#also ik he is just a crush and I don’t treat him like he’s real in reality — but Bya is very important to me and that’s why any man I like - | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

brisquad-unit-4402 · 2 years

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zombie au with ike ft. luxiem - In Pursuit to and from the Sun

(i think this submission got lost in the sauce and i can't find it but at least i still have this screenshot)

lmao sorry i went off the grid for a sec. life happens, you know, applied for some vsf programs, went on a classified operative excursion away from my post and got a new writing software. i actually wrote the last of this on a helicopter returning from the mission so that’s why i didn’t proofread beforehand sorryyyyy. but more importantly I TOUCHED GRASS. guys. i touched so much grass. i touched so much grass i could replant a garden. call me a topiary, i touched that much grass. is this what it’s like to work at a dispensary? bc i touched so much grass

a few disclaimers: this fic is ike centric but contains general luxiem angst as a treat and may be read in a platonic or romantic tone, whichever you prefer. it's also another 10.7k words long so if you want to read but don’t have the time, use a like/rb as a bookmark. most importantly: heed the tags for this one, i kind of went off the deep end here

tags: platonic relationship, hurt no comfort, angst, zombie au, no happy ending, gender neutral reader

⚠️ major character death, suicidal thoughts, gore, infection, arson, and apocalypse-typical violence

continued au notes and commentary here (spoilers)

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Ever since the initial zombie outbreak, you’ve been running around the country with your best friend Ike and the circle of close friends you both share. You’ve made peace with the fact that it will always be hard. You and your band hop around from town to wilds, with no real objective other than to survive. Every location has something to glean, after all. It’s just that the zombies are always on your tail, and there’s only so much looting to do before the chorus of dead can tear you and your family apart.

It’s deluded to pretend you’re the invulnerable main characters, though. You and your friends are in a townhouse currently being ambushed by a strain of zombies. You swear they’ve gotten more intelligent since your last encounter. A dense herd of bloodthirsty undead is one thing, but a dense herd of bloodthirsty undead that have a chance of understanding positioning is another. Closing doors is barely a second of relief now.

You were lucky to be in a room with Vox when you got ambushed. He lived his post-apocalyptic life with a rebar rod in his hand, wrested from a collapsed concrete building early in during the initial outbreak. He claimed to be a trained swordsman once, and even though the rebar was more of a club than a sword, you admit you would’ve been worse than dead if you didn’t have him by your side. You’re sure he’d be screwed without you, too. Now that the world’s gone to the dogs, you stay prepared with a pair of climbing picks that can clobber in zombie brains just as well as scale walls. Vox shoved zombies out of the way while your picks cleared a path to escape from the house out through the window, Vox in tow.

You and Vox reunite with Ike and Shu outside. The former keeps various kitchen knives hidden under his no-longer white mantle, and defends Shu from stragglers while he digs into his backpack. You notice his weapon, an iron fire poker, by his feet along with a bottle. He rips sheets off of an old Millwall brick to stuff inside the bottle.

“Blowing the place up,” Shu says, in case you didn’t make the connection already. His breath is ragged. “Where’s Luca and Mysta?”

Like a stage cue, you hear the rocket of gunfire the second he says it. Your hope is crushed. Noise attracts zombies, and Luca was the only one with a shotgun. If he pulled the trigger, the situation was even more dire than you thought.

Shu grits his teeth and repeats himself, intensity barely restrained. “Where is Luca and Mysta.”

“I’m going back in,” Vox declares.

Ike drives a knife into the head of a fallen body. Destroying the brain confirmed they wouldn’t regenerate, and he minimizes the risk as precise as a surgeon. He made short work of the zombies that hadn’t overrun the house yet, but you could see them flood the interior. “Don’t be stupid, Vox, that’s suicide.”

“You heard the gun!”

“And I said that’s suicide!”

“Not if someone goes back in!”

“How are you going to find them without getting yourself killed?” Vox opened his mouth, but no sound came out, and Ike took advantage of it. “That’s what I thought. Luca’s our muscle and Mysta’s a clever guy, you’ve seen him outsmart the zombies so many times before!”

“They know basic organization, Ike!”

“All the more reason not to go back in! Have some faith in your friends!”

Vox grants him an unholy leer through his haunting yellow eyes. “How dare you lecture me about faith when I’m trying to save their lives.”

His glare was lost. Ike focuses on confirming the dead stay dead. His back is turned from the swordsman as he chops a skull in two with a butcher’s cleaver. “Because no matter what, they’re going to get out, and they want you out just as much as they’re fighting.”

But Ike’s words were just as lost to Vox; you barely saw the trail of his blood-splattered haori before he ran back to the townhouse, rebar in hand and fury on display.

Shu shoves the remains of the Millwall brick into the cupholder of his pack, a battering ram for another day. He produces a box of matches instead. “It’s best to take them all out at once.”

You speak up. “But Vox just-”

“I know.” Shu’s lips purse. “And I’m not going to throw them. Not until I know they’re all safe.”

You watch as Vox speared through a living corpse, then threw its remains on the ground. The zombies are centered inside the house, but the windows are all covered. The door stays open as he passes through the threshold, but you can’t see a trace of him left.

Ike stabs through a brain close to you and Shu. You see him heft himself up, and the traces of a permanent dead remain on the ground. The head is split open with precision, and the brain blooms out from the skull. It leaks pink nerves and black rot among the blood, like a disgusting flower.

He passes by you, dead set on his goal. “You’re not going, Reader.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“And don’t expect to.” Ike’s words are emotionless, but not cold. As much as he pushes away Vox, you know he cares for everyone in your group like brothers. He’s the least risky out of all six of you- after all, he’s tearing apart zombie brains without a complaint while you catch your breath and Shu stands watch.

You draw your climbing picks and follow him to the field of dead. “Let me help you.”

You feel useless just standing there, after all.

Though the task of confirmation is much calmer than fighting for your life, it’s still unenviable, and you have to admire how Ike distances himself seemingly so easily from it. You try not to look at their faces, but that’s just as impossible. After all, the brain is right between the eyes. That’s the worst part.

You made the mistake of looking into zombie eyes twice in your life.

The first was your first fight of the apocalypse; a zombie had you deadlocked in an aisle of an outdoors store, and only when it was within biting range did you drum up the courage to grab the first thing you saw- two fluorescent orange climbing picks, never used- and drive them into the writhing heart. You bolted then, too focused on escape than freezing, and those climbing picks proved themselves to be your best survival tool in combat and exploration.

The second was the first time you confirmed the dead, and those eyes, that face- skin and bone but youthful, blue bleeding through the iris like a cracked yolk, remains of eyeliner and mascara along her deteriorated features- she was a person, so young, so beautiful when she was alive, like she knew she had decades to go- sometimes you swear she’s the face you see at night when you remember how human and how simply unlucky this world is now. It’s simply unlucky, and being unlucky is simply brutal.

(You held back your tears when you bashed her brain in. Later that night you pulled your best friend Ike aside, and cried in mourning of a woman whose name you never learned. He didn’t complain then, either, and you only sobbed harder when you realized as much as he comforted you, he could never muster up the vulnerability to grieve himself.)

You club a pick into the forehead of the fresh, putrid dead. The other pries it open, and a third swipe pulverizes with finality.

It’s messy. When you drive your weapons into the skull there’s a crack of metal against bone, and a thin gush of blood that spurts out to your arms. Especially large openings reveal nodules of black rot spotted through the brain. If you focus, you can see the moist, moldy texture seep through the wrinkles of the brain, and if you were any less jaded it’d be enough to make you turn your head and hurl.

But the deed is done in only three stabs, and you cling onto that fact. The more mechanical the task is, the easier it is to drive yourself to just get it done. Club, pry, pulverize. Club, pry, pulverize.

You pass by one of Ike’s carvings as you move onto another body. His work is premeditated from habit; he usually does this deed while everyone else recuperates. A standard chef’s knife is his weapon of choice when he faces against zombies, but he keeps a cleaver sheathed to his side when he has the time to get precise. One good slash goes through bone. Bone sweeps through the brain, and the work is done, and he carries on to the next, messy on his mantle but clean in the cut.

There are only a few more bodies left untouched on the yard where you hear heavy steps on the grass and Shu’s voice cry out. “Luca!”

You and Ike snap up. Luca’s blond hair is matted to his face with blood and rot as Vox runs beside him. They look like they ran through a blender of decayed flesh, and considering the herd of dead inside the house, perhaps that isn’t so strange of a metaphor. Even as Luca sprints, he turns to pump shotgun lead to the predators when they get closer, and each corpse’s fall is punctuated by hot gunfire.

Shu calls out his name again frantically. The men return, and so do you and Ike, five missing one. “Luca, where’s Mysta?”

“It’s bloody,” Luca simply says. His breath is short, and he wipes at the mess of gore and hair on his forehead. All it accomplishes is smearing black and red together along his face and in a blotch along his arm.

“But where is he, I need to know!”

“And it’s so much.” He trails off. He stares into the side of the townhouse and beyond the distance. Strapped to his back is his go-to weapon, a baseball bat littered with nails, each with residue dripping off the spikes from freshly killed zombies. “There’s a lot. Oh, I’m feeling kind of- kind of cold.”

“He’s in shock,” Ike says. He takes Luca’s hand in his, but Luca doesn’t even react. “Oh, Luca. What happened?”

“Kind of a lot?”

“Where’s Mysta?”

“He…” Luca’s eyes dart to the center of the townhouse. “He’s stuck, because of me, isn’t he?”

“Alright, lay off the man.” Vox intervenes. “We’re done asking questions. Shu. Your matches. Light it up.”

“What?!” Shu screams at Vox. You’ve heard him yell, but never once have you heard him scream. Especially not with Vox sounding so detached. “No, are you crazy? Mysta is in there!”

“Light it up, Shu-“

“I said, no! No! No way, not a- not a fucking chance!”

“Shu, listen to me!” Vox thunders. “I’m sorry, but Mysta is gone.”

Shu stands his ground. His features are tense, and his ultraviolet eyes burn holes through the earth. “Not a fucking chance.”

“Mysta is gone,” Vox insists, and you hear his bassy voice break even lower. “I saw it myself.”

“He is not.”

“It was too overrun, it’s miraculous Luca even got out.”

“Mysta,” Luca says, and closes his eyes. Ike holds him upright and rubs his arm, as comforting as he possibly can in the worst situation, as much as possible when his own face is just as distraught as everyone else.

“And I wish with everything that I have that I could’ve gotten him out,” Vox continues, more of his own justification than anyone else. “And I wish I was just a little faster, and that they were a little further away, and, God, that he wasn’t trapped, but he was, and I wasn’t fast enough, I wasn’t close enough…”

Shu is murmuring his own protests to himself at this point, and feeling the pit in your stomach yourself, you reach to hold his hand. He jerks away like you’re made of lava. You feel ill. “You’re lying to me.”

“And he got bit, and he knew that meant death. And he ran, ran upstairs, to draw them away from us, and there were more, and he knew, he knew, he knew he was dead but we weren’t.”

Luca lets his head fall on Ike’s chest. Ike becomes his crutch, and holds him. “Mysta.”

“His distraction saved Luca’s life. And mine if I was slow.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He was a hero,” Vox says.

“Stop.” Shu’s eyes shut. He looks like stone about to break, paralyzed in denial as the proper grief is setting in. His hands dive and clasp around yours. He’s trembling. You squeeze back. “Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.”

“He was a hero, and our brother, and the sun. Please don’t devalue his sacrifice like that.”

“Oh my god.” Ike interrupts, and his face is paler than the dead. “Oh my god. Oh my god, Luca, don’t look.”

With one hand, he buries Luca’s head into the fabric of his mantle, and with the other, he points to the tallest point of the townhouse.

You crane your neck up and squint. The townhouse has one window peeking out from the room along one small wall. When you recognize the shapes through the window your legs nearly give out. Startling, saturated, unadulterated horror grips you. You see his hat.

“He’s still alive,” you whisper. “Or he rose. But he’s still surrounded.”

With revived desperation Vox grasps Shu by the shoulders. “Don’t devalue his sacrifice, Shu, you know better than anyone he never wanted to fall victim to that curse. Let him and the rest of the zombies pass on properly, like a hero should. Light the match, please. Please.”

You absorb the chaos as if you weren’t there. You’re detached. Nothing feels real, not even as Ike strokes Luca’s hair, distressed and staring at the window, while Luca is just as distanced as you are. Vox’s heroic resolve shattered as he recounted Mysta’s last moments, and Shu, the smart one out of your group, can’t even function anymore. You knew everyone considered themselves each other’s family, but Shu and Mysta were especially close, and it tears you apart to watch Shu finally grasp the terror of the townhouse ambush.

Shu lets go of your hands to cover his face. Through the gaps between bloodstained gloves, you can see the sparkle of tears. He’s crying. “This isn’t possible.”

“Do the right thing,” you say. “Do what he would’ve wanted.”

Shu stands so still. He looks up to the sky, as if it could all go back just by an hour. The clouds just kept rolling.

He picks up a bottle and lights a match.

“This can’t be happening.” A teardrop nearly flicks out the match, but he gathers his strength, and places it by the newspaper wick. The paper flares alive in caution orange.

Shu breathes in. You see his face is scrunched up from crying even as he tries to aim, and it’s like he’s aged years in a matter of minutes. His face has never truly been clean of dirt or gore in weeks, just like the rest of you, but even under the orange fire his eyes go dull. There’s weight under his eyelids, and his mouth is forced into a tight, shaky frown as he exhales.

“I’m so sorry.” Even when it was a zombie Shu always apologized before killing. He treats it as a blessing of what they once were. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry it had to be this way.”

Shu throws the molotov.

You lose track of Mysta’s silhouette as the townhouse goes up in flames.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

The death of Mysta Rias was the death of the sun, and the world has been even drearier than the desolate land would have you think.

Everyone lives on edge frostily. It’s barely been a month since he passed, but the wound hesitates to close.

Ike is maybe the best adapted to your band of six now as five, but even then you can tell he’s not the same. He’s a champion of reservation. Every sweep of his knives into dead flesh are purposeful, every word spoken is calculated.

You think back on that night you cried in Ike’s arms the first time you confirmed the dead. You still haven’t seen him cry. Strange, since he was the type to get emotional at sappy movies and video games before the first outbreak. You’re worried, but he insists he can keep it together. To be fair, he’s doing an excellent job at not having a conniption, but the way that he acts so much more emotionally distant isn’t exactly inspiring confidence either.

But Vox, for all he puffs himself up about making sure no man gets left behind and all that heroic junk, hesitates far more than his honed swordsmanship would have you think now that Mysta’s gone. It hasn’t gotten in the way of surviving yet, but you have to wonder when it will. He’s gotten indecisive and requires time to think- great for planning, not so much for a live-or-die fight.

Luca’s the one that surprises you. You wouldn’t go so far as to call him happy when your band of friends started roaming the country together, but he was good natured, and was the first to pick himself up from a bad scrape. He had a sly, sideways curve to his lips whenever he laughed, but it’s been so long since you’ve heard it that you’re starting to forget the way his skin curves into smile lines.

He doesn’t smile at all, really. As optimistic Luca was, it was no secret Mysta was the other half of the laughter in your group, and now that Mysta was gone the morale was as well. Luca keeps up his positive attitude as much as he can but it’s rare, and it’s quiet when you see it.

You notice whenever someone lights the campfire, he’s never around to watch it, and no one makes him do it. You don’t think anyone’s ever talked about it out loud, nor has he ever let himself show it. But when he turns around to feel the warmth, Vox is always to his front, blocking off the bright blazes, and sits by him while he cooks game. You have a theory Vox hasn’t given up his hero complex yet, but for as tense as he gets by the fire Luca hasn’t had a breakdown yet either. Unless things change, you won’t bring it up. Your group has never experienced a loss quite like this in the zombie apocalypse, and all things considered, for as awful as the morale it could be much, much worse.

Speaking of much worse, Shu…

He was a wreck when Mysta passed away, and that’s putting it lightly. When you ran from the remains of the burning townhouse and into a forest, your footfalls were punctuated by Shu’s shortened breaths, and he held back hiccups as you left Mysta behind. By the time Vox figured you were safe from the horde and Ike’s feet gave out from exhaustion, Shu’s eyes were shut tight in disbelief.

You barely uttered a word to him before he fell back into sobs, and when you offered a hand he threw himself to you. It was disorienting. You always considered Shu the face of serenity and restraint even in your lives before the apocalypse, and after the outbreak he was always the one that could find the best path to follow for the greater good of all six of you. But now there were only five, and the grief was fresh.

But Shu howled. He clawed himself against your chest in inconsolable wails, and his face was contorted, sore and raw red in splotches of unmuted primality, nearly unrecognizable. There was an animal in your arms. Agonized.

“It’s not possible,” he heaved. His articulation was lost in his eruption. “It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be!”

You didn’t have any words to say, and clearly Shu didn��t either. He howled again as his bestial hands clutched around your arm. Nails dug through his gloves and into your skin, and if he clutched you any tighter he’d tear the flesh off the bone straight, a creature of despair. Screaming and howling, and soon enough he was choking on his own spit and the block of mourning in his throat, some ugly peals of tears and snot, and the remains of rot on his hands and blood against the hollows of his ghastly cheek; the ash left in his lungs and the smoke that lingered in his hair, and the flames that licked through his fingers and inside the bottle and outside the glass; the blazes that ate through the wood of the house, the very same hue as his brother’s favorite shirts, his hat, flickering a cycle of brightness and color and roiling heat until he knew the fire had swallowed up what remained of Mysta.

