just hate us.

[stranger] relatable.

You’ve filled up nearly an entire new page, but you’re noticing your words fading as you write them, disappearing into thin air on the parchment in front of you, like invisible ink, but only backwards. Every word that pops up onto the page from whoever is on the other end of your weirdly transcendent journal disintegrates about ten seconds after you’ve read it, the speech literally sinking into the paper.

[you] how did you get into my journal?

[stranger] pretty sure this is still my journal.

[you] but i can see you writing.

[stranger] well, i can see yours.

[you] this makes no sense. how can you see my writing when you don’t have my journal?

[stranger] it’s not like i know.

[you] i literally cast a spell on my journal so people wouldn’t be able to read it.

[stranger] and how trustworthy is said spell?.

[you] …

[stranger] well, that explains that.

[you] are you judging me behind a goddamn journal cover?????????

[stranger] i’m not not judging you.

[you] can you read what else i’ve written?

[stranger] i can see your poems, if that’s what you’re asking.

For fucks sake. This is all totally against anything and everything you wanted from Sketchy Book Spell. You don’t know if the Namjoon incident is worse or better than this, a random stranger that you can’t even visualize, access to every single thing you’ve written down in your duration of Hogwarts attendance.

[stranger] can you see my stuff?

[you] you write?

[stranger] can’t you see it??

You flip backwards a couple of pages, and printed right where your poems used to reside are words that do not belong to you. It looks like poetry, when you see it from a first glance, artsy and cut off and short, but when you investigate a little further, it’s not poetry. It’s lyrics. The stranger writes lyrics, and holy shit, they are good.

give me some drinks, i want to get drunk today please don’t stop me anything will be fine alcohol is a luxury for a bum but i can’t stand it sober everyone else is running why am i the only one here

You suppose that in exchange for inadvertently sharing your entire life story in the form of verse, it would only make sense for the person on the other end to have their private lyrics revealed. Neither of you are getting much out of this, other than a nice, jovial chat.

[you] i can.

[stranger] guess it goes both ways then.

[you] yes, i guess it does.

[stranger] do you know how to fix this?.

[you] no, i found the spell that caused this in the first place in an old book.

[stranger] okay, but wouldn’t that book have the counterspell?

[you] no, someone wrote in the spell at the bottom of the page.

[stranger] didn’t your mother ever tell you not to use spells not put in print?

[you] i’m not very good at following rules.

[stranger] clearly.

[you] hey! it’s not like i WANTED this to happen.

[stranger] well, it happened.

[you] no shit sherlock.

[stranger] so can you fix this?

[you] i’ve never been very good at solving problems.

[stranger] ?

[you] that’s literally why i have a journal. because i can’t solve my problems.

[stranger] so you write about them instead?

[you] yes.

[stranger] i do that too.

[you] do you mind telling me why you write the lyrics you do?

[stranger] what goes on in my mind isn’t necessarily stuff other people want to hear.

[you] i have the opposite problem. everyone wants to see what i put in this thing.

[stranger] and that’s why you cast that spell?

[you] precisely.

[stranger] well, no one else can see it except me.

[you] i don’t know if i prefer that.

[stranger] you’ve read my lyrics. i won’t judge you.

[you] i won’t judge you, either.

[stranger] do you trust me?

[you] i’m not sure.

[stranger] i trust you.

It’s not like you can get any more personal with whoever is on the other end of your messaging journals.

[you] i guess i trust you too.

[stranger] i’m suga.

[you] i’m Y/N.

[suga] nice to meet you, Y/N.

[you] nice to meet you too, suga.

And for some strange reason, as you sit in the quietest corner of the Gryffindor common room, scribbling away on your journal, wasting ink as you watch it disappear on the page before you, you feel like whoever this Suga person may be, you are comfortable with them. It’s as if you were meant to share your writing with them all along.

Keeping the majority of your identities offers some sort of security blanket between the two of you, a safe haven, where neither of you have to specifically worry about the other finding out who you are, or where you are, or why it was you who chose to write in your respective journals. When Suga doesn’t know who you are, and you don’t know who they are, it’s easier, because you feel like you can say anything without worrying about repercussions.

[suga] i never asked you,

[you] hmm?

[suga] are you a she?

[you] do i seem like a she?

[suga] your words definitely read like one, not to be gender stereotypical. i don’t mind if you’re a he, or a they, for that matter.

[you] you read well.

[suga] so i’m right? you’re a she?