Shu had no choice but to scream. When his throat took away that privilege he mustered up what he could of his vocal chords and churned. All his mouth went dry but he still smacked his tongue against his gums and huffed out seethings and surges of thin breath through gritted teeth, more akin to wheezing than anything else he’d howled but the pure distress gone untouched.

He eventually exhaled himself into an uneasy sleep, but even in sleep his face was still struck with suffering. Rest was more like a pause to a realized horror than it was a reprieve. You and Ike cleaned him up and laid him sideways on the ground for the night- after all, it had been an awful day, and as the moon rose in the sky you know you wouldn’t be getting anywhere after the horrible events, much less with an unconscious Shu.

Luca spent the rest of his day detached from his own experience, even after the shock wore off. When Shu’s composure broke, Vox had attended to Luca, and they quietly wept together while Shu bawled. By the time Shu began to rest, Luca looked into the ground, water bottle in hand.

Vox approached you while Ike started a fire and prepared some rations for the rest of the group. “He’s not taking things awfully, but I’m concerned for him,” he said. “Luca, I mean.”

“I know you mean Luca,” you responded. You couldn’t hide your own exhaustion from the day either.

“As much as I hate to say it, Shu freaking out was to be expected. He and- and Mysta- those two- they were so close. And Luca, too. I thought he would freak out like Shu, but hell, Reader, I cried more than him. I know I get emotional and he’s better at keeping it down than me, but…”

Vox’s eyelids fluttered as he looked up at the dark sky. His eyes were red. “I’m just concerned, that’s all. It’s not like him.”

“Well, living without-” Your exhaustion dragged down your sentence before you could finish it. You thought you were well-adjusted to the death, but your voice caught before you could utter his name. You cleared your throat. “Living like this. There’s going to be a lot of weird changes, and everyone mourns differently.”

“I suppose you’re right.” But Vox didn’t look too pleased to hear that. “We need to protect him.”

“He does plenty of protecting himself. And we look out for each other regardless.”

“Then we should look out for him especially.”

“Of course. I don’t want him to get overexerted.”

“And let’s tap out of any interaction if we can, including looting. Last thing we need is to get into another big fight with the zombies, or worse yet, other survivors.”

“Avoiding fights has always been our M.O.” A chilled breeze ran through the forest. Vox fiddled with his haori. You stared right through him. “Sorry if this comes across as weird. But do you really think laying low is a good idea?”

“It’s dangerous to let anything interfere with us.”

“We’re in the zombie apocalypse, Vox, everything is dangerous. It’s not like I can just wave a wand and poof, we’re immune from the plague. Besides, we’re just two out of s- out of five. We’ll figure it out when it’s not so late, and Luca and Shu are in working condition.” You squinted. “Hey. Enough about them for a second. Has anyone ever asked you if you’re okay, Vox?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Is now. How are you holding up?”

“What, do you want me to lie to your face? No one’s doing well.” He averted his eyes, and you knew he was averting the question. “I could ask you the same thing. Shu was intense.”

“Tired,” you said. “Just plain tired. I don’t even think I have the energy to properly grieve.” And just like the man standing before you, you averted your eyes as well. “I don’t think I want to either. I don’t know. I miss him a lot, but I don’t have the time to miss him. Not when the apocalypse is literally unfolding in front of us and there’s people taking the brunt of the loss way harder than I am. I wish I could give him the remembrance he deserves.”

Vox nodded slowly. He didn’t say anything in response, and the silence made you feel like you aged hundreds of years in his presence.

“You’re very observant, Reader,” he finally said. “And you spend a lot of time making your own conclusions before you act. That’s smart. But knowing too much prevents you from action, full stop.”

Campfire smoke curls around the chilly air and by Vox’s face. His head was still angled up to look at the sky, and the orange glow against his sharp features weathered him into a dreary oil painting. There was a gash between his cheek and ear where a tree branch hooked him while he evaded a zombie’s grapple, and the light illuminated the soft pink flesh exposed under the cut of skin. The corner of the gash met his thoughtful frown. “Every moment of life teaches you something. I’m wondering when it’ll be too much and we simply can’t go on the way we used to.”

“Might be soon.”

“Today definitely sped it along.”

The fire crackled. You and Vox sat there unmoving, too focused on the blaze and how controlled it was compared to the townhouse.

Even as the tinder burns, your thoughts were still so awry now that the group got smaller. Vox had a point about Luca. You needed to keep an eye out on him in case he’s putting on a brave front. Even then, you didn’t like how Vox deflected your concern, but prodding him would only make it worse, especially when the loss was so fresh.

Your thoughts drifted to Ike, and how you haven’t managed to share a word with him at all since the townhouse burning. He hasn’t cried, you recall, not a single time since the first outbreak. You admired his composure but now that Vox admitted his own fears for the others (and neglected to tell you the ones about himself), you can’t help the unease that settled into your stomach. What were his thoughts like? Everything went off the rails whenever you tried to collect yourself, but if Ike was able to keep it all under wraps, then his mind must be a storm.

Speak of the devil. Ike hands Luca a small can of beans, but the blond stayed by his lonesome. Your best friend took the empty seat beside you, and gives you and Vox your dinner.

You thanked him, and after savoring what little you had of your portion, you asked how he’s doing.

“Just gotta get through another day,” Ike responded.

Then he tipped the last of his beans into his mouth and stared at the fire, just as you did after talking with Vox. He was unreadable as ever, but the only thing you could glean from him with confidence is that he had just as much on his mind as you thought. Maybe even more.

You wished he would just tell you.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

But grass grows over graves, and even if Mysta didn’t have a proper send off, time waits for no one.

Once Shu woke up, his face was a mess of bleariness and exhaustion. Something in his bright eyes froze over during the night. Amethyst faded to plastic.

“We’ll keep moving,” he declared, and his voice chilled you to the core. He called out the order as a leader, not a friend, without the care or delicacy he always granted to your group. His emotion died with Mysta.

(And you saw Vox ready himself to refute, but once he met those purple eyes filled with something unearthly, he shank under Shu’s presence.)

Days pass. All of them are spent on the road. The group spends as little time resting as possible just to get a few extra miles out to your next destination.

Shu and Luca say it’s to get away, but they end the sentence differently. Shu says to get away from the zombies. Luca doesn’t finish his thought at all.

It’s no surprise that Vox opposes it. The more distance between the group and the townhouse, the more he speaks his mind.

But Shu is determined to go further, just as much as Vox is convinced everyone needs to lay low.

And in all the time you’ve known these men, you’ve never seen any of them fight against one another quite like this. Vox always concedes, but not before Shu spits venom and he flings it right back. Their words are always about the plan, their future, where the group is going and why don’t they wait out the zombies instead of these hourly skirmishes on the road; but everyone can tell there’s more lying in subtext than the literal argument. You’ve seen the way Vox grits his teeth and musters up his courage whenever he’s about to tell Shu off, and you know that disgusted glare Shu gives Vox whenever he brings up hiding from the zombies.

Ike usually ends up being the one to break up their fights. One dismal evening while he lectured them both about teamwork and other platitudes, you and Luca sat next to each other. He’s a big guy, but he’s lost a lot of weight from rationing, and his expression looks like an abandoned dog more often than not these days.

He talks quietly, but plainly. “Shu hates me, doesn’t he?”

“What?” The bluntness startles you. “Luca, listen to yourself. He could never.”

“He could.”

“He wouldn’t,” you insist. “He’s gone through a lot, and he’s not taking it well, but I know it’s always because he wants to protect you. All of us.”

“So is Vox. But he just shuts him down without a thought. You ever wonder why, Reader?”

“To get away from the zombies,” you recite. That’s always his reasoning. Staying put in one place just means more time for zombies to gather at the scent of the living.

“So would finding a secure shelter, like how Vox says.” Luca sits with his knees close to his chest, and watches from a distance at the quelled fight. Vox says something, and you can see Shu’s face contort even though you can’t hear what he says. “But he doesn’t even listen to him. He doesn’t even listen to you, Reader, when you try to break it up.” He holds his legs closer to himself. “I don’t know if he’s ever listened to me. Or anyone.”

“He would if you told him you feel like that. He’d understand.”

“Would he really?” You nearly answer that before you realize the question is rhetorical. “You’ve got eyes, Reader. Be attentive like how I know you always are and look at how he looks at us. Me and Vox.”

You try to follow Luca’s request but Ike is speaking, and Shu’s eyes close.

He elaborates. “It’s not a nice look.”

“He’s stressed.”

“Then why doesn’t he ever look at you like that? Or even better, why does he listen to Ike only, and how come it never seems to stick?”

“He’s going through a lot.”

“We all are.”

Across the camp, you watch Ike run a hand through his hair. Shu is still talking, and Vox sighs.

“I think he blames us.”

You grab Luca’s arm. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s obvious anyways.”

“Because that’s our friend.”

“He hasn’t acted like one for a long time.”

“Because he’s lost so much.”

“We were all friends,” Luca snaps. “We lost just as much. Hell! I was in the house! We were together! And then we got separated, and unlike someone Vox actually tried to help him out until- and I should’ve- we saw him get bit, and I couldn’t- I just, I-”

Luca shuts himself up. Your hand falls from his arm to his palm and squeezes. No life returns your gesture.

You sit in the stagnant silence.

“I’m sorry.” Luca lowers his head. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Get it off your chest, Luca. I won’t hurt you.”

“No, I don’t think I should.” He unwraps his legs, and stands up from the ground beside you. “I’m not going to say it and be an awful friend, even if he’s acting like one.”

Before you could ask what the hell that was supposed to mean, Luca already turned his back, and you sat alone from the argument as he walked away from everything.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Despite all their bickering, Shu and Vox lead the group through travel. It’s more likely that the bickering is the exact reason why. The fire iron and rebar push aside the greenery, until Vox stops with his rebar casting the brush aside. “Fucking finally.”

You catch up and look across the hill. Buildings. This used to be a small rest town in a clearing between the hills before the outbreak, but now the bright signs are dimmed out and dirtied. Not a soul lurks in the abandoned town, including the dead.

“We’re not stopping,” Shu says.

“Piss off, Shu. I’m tired.”

“You’re never going to be well-rested.”

“Then how does safe sound?”

“Not possible no matter where you go.”

“But safer than on the road-”

“Guys,” Ike interrupts. “Quit acting like toddlers.”

Vox pouts and Shu squints. None of the three want to get the next word in.

So you speak up instead. “We’re running out of supplies. If we don’t find any more food soon, then we won’t even be able to continue on the road.”

“Reader has a point,” Ike agrees.

Shu’s expression sours. “Fine. We’ll look around, but make it quick. Camping out here is a great way to get robbed.”

“Then we’ll move together and keep watch for one another,” Vox declares, and he smiles. “Welcome to the correct side, Reader, Ike. It’s good to have you on board.”

Ike rolls his eyes. “Don’t drag me into your petty fights.” You fight the urge to quip he’s already in the mess as the mediator.

But the group traverses the hills and enters the remains of the town. The ground is littered with garbage strewn about in the haste for its citizens to flee town- or for the ill-fated, become the corpses dragging along the cement.

The zombies here shamble along independent from one another. That’s the best you could ask for. The only consistent thing about zombie behavior is their danger when in swarms. Alone, they’re nothing but fetid flesh barely clinging onto the skeleton, ready to fall into a hundred pieces at one strike, but when accompanied by others? Fodder makes up for each others’ weaknesses, and no matter how competent or skilled you are, one human is nothing to a crowd of zombies on the warpath.

The zombies of this town haven’t synced up with one another, and you’d like to keep it that way. While on the road, you’ve had plenty of skirmishes with small groups of zombies, but the last time your band faced off against a proper herd, you lost one.

A single zombie clambers to the front of your group. You hear metal against fabric as Ike pulls out his cleaver from its sheath, ready to do the deed, but before he can advance Shu already has his fire poker in his hands and the business end driven through the eyes of the zombie. He twists, assuring the brain is too punctured to allow the body to rise again, and the poker is back at rest. He barely even apologizes to the body as everyone trudges on.

Behind his back, Ike resheathes his weapon. He squints through his glasses, and you can read the confusion between his green eyes. Ike doesn’t meet your glance, but his expression is welcome, as unfortunate as it is. At least you’re not the only one that noticed how out of character Shu has been lately. You’re getting a sinking feeling about him.

However, the moment passes as soon as it appeared, and you and the rest of your friends rove onwards until you come across a set of stairs erring into the earth, surrounded by a dirtied glass entrance.

“Who would’ve thought?” You wonder aloud. “I never would’ve guessed this little town had a subway system.”

Vox raises his hand along the cool glass. “This could be good. The entrance is camouflage pretty well considering the damage of this town, and there might be some preserved food in vending machines. All we need to do is break ‘em.”

“And if there isn’t any food, it’s still a big area,” Ike adds. “Plenty of space and a roof over our heads.”

Luca looks down the staircase. It’s dark, but not unnavigable. The edges of the sidewalk are lined with yellow paint stripes, and features small lights along the walls from a backup generator, most likely. “It’s a good hiding place,” he says.

Luckily for everyone, Shu can already tell he’s defeated, and doesn’t put up much of a fight before you all descend down the stairs.

Not even ten minutes later Luca found a vending machine and smashed it apart with his spiked bat. Vox unwrapped a pack of Oreos with a smug smile.

The subway was no longer in operation and the trains themselves were abandoned, but you found a sign with a map of the station. The subway connected the major areas of the town together, and could be used as secret passages through the ruins.

And most interesting, there were even less zombies underground than under the sun.

“I wonder if the stairs confused them?” Luca says to himself. “Surely a few of them figured it out, since we killed some since we entered the subway, but it might be too complex for herds to come through. Or the architecture itself is confusing.”

You weren’t about to question it. This was one of the most peaceful environments you’ve entered since the outbreak, and there was no way you would ignore the moment to catch your breath, even if you can still cut through the tension with a knife.

You enter first watch with the drifting bond between everyone on your mind, and when Ike relieves you for his watch, you fall asleep in record time.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

An arm jostles you awake. “Reader. Wake up, zombies.”

You curse, albeit a little groggily, but in a flash you’re on your feet. You thumb under your sleeping pad and grab your climbing picks. “I thought we were safe?”

“Not at all.” Your eyesight adjusts after you start walking, but you can already recognize the voice as Ike. Out of the corner of your eye you can spot Shu trying to shake Luca awake, and Vox gathering everyone’s things together. “They’re flooding in fast. Herds of them. Like they’re all on the same wavelength.”

“Like the townhouse.”

It dawns on you and you say it without thinking. Ike’s shoulders freeze over. “Don’t say that. Not so loudly.”

“Fine. What do you need me to do?”

“Get your things together. They’re not here yet, but they will be soon, around the corner we came.”

Vox approaches halfway through zipping a backpack together. “We should take the next right corridor. I remember that leads to a different exit.”

“You sure it’s not the same one the zombies are coming in through?” You ask.

“Positive.”

“We need to stay ahead of the herd,” Shu said, Luca in tow. “No fighting unless absolutely necessary. If we get started now we should be able to get away without overexerting ourselves. Ready?”

No words need to be exchanged. You leave the clearing just as you found it.

A collected groan follows behind you, and a chill runs down your spine. You’ve never heard so many zombies, and never so man all in harmony. The moans arrange together in the cavernous halls, bouncing off the cement and down the station.

The urgency rises once the cries grow closer. Vox breaks out in a run, then Luca, and Shu behind him.

“Right,” Vox calls, and dives at the turn. A zombie greets him. He drives his rebar into its head and flings it away without a second thought like a lancer.

The zombie smashes against a sight with arrows to different stations. Ike swerves out of the way. “Fork ahead, where now?”

“Right? I mean-” He goes one way to view a sign, then sprints the other. “Straight! Straight!”

The dead sing. You can’t think to look back but the smell of rot is suffocating.

Your foot falls under the concrete ground in time with your family, and in time with the stumbling zombies approaching faster than you’ve ever felt before.

Luca halts in his tracks, and you thump against his back. Your mouth parts to speak but your eyes fall upon the exit.

Or rather, the lack of exit.

Boulders of broken concrete hide the stairwell from daylight.

Hot breath strangles you, and you turn with your picks in hand. Swathes of the dead are fixated on your group.

Ike runs straight-on to the choir. You scream out as one reaches for him before he turns at the last fork in the road.

You cut your scream off halfway when you follow him without a second thought.

A hand covered in dirt and mold grasps against the sleeve of your jacket. You swivel and sink your pick into the limb, and the wrist pops off under your blade. The hand goes limp and falls from the fabric.

You hear footsteps behind you, and when Luca speaks up you’re full of relief even if only for a moment. “What now?”

“Just run,” You say back, more of a guess than an order.

Shu drifts in front of you. “Where are we?”

“Give me a moment, I’m trying to think!”

“We don’t have time, Vox!”

“I know, Shu, shut up!”

“Going left!” Ike shouts, and you all move without question.

But you realize only after the zombies cut away the turn that the station turns more decrepit on this side. The tunnels are lined with debris and the floor crumbles away along the painted stripes.

And before you can find a new route, you see a puff of dust from the ceiling.

“The roof!” You shout. You’re gasping to breathe now, and your words stumble upon the exhale.