[you] got it.

[suga] i’m a he. in case you wanted to know.

[you] i didn’t, but thank you for telling me.

[suga] i’ll tell you anything you want to know.

You’ve refrained from informing your friends that the reason you’ve been so engaged with your journal recently is because there is a mystery man on the other end, responding to you like he’s know you his whole life. You don’t really think they need to know this.

What your friends have noticed is your particular affinity for trying to sneak glances at a certain boy, because they know you and they watch you look around each room you enter, like you’re searching for someone. You’re not exactly very good at being discreet, especially when it comes to the boy with the platinum hair and hazy smile.

“Hello? Earth to Y/N?” A hand waves in front of your face, snapping you out of your mindless trance. When you look down, the inked quill in your hand has drawn a squiggly line all across one of the blank pages of your journal, but this time, it vanishes.

“What?”

“Were you looking at someone?” Your friend asks, an eyebrow raised in something that looks like curiosity and excitement.

“I think so!” Another chimes in. “I think it was him.” She points towards the boy, who’s currently sitting quietly, a quill pointing towards his textbook. He’s surrounded by other boys, all from different houses, and they’re chatting away, tossing bits of food at each other.

“Jungkook? Isn’t he the commentator?”

“No, not him, the Slytherin boy.”

“Yoongi?”

Yoongi. The boy finally has a name. You glance up at the mention of his name, smiling to yourself as you think about him. There is something that makes him stick, something about him that keeps him afloat in your mind, refusing to sink.

“Aha!” One of your friends shriek, making some of the younger students in the Great Hall look towards you, trying to find the source of the exclamation. “You do like him, don’t you?”

Your cheeks heat up furiously, and you scowl, bested by your friends. “No comment.”

“I knew it!”

No point in trying to dig yourself out now. The only thing that you can do is prevent yourself from getting buried any further. “I’ve never even spoken to him before.”

“That’s ridiculous,” your friend says, at the same time another one speaks, saying, “That’s understandable.”

“Why?”

“He’s a quiet kid. He’s in our year, but I never notice him anywhere. He’s always writing something down—doing homework, probably—he’s got fantastic grades—or sitting amongst his friends, that rowdy group of boys from all different years and houses,” your friend explains, and suddenly it all makes sense, why you never see him. It looks to you like he doesn’t want to be seen for whatever reason he may have.

“Trust you to have a crush on him,” your other friend jokes, nudging you with her shoulder as she smirks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You act exactly like him,” your friend spells it out for you. “You’re quiet unless you’re with friends, and you’re always writing shit down in that spell-ridden journal of yours.”

“Don’t bring my journal into this,” you say, hugging the book to your chest tightly, like a security guard.

“All I’m saying is that you should go talk to him.”

Like that’s going to happen.

[you] how old are you?

[suga] eighteen. you?

[you] 17.

[suga] you write well for a seventeen-year-old.

[you] you write well for an eighteen-year old.

[suga] do i, now?

[you] i don’t know what it is, but you write like you’ve already lived a life, and you’re looking back on it.

[suga] like a sad old person?

[you] yes.

[suga] -_-

[you] i’m kidding! you just seem sage. mature mind for an immature body.

[suga] that’s one way to put it. who’s the boy you keep writing about?

You were going to get there eventually. Yoongi, whoever he is, has become somewhat of a recurring character in your poems, the same platinum boy who keeps making a comeback in your writing as he slowly overtakes each crevice in your brain.

[you] just some boy.

[suga] doesn’t seem like ‘just some boy’ to me.

[you] my friends think i have a crush on him. how juvenile.

[suga] do you?

[you] not you too!

[suga] i just wanted to know! it doesn’t seem like you do. it just seems like you’re interested in who he is.

[you] at least you’re not as persistent as they are.

[suga] your poems don’t exactly scream ‘unrequited love with fellow schoolboy’ to me, if it’s any consolation.

[you] at least you’re on my side.

[suga] you haven’t given me a reason not to be.

[you] i don’t know how i feel about him. he just won’t get out of my head.

[suga] in a bad way or a good way?

[you] both? neither? god, i don’t know.

[suga] judging by your poetry about said boy, it must be in a good way. you don’t really write about boys and universes if you’re thinking that they’re a piece of shit.

[you] yes you can! what if i had written something like ‘i wish the universe eats you up so i don’t have to see you again’? that’s not very positive.

[suga] haha i guess you can, then.