Shu’s eyes roll up to the flickering light, and you both see the elongated crack above your heads. It’s been in decay for years. How unlucky. How simply, brutally, lethally unlucky.

“Hurry!” He pleads. He’s at the front of the pack, followed by Vox and Luca alongside each other. Ike trails behind you.

The crack in the roof follows your every footstep even as ancient instinct kicks in. Adrenaline shoots through your veins and pushes you forward, accompanied by bits of debris tangling in your hair. The flooring turns from concrete to tile, and with the dirtied mosaic comes a glimmer of hope. Surely you must be going the right way.

The zombies’ cries are loud, but the squeak of your shoe against the tiles is louder. There must be something beyond.

But the ceiling splintering out is the loudest of all.

It all happens at once:

The way that Shu turns at the sound and can’t even get one of his own out before he sees your face-

The powdered cement turning to hail in the blink of an eye-

Your war cry through gritted teeth as you launch off, the fastest you’ve ever run before-

A knife unsheathed in in warmth and frigidity in your midst-

Luca, hated, blamed, petrified.

Your brain catches up through the curtain of scrap. It’s all because of Luca. Even at his most vulnerable, you’ve never thought of him as weak. Nonetheless, his eyes are dead purple crusted against his ghost-white face, and his lips force open while a vein along his neck strains to scream out your name, but he lets out just one small, throaty heave. A miserable noise.

It silences you.

You know it, and he does too. A chunk of ceiling drops mere inches from your last step. Vox approaches, calls out your name before he’s even comprehended the truth before him. You see the dark in his pale eyes tighten into a thin reptilian pupil and he reaches out in desperation.

The last of the ceiling shatters. A broken crag hammers into his palm instead. All you hear is Shu finally get out the scream before the remains of the underground roof shuts you out from your family.

The dead rises in volume. The glimmer of hope evaporates.

You force yourself against the barricade, but your weight is no match for the pile of rubble, and you watch the zombies shamble forward with your back against the wall. The only person you have left brushes plaster away from his eyes with one arm and brandishes a knife in the other.

Ike Eveland looks like hell alive.

It would almost be hilarious if you weren’t facing a subterranean grave. His face is dirtied with mud and rubble, and the legs of his trousers are matted in blood, rot, and dirt, but even then, this is still your best friend. The years you’ve spent alongside him blend together. His once-delicate hands now bear countless scars from travel and fights, but the contours of his face are recognizable even through the dust that mars his skin.

This is an unwinnable situation. You’re locked in checkmate, but Ike stands next to you.

You speak. “No more exits, right?”

Ike swipes at his face again, and the sleeve of his mantle comes back grayer than before. “I think we both know how this ends, Reader.”

“Yeah. I do.”

You both watch the leading zombie shuffle one foot forward, and each of its followers mimic the motion.

You notice Ike’s hand against his face out of the corner of your eye. Then how his shoulders jerk up for a moment, before setting themselves in place, stony and rigid.

His words break your heart. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Me neither.”

“I wish I could refuse all this- all this-”

He sniffs.

You move without thinking, and your mind is set. You wrap your arms around Ike.

He doesn’t even raise his hands. He just leans against your shoulder lifelessly, and lets the tears fall.

You rub his back as he hiccups into your shirt. How long has he been keeping this locked up? You ache for him and all his repression as his body goes limp against yours, the only thing keeping him standing.

“It’ll be okay.” That’s only a lie you can hope is the truth. “After all this. We’ll be okay. Shu and Vox and Luca, too. It’s a straight shot now that all the zombies are on us.”

“I’m going to miss you. All of you.”

“We’re together.”

“I’m sorry this is how it ends.”

“We still have options.”

He scoffs, even as his voice cracks through his quiet crying. “We’re trapped, Reader. There’s no way out.”

“We can still go out on our terms,” you say. You place your hand over his, the one that holds the knife. “Once we’re gone, the zombies are going to search for the other three.”

You squeeze one last time, and break away from the hug. You look upon the wave of dead flesh and rot, and draw your weapons. “I don’t want them to fight any more than they have to.”

“That’s hopeless.”

“It’s all I can do.”

“How are you so calm about this?”

“I’m not sure myself,” you admit. “It’s just that right now, I know I’m in a losing battle, and I accept that. But I don’t accept just laying down and dying like that.”

Your climbing picks cross together as you ready your eerily still mind. The blades scrape against each other. Metal sings. “And I just want to handle things calmly. After all this time, I learned that from you.”

“I don’t know how you can just remember things like that when we’re about to die.”

“I suppose I only die on my own terms. Hey.”

Ike stumbles to his feet. His knife is pointed to the ground. With a tranquility that evaded you all throughout the apocalypse, you steady his posture and guide the blade up to the dead beyond.

Your hand rises up his arm as his eyes close, and he silently murmurs to himself. You rub his shoulder. “You good?”

Ike exhales. His body lowers as he does, and with the breath comes a relaxed posture. This is the most at peace he’s been since the outbreak strangled the past world.

His eyelashes rise. Stormy green seas focus upon the staggering zombies.

“No.” Ike’s lip trembles. But he’s set on the zombies ahead, and a bolt of lightning crosses through his eyes. “But I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Good man.”

“There’s about five of them leading the pack in that corner. We can pick them off and get some more breathing room.”

“Understood, Mr. Tactical.”

“Don’t call me that.” Under the exhaustion and the fear and the grittiness that comes with crying, you hear some of that classic, joking exasperation. You snicker to yourself, but the bittersweet smile remains.

“Mr. Eveland, then.” Your sight hones in on one zombie to your right. Its jaw slides apart as it follows the scent of the fresh living. “It’s been an honor, Ike.”

“Likewise, Reader, we’ll do what we can.”

“Let’s go.”

At your command, you both launch off, laser-focused on the individual dead.

Ike kicks a corpse down to knock it prone, then rakes his knife into the skull, and that’s all you can see before you throw yourself into the fray.

A one-on-one is simple. The zombie in front of you holds out a decrepit hand, perfect for your climbing pick to detach. It stumbles at the force and grants you an opening to clobber its brain in.

Rinse and repeat.

You dive between the steps of your latest kills to divert attention in time to slay another and stay moving. The trick is to use gravity to your advantage. They aren’t smart enough to stand their ground, and when they inevitably fold from the pressure of your picks, it’s like the zombies present themselves for you can finish the job.

The next target swipes at you. You jut one pick down upon the corpse and one more meets the brittle skull. This gives you enough time to duck under a lunge, sweep the leg, and aim to kill.

Something grabs your leg before you plunge the pick in. A body, dismembered from the waist up.

You yelp as yellow-black teeth rise, and frantically kick. The zombie holds on tight, but when you regain your senses, it doesn’t even see the blade incoming before the soft brain squashes in. Splatters of gore and bits of chunky nerve endings sprays against your frame while your sweat mixes in with the stench of rot and muddy mildew.

You step back to reposition. Ike’s clothing is covered in blackened blood, and you watch him plunge his knife into the chests of whatever unfortunate beast approaches next. He twists and yanks out, then goes in for a final blow between the eyes. He has a rhythm established despite the shades of rot against his mantle and shirt. It almost looks routine.

His next victim’s head rolls to the ground and breaks apart like porcelain. The brain is still in place, but the elongated gash through the nervous system confirms it would never rise again.

But one gets the jump on Ike while his back is turned, and he yells out as he thrashes. He swivels on his heel. The zombie maneuvers around even as his hands push back in a fierce gridlock. It snaps its broken jaws in Ike’s face as it snarls, and sinks its claws in. Gunk travels through its saliva.

“I got your back!” While Ike retreats, you trip the dead that crawls in front of you, and dash to his side. You drag your picks into the nape and back of the zombie’s head, and the creature goes limp just in time for Ike to shove it against the wall.

Ike catches his breath, brushes his hand against his arm, and meets your concerned look with a nod in silent gratitude. “They’re gaining on us,” he says. “You don’t need to kill all of them, disabling them is fine!”

“Got it!”

But even that is easier said than done. There are so many zombies in the herd, it looks like you haven’t even left a dent, and your space is getting limited. You hack through the edges of the herd and pray that your wild swipes cut through a limb or two.

“We’re losing turf!”

“Yeah, and I- gaah!”

Ike heaves. Your switch flips from ‘kill zombies’ to ‘check Ike’.

You follow his rasp to the corner of the room, where the ceiling crashed down. His back is pressed against the tiled wall, and he struggles to peel off his mantle.

You don’t even need to ask. His hand clutches his arm, and the chunk of flesh missing from it.

“Holy shit, Ike!” You can’t even mute yourself. Millions of warning bells go off in your head. The internals are coated in a dark membrane from where it meets the oxygen in the air, less red than it is purple, and his veins beside the mutilation rise in an ugly green.

You reach your hands out as you rip off a cut of fabric from your sleeve. “No. No, this can’t be happening-“

He slaps your hand away before you can begin to bandage the blood loss, and immediately crumples. “Don’t do that! It’s the virus!”

“There’s no way it spreads that fast-“

“It will. I don’t want you to have that.” Ike sucks in air through his teeth as he sinks to the floor.

“How did you even-“ you cut yourself off. “It was the zombie that jumped you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. I didn’t even notice the pain when it happened.” He curses in his native language. The green in his veins rise, and branches sprout from the veins under his graying skin, like tree bark. The rapid decay of the outbreak. “Oh, that’s not good.”

The din of the battle behind you is entirely forgotten as you focus on the uneven flesh, the imprint of the bite upon his mangled arm, how nearly every level of the wound has turned to the same rot of the zombies.

Ike’s breathing is labored. The center of his shirt is soaked with the rot of those he killed, and rises and falls shakily.

He smacks his lips, and you’re struck with the realization that talking is a strain. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

You crouch by his side and nod.

“The sheath, on my belt,” he says. “Can you unfasten it?”

You comply without question even through your blurring eyes. I can’t refuse a request from a dead man, you think, and then the weight of your thought slams you.

Ike’s unscathed hand rises from the wound, coated in slick purple gore, and brushes against the handles of his knives. The membrane pools together into beads along the handle. His fingers stop at the last slot in his sheath, and the tip of the cleaver is dyed in the beginnings of the rot.

You think you’re about to vomit your heart out.

“No.” Your voice wavers. “No. No, I can’t do this.”

“You can,” Ike comforts you, and you feel even more like trash. You should be the one comforting him instead. “I trust you.”

And that’s what gets the tears to spill out from your eyelashes. “But I can’t kill you.”

“You said it best earlier. Dying on your own terms, right?”

“But I can’t kill you.”

“I don't want to be one of them,” he admits. “Look around, Reader, we’re surrounded, and we both know there’s no way out. And being one of them, it’s unnatural. It’s just messed up. If I’m going to die, I want to know I’m at rest. None of this- whatever all this is.”

His head lolls to the side. “And I want to see Mysta again.”

The chorus of the dead accompanies Ike’s heavy breathing and your weeping. You are a helpless child.

“I’ll help you,” Ike adds. “I’ll tell you how I usually confirm the dead. You’re my best friend. I trust you.”

It sickens you.

You let out a puff of air as you draw your palm over your eyes. The gore across your face smears over with your tears.

You take the cleaver in your hands.

“Thank you.”

“You deserve better than this.”

“It’s the best we can do. I’m glad.”

“This is so fucked up.” You draw the cleaver with both hands, as if that would end the shaking. Even as you shut your eyes, you can’t get your resolve in place.

“The trick is to be fast,” Ike says, and it disgusts you at how easily he says it. It disgusts you even more when you know the decay is spreading as he speaks, all the way into his raspy voice. “It’s all in the wrist. That’s what keeps it precise instead of clumsy. It’s where all the force is. Don’t swing wide. Just center it where you want to hit. How are you doing?”

“Not good.” Your breathing deepens, a last-ditch effort to remain calm. “I’m scared.”

You force your eyes open. The world floods in white, then falls into the blurred grays of the subway station.

Ike is already so much worse for wear. The bite is entirely blackened, and the discolored skin stretches from his arm to his shoulder, creeping along what little you can see of his neck.

His eyelids are shut, gentle aside from the furrow in his brow.

“Me too.”

Even with his feigned nonchalance, there is so much sorrow laced between his words.

“I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll be safer,” Ike says, and even he doesn’t seem so convinced by it. “Thank you for everything. I’ll miss you too.”

“You’ll always be my best friend.”

You raise the cleaver.

“Please tell Mysta I’m thinking of him. We all are, always.”

“We’ll be watching.”

Ike’s head is lowered, but you still see his attempt at a smile.

You black out as you swing.

There is no memory left of his last moment. It’s all too much to bear.

You cover your face, because looking at him is simply- just- too- much. Blood mixes in with your eyelashes, and you taste metal on your lips.

You don’t even have the energy to scream, or cry, or do anything. You are a husk, and you do not hear Ike’s cleaver clatter to the floor. There is nothing.

Your body moves without your command. You step back, and even though you refuse to look, you know you’re backing away from Ike. Your heart hammers, and so do your limbs. It spreads in droves, this pressure of heartbreak, constricting you and squeezing you apart.

Daggers fall into your skin. You snap out of your stupor.

But once you identify the daggers as teeth, you wish you didn’t.

You tear your hands away from your face as a glob of rot (his rot, you realize, and you can’t even begin to wrap your head around that) flicks out in an arc. The hammering- it’s claws raking against your flesh and tearing you apart like meat.

While you accompanied Ike in his last moments, the outbreak stopped for no one, least of all you. You are no invulnerable main character. You blocked out the roaring chorus as he lay, but it continued outside of your little bubble, and with your back turned they absorbed the last of your free space for a perfect siege.

You veer your head away out of instinct when the teeth pull away, and takes a bite of muscle out with it. The pain is blinding hot- you finally regain your voice in time to screech, but it drowns out through the zombie moans.

A second set of jaws snaps you up. Already your head is spinning, and when you see the sinew from the corner of your vision you resist the urge to faint. If you take a look at the broken skin and extruding vine-veins again, you know you’re going to black out again, and never wake up.

You force your sight to anything else.

You make the mistake of looking into zombie eyes for the third time in your life.

But this time you don’t retain the memory, either. Because for as little time you have left, how could you live knowing that your best friend’s peaceful green eyes snapped open in terror in his final moment?

You choke out, and whether it’s from pain or grief or pure fear, you can’t even tell. Just that it all mixes together into a toxic blend, the poison of your undoing.

And to think, you had the gall to meet such a grisly end head-on minutes ago.

On the ground, next to his limp foot, the steel edge of Ike’s cleaver winks at you.

It’s all in the wrist, he told you, and your blood burns into dust. But Ike is gone, now, and for as horrified as his melted remains were, he was certainly watching your every move.

And the infection is unnatural, and climbs along your shoulder, and there is no agony in the world like this fate.

And you wanted to see Mysta again.

With the last of your strength you regain your legs, and kick off one zombie from your leg. It topples and gives you enough time to shake off another that has you grappled.

The weight shift combined with your blood loss makes you hit the ground hard, but you scrape at the floor nonetheless. You are so weak, and you struggle, so focused on the glint of the blade that you ignore your skin crack apart like mud in a drought.

You reach, bloodied and battered, and so close to rest.

The washed light shines off the cleaver. Its reflection teases you as a monster snatches your foot and send you back into the horde like a toy.

You emit your final scream, and that too dies as hundreds of hands hold you back. Your body and blood is swallowed by the herd of dead.

When you can’t keep your eyes open anymore, the dark in your mind rearranges to replicate the cleaver. Then it flattens, and you see the haunted remains of Ike Eveland between it.

The only sound left is teeth meeting bone.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

#ike eveland x reader #ike eveland #ike eveland angst #luca kaneshiro #mysta rias #shu yamino #vox akuma #luxiem x reader #luxiem #nijisanji x reader #luxiem angst #4402 writes #bsprites #STEALTH PROTOMEN REFERENCE BABEY #this is a bit clumsy but i'm glad it was over 10k words i wonder if saying so much is just my style now #how much of a coinky dink is it that i was binging luca's twd streams and a bunch of southern gothic music when i was writing this #i'll post the full au notes i had operating tomorrow i think

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m1ckeyb3rry · 1 month

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HSGSSH I THINK I SAW THAT POST WITH THE DETECTIVE AU!!! Sign me up for second in line to read it omg….and noooo don’t feel guilty LMAO but ikwym!!!

Wait kinda related but all the talk abt karasu reminded me that his bday is this month….Really hoping maybe we’ll get some promo art?? Who knows though LOL (MAYBE EPINAGI ART TO CELEBRATE??? MANIFESTING)

No because I can only imagine what he went through after joining tabieita in the second selection like imagine he pulls up to their bedroom and it’s just Otoya butt trapping a shoe and karasu sitting next to a bucket of wax and he’s just standing there like wtf (like the who’s this creep moment from the tabieita meeting LMAO) uhhh speaking of I think the new ch is coming out really soon?? Very excited because what was the mid sentence cliffhanger we got last time…..

ADDING NAGI TO THE MIX WOULD BE SO FUNNY HAHAHAH I love the nagi Barou dynamic <3 I can so see nagi asking that like “bro why not me?” Same vibes as when Barou called Isagi by his name and nagi was like “bro wb me???”

For me I lean slightly more to the astute Barou vibe but I’m crying I can also see the super obvious and it’s so funny like bro just accepts whatever reason Karasu gives him and doesn’t gaf otherwise HAHA

Honestly real carbonated drinks are a hit a miss depending on the person!! This is slightly related but have you ever seen those really goofy looking motion sickness glasses on tiktok?? They look really funny but some people say they work LMAO I’m not sure how good of an investment decision it is though LOL but YAY glad you found something that works!! Shsgsha don’t die in the car!! I wish I had more remedies for actual car sickness but my knowledge kinda stops at not looking out the window and those goofy glasses….

Also THE NAGI CLIP?? Ik kaneshiro said somewhere that Nagi didn’t buy the cactus out of loneliness but the way that he treats it like a real companion is so cute jjshshshs

-Karasu anon

i’m glad there’s other people out there to write for all of the different karasu avenues that exist in the world 😩 speaking of writing for karasu…BIG news our boy just graduated high school in bfb!! not going to let you know what the word count is atm because i think it might give you psychic damage FHSKJS but we are finally entering the home stretch (kind of) I’M REALLY HOPING IT’LL BE DONE SOON i’ve been saying that for ages though but this time i’m being fr like it should only be a little bit longer 😭 on the plus side this one will keep a starving nation (aka karasu fanbase) fed for a hot minute i hope…as long as people like how i wrote it anyways 😓

OMG WAIT YES IT’S SOON!! i think the next epinagi chapter lowkey comes out on his birthday so basically if they don’t do an fun little art of him it’s illegal messed up and wrong 😐

LMAOOO JUSTICE FOR YUKIMIYA ACTUALLY there’s no way he wasn’t the last one picked because idt he could’ve survived with those two for very long…i feel like tabieita is so duo within a trio that half of the time i forget they ARE a trio 😭 poor yuki doesn’t really have a canonical bestie…like i can’t think of a single person he’s typically shipped/paired with 😪 it’s okay though he can be ours 🤩 kenyu yukimiya the people’s princess 💖

YES THAT’S THE EXACT VIBE I WAS IMAGINING like nagi is just heartbroken that barou lets reader get away with sm bullshit but he accidentally breathed on barou’s lucky bowling ball and almost lost his life 😭 meanwhile reader’s like “omg nagi i heard you were in the top six in blue lock!! do you know karasu?? because apparently he was ALSO in the top six!! so please tell me anything and everything you know about him please please please 🥺🤤”…to that nagi is just like “he plays soccer good 👍” which makes barou freak out even MORE like bro do you not see that this girl is trying to SLIDE IN 😰 give her more to work with 😟☝🏻

i can def see both ways!! but consider the third option where he immediately realizes reader has a crush on karasu due to spending most of his time around girls (aka his mother and sisters) but because he has like negative guy friends he has NO IDEA how karasu feels abt her 😓 so then HE becomes a wingman for reader as well but he’s sooo bad at it like he’ll say some shit to karasu about how “y/n l/n is a lovely girl who can really keep a house clean. any man would be lucky to have her 😒” and karasu’s like yoooo barou x y/n canon 😳⁉️ because he somehow knows barou’s type is a woman who can clean well (reader cannot in fact clean well barou was just trying to make her seem appealing 🥲) i think wingman barou + wingman yuki + anti wingman for himself karasu is just such a crazy combo of characters HAHAHAH pure insanity…poor reader the only consolation is she’s definitely getting a hot soccer boyfriend out of this fiasco one way or another 😭

i took an anti-nausea medicine today and it basically knocked me out?? like i could NOT keep my eyes open…so ig it did work in that i wasn’t nauseous per se 😭 hoping the effects linger a bit through tmrw but not the side effects LMAO it’s okay i’ve been having such an amazing time otherwise that it’s not a huge deal!! we’re going paragliding tmrw (😬 i’m scared of heights but yk yolo how many times does one get the chance to paraglide in the swiss alps) and then the day after we drive to italy for a bit 🤩 i loveee visiting italy hehe so i’m excited for that!! and then afterwards france time 🙏🏻 as long as my ass doesn’t get carsick again that means lots of driving time when i can get some writing in!! but no promises we will see how it goes 😩 if not i’ll just listen to music and stare out of the window all moody and aesthetic while in the car and just write at night as i typically do

yeah apparently according to the ln he bought it so that he didn’t forget how to talk?? again one of those things that’s like funny but also kind of sad…i think in his internal narration he says he has no interest in friends or a gf or anything so he wasn’t lonely or anything but he knew that in order to fit into society he needed to be able to talk and all so he got choki 🥹 but tbh just based on how he treats it + how he talked abt reo in the convo w zantetsu while they’re bathing in epinagi i feel like he actually was lonely and just had 0 idea how to have a proper relationship or that that was something he even needed…idk maybe i’m reading too much into it but that’s nagi in the miraverse anyways 😰

#answered asks

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crayonfears · 5 months

Note

Basic a** question but I have to know what you think about the ship between Chayoung? and Han Seok because let’s be fr I don’t really see anything between them and I really really REALLY hate the ship where it gives me the Ick when I hear it (don’t come at me I still have a live😃) like it doesn’t makes sense (for me) I can see the idea the writers had but NO. I‘m already happy what kind of answer you will give me bc I know it will be good 🫶🏻 by Al :3

hi there, al! always nice to see you in my inbox 🥰

now this is a fun question haha. personally I don't care much for cha young x han seok, but I won't judge the people who do ship them - that's their business and as long as they stay in their lane, I'll stay in mine. I'm sorry to hear the ship gives you a genuine ick - ik exactly how that feels, though for a different ship in a different fandom haha. ig the best thing you can do is just avoid them, block their tags and the people who post about them. out of sight, out of mind, yanno?

personally, i think they CAN make for a very interesting pair, they're both ruthless in their pursuit of their goals; they're both hardheaded alpha-type. that can be interesting to explore. what turns me away from them is how they're both treated in canon. cha young doing a 180 after her father died, and don't even get me started on how badly han seok's characterization was treated in the second half of the show. god, not the mention, the way cha young gets sidelined/benched a lot in favor of the showrunners' favorite boi vincenzo ;;

canon treated them both so badly that whatever romantic interest between them felt superficial. han seok was literally playing a character being an intern - who knows if his "crush" on her was real at all. she did not care for his intern ass lmao. there was no hot and cold, no push and pull between them, which is why that line he said showing his interest in her in the last episodes, during the kidnap, felt super out of place. nothing before that point really supported it. it's so hard to believe han seok had actual romantic interest in her - pure interest i can see, though, she was ruthless, corrupted just like him so maybe he felt kinship there, but romance? nah.

but again, if anyone wants to imagine something romantic between them, that's cool! good for them! they're doing more work than canon ever cared to 😂

(also you really don't have to censore yourself here on tumblr dot com. swear and curse all you want, my friend. free yourself from the clutch of tiktok and twitter's strict rules)

#the-ace-friend #not tagging this one with anything cuz i don't want it breaching containment haha #i think something could've come out of them with better care and handling; which canon did not offer them #so they work better as enemy; maybe partners in crime in a funny/cracky AU idk #will you hate me if i tell you i've got a han seok x cha young au in the works. endgame is still jangbros tho hehe #ask #*crayonspeaks

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jjacob · 4 years

Text

all i want for christmas is you

❝ the school had started to take notice of you. lee juyeon, however, had always noticed. ❞

PAIRING ▸ lee juyeon x fem!reader (ft. best friend!lee minho)

GENRES ▸ fluff, high school au, sports au, best friends to lovers au

WARNINGS ▸ mild profanity but !! lots of !! fluff !!

SUMMARY ▸ the bet was simple: find a date to the winter ball. the only problem was that juyeon didn’t want just any girl. he wanted you.

PLAYLIST ▸ all i want for christmas is you by mariah carey

WORD COUNT ▸ 5055 words

AUTHOR’S NOTE ▸ merry christmas! this is a gift for addy @honeyju the biggest juyeon simp ik !! ily addy i am excited/scared/not emotionally ready to read the minho one which ! btw y’all should read here bc our stories are loosely connected! also disclaimer: i know jack shit ab football but i tried

LEE JUYEON TENDED TO REGRET HALF THE THINGS HE SAID SOMETIMES.

In eighth grade, Juyeon’s sense of humor was largely self-deprecating and consisted of saying he wanted to die at the slightest inconvenience. But, with his spectacular timing, he let the joke slip in front of a teacher once and froze up upon seeing her concerned expression. Juyeon later received a note from the counselor’s office and had to convince them that he was perfectly fine.

In tenth grade, Juyeon had grown past his phase of dark humor and moved onto high school football. He made the cut for the team the previous year, and managed to make it on the varsity team by the time he was a sophomore. In the beginning of the season, they asked who wanted to be captain the next year, and Juyeon boldly declared that he did. Thus, he was ridiculed and sentenced to pick up balls and clean up the gym after every practice from then on.

Now, as a high school junior in the varsity football team, Juyeon had screwed himself over by making a stupid bet with his best friend, Lee Minho.

Lee Minho was, in short, a conniving bastard. Juyeon never should have trusted him and gone along with his antics. The mere thought of what he had gotten himself into was enough to send his heart into overdrive.

The bet sounded simple enough: find a date to the Winter Ball.

Of course, it was easier said than done, but Juyeon was a star athlete and had girls sliding in his DMs left and right. He could easily find a date if he wanted to, and, honestly, Juyeon only needed to send a few texts and he would probably be secured for the dance. The problem was, however, that Juyeon only wanted you.

Minho was well aware of Juyeon’s pitiful, unrequited love towards you. It was probably the reason he suggested the bet; his best friend either wanted to see him miserable or see him score a chance with you. Either way, Juyeon wasn’t sure his heart was ready to shoot his shot.

Juyeon had crushed on you ever since you sat next to him in the seventh grade and let him borrow your pencil. It was such a silly start to his admiration for you, but his feelings grew stronger when the both of you actually became friends. You were so bright when you laughed, so sweet when you spoke, and so adorable when you smiled. Juyeon had never felt this way about anyone else and always got butterflies when he saw you. Juyeon was never one to chase after girls but he would find himself constantly thinking about what you were up to and having several internal dilemmas over whether he should ask you to hang out or not.

Five years later and Juyeon still harbored feelings for you. Now, they had matured into something deeper, but you still racked his brain nevertheless. It didn’t help that you had a major glow-up in high school and were probably the most beautiful person Juyeon had ever seen.

The school started to take notice of you.

Juyeon, on the other hand, had always noticed.

“Are you sure we can finish a medium before practice?” Minho asked Juyeon, setting a box of pizza on the table in front of him. “Also, I saw Y/N by the gym earlier.”

Juyeon perked up. “Y/N?”

“Yeah,” Minho replied, grabbing a slice of pepperoni pizza for himself. “You know what day it is, right?”

Minho took a bite out of his pizza, observing Juyeon with a raised brow. His best friend was on the baseball team but treating themselves to pizza had become a monthly ritual. Despite being on different teams, he was closer to Minho than his football teammates.

“Thursday?”

“And that means?”

Right.

Juyeon had formulated an elaborate plan to ask you out during the football game today, but, of course, it all depended on whether their team won or not. It would have been kind of ridiculous to propose after a loss. On the bright side, he knew he could count on the fact that you’d actually be present considering you were a cheerleader.

But what if you already had a date? You surely hadn’t mentioned it to him or posted about it on social media, so he was riding on an assumption that you haven’t been asked. That was bizarre to Juyeon, though, because you were the prettiest person he had ever seen. However, it was true that you were gradually getting popular, and that made Juyeon a touch nervous.

“I ask her out tomorrow,” Juyeon breathed out. “Am I ready for this?”

Minho scoffed lightly. “Are you ever?”

Juyeon frowned at his best friend, scrunching up his nose at his distasteful comment. “What about you? Have you gotten a date?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

Juyeon sighed. That was probably all he would get out of Lee Minho today. Once Minho set his mind on something, he carried it out diligently until the end. Juyeon honestly had no idea who he wanted to bring since Minho didn’t like talking about girls he was interested in, but he supposed it wasn’t that big of a deal as long as his best friend was happy.

It wasn’t like Juyeon was never going to hear about his friend’s endeavors. After all, he did pick up on Minho’s slow descent from an apathetic individual to a whipped ball of fluff. If Juyeon mentioned that to his best friend, however, he would probably be ridiculed for consistently being whipped for you since the seventh grade.

Juyeon nearly jumped out of his seat at the sound of his ringer going off. He scrambled to pull his phone out of his pocket, ignoring Minho’s teasing smirk at the sight of his frazzled self.

y/n: hey :) i’m gonna drop off some gingerbread cookies my mom made after practice so lmk when i can come over

Juyeon must have saved a country in a past life for this kind of luck.

juyeon: i love your mom’s cookies. you can come over whenever you’d like

y/n: how about we walk home together after practice?

juyeon: sounds good to me

Now, the pizza was starting to make his mouth water, but if you were walking home with him, Juyeon was ready to drop it and run to see you even though he loved pizza. But Juyeon loved you more than he loved pizza, and he believed that was true love.

“She made me cookies,” Juyeon announced.

“She made you cookies,” Minho repeated, leaning forward in surprise.

“Well, her mom did, but yeah.”

Minho turned his attention back to his pizza. “So this is about your mommy kink again.”

“I don’t have a fucking mommy—why would you say that?” Juyeon cried out, kicking his friend’s shin under the table.

“You don’t? Last time I checked, she was making dinner in the kitchen when I came over yesterday.”

“I’m talking about the kink!”

Yet, even a silly back-and-forth with Minho couldn’t get Juyeon down from his high over you. He was still processing the fact that you were going to walk home with him and, if Juyeon played his cards right, maybe he could get a feel of how comfortable you would be if he asked you out during the game tomorrow.

Minho snickered. “You look happy.”

Juyeon couldn’t even mask his lovesick smile and flushed cheeks. He folded his arms on the table in front of him and buried his face in them, his head spinning at the thought of you.

“Shut up, Minho.”

The only problem with you being on the cheerleading team was that you were extremely distracting.

Juyeon was the star quarterback and frankly, it was kind of pathetic that the one thing that kicked him in the ass was seeing you in the knee socks and pom-poms. It didn’t help that you were a flyer so Juyeon’s stomach pitted with anxiety whenever he saw you being thrown up and whenever he heard a scream coming from the direction of the cheerleaders.

Today was different, though. Juyeon could care less about the screams and falls from the corner of the field. All he could think about was you and how he was going to ask you out. If his plan was going to work, it was going to draw a lot of attention and be quite embarrassing if it failed.

All of his confidence got knocked down with a single sweep when he saw someone asked you to the dance.

One of the cheerleaders broke into a fit of giggles at the sight, clasping a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god!”

You were frozen stiff, an awkward smile on your face as the guy walked onto the field with a sign and about a dozen roses. Juyeon could feel his heart sinking to the ground with each step the guy took, with each second his smile grew brighter.

“Is he seriously confessing during practice?” Sohn Youngjae asked, brows furrowed as he rested his arm on Juyeon’s shoulder. “That’s real brave.”

“What’s his deal doing it here? He isn’t even on the team,” Juyeon said, coming off more bitter than he had expected.

Younghoon scoffed. “It’s a bold move. He must be confident that Y/N’s going to say yes.”

Juyeon squared his shoulders. He was conflicted with the swell of anger and deflation of you possibly being taken, but nevertheless, all he could do was watch helplessly as you were being asked out. From where they were on the field, Juyeon couldn’t hear much, but he could see your reactions quite well. The wolf-whistles and cheers were pissing him off, but he was fixed on you.

He turned to look towards Minho, who was practicing on the field adjacent to theirs. His best friend met his gaze immediately like they had some form of exclusive telepathic communication. Minho nodded towards you and raised a brow, as if nudging Juyeon to go interrupt them. That, however, was something he was far too cowardly to bring himself to do.

Your voice resounded clearer than Juyeon had expected.

“I’m really sorry,” you apologized sincerely, ducking your head and keeping your hands entwined behind you. “I’m not interested, but I do appreciate the gesture.”

Juyeon felt a weight lift off of his chest. He wasn’t sure if he should’ve felt relieved that you shot him down or nervous that you rejected an attractive, confident guy who clearly liked you. However, he soon had no time to mull over that when the guy’s reaction was getting more aggressive than crestfallen.

“Y/N, I asked you out in front of all these people,” he said with a distasteful laugh. “Are you seriously rejecting me right now?”

“Sorry, I just don’t want to go with you,” you replied firmly, voice dropping as you became more conscious of your surroundings. “I’m sorry it had to be public but you didn’t really give me a choice.”

For a split second, Juyeon wondered how he could still hear you when you were practically muttering at this point, and then he realized that he started walking to you without even realizing. His feet carried him unknowingly, hand balled at his side and eyes stony and trained on the guy.

“You could’ve just accepted it and told me later that you didn’t want to go with me,” he said with a scoff. “It’s like you enjoy humiliating others publicly.”

Your teammates rushed forward to argue and fend him off while you opened your mouth to protest, but Juyeon was faster, moving in front of you so he was head-to-head with the guy.

“She said she’s not interested,” he said with a threatening undertone, wondering where he managed to muster up the courage to be this assertive.

You were visibly shocked by Juyeon’s actions, and he couldn’t even blame you because he was equally just as surprised as you were. Yet, all he could do was glare daggers down at the other guy with steely eyes and frown until he backed off.

“Thanks,” you said softly once the guy had left.

Juyeon was flustered by all the girls giggling behind you but was amazed by how cool and collected you remained despite that. He turned to you, eyes softening and shoulders relaxing. He knew he was getting an earful about this from his teammates after practice and most definitely from Minho as well.