[you] i mean, you’re right, i’m not bothered in the slightest with his presence in my head. it’s quite comforting, actually.

[suga] let me guess, you’ve never talked to him?

[you] HOW CAN YOU TELL?

[suga] not hard to. if you had spoken to him, you would’ve written something else, something about his voice. maybe his lips.

[you] what are you, some sort of psychoanalytical journal whisperer?

[suga] shit, you’ve revealed my true identity. i hide out in worn leather journals so innocent, unsuspecting schoolgirls like yourself can come chat to me, then i take their souls and make myself immortal by consuming them.

[you] creep.

[suga] haha. listen, i don’t really know who this boy is, but i, for one, think he’d be lucky to chat to someone like you.

[you] you do?

[suga] you’re witty, sarcastic, well-spoken. i don’t see why any boy would turn down a conversation with you.

[you] thanks, suga.

[suga] hey, i might be a serial killer whose primary method of soul-extraction is via journal, but i’m always here to help.

And alright, so maybe you’ve never met Suga before, but revealing all of your concerns with your crush-not-crush on Yoongi to him doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. In fact, you just might take Suga up on his advice. He seems to know what he’s talking about.

Your subsequent interaction with Yoongi happens the day after Suga told you to actually talk to him, and he’ll be very pleased to know you do just that. Your friends were right—he is always writing something down, even as he’s lying flat on the lawn of the courtyard, textbooks and scrolls of parchment decorating the area around his strewn-out hair, inkwells and used quills among the mix. He looks, for one thing, irrevocably photogenic, and a little bubble of envy pops in your brain. How dare he always look good. That is Not Allowed.

You tentatively approach him, journal resting in your hand by your side, almost blending into your black robes if it weren’t for the difference in the fabric. He’s craning his neck as he writes something down, in some sort of notebook, as he occasionally glances to the side, stretching to see the tiny little font in the textbook to his left. It looks like the most uncomfortable position you could ever somehow warp your body into, but for some reason, he looks perfectly fine.

“Hello.”

Yoongi shoots up, quickly shutting his notebook as he turns to you, eyes blown impossibly wide. Clearly, he’s not used to people talking to him.

“Hi,” he says, short and sweet.

“I’m Y/N.”

“I know.”

It makes absolute sense that he would know who you are, but not you him. It just seems so cliche, how you’ve hardly noticed him throughout your schooling but he’s already seen you in the hallways, his classes, a name easily put to the face.

“Oh, of course you do,” you say awkwardly, chuckling to yourself as you fiddle with the journal in your hands, switching it between your left and your right so you don’t look stiff as a statue.

“Can I, uh, help you?” Yoongi asks. His voice is a little rough, but still smooth, like ice cream with cookie bits crushed into it.

“Me? No, I just wanted to say hello, you know. Get to know you,” you reply, your hand gestures wildly out of control. It seems that you can’t keep still in front of him, fidgeting and squirming like an impatient child, desperate for some sugar.

“Oh,” Yoongi says, hands behind him, propping his body up. “Well, I’m Yoongi.”

“I know.”

Yoongi grins to himself. “Glad we’re on a first-name basis, then, Y/N.” He motions to the journal getting tossed back and forth between your hands, an eyebrow raised in curiosity.

“This? Oh, um, just homework. You have one too, don’t you?” You say, desperately trying to get the conversation off of your journal. You don’t really want to discuss it with him, especially not when there are poems inside of it about him.

He looks to where you’re pointing, the black book beside him, and he chuckles awkwardly, a forced laugh. “Guess we got one thing in common, then.”

“I’m sure we have more in common than that,” you insist.

Yoongi begins to gather up all of his belongings, shoving them into one uneven pile, quills and parchment alike, holding it with both of his hands, his little black book sitting neatly on top. He looks at you, grinning a smile that’s gummy and sweet. “I guess we’ll have to find out about that, won’t we, Y/N?”

With the last word tucked under his tongue, he’s off, walking in the opposite direction from where he was facing you, leaving you embarrassingly breathless in the middle of the courtyard.

That night, when you open up your journal to write down your thoughts of the day, you see that Suga has already beaten you to it, claiming a fresh page for a new batch of lyrics, as beautifully wistful as always.

the awkwardness was only for a moment, i touched you again even though i was gone for a long time without repulsion, you accepted me without you there’s nothing after the dawn, two of us we welcomed the morning together don’t let go of my hand forever, i won’t let go of you again either

You decide to add to the mix, letting the words leave your brain and engrave themselves on the page before you, soft and gentle.

his grin he may have the universe written amongst his eyes but his grin oh, his grin it has hell and heaven all across the outline of his lips. it’s lopsided, like he knows something i don’t, and of course he does, after all, there are nebulas in his irises, comets on the inside of his eyelids, a galaxy painted across his vision, and i see stars.