“No problem,” Juyeon replied, cheeks red. “He was bothering you. I couldn’t just ignore it.”

“That was really sweet of you, Juyeon.” You bit back a smile and suggested, “Meet you at the front gates after practice?”

“See you then.”

Even though Juyeon could’ve spent the rest of practice talking to you, he sprinted back as fast as he could because his cheeks were only getting redder as the cheerleaders gushed about what he did for you. He could hear their gossip and whispering even as he was running back to his team. Juyeon was positive he wouldn’t escape the embarrassment, though, because Lee Jaehyun was smirking at him when he got back.

“You’re blushing, dude.”

Juyeon shoved him.

There was a universal law that was newly decreed. It read: Lee Minho shall never text, call, or speak to Lee Juyeon whenever Y/N was around.

The reason for that being the fact that Juyeon was easily embarrassed and Minho’s texts were not helping his case. He felt it was rude enough to check his phone while he was walking with you, but every time he saw a notification flash, his eyes widened with sheer distress over Minho’s texts.

minho: like three people asked me if you and y/n are fucking bc of what you pulled during practice today

minho: wait are y’all fucking and just not telling me

minho: i knew it was sus that she was coming over to your house

juyeon: fake news!! stop making me feel shy :(

Juyeon decided he had enough Lee Minho for today and turned off his phone.

“That was honestly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” you gushed to Juyeon as you walked home with him, fingers looped around the straps of your backpack. “Way cooler than you punting footballs.”

“No need to flatter me,” Juyeon replied coolly but his shy smile and red-tipped ears said otherwise. “That guy was being unnecessarily aggressive.”

“His proposal was out of nowhere!” you exclaimed. “I don’t get what he expected me to do.”

Juyeon smiled through the pain. Lord, give me strength, he prayed to whatever divine power was out there.

“Are you not interested in having a date to the dance then?” Juyeon asked, looking down at you curiously.

You paused for a moment and Juyeon thought his heart would stop in anticipation for your answer. Come to think of it, he had never seen you go to a school dance with a date before. You were always with your friend group. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to see you stick with them, but Juyeon was hoping he could change that.

“Well,” you started, “if the right person asked me then I wouldn’t be opposed.”

Juyeon couldn’t exactly read your smile but it made him want to faint. The rest of the walk back home was spent talking about school and football, but Juyeon couldn’t get your answer to his question out of his head. He even walked past his house because his head was so full of you, resulting in you needing to stop him and tell him that they had already reached his place.

“Y/N! It’s so good to see you!” Juyeon’s mom chirped with a good-natured smile. “How has your mom been?”

Juyeon’s eyes widened upon the realization that they never stopped by at your place first to get the cookies. He opened his mouth to interject but you went on to answer.

“She’s been great, Mrs. Lee,” you replied, smiling just as big, and pulled out a box of cookies from your bag. “She wanted me to give these to you.”

“That’s so sweet! Give her my thanks,” his mom replied and opened the door wider once she accepted the cookies. “Come in for some tea, will you?”

Juyeon was practically frozen at the doorway while you were taking off your shoes and walking inside. If you had the cookies with you this entire time, then why didn’t you just give them to him to take home himself? Unless you were worried about the courtesy, it was a bit out of your way to take the time to walk home with Juyeon to deliver them.

“Juyeon, what are you doing out there?” his mom asked. “Come inside. It’s cold.”

“Right.”

Having you over at his house wasn’t exactly the sparkly fantasy that Juyeon thought it would be.

He was getting quite jealous of your mom hogging all of your attention. It wasn’t like you and Juyeon drifted apart during high school, so he wasn’t sure why his mom had to pull you away from him and have her own conversation with you. The worst part was that Juyeon couldn’t even join in on the conversation. He had no idea what they were even talking about.

That is, until his mom brought up the dance.

“Do you have a date, Y/N?” Juyeon’s mom asked.

“I don’t,” she replied. “I usually just go with my friends.”

“You’re so pretty, though,” Mrs. Lee tutted. “I’m sure someone must’ve asked you out.”

“Actually, someone asked me today,” you said. There was a moment of silence as you looked over at Juyeon while his gaze bore into yours. For a moment, you were struggling for what to say, mouthing words that weren’t being processed. Juyeon rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly once you regained your composure. “Juyeon actually helped me out.”

Mrs. Lee straightened up. “My son did?” She looked amused as she turned to Juyeon.

“Yeah,” you answered, grinning. “He was really cool.”

Juyeon blushed darkly once their eyes were on him. “W-what? I couldn’t ignore it. I wasn’t even doing that much. I was just helping out. You know, being a decent person,” he rambled and stood up. “Anyways, isn’t it getting late? Mom, Y/N has to go home soon and it’s gonna be pitch black outside if you keep her here.”

“Oh, you’re right.” Mrs. Lee frowned as she peered out the window. “Juyeon, you walk her home then.”

“What?” he sputtered out, looking between you and his mom before he caved, muttering, “I’ll go get my jacket.”

After an exchange of goodbyes, you had stepped out of the house and waited while Juyeon was slipping his shoes on. There was a moment of struggle where he had tied his laces too tight and couldn’t get the shoe on but he managed to slip it on after a few seconds of internal screaming. Juyeon zipped up his jacket the moment he stepped outside, the brisk coldness making his goosebumps rise.

“You really don’t have to walk me back,” you told Juyeon. “It’s cold outside.”

“It’s really late,” Juyeon replied, rubbing his hands together in hopes that the friction would provide some heat. “You shouldn’t be walking home by yourself, and I really don’t mind.”

“Thanks,” you mumbled, ducking your face. “For this, for what you did during practice—everything.”

Juyeon was glad that you weren’t looking at him because his mouth was opening and closing over and over again like a fish. He was also thankful for the fact that he could blame the dust of pink across his cheeks on the cold winter bite. Unfortunately, you lived close by so Juyeon didn’t have time to come up with a cool response and he didn’t want to leave things like this. There was a good vibe going on and he was upset that he couldn’t act upon it; when it came to you, Lee Juyeon was a coward.

“Um, we’re here so…” Juyeon trailed off when he turned to you, sort of thrown off by how beautiful you looked with your windswept hair and flushed cheeks. Dazed, he reached forward and moved a strand of your hair out of your face. “It’s good I walked you home and you’re not like, lost or… something—I’ll shut up now.”

You laughed, and it was an octave higher as if you were rattled from him touching your hair. “Ah, yes, a few streets down can be a harrowing trek.”

Juyeon laughed with you before his eyes settled on you. Your hands were crossed, rubbing your arms that were prickled with goosebumps. A wave of guilt washed through Juyeon and led him to strip his jacket off immediately. He ignored the piercing chill and put his jacket around your shoulders, making sure they covered your bare arms.

“My house is right here,” you argued. “You’re going to be cold.”

“Keep it on. I have something to tell you after the game,” Juyeon said firmly. It was his second burst of courage for you today and he was a little too amped up for his own good. “If you don’t like it then give me back my jacket tomorrow.”

Before you could respond, Juyeon turned on his heel and bolted home, the biggest grin across his face because he was head-over-heels for you.

Juyeon had never been so nervous in his life.

The game was underway, Juyeon’s leg bouncing as he eyeballed the scoreboard. His team was strong in the first two quarters, cutting it close by the third, but now they were neck-to-neck. They had ended with a tie and now they decided to go into overtime for the sake of choosing a winner for the game. It was a sudden death round so whoever scored first would win the game. Juyeon, however, found it difficult to concentrate.

Especially with Lee Minho breathing down his back.

“Are you ready?” his best friend asked.

“Yes—well, no, but I don’t really have a choice.”

“That’s true.”

“I already made the sign and told the team and everything,” Juyeon whined. “I really screwed myself over, Minho.”

Minho pushed at the back of his head. “Dude, I’m talking about the game.”

“Oh, that—that’s fine,” Juyeon stammered. “Fifteen minutes—we just have to win, and then I have to ask out the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

“You could chicken out,” Minho suggested, “but that also comes with me never letting you live it down.”

“You see, I kind of already implied that I’m going to tell her something important.”

“You did?” Minho’s voice was somewhere between shocked and impressed.

“Shit, I gotta go,” Juyeon muttered, pushing himself off the bench. “Keep the poster safe for me!”

“Good luck, champ!”

Juyeon, sweaty and bangs sticking to his forehead, had to ignore every distraction and think about winning the game before his stomach threw itself into a pool of anxiety over asking you out. He got in a huddle with his team in the remaining fifteen seconds they had before they had to get in formation and lowered the facemask of his helmet. It was up to this one last play to determine whether they would win the game or not.

“Just like we practiced, alright?” Juyeon told them. “Double-wing power pass. We get them to bite thinking it’s a run play and then open up a passing lane.”

“Alright, let’s go,” Jaehyun cheered, and the rest of them put in their mouth guards and lowered their facemasks.

Juyeon took a shaky breath as he got in formation at the line of scrimmage. His heart was racing but he wasn’t sure it was about the game. Nevertheless, he steeled his nerves and held his ground. The whistle blew and the crowd was silent, observing the tension on the field carefully.

“Silver-80! Silver-80! Hut! Hut! Hike!” Juyeon yelled, and the center, Sangyeon, snapped the ball to him.

Juyeon faked a handoff to Jaehyun, the fullback, and spun around, rolling to his right. Changmin sped up in front of Juyeon to defend him. A smile tugged at Juyeon’s lips. Their plan was working just as he intended, but there was a problem: they couldn’t open up a passing lane for the running backs like he thought they would. The play was too rushed, so it wasn’t ever a guarantee.

So Juyeon had to do what he would normally deem crazy.

He spun at the sight of the other team coming to tackle him and skirted around the field, belting down the field. He dodged past another linebacker that tried to body him. His primary motivation was that he didn’t want a concussion before he confessed to you, but he assumed it was okay to admit that to himself as long as he didn’t throw the game.

Juyeon felt a hand grab him but he pushed forward, running across the goal line and into the end zone. He threw the ball down and cried out in joy as he scored a touchdown. The whistle blew and the scoreboard flipped. They won.

He did it.

Juyeon’s team ran to him, cheering at the top of their lungs. He was lifted up on Jaehyun and Younghoon’s shoulders, grinning happily before his heart sunk back down. The cheerleaders ran to the field, cheering and tossing their pom poms up. The crowd was roaring. Juyeon was realizing that he had to do the scariest thing that a heterosexual teenage boy ever had to experience.

“Jaehyun, Jaehyun,” Juyeon tapped his shoulder quickly. “We have no time. I have to do it now.”

“Oh shit.”

Jaehyun and Younghoon dropped Juyeon onto the turf. Juyeon winced at the sudden impact, gathering himself back to his feet and hoping you didn’t witness that. Jaehyun gave him a half-assed apology and pushed him forward to run and get his poster and flowers from Minho. Jaehyun then grabbed Changmin by the shoulders, urging him to go to the announcer’s booth.

Juyeon sprinted over to Minho, waving his hands dramatically. “Give, give, give,” he demanded amongst all the cheering.

Minho didn’t waste any time and pushed the poster and bouquet into Juyeon’s hands. “Break a leg, tiger.”

“Trust me, I nearly did.”

Juyeon jogged back onto the field, cheeks hot and head a little dizzy for what was about to come. He didn’t even tell his mom he was going to ask you out and she had to watch her son ask his best friend out to the dance. This was probably going to be a moment of utter humiliation but once Juyeon saw you in your high ponytail with a bright smile on your face, all that fear faded away and it was just you and him.

More importantly, you were wearing his jacket over your uniform and Juyeon felt like he was going to combust from the cuteness.

“Guys, guys,” Jaehyun called to the team. “Surround Juyeon. Make sure Y/N doesn’t see him.”

Juyeon’s heart was beating a hundred miles per second. He was glad he was running on the adrenaline from winning the game because otherwise, he would be cowering in fear and sweating buckets right now.

“Everyone, listen up!” Changmin spoke over the intercom. “First of all, the football team scored a major dub today—ow! Sunwoo, cut it out—alright, I’ll get to it!” Changmin broke from the mic and started bickering with Sunwoo.

There was a pause, and Juyeon was surprised to hear Minho’s voice fill the speakers, “Anyways, my buddy and our star quarterback, Juyeon, has something to say for a special someone.”

The crowd fell silent, a couple cheers and wolf-whistles as it was pretty obvious that a confession was about to happen.

“This is so fucking fluffy,” Sunwoo mumbled.

“Shut up, Sunwoo,” Juyeon replied, nudging him with his elbow.

The football team moved out of the way so that they weren’t huddled around Juyeon anymore. Juyeon’s breath caught in his throat as he walked forward to the middle of the field, holding up his sign, reading: Will you be my sunshine?

“Y/N,” he called out loudly, “honestly this confession is long overdue, but will you go to Winter Ball with me tonight and be my sunshine?”

The crowd started cheering and whistling again, and Juyeon wanted to die. She hadn’t even given him her answer yet and everyone was acting like she had agreed and they eloped. The cheerleaders pushed Y/N forward and she approached Juyeon, looking like a deer in headlights.

Juyeon took another shaky breath and continued, “I’ve been in love with you for so long so it would be an honor if I could take you to the dance,” he said and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m sorry if this is uncomfortable for you.”

You bit your lip but that wasn’t enough to contain the happiness that showed on your face. You zipped up Juyeon’s jacket and threw yourself into his arms. Everyone practically exploded but Juyeon was sure his heartbeat was louder. He wrapped his arms around you and buried his face into your shoulder.

Was this what people called a Christmas miracle?

“Oh shit!” Changmin screamed over the intercom. (“Shut up, they’re having a moment,” Minho’s faint voice was picked up in the background).

“Oh my god, you just made me the happiest man alive,” he mumbled.

You pulled back and reached forward to move his damp bangs off of his forehead. “Took you long enough.”

“Wait, did you—did you like me?” Juyeon choked out.

You laughed and cupped his face in your hands. There was a shaky inhale and exhale of breaths when his lips brushed against yours, and Juyeon closed the distance, kissing you like he was starved of your touch. His hold tightened on you as you melted into him, and then you both pulled away, smiling and dazed and lovesick.

You giggled. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yes,” he breathed out, grinning as he brushed his nose against yours.

Juyeon could care less about all the presents and holiday cheer because he had you and you were all he wanted.

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smolfailure · 4 years

Text

FUCK IT, DREAM SMP HOMESTUCK AU

but it's only half shitposts and there are actual Thoughts in there.

You don't need to have read the comic to understand because I tried not to spoil anything major, but it'd help if you knew basic stuff about classpects, SBURB and the hemospectrum.

disclaimer: i'm not a good pixel artist and this is my first actual sprites ever so please be kind to my weird pixels

The Kids:

Tommy

Fundy

Techno

Tubbo

tommy, tubbo and fundy one of the kids because they're the kids in dream smp canon (with fundy being son of wilbur)

techno's there because i want to make a dave strider reference (haha get it because techno's name is also da-- *gets shot) and also because they are both coolguys except instead of using irony, techno has adhd

The Trolls:

Wilbur Soohte (fuschia)

?????? Ehrret (violet)

J????? Shlatt (purple)

Nihacu Niikki (indigo)

Skeppy Diamon (cerulean)

Quacki Tthiey (teal)

Philza Myncra (jade)

Dreame Wastkn (lime disguising as olive)

George Notfou (gold)

Sapphe Nahfpe (bronze)

Badboy Haelow (burgundy)

don't come at me saying only females are allowed to be jades and fuschias; gender is fake and this is an au

more of the AU and the talksprites are under the cut:

Tommy

Lunar sway: Derse. Types in: Red

chaotic. the first person to be introduced.

when he gets introduced instead of the “Zoosmell Pooplord” bit, Tommy is initially going to be the name inputted but then backspaced it and decided that Tommyinnit was better and he was fuming until he’s named Tommy.

Gives me big Blood/Hope vibes. Blood because a lot of the conflict of the dream smp connected to someone breaking his trust or harming the things he cares about, Hope because a lot of the plot of the dream smp stems from Tommy starting shit based on his ideals and what he thinks is right.

the first to instigate fighting against the trolls

bbh contacts him once and tommy keeps cursing until he disconnects from frustration rip

wields Gunkind and his only strife weapon at the beginning is the Vlog gun. He has Gunkind as his strife specibus mainly because he looked up at schlatt and he imitates him.

Fundy

Lunar sway: Prospit. Types in: Orange

it was his idea to play SBURB but only through Dream.

he talks to dream the most among the other trolls fwt stans getcha juice this is the rosemary of the session

dream’s the one giving him exposition about the game so that’s how he knows how to play SBURB.

wilbur trolls fundy once and instantly adopts him.

“You’re my son.” “How does that even work??” “I was one of the people who created your universe. It’s basically the same thing.”

Fundy relents anyway.

Techno

Lunar sway: Derse. Types in: Pink

dave strider but dead-inside voice + rose lalonde english major vibes

he slices the text box when you try to name him "Dave " like in

techno gives me time player vibes (contantly on the move. his skyblock series, his “stays in the pit” monologue,) but also rage vibes (anarchy, the “theseus” monologue, political alignment is Chaos) alas i am not sure what class

uses Tridentkind and claims "it came from god"

it was dream, he accidentally transportalized one of wilbur’s weapon while he testing the transportalizer.

Tubbo

Lunar sway: Prospit. Types in: Green

the jade harley of this session. the only thing keeping them from going apeshit. where would they be without him.

but also jade harley in a sense that he seems nice and wholesome but also don’t fuck with them they can mess you up

Heart/Life vibes??? someone good at classpecting help

i put them in prospit bc of the "tubbo third eye" instead of tubbo having a sixth sense or smth, they see the future from the clouds of skaia when they sleep

wields Stress-relieverKind at some point

bonus: everyone’s actual hair colors

Ideas about the Trolls

no i haven’t done their sprites yet bc it would take so much time and i’m not even sure if people wanna see more of this au skjdkdsakdfkl,, but i have Design Ideas.

events of the dsmp revolution are just a FLARP session drawing parallels to how the homestuck trolls had a FLARP session that spoiler alert: destroyed friendships. dtrio, eret, will are involved. eret betrays will's faction and wilbur's still Bitter over that.

on the context of alternia (highbloods and lowbloods) lmanburg and dreamsmp have their roles SWAPPED. the emancipation theme thing is completely gone since highbloods are in more power than the lowbloods (the dream team) .

wilbur made a faction called l’manburg because he wants a place where he and his fellow highbloods could make drugs vibe.they take a piece of land that was owned by the dream team. in normal circumstances, they shouldve stood down because lowbloods aren't supposed to start shit with highbloods (especially a group of highbloods that has the alternian heir among them) but dream turned it into an activism thing about lowblood rights. the story plays as close as possible without tommy or tubbo in it (which is pretty hard ik but this is the best can do).

like in the dreamsmp revolution, dream kinda let wilbur do what he wants but this time he has more reason to because he’s in a lower caste. dream really only fought back when wilbur announced that he’d be building lmanburg on their land and calling it theirs.

eret betrays wilbur by supporting the lowbloods and wilbur and co. technically won but only because he finally called the drones in, as a reference to how lmanburg absolutely got crushed by the dream team in the smp but technically won. l’manburg keeps the piece of land and the dream team scatter away to find a new home.

wilbur soot's a fuschia because a) he's in a position that has a lot of power, b) yknow how he wrote a song about squids and his thing with sally… yeah.

eret's a violet because nobility!! dream looks down on him because he's ambivalent on fighting for lowblood rights when he's in a power to do so "you just sit there, and you look pretty that's it"

also like eridan he has a minor aesthetic mutation (herobrine eyes) that won't classify him as a mutant.

jschlatt is purple because it makes sense thematically because of the gamzee parallels (a. substance abuse b. if you know what happens in act 6, you know this already but spoiler alert, he ruins the main protagonists' lives) also he's a funnyman he deserves the clown caste

quackity's a teal because he’s a law student. moving on--

ok but for real it also makes sense thematically because he's the one who wrote the thing that tricked schlatt into agreeing also he gets manipulated by schlatt which also draws parallels to certain events in the comic

skeppy and bbh are BEST FRIENDS despite being highblood and lowblood respectively. initially, skeppy just wanted to bother bbh but they grew to be good friends in time. y’know like how they actually becane friends :D

philza minecraft is a jade because dad friend. also works thematically, because spoiler alert he gets to murder a seadweller for going batshit crazy.

he also god tiers early. he dies fighting his quick undead denizen (haha baby zombie) but the consorts of his land carry him to his quest bed because he’s treated them all so well.

dream was initially going to be another caste but then i realized that means i have to make his hoodie something other than green which is unacceptable so its a good thing the fact that he's a lime works out

dream was the one who thought of playing sgrub in the first place- initially only planned to have gogy, sap, and bbh in the session but then realized that they four won't be enough so he invited more into his session

he’s also the first to go godtier ez clap blind speedrun not sure what classpect tho

the only reason why dream avoided being culled at birth for being a limeblood is because his rng is That Good. he quickly picked up the fact that he’s not supposed to exist and masqueraded as an oliveblood and kept mostly to himself to avoid suspicion.

george is still colorblind but he has lazer eyes along with it instead. dream lives with him in the same hive since being a mutant means dream doesn’t get a lusus of his own (dnf fans getcha juice “and they were roommates”)

despite living in the same hive, he never really figures out that dream is a limeblood. possibly because a) he’s colorblind and when he sees dream bleeding he just sees yellow b) he’s just that fucking oblivious and it’s so valid of him.

sapnap’s a bronzeblood mainly because i know he’s the instigator of the pet war with tommy also because i associate him with the color orang in my mind so bronze it is

that’s the end of this long-ass post!! if you have other ideas PLEASE i want to hear them. i don’t know the other streamers i mentioned in here very well so if you have ideas that would be fitting to them like with classpect or lunar sway that would be GREAT.

the only thing i’m confident about in here are the kids’ lunar sways. i’m not an expert in classpects and homestuck lore so there’s that too!! i just wanted to make this post because adhd means that the idea wouldn’t shut up until i finished it. This initially started as a single shitpost edit of tommyinnit talksprite but then the hiveswap 2 trailer came out and that means i have to combine my two hyperfixations.

also i have ideas about potential quadrants but idk how much of that is breaking some streamers’ boundaries about shipping (even the non romantic quads such as kismesistude, morallegiance and auspisticism) so i decided not to include it.

edit: apparently people want more so i made a discord server as a place to brainstorm!! please pm me to join!

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suntrastar · 4 years

Text

sink or swim

pairing: ransom drysdale x reader

summary: you first meet ransom when meg drags you along to a party. everything somehow spirals from there.

warnings: swearing, smut (but like very vague smut, nothing super explicit), ransom’s general assholery

word count: 9.3k

author’s note: i hate ransom drysdale! he is a shit character! if he existed irl i would whoop his ass with NO hesitation. but i still wrote this fic because ... a bitch gets thirsty okay?? okay. and ik this is very long BUT a lot of it is dialogue so it should flow pretty fast!!! likes and reblogs are always appreciated!!! ily now enjoy!!! you can also read this on ao3 :)

There’s something fun about being somewhere where no one wants you, and then something shameful.

Meg isn’t touching you, but as she drags you around her famous grandfather’s mansion in search of people to bother, it feels like she has you on an invisible leash, fastened tight over your neck. To keep you tethered to her- like a fucking dog.

The leash hurts like it is not made of plastic or metal but instead two hands squeezing tight, wringing you dry, choking you harder and harder and bruising you purple with no remorse.

Now, she’s debating political theory with her douchebag fuck of an uncle, who almost hits you once- almost hits you twice with his cane while waving it around as he quotes Fox News-

Their voices rise. You’re the only one that flinches.

Standing awkwardly on the edge, you wonder why you are the only guest at this terrible party that looks so lost. Meg gives you a covert this-is-total-bullshit glance, and a small, pained, rehearsed smile, both of which you have to return- that’s the real reason you’re here, after all- and her uncle rants on, wholly oblivious.

You look past them both, to where one man stands by himself.

He’s leaning against the far wall, and while Meg retaliates with some of her favorite words, including audacity and bigoted and problematic, you take a sudden, intense interest in the wallpaper pattern, sweeping your eyes over the span of it, looking over the man just once.

He is staring right back at you.

All it takes is his eyes- he’s just staring, but you’re absolutely embarrassed.

He looks rich, with too much product in his hair and a coat that looks like it cost more than your rent, with loafers that expose an uncomfortable amount of ankle and an expression that morphs into something wolfish as he starts towards you-

Before you can think, he’s joined your little circle- Meg prefers standing, so of course, everyone stands- and smiles when she glares at him.

He isn’t looking at you anymore.

“So,” he interrupts, and his voice is so dark, “what riveting political topic are we debating tonight?”

You should call an Uber. Why did you accept Meg’s offer of a ride?

“Ransom,” Meg says sweetly, “could you just, like, fucking not?”

This is supposed to be a Christmas party, but none of these people seem to be in the Christmas spirit. Including her uncle, with his stuffy sweater set and clunky-as-hell shoes. He sputters something about young people and their profanity, and then hastily leaves.

Without thinking, you breathe out a heavy sigh of relief.

The man smiles wider. Unfortunately, it makes him look very handsome.

”Ouch,” he says lightly, to Meg, and turns to you.

A shiver runs down your spine.

You hate him immediately.

“Who are you?” he asks.

For whatever reason, the question makes Meg scoff. She shakes her head at you- a warning. Her hair flounces with the movement.

Because she doesn’t want you to, you give him your name. And then add, because your name alone seems like a title too stripped down, “I’m Meg’s friend.”

It’s hard to convince yourself to be polite, when you don’t like how he’s been looking at you- with his eyes narrowed and brown furrowed and lips parted. He gives an insufferable nod.

“Right,” he says. “The one she’s been showing off all evening.”

Your heart skips a beat.

“Ransom-” Meg starts, and suddenly you are so angry, at this man for confirming what you thought was all in your head, at Meg for suddenly swooping in to save you, like she’s been waiting for it-

“I guess,” you say, and smile a little, and regret everything.

“That’s pathetic,” he says, and looks at you kindly.

Apparently, Meg is the only one allowed to be self-righteous in her annoyance, or anger, or any other mildly passionate emotion. She doesn’t return your covert this-is-total-bullshit glance.

So you fend for yourself.

“Well, so is this fucking party, so-”

He interrupts you with a laugh.

It’s loud and arrogant and mirthless, and you’ll climb out of a window, find a way to walk through the walls, if it means that you’ll escape it.

“I’m just joking,” he says, pursing his lips, and the hands on your neck, ever-present, nearly crush the breath out of you. “Don’t get your panties all in a twist.”

“So funny I forgot to laugh,” you say, and instead of replying, he just looks at you.

He looks at you slowly, like he has nothing better to do, like he has time to waste. You can smell him- some cologne that’s spicy, and expensive, and Meg is staring at you in shock, like you’ve committed a crime.

But she’s quiet.

“I’m Ransom,” he says, and raises his hands to make little air quotes, which is weirdly adorable in a way that you hate, “Meg’s ‘asshole cousin’”

“Weird name,” you say.

You’ve changed your mind- you’re not even going to attempt to be nice.

For a second, he looks furious.

It’s attractive.

“Yeah,” he says. “Anyways, I’m about to ditch. Do you want a ride?”

How does he know you came here with Meg?

He was staring at you from the wall-

From his butterscotch-colored coat with its awful, ostensible lapels, he pulls out his car keys. The BMW logo flashes silver and blue, clashing against the gold of his pinky ring, clinking against the metal as he twirls the key ring around his finger-

For a second, you think that he’s about to toss the keys across the room and command you to fetch.

“Um,” you say, uncertainly, irritated with your own restraint, “Thanks, but Meg will-”

“Meg will what?”

He’s mocking you, and there is no one to come to your rescue.

Hesitantly, like she has to think twice about it, Meg opens her mouth to say something. What is her problem? What is your problem? Why are you treating her like she is your saving grace?

You talk before she gets the chance. “Okay, yeah. A ride would be great.”

***

Ransom offers because he likes your face.

You’re better-looking than the girls that Meg usually brings along to these parties, or maybe his standards have fallen- he isn't sure. Does it really matter? Even though he’s been looking at you all night, even though he’s positively thrilled to have you in his car, he’s not going to try anything.

There’s something desperate in your eyes that compels him against it.

You inhale sharply when he turns left.

“You forgot your turn signal,” you say, and he kind of likes how you chastise him, not angrily or even upset, but just exasperated-

How is someone like you friends with someone like Meg?

“Don’t worry about it,” he says lightly, and the tired glare you give him is enough to make his entire week.

Now that he thinks about it, his mother is always on his case about things like this- compassion and civility and basic human decency, and how he lacks it all, but what about now? He’s taking a miserable girl to her home, simply from the goodness of his own heart, with no strings attached.

This is such a good deed- this is like charity.

His mother is also always telling him that he’s severely, almost clinically narcissistic.

He definitely is, but again, does it matter?

“So, what do you think about my family?” he asks, making a big, dramatic show of using his turn signal before swerving right, feeling too pleased when you smile.

He steals a glance at your knees and somehow feels guilty.

He’ll have to do something about that.

“They’re pretty... lively,” you say hesitantly, and he’s suddenly hating the dark, this stupid fucking night- he’d like to see you better.

“Lively,” he repeats, and barks out a laugh. “They’re fucking crazy.”

You laugh, too, a real one- off-kilter, and too loud- none of that artificial shit he heard at the party. Nothing meant to please.

“I was definitely thinking that,” you say. He catches you looking at his hands, but boldly, you don’t look away. “I just didn’t want to be rude.”

“Now you’re worried about being rude?”

“I’m in a car with a strange guy I’ve never met before, so yeah.”

You’re smiling but look uncomfortable, and then afraid.

All bark and no bite- you’ve been talking all this talk, when really, he realizes, you’re so washed-out, so faint, like the bare sliver of moon out in the sky, the same weak moon he’s been cursing out. The same stars, too- you are just as scattered.

You look pretty.

“Are you scared?”

He keeps his eyes on the road because he thinks you’ll snap at him if he doesn’t. Not like anyone drives out here anyway- not like he can’t pay off a ticket or two or five-

“Should I be?”

There is something so delicious about this moment, with you starting to worry- he can’t look at the road anymore, not when he can watch your throat bob as you swallow instead, and it still feels so violating, but so good.

“Nope,” he says, and you startle when you hear him say it, and he has to bite his cheek to keep himself from smiling. “No need.”

“Great,” you say, and go quiet.

When he pulls up to your apartment complex, not too far from where he lives, he holds his mouth in check. He could say so many things right now, but for you, he restrains himself.

You have your bag in hand, seatbelt off. From the streetlight, the planes of your face look waxy yellow.

“Thanks for the ride,” you say.

Your hand is on the door handle, nails glittering. He can’t make out the color of the polish.

While looking at it, a sudden urge overcomes him.

And he shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t, but he wants to, so bad. It’s borderline frantic, the desire- it’s necessary and all-important and crucial, for him and his basic peace of mind, and maybe for you, too-

Who is he to deny himself?

“Wait,” he says, even though the door is open and you have half of yourself out the door.

The cold is slowly seeping in, bone-chilling.

You wait.

“Let me just,” he says, and can’t bring himself to say anything else.

He reaches out for your waxen face with one hand and presses it firmly against your cheek.

Under his touch, you shiver. He fans out his fingers to hold you better.

Your eyes are wide. He thinks you look a bit horrified- horrified with yourself for not resisting, maybe.

But he closes his eyes as he leans in, so it doesn’t matter.

He turns your head for you, a bit forcefully. You don’t protest.

He kisses your cheek.

When he pulls back and opens his eyes, you’re staring at him with your mouth in a perfect circle.

“Uh,” you say, and suddenly look away and out into the night, and it makes him angry, even though it should be flattering, “Merry Christmas.”

***

You don’t think about Ransom as much as he probably would have wanted- life picks up too fast.

In the last days of the year, Meg calls you and texts you and even goes so far as to send a few emails, but finally, you seem to have found the self-respect to not respond- consider that ridiculously wealthy bridge burned.

In January, your brother leaves to study for a semester abroad. All the walls in your small apartment are suddenly looming, standing high over you, standing empty. You try to shove off the loneliness by studying harder, by staying distracted.

In February, you have the same dream nearly every night- you’re sitting outside on a porch in the sun and for some reason there’s a bird on your head, and in your lap there’s a clock whose hands don’t work, and you’re wearing a heavy necklace made of gold links that jingle, and you’re so happy.

Does the bird count as company?

In early March, while you’re watering your plants, your phone rings with an unknown number.

You shouldn’t pick up unknown numbers.

You pick up.

“Hello?”

“Remember me?”

His voice nearly gives you whiplash.

It’s dark and harsh, faceless and yet as arrogant as ever.

“Hi, Ransom,” you say, and think of the night in the car for the first time since, think of how he gripped your face so hard that his ring left an imprint. “How the hell do you have my number?”

“Meg gave it to me,” he says smugly. “She says hi.”

You wonder what Meg thinks you did to her. It’s obviously something bad, something terrible, if she so willingly gave your number to this pretty-faced, pretty-voiced, ugly-coat-wearing asshole-

“Awesome,” you say plainly. You don’t want to talk about her. “Do you, like, need something, or-”

“I want to take you out,” he says.

You laugh and your grip on your pitcher slips, sloshing water over the edge.

“You’re joking.”

He is, right?

He takes an impatient breath that, for some reason, sounds inappropriate. “I’m serious.”

“Ransom,” you say, slowly, “I don’t even know you.”

“Then get to know me,” he says testily, and you can perfectly picture him, sitting in some colossal brownstone his parents bought him, while a butler daintily dabs the sweat from his brow with an embroidered handkerchief. “Tonight.”

You’ve overwatered your marigolds.

Has his voice really swept you this far away?

“No,” you say, and shake your head, even though he can’t see it. “No fucking way.”

“Oh, come on,” he says, like you’re the one being unreasonable. “You have anything better to do?”

You don’t, but you take a deep breath and prepare yourself to lie-

“I’ll treat you good,” he suddenly says, and his voice is low and sticky-sweet, dripping with honey. “I promise.”

He says it in a way that makes your knees weak.

You physically have to sit down- he knows how to get what he wants.

Could you actually do this?

Could you go out on a date with a crude, pretentious, trust-fund piece of trash, who probably thinks you’re easy, who’s only calling you because he’s bored, who has already subtly insulted you twice in this conversation alone-

-who got your number from his cousin that you both decidedly dislike, who kissed your cheek like you were pretty in the dark of the night, in his cold car?