It’s only a matter of time before Suga opens his journal to see your addition to the mix, sappy words of love, making the both of you terribly hopeless, terribly romantic.

[suga] i take it you spoke to him?

[you] what gave it away?

[suga] all the universe references. i feel like i’m reading a young adult romance novel.

[you] you sort of are, aren’t you?

[suga] it’s a very well-written young adult romance novel. lots of verse, little prose. i’m not good with prose.

[you] is that why you’re a lyricist?

[suga] one of the reasons.

[you] why else?

[suga] to hide behind my words.

[you] hmm?

[suga] i’m a new person when i’m writing. i’ve created an identity for myself.

[you] am i currently speaking with this identity?

[suga] you are.

[you] you’re fascinating.

[suga] that’s the last word you’d use to describe me if you knew who i really was.

[you] i already find it fascinating that you, whoever you decide ‘you’ is, have channeled such emotion into your lyrics that you’ve shaped a new persona out of it. that takes true dedication.

[suga] it’s more of an escape, actually.

[you] tomayto tomahto.

[suga] did you realize halfway through writing that that you couldn’t necessarily emphasize the different enunciations via written text?

[you] maybe.

[suga] you’re fascinating, also. how’s the boy?

[you] don’t tell my friends, but i think they’re right.

[suga] i kind of already figured they were.

[you] hey!

[suga] it’s not hard to tell. only a person in love would start comparing their lover’s body parts to falling meteors.

[you] did my poem scream ‘unrequited love on fellow schoolboy’ to you? well, what do you suppose said person in love should do about it, love expert?

[suga] love expert, huh?

[you] you seem to know what you’re talking about. ever dated someone, suga?

[suga] can’t say i have, but i could offer you some words of wisdom.

[you] fire away.

[suga] do your best.

[you] my best?

[suga] i can’t imagine why this boy wouldn’t want to talk to you. there’s no reason why he would avoid you.

[you] isn’t there?

[suga] no. there isn’t.

With great practice, your conversations with Yoongi slowly transition from awkward, empty small talk to mindless chatter you don’t mind listening to, not when you find yourself lost in the haze of his voice as it settles around you, invading your senses. Listening to him speak is like listening to the white noise in The Three Broomsticks, soothing and peaceful. It is so difficult not to drown in the sound.

“How long have you known about me?” You ask him one day as you’re secretly camping out in the Slytherin common room, completely immune to the confused and snarky looks the other Slytherins are sending your way, you, a Gryffindor with that obnoxious red collar of yours.

Yoongi tilts his head back on the edge of the couch, revealing that beautifully smooth neckline that you want to do things to, but you won’t mention that. “Since first year, I suppose. I remember your name.” He looks at you, a cheeky smile on his face. “You didn’t remember me, though.”

“Hey! You were a quiet kid,” you defend yourself.

Yoongi chuckles heartily at your indignation.

Perhaps this is crossing the line, but every marker has been blurred over the past few weeks that you’ve been talking, the border between you two nothing more than fuzz, so you reach over, twirling a bit of his platinum bangs in between your fingers. “When’d you do your hair?”

“This summer. Can’t you see my roots?” He asks, tipping his head forward to reveal the most beautiful blend of ivy black and lightning blonde atop his head.

“It looks good.”

“I need to dye my hair again,” Yoongi huffs. “What color should I do?”

“Green? Like your robes?” You suggest jokingly, and he scrunches his nose up at the thought of him, with bright green locks.

“Maybe not. How about pink, like yours?” He contemplates.

“My robes aren’t pink.”

“Close enough.”

“You’d match all the Gryffindors,” you remind him.

He shakes his head. “No, I’d just want to match you.” When you look at him, his cheeks are tinted the same shade of pink you’d imagine would decorate his hair, a soft rose color that makes him glow in the morning, afternoon, and evening.

[you] is suga the only identity you’ll allow me the pleasure of meeting?

[suga] i wouldn’t exactly call it pleasure.

[you] i find it pleasurable. you’re wonderful to talk to.

[suga] i feel like you’ve become too trustworthy of me.