“Fine,” you say. “Take me out.”

***

He doesn’t tell you that you look nice- he just stares.

There is something predatory in his eyes.

You’re out on a Wednesday night with a bad man, wasting your time, trying to get something out of nothing, smiling a fake smile when he orders you a drink you don’t like, already irritated with him, and trying too hard to stop looking at his face.

How are you actually interested?

You tell him that you’re in medical school.

“Really,” he says, like he doesn’t believe you. “You don’t strike me as that kind of girl.”

Underneath the table, you clench your hands for some sense of control, but still feel like you’re spinning. “What kind of girl?”

“Smart,” he says, and picks up his drink. The glass sweats beads of condensation, wetting the tips of his fingers. “I didn’t know you were smart.”

You shouldn’t dignify his flimsy insult with a response- he’s just trying to get a rise out of you, trying to make you roll your eyes or scowl or shiver. He wants you unsettled.

But the moral high ground is, unfortunately, too high.

“And I didn’t know that you’re such a terrible date.”

His teeth gleam white when he smiles. He knows.

He knows that he can say whatever the hell he wants, because he has money, and those eyes, and that insufferably nice rich-boy hair, and that sweater with its charmingly frayed hems, and that voice- he has everything, and then some, and he’s about to have you, too, if he keeps on looking at you like he already does.

“You’re so sweet,” he says.

“Fuck off.”

He winks and you could cry, you’re so fucking bothered-

You’re not usually this uptight, but he has you so drastically wound up that every little thing he does, even how he’s sitting- body sprawled, manspreading- is fire licking up on your skin, scorching-hot and ruining you with no remorse, like you have done something to deserve it.

When his eyes trail down, from your eyes to your mouth to your neck to below, you are so acutely aware of wanting him that you feel guilty. Like it’s a crime.

***

You don’t seem like the type of girl to fuck on the first date.

So, of course, Ransom tries to fuck on the first date.

As you stand outside the restaurant, in your dress and strappy sandals, you look so tense that he wants to laugh.

He can’t help it, because this whole thing you have going on- this weariness you approach everything with, this attitude- is so funny. Maybe, in any other situation, it would be irritating, but he’s been so bored lately that it’s stirring.

“Do you want to go back to my place?” he asks, quietly, taking a step closer to you so that at this very moment, under the waning sun, you should be able to just lean up and kiss him-

You blink slowly and keep your silence.

This is fucking tedious.

This should be so easy- all he has to do is settle his hands somewhere soft and let time pass, and then before he knows it you’re there and under and begging. But he can’t bring himself to touch you just yet, not when his head is calling you pathetic, and his heart calls you-

His heart just calls you.

You start to answer, and then hesitate. All five stages of grief flicker over your face at once- denial to acceptance in the same breath.

“Sure,” you say, unevenly, desperately-

When you step inside his house, your eyes go wide. As you take it in- the decor, the windows, the excess, he locks the door behind him and takes you in.

You step further inside, and he thinks of where it would be best, but then your eyes crease as you smile- it’s impossible to wait when your smile looks like that- and so he backs you right into the closest wall, cups your face with both of his hands and kisses you.

He kisses you and you curl your hands over his shoulders and immediately kiss back, and he is taken aback and delighted.

And he knew- the entire time at dinner when you were making eyes at him like you couldn’t believe that you were actually sitting there, present in that moment- he knew that secretly, you’re a freak. He knew it- he knows it.

He hopes it.

“Let me fuck you,” he whispers, right into your mouth, when your heart has been beating right into his for a while, “Let me fuck you right here.”

You bite his lip.

He takes a hand away from your face and reaches under your dress fast, rucking it all the way up your thighs, trailing up to touch you-

“Fuck,” you gasp, and arch your back up against the wall, and he grips you a little tighter-

He presses a finger into you- pushing aside your underwear and, good grief, you’re already wet- harshly, and pulls away from your mouth, so he can watch your face.

The lines creasing your forehead look like poetry.

He thinks he likes you. It’s a shame he had to meet you through Meg- it would be nice if he had met you somewhere else, on his own.

That way, he’d be able to waltz in one day, to another insipid family gathering, with you tucked under his arm. You, with your promise of a medical degree and your strappy sandals, and your iron grip on his shoulders and your drawn out breath of a moan-

The looks on their faces would be priceless.

“I’ll take care of you,” he says, and he’s a little irritated at how cracked his voice sounds, but it’s the right thing to say- you swear again and he picks up his pace, pressing hard on your clit. “If you’ll be good to me.”

“I’ll-” you say, and you’re actually stuttering, and breaking out into a lovely sweat, still forced back into the wall with his hand and body. He leans closer, so he can’t tell where you and him and the wall start and end. “I’ll be- fuck, Ransom-”

You still have your arms wrapped around him, like an embrace. He keeps one hand between your thighs, your dress pooling over his arm like water, and uses his other to work at his belt buckle.

This is also funny- you stay exactly how you are, even though at that moment, there is nothing holding you back.

***

The world is begging for you to consider your actions.

But you don’t. You know that when he offers, you’ll meet him again.

It should be too late. You’re exhausted, from a day full of lectures and an evening spent in a lab, working as a professor’s research assistant, and then studying for a few hours in the library- all you really want to do is sleep.

But then he calls.

The night is suddenly brimming with possibility, and you’ve never been more awake.

On a whim, Ransom suggests ice cream, and because you can’t bring yourself to deny him, you end up at a place that you would never go for- where everything is handmade and served in thick paper cups with multicolored plastic spoons, but he pays, because of his stupid ego or fragile masculinity or whatever the hell, so you don’t care.

He stands next to you as you order, and his shoulder keeps on brushing into yours. You can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not. In the glass shield that the tubs of ice cream sit behind, you’re both reflected, your body warped and tall, his body warped and taller. In the glass, his eyes meet yours.

The tension is strong- it’s only a matter of time.

Your heart flutters.

When you sit, he bumps his knees against yours- you’re sure it’s on purpose, now, but you don’t say anything. What even is there to say?

That you like it?

When he digs into his ice cream, the plastic spoon- a green one- snaps in his hand.

And because you’re so caught up in your own ridiculous thoughts, before he can go back up to get another, you pull your own from your mouth- a pink one- and offer it to him.

The proposition makes him smile.

Why does he smile like that? Each movement, each twitch of muscle is so perfectly detached and coordinated- it’s violent.

But he still takes the spoon from you gently, with a soft hand.

He’s too pretty to be mean, you think, but against any type of judgement- not just the better kind- you wouldn’t have it any other way.

You let yourself laugh and he scowls.

“This place sucks,” he says, like he isn’t the one who chose it.

He adjusts the womens’ scarf he’s always wearing, carefully arranging it over himself so it looks like it was carelessly thrown on. The blue in the paisley print brings out his eyes- it makes him look so stupidly hot that you start to get angry.

You just shrug. “Suck it up, buttercup.”

He puts your spoon in his mouth and looks at you.

Again, the night ends at his place- this time on an actual bed, because you ask for it, and you think he likes how you look when you ask for things in the current state state you’re in-

He fucks you in the dark, and swears into your ear, and is not kind or soft in any way, but after he finishes, he takes the time to kiss the spot in between your breasts, and you think that maybe he isn’t entirely horrible. The bedsheets are cool against your skin, and his mouth is always hot.

You leave without a word.

***

He takes you out this time, in a real, urgent show of wealth- he picks you up in his fancy car, takes you to a fancy restaurant where the numbers next to the fancy menu items are all appalling, where he spends the whole time making these awful, unfunny innuendos that still manage to rile you up, because they’re coming from his mouth-

On the way back, while waiting at a stoplight, you take a deep breath and brace yourself before looking at him.

He really is gorgeous- all lazy grace and harsh angles. The light colors his face red, red in his eyes and in the plane of his cheekbone and in the slope of his mouth- like a beautiful warning sign. His hands are carelessly draped over the steering wheel and, despite the warning, you reach out and trace a finger over his knuckles.

His whole body jerks.

You quickly draw your hand back.

“What?” he asks sharply. He’s staring at you like you’re crazy.

You don’t know why this is suddenly so fucking embarrassing, all you did was touch him- but you suddenly feel terrible, and-

“Nothing,” you say, with the same tone, and whip your head away from him to the window, where you smolder in the dark and furiously stare at nothing.

The light turns green. He takes his foot off the break and all but slams it on the gas pedal, driving as atrociously as ever, looking over at you for a split second when you don’t protest. The blood rushing in your ears is too loud for you to think- you can’t form any words.

Once it subsides, marginally, you add, “Sorry.”

His jaw tenses.

You look back over at him, at his ring, and imagine it pressing into your neck.

“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?” he suddenly asks- suddenly demands, with a blazing authority that makes your stomach do flips.

You don’t know what answer he wants. “Um, one time I snuck out of-“

“Let’s do something crazier.”

On an abandoned road, he pulls over, and then you’re under him in the backseat- doing something crazier.

You might have some type of psychic tendencies, because his ring presses heavy into your neck as he pushes himself inside you, starting at a bruising pace, and then he says your name in the dark, and he looks so beautifully flushed, startling when you grab his hair, laughing when your hand accidentally skims his thigh, smiling when you come-

You wish you had the resolve to put an end to this.

You wish you could stay when it’s over.

***

You don’t like his house.

It’s not the brownstone you imagined, but rather a huge, minimalistic box, with too many windows and spotless paint and modern wood fixtures. Ransom has all of these customary rich-person things, including stately furniture and eclectic art pieces and tall shelves stuffed with books, but owning any actual personality has escaped him.

Standing in his house feels like standing in an empty room- it’s all so apathetic.

Still, you show up when he calls.

You haven’t done anything this bad before.

But there’s a first time for everything, right? First time for enjoying bruises and biting and an unwavering grip on your neck or hips or waist or thighs, first time leaving something so intense so awkwardly.

Each time is worse than the last, with the awkwardness spiraling, accruing beyond reason, and each time you struggle with what to say- even now, you just do your best to stay quiet as you start to get up, reaching for your clothes-

Ransom drapes a heavy arm over you before you have the chance.

“You can stay,” he says flippantly, and then shifts to pull you close to him, so that you are suddenly lying bare-backed against his chest, so that his sweat-slick body and heartbeat imprints itself on your skin.

Is he asking?

You crane your head over your shoulder to get a look at him.

He returns your stare like he’s been waiting for it.

His face is still flushed pink and a lock of hair hangs low over his forehead, and if you were any braver, you would comb a hand through it, gently, with no real intentions. He’s breathtaking. Even the new, foreign purple under his eyes is a sight- pretty like something you would want to kiss.

“You want me to stay?”

He rolls his eyes and tilts his head back. You would lick the sweat from the divots of his neck, if he asked you to.

“Or leave, if you want. I could care less.”

He cares

You know it because his grip is unwavering, because the terseness in his eyes is enough to make you look away.

Eventually, you settle a hand over his arm and try your best not to tremble. Ransom mumbles something under your breath- you can’t make any of it out, but you don’t ask him to repeat it, for the fear that it’ll upset this fragile bedroom balance you’ve so painstakingly built yourself into-

He wants you to stay.

“Are you okay?” you ask, because you don’t think he is.

He inhales. You feel his chest against you; it’s shaky. You wonder, for a second, about who he might actually be, underneath the arrogance and egotism and constant need to be an asshole- is he someone you could like without feeling bad about it?

“Yeah,” he says, and throws his other arm over you, so that he is holding you. “Why?”

There isn’t a genuine bone in this man’s body, but he genuinely sounds confused.

It’s possible that you’re the one who isn’t okay.

“Because,” you say, and take a great leap of faith- holding your bare heart in your hands, you turn to face him.

You’re fully exposed and subjected to his gaze- it’s nearly eviscerating. His eyes dip down to your chest and something like insecurity flares in your chest. It’s awful and terrible and you urgently want to kiss him on the lips.

He always kisses you first. You don’t know if you have it in you to kiss him yet.

You wouldn’t ever try, in case you don’t.

“You look kind of tired,” you say, and his eyes bore into you with a sinking weight, threatening to drown. One of his hands finds a blooming bruise on your skin and lightly presses. He doesn’t react when you wince. The action is still kind- almost tender.

He sighs, and it is such a delicate breath, fanning hot over your skin.

“I’m not tired,” he says, almost childishly.

You might be overstepping. But you don’t even know where the lines have been drawn.

“Okay,” you say, and because you would not dare kiss his lips, you lean close and kiss his jaw instead.

He startles and then gives you a crooked, lazy smile. He is everything good, you think- for this one moment. Pretty and soft-handed and made of glass and honey and all other lovely things.

You tuck your head in the crook of his neck and wrap an arm over his, tight, so he knows you are there, and hope for the best.

***

In your spare moments, you’re always thinking.

Ransom knows this because of how you look when you do it- your brow furrows and your eyes go glassy, and you frown with an intensity that he has never seen on anyone else.

It happens when you finish a sentence, when you have no response for him, when he is still talking but you’ve stopped listening. When you think it’s quiet.

It never happens during sex- is it pathetic to take pride in that?

As he stands in your apartment for the first time ever, you look like you’re in near-despair, like your thoughts are wreaking havoc on your mind, destructive and distressing. You wear basketball shorts and a college sweatshirt and glasses.

He didn’t know you wore glasses, and that you looked like this in them- he’s been missing out.

“Hi,” you say, and stare at him with troubled eyes.

Your apartment is so small. He almost feels claustrophobic, standing in here. When was the last time he willingly stood somewhere so small?

The lengths he’ll go to, for…

For you, he supposes.

“Hi,” he says, and wonders, also for the first time ever, what it is that you’re always thinking. “Why do you have so many plants?”

On the windowsill, with even spacing in between, sits an entire row of glass jars housing plants- all singular flower stems, some budding, some in bloom. The petals of a marigold brush against the window, orange against the grey outside. It’s cute, he absently thinks, in a struggling, shabby type of way.

“It’s just something I do for fun,” you say, sounding irritated. “Like, a hobby.”

Infringing on the living room space is a small table, cluttered with textbooks and pens and an open laptop with its screen dark.

It still baffles him that you’re smart.

“So,” you start, and cross your arms over your chest. He feels kind of offended, because he’s just realized that he really only knows a handful of things about you, and even that handful is sparse, slipping through his fingers. “Why’d you want to see me?”

He called on impulse.

He’s just- he’s in what someone could call a mood, where he hates everything and has the intense desire to ruin something, and while he was thinking of how to fix it- beyond just getting wasted- he thought of you.

And when he called, you were sounding so tired and so he even said he could just meet you here, so you wouldn’t have to drive, so you could squeeze in a few more minutes of studying before he inevitably invades your mind-

Easily, he deflects. Nearby, there’s a hallway with two doors, one of which is tightly closed shut.

“What’s in there?” he asks, and points towards it.

You relax, slightly.

He wants to gather you up in his arms, but he doesn’t know for whose sake- his or yours?

“That’s my brother’s room,” you say, and your shoulders slump, and he resists the urge to pull you upright, and the urge to gawk. Brother? “He lives with me. But he’s studying abroad this semester.”

“Where?”

“Prague.”

He nods. This is a stiff, perfect, shocking distraction. “Nice city.”

You nod distantly and head back to the table to put your things away.

“Yeah,” you say, after too long of a pause, as you start to cap pens and set them aside. You look at him as you do it, and so you miss a few times, accidentally drawing dark lines of ink all over your fingers. “I’m glad he got to go. When we were kids, he was obsessed with wanting to travel- he had this entire map in our room, and he would draw stars over every country he wanted to visit, and there were, like, a hundred of them, and he could list every single one, in the exact order he wanted to visit, and he could even list the capitals- I’m sorry. You probably don’t care about any of this.”

He doesn’t.

Or, he shouldn’t, but your eyes are clearer, and as you neatly stack your textbooks in an order only known to you, he is almost intrigued.

He’s longing for you- when you are right there.

He feels like a person outside of himself, when you look at him and smile tiredly.

“Do you want to watch a movie?”

There’s a cheesy ‘90s horror movie you find after a few minutes of channel surfing, complete with terrible special effects and edited-out profanity. The days are longer, now, and to stop the sun from casting a glare over the screen, you close all the blinds. It adds to the atmosphere, you say lightly, fully phased out of whatever just possessed you, and his hands are so itchy- itching to do something.

He sits. Patience is a virtue, but he is not virtuous, and so when you sit next to him and bring your knees to your chest, making yourself small, he goes to-

Something in his stomach stops him.

It’s butterflies- is he actually nervous?

This is so fucking infuriating.

You’ve got him trapped in some type of pain-and-power-play, some type of unassuming purgatory, and all he can bring himself to do is lightly brush a hand against your shoulder. You smile at his touch and his heart fucking breaks.

As the second boy in the friend group gets murdered onscreen, you close your eyes and duck your head into your knees.

“Tell me when it’s over,” you say, voice muffled.

“Scaredy-cat,” he says, even though this is no time for jokes.

You crack one eye open, looking only at him, and give him the finger.

Come here, he almost demands. The butterflies protest- he holds his tongue.

The dance continues. When the sun sets, everything darkens, settling into a dim blue. You look like something out of a painting. Faintly sad, unusually serene. The skin around your eyes has smoothened- you’ve stopped thinking so hard and he can suddenly breathe easier because of it-

And then there’s a jumpscare, and he shouts, “Jesus!”

The murderer has broken down a door, and all of the remaining characters are screaming, and you burst out laughing.

He’s in the middle of a crisis, and you’re laughing.

You lean into him as you laugh, with your head turned away from the screen and your eyes open, looking at him so fondly that he suddenly feels violated, and you let your shoulder brush against his.

“Scaredy-cat” you tease, and it’s absolutely now or never-

You’re making him weak- it takes too much time and effort for him to draw an arm over you.

You don’t flinch, but he is sure that you can hear his heart beating dangerously fast, without abandon, like it's trying to break free of his ribcage. He almost gasps when you come even closer and lightly kiss his cheek, wrapping your arms around him, and his head is just saying yes yes yes-

Your mouth goes over his ear, lips ghosting over skin. He waits, more scared than he’s ever been in his entire life, for what you have to say.

***

So this is Ransom’s deep, dark, ugly secret.

He likes to be cuddled.

If it were anyone else, you would laugh.

But it’s Ransom, and so you just take it in stride, as part of his extremely fucked-up psyche that is probably a result of a hundred things he’ll never tell you- childhood trauma and neglect and the consequences that come with having more money than you need or deserve.

He’s always talking, always talking shit, always talking over you and over everyone else, and you realize, one day, that he really only is treading water- he’s only focused on staying afloat, speaking whatever he wants, but never actually saying anything.

He’s responsible for his faults, of course. But still, when he smiles in low light or curls his hands over yours so viciously, you don’t know if you should leave, or if you should just stay and pity him quietly.

You’re starting to like him too much to even care.

He starts coming around more. And he actually stays, and starts leaving pieces of himself behind. He has a toothbrush next to yours and a phone charger on his side of the bed and imported, undoubtedly expensive snacks in the kitchen.

He leaves clothes, too- you wash them with yours and keep them, neatly folded, in your closet.

On a warm day in May, he meets you at a cafe.

He does most of the talking, like always. It’s been months, already, but you still find it difficult to start conversations.

You still have trouble telling him certain things without feeling like you have to defend yourself, and he still rarely deviates from being a total dick, even when you hold him or have his head in your lap, when you make him laugh or when you kiss him.

Or when you put your hands in the sleeves of his sweaters and rub your palms against his forearms, because he’s always running warm and your hands are always cold.

He always acts like it annoys him, jumps when your hands meet his skin- but you know he secretly likes it, because whenever you’re done he pulls the hems all the way over his hands and looks at you with something amazed in his eyes.

With the weather warming up, he’s ditched the sweaters and taken to wearing these awful fucking short-sleeved button-downs, all unnecessarily tight and showing way too much collarbone. He’s making you sweat.

“You’re staring,” he says, and smiles, self-satisfied.

You bring your straw to your lips and shake your head. “I’m not.”

He knows that you can’t help it- he is always so gorgeous. He’s infuriatingly pretty.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says, and nudges your foot under the table, voice suddenly low, and it’s like, holy shit-

You bring your drink down and lean over the table, careful to avoid knocking anything over, and kiss him quickly.

He tastes like bitter coffee.

You’re sad, all of a sudden.

When you settle back in your seat, you clear your throat like nothing happened. You want to lean in again and button up the rest of his shirt, and kiss him again. You want to come so close that your noses touch, and then yell at him, just for being him.

He looks appalled

“What was that for?”

It’s the first time you’ve ever done this.

“No reason,” you say. “I just felt like it.”

“You just felt like it,” he repeats, and it’s like the same reaction from the night at the stoplight, and you realize-

He’s dumbstruck.

Then, just as quickly as it came, it disappears. He sets his jaw like he’s about to get up and leave. You try not to scowl, even though you feel like you’re drifting, tide carrying you away, sand clean and smooth on where your body once was-

It gets to you.

“Can I not just kiss you?” you snap harshly, glaring at him with a ferocity you don’t think he’s ever seen.

It’s inevitable- the result of months of frustration. You can only suppress yourself for so long. Why, you want to ask, why are you not entitled to him the way he is to you and everything else? Can you not ask for him so wholly?

He flinches.

Ransom Drysdale, asshole extraordinaire, flinches.

It brings a small sliver of satisfaction with it. There’s some nerve you’ve struck, and the discontent on his face is steadily growing-

You pay it no mind, drinking the rest of your iced coffee in calm silence.

Outside, the day is vaguely summery, where the sun is out and strong, but still too cold in the shade. You stare past his head, towards the door. How quickly can you leave?

“You can,” he says quietly, when you’re rising to throw your cup in the trash. “Whenever you want.”

His eyelashes are so long- they command a moment of attention all on their own when he blinks- soft and slow and gazing at you from underneath them. You wonder if he is doing this for the same reason you are. If he’s lonely, too.

When was the last time you had the dream with the bird?

You smirk. “Whenever?”

He is forlorn.

You like him better in the spring.

“Whenever.”

“Let’s get out of here,” you say, and make your voice low, since two can play at that game.

He considerably perks up.

***

When you wake up, he’s still in your bed.

Lately, he’s been spending more time at your place than his. You think that all those windows are finally starting to get to him.

Ransom always holds you fiercely in his sleep. You break free as gently as you can and take him in for a brief moment- you like how he looks when he’s asleep. Unconcerned, chest rising slow with each breath, hair splayed over the pillow in nearly every direction. He almost looks innocent.

You get up quietly, even though there’s no chance he’ll stir- he sleeps like the dead.

Daylight filters through the blinds in white-yellow streams, dappling him golden.

You almost take a picture, but regretfully leave the room for other tasks- you stretch and water your plants and check your email, and then sit down at the table to Skype your brother.

He picks up fast.

“Hey!” you say, and at once feel so much relief, to see his grainy, smiling face on your laptop screen.

Europe has done him good- he’s grown out his hair, and his skin is glowing, and he looks so happy.

He tells you about what he’s been doing lately, studying architecture. It makes you so proud, this fact alone- that unlike you, he can do whatever he wants and doesn’t have the looming promises of debt and academic burnout and crushing, ever-present stress hovering over his shoulders. It is so good to see him, and you are so grateful that he can be who he wants to be, do what he wants to do-

“Holy shit, who is that?”

He’s looking past you. You turn around and almost jump-

Ransom stands in the kitchen, shirtless and rummaging through the cupboards. He waves at you.

You would think that someone like Ransom would exclusively sleep in, like, silk pajama sets, or something, but at least he’s in sweatpants- however low-rise they might be, however loosely knotted the drawstring is. It’s better than nothing, at least- what if he had walked out in nothing?

When you turn back to the screen, you catch a glimpse of yourself in your camera feed- you look absolutely mortified.

You are absolutely mortified. This is the start of what can only be a nightmare.

“Are you dating that guy?” your brother asks incredulously. He’s still staring at Ransom with his jaw hanging loose. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“No,” you say forcefully, without thinking. “That’s, um... “

Hopelessly, you gesture back towards him, trying to come up with the words. Nothing feels right in your mouth- every title you can come up with is too consequential, too heavy.

“...That’s Ransom.”

“Weird name,” your brother says, and grins.

You take a breath that feels more like a gasp. “I know.”

“Hey,” Ransom says, from the back, and continues to loudly open and close the cupboards- what the fuck is he even looking for? You don’t keep enough shit in there to warrant this much noise- he’s doing this for theatrics.

“I think I’m going to go,” you say loudly. “Love you.”

“Bye,” your brother says, and he’s grinning stupidly, like a madman.

You disconnect and feel like you might faint.

Not your boyfriend, right?

“Was that your brother?” Ransom asks, casually, finally finding what he was looking for- two mugs. There is no way that he didn’t come across them earlier.

“Yeah- yes,” you say shakily. It feels like someone has filled your brain with fizzy water.

There’s a few boys your brother has met over the years, but you’ve always been careful. Because an introduction is like making a statement- it’s like saying that this person you’re with is important enough to you that they’re going to overlap, exist in more than just one part of your life.

But Ransom is a catastrophe of a person- you can barely handle him as he is. How could you ever have him as anything more?

He goes through the cupboards, again, and finds a box of teabags. “The one studying abroad?”

“I only have one brother,” you snap.

“Okay,” he says, totally unbothered, surprising you. He’s not a morning person in the slightest- why is he being so cordial? “Where do you keep your kettle?”

“Second cupboard on the right,” you say, and bury your head in your hands.

He looks at you. He is so many things, but never kind, until now. His hair, in its adorable bedhead, flops over his eyes. Before, it was only almost, but now, you think, he looks completely innocent, like the type of guy you could give kisses without feeling nervous, the type of guy you wouldn’t deny as your boyfriend.

What is wrong with him?

What is wrong with you?

At the end of the day, he’s always there- you’re exclusive, aren’t you? Isn’t that enough to deserve a title?

He finds the kettle, and then sifts through the box. He sorts through different flavors with a gentle precision you’ve never seen before- is this really him? Is he the type of person that is gentle and precise?

The uneven smattering of blue-black bruises on your thighs say no.

You’re so confused that your head hurts.

“None of these flavors are any good,” Ransom says, and shakes his head. His hair shines in the morning light. “Earl Grey- who the hell drinks Earl Grey?”

“Don’t insult my tea like that,” you say, and he looks back at you and gives you a brilliant flash of a smile.

If he’s bothered at all by your denial, he never brings it up.

*** He’s too far gone.

He’s in freefall, feeling weak- he’s fucking succumbed.

To you. To your comebacks and the world-weary gaze you have of everything, to your nonsensical collection of plants and your painfully unattractive basketball shorts, to the way you laugh too loud and too little, to the way you say his name, where he can never tell if you’re happy with him or exasperated-

It’s wrong.

But, he thinks, so are all of these other things, like drugs and alcohol and blowing money on shit he doesn’t need- and you make him feel better than any of those things ever have, so why should anybody have a problem with it? A week goes by after you tell your brother that he isn’t your boyfriend- and it doesn’t bother him, because he’s never wanted that title in the first place, never has- but it obviously bothers you.

You’re disappointed in yourself, because you think you’re supposed to be better than him, because you’re so smart and he is so terrible.

He hopes that that’s not how you actually think. It hurts him to0 much to even consider it, and so he doesn’t, and so he thinks of how to keep his hold on you, and then he thinks of why he even wants to-

The truth is too apparent to deny.

After a week, he calls.

***

He’s very slow.

Not tired- just consumed with the sudden need to savor things. When you let yourself into his arms, Ransom treats you like you’re fragile.

“What’s up with you?” you ask, and as he stares, your voice reduces to something small. You go timid when his eyes are on yours, he realizes, and the thought sends a thrill through his body- he slowly rocks you, to calm himself.

Your shirt is off and you wear a bra with a small lace trim- not racy, but very cute- and he just keeps on staring.

Wow, he thinks. He fucked up good.

“Nothing,” he says, and moves one hand from your waist- he has you in his lap, straddling him- up to the top of your neck. He trails down and over to your collarbone, hooking a finger into your bra strap.

You laugh, breathy and indecent.

He lifts it, subtly, and you whine, and he bites back his own.

“You’re so pretty,” he says, and kisses your neck. “So fucking beautiful.”

“Ransom,” you gasp, with your hands splayed over his back. He slowly skims his hand over, to your back, feeling every little thing, dip and contour and curve, everything- and then unhooks it, and you are bared to him and he is breathless.

He takes you by the shoulders and twists, to bring you down, to pin you against the bed. Your comforter is dark blue, like ocean water.

Your eyes are endless, like ocean water.

“Are you upset about something?”

Your chest rises and falls and he almost reaches for the waistband of your underwear, but stops himself. He presses a wet kiss to one of your breasts, and you arch into his mouth. He feels like you know every single secret of his, when he has told you none.

You know by accident that he’s ticklish. That’s it.

“I’m not,” he says. “I promise.”

He bends low to kiss down the length of your body, repositions his hands to hold your waist. He thinks that this is more intense- it is just his mouth and your skin and the sound of your breath hitching.

He still has it put together, remarkably well- unfathomably well.

“I feel like there’s something you’re- ah- not telling me, honey.”

That does it.

He grips your waist harder, in the way he knows you always like, so that tomorrow he will be able to retrace his steps, follow the blue-

“Say that again,” he says, and presses a soft kiss over you- even through your underwear, with its delicate lace trim, he can feel how wet and wanting and ready you are for him.

“Say- fuck- say what?”

Your hand flails, for a second, before you thread it through his hair, and yank. It hurts, pleasantly.

He hooks his fingers into your waistband and shimmies it down your thighs, and you instinctively spread your legs. He puts his mouth to your slit, slicker than he imagined, and the heady arousal rushing through his mind- and everywhere else- is nearly enough to make him forget what you even said-

He is quite possibly drunk off of you alone, and he wants to slap himself, and, like, press you so close into him that you forget your way out.

With the spare glow of one lamp, you look like you’re made of gold.

He breaks away from you for a terrible moment to strip, and with one hand he teases your clit, and with the other he pumps himself, hard, once, twice, three times in anticipation-

“Don’t make me ask again,” he says, and comes back up to cup your face once more, and slips his hand back down into you at the same time, with his cock hard against your thigh- this is all quite slippery- the game you’re playing at and the risk he’s trying to take-

“Honey,” you say, and you’re smiling deliriously, but shakily. “Honey honey honey.”

“You’re killing me,” he says, and his voice, in a moment of terrible, vulnerable, unspeakable betrayal, cracks.

“Good,” you say, but your voice is all wobbly as he lines himself up and roughly pushes into you, holding you a little tighter to keep you steady. “You deserve it.”

He kisses you openmouthed, with his teeth scraping- it’s rough and jarring, the way you always take it. Against his mouth, you swear incoherently, stringing together a litany of curses with his name thrown in between, and goddamn him- it makes him smile.

He wastes no time- he can’t be patient any longer, not when he has you under him like this, and so he goes fast, snapping into you at a bruising pace and keeping his mouth close, and rubbing at your clit, to overstimulate you and make everything faster, harsher, more immediate-

When you come you always say his name, thickly with gravel in your voice, and gasp like the breath has been stolen from your lungs. This time, when you are so far gone that he thinks you’re beyond the realms of sound, and sight, too, with your eyes tightly screwed shut, he says it, for the sake of himself.

“I think I love you-”

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imagines-mha · 4 years

Text

class 1-B and night routines

Monoma: if monoma doesn’t annoy at least 2 people per night he simply will not sleep. Wears the comfiest pyjamas- like a 100% cotton top and plaid pj bottoms and everyones so fuckin jealous. He tells everyone he has a 16 step self-care routine he does every night but he really just brushes his teeth and then sits on his phone for like 2 hours? Ike what do you GET out of lying???

Tetsutetsu: he thinks going to bed after 11pm is criminal. Literally doesn’t understand the cryptidcrew™️ who DONT MF SLEEP. Works out before bed which is 👌🏻👌🏻 OOF. Aw hes the type of friend to make everyone tea and toast and send them asmr videos if they cant sleep i love him. He usually spends his night dancing around with pony and working off all his ENERGY

Kendo: “yall im turning into bed i’m too tired for this shit” “kendo it’s 7pm”

My girl will retire to her room as early as she can (usually with the rest of the girls) and she just RELAXES. Like self-care to the max: paints her nails, watches tv, plans her tomorrow, showers. She’s usually asleep at 10pm and wakes up the next morning full energy I want what she has

Awase: he has the WORST sleep schedule like fr. Literally sits up on tiktok until 3am and he’s just like “oh shit i’m up at 7…” *continues scrolling* like bro GET UR ASS TO BED U HAVE TRAINING AT 6AM. His night routine ain’t anything special- he sleeps in sweats and always keeps his window open (although someone told him about banshees once and now hes lowkey terrified lmao)

Kaibara- the type to fall asleep on the sofa and wake up at 4 in the morning to find tsuburaba in the kitchen eating a full course meal and he just SIGHS and goes up to bed in the worst mood bc why tf are his friends so WEIRD. Likes to watch the stars and edit pictures before he sleeps- its so therapeutic to him and also productive so he’s winning

Rin- he drinks coffee every night after midnight and then goes “oh my fuck shit i just drank coffee why am i like this” like congrats u fuckin dumbass now u ain’t gonna sleep. And he never fuckin learns. Always does his hw at like 11pm, Also stays up way too late binge-watching star wars smh

Tsuburaba: he gets up every night and treats himself to a three-course meal in the kitchen no cap no sound awareness my man will be blending shit full blast at 2 in the morning. Usually falls asleep sitting at the kitchen table and he 👏🏻 needs 👏🏻 a 👏🏻 chiropractor 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻. Also always forgets to do his homework until everyone’s packing up to go to bed and hes like “please,, anyone,, the math?”. Shoda wants to punch him so bad

Ibara: the most well-structured person in the entire building. At 7pm she has her shower, at 8:30pm she goes to pray, at 9:30pm she journals and draws to calm her mind, and at 10pm she meditates until she falls asleep- which is usually 10:20pm.. Everyone wants her self control and independance like damn how does she FUNCTION. Also queen of vegan self-care remedies

Pony: girl is chaotic as fuck it’ll be like 10pm and rin’s like “yo pony can i copy the hw??” And shes like “WHAT HOMEWORK.” . *cue two idiots freaking tf out*. She’s always wearing matching pj sets and fluffy socks and loves sliding around in them like a dork. Dances every night before bed to tire herself out like shes just in the lounge deadass vibing to taylor swift and a new person joins her everytime . people would be dead without her

Kodai