[you] maybe you’re right. i mean, i haven’t heard of many pedophiles who write crushing lyrics about loneliness and the loss of youth, but you never know. you could be a serial killer.

[suga] and you’re making jokes about it?

[you] you’re not a serial killer, suga, though it would be nice to know who the person holding the quill is.

[suga] i’m not so sure you’d like to know.

[you] what’s not to like?

[suga] most things.

[you] you say you’ve created an identity for yourself, but i highly doubt that identity varies much from who you really are. we don’t have to meet or anything. i’d just like to know who you are.

[suga] i feel like meeting is the only way we could do this.

[you] i’m in school, i can’t just up and leave. i don’t even know where you are.

[suga] i’m in school, too.

[you] are you, now? where?

[suga] i don’t imagine i make it difficult to guess.

[you] let’s see. you write in english, which could mean nothing considering lots of foreign schools are teaching english anyway, but you write lyrics in english, which means you have a greater understanding of the language, so you’re a native speaker. this could put you in america, england, or australia, for the most part. if you said you were in school as any sort of consolation, then that means us meeting isn’t at all implausible, which places you in england, at hogwarts. and judging by that, you definitely know who i am.

[suga] who’s the sherlock now?

You wish you could say it would surprise you that you’ve narrowed it down so well, and that the very person you’ve been messaging via journal has known you this entire time, but it doesn’t. And in the dusty crevices of your brain, there lies a sneaking suspicion as to who you’ve been speaking to, and it both excites and terrifies you.

[you] where do you want to meet, fellow hogwarts student?

[suga] the courtyard?

Suspicion confirmed. Guess you are quite the Sherlock, after all.

When you turn the corner of the hallway and the courtyard comes into view, a certain platinum-haired boy with unruly roots and a lopsided smile catches your eye as he sits on the ledge of the wall, foot tapping on the ground to some imaginary song, probably one of his own. You walk up to him happily, your arms swinging by your side, the journal resting in your hands.

He sees you, too, and he stands up when you near him, mouth open to offer some sort of explanation, but you beat him to it.

“Suga, huh?” You say somewhat loudly, your voice unwavering, filled to the brim with confidence.

Yoongi’s eyes widen, the same look he had on his face when you approached him but a few weeks prior. “You knew?”

“Not until yesterday,” you admit. “But I had a feeling.”

“What gave it away?”

You grin. “I hate to break it to you, Yoongi, but you and Suga speak the same way, an aura of concern and disregard lacing your words. If you were trying to run from the police by hiding under a different name, you’d be absolute shit at it.”

“Wow, thanks for telling me that,” Yoongi says, chuckling. “I guess I better work on my soul-sucking tactics.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Can I—can I see that, for a second?” Yoongi asks, motioning to the journal in your hands.

You hold it out for him, and when he takes it from you and opens it up to compare it with his, sure enough, your messages, poems, and lyrics cover the pages of both of your journals, the scrawl completely mirrored. He gives it back to you almost instantly, shoving it into your outstretched hands as he fumbles in the pockets of his robes, pulling out a quill with a bit of dry ink on the end. Quickly, he flips his journal open to a clean page, untouched by the both of you, and wets the end of his quill with his tongue. When you look down at that exact same page, you watch him draw on one page, curving the line to reveal half of a heart, split right down the middle where the books are bound.

“May I?” You ask in response, and he lets you grab hold of the quill in his hand. You look down, finishing the heart out on the opposite page, and the both of you look down at your respective journals, watching the ink fizzle into the journal like it was never there in the first place.

“Good to know we’re both on the same page,” Yoongi jokes, shooting his beautifully gummy smile your way, making your cheeks heat up at the sight.

You shut your journal and hold out your hand, a symbol of peace, friendship, romance, or all of the above. He takes it gladly. “Haven’t we always been?”

When you go back to your dormitory that night, you open up your journal to find a message from your one and only, written in the same spot where that heart once was.

[yoongi] i love you.

[you] i love you, too.

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#bangtanwriters-net #kwriterskollection #yoongi fluff #bts fluff #bts scenarios #yoongi scenarios #bts hogwarts #bts hogwarts au #bts imagines #yoongi imagines #suga imagines #suga fluff #w: interconnection #w: sorted #thiS WAS SUCH A BEAST AND I RUSHED TO FINISH IT SO IT'S A LIL SHAKY #but i think she turned out pretty not terribly #i am so tired. it's nearly midnight here. and im crying

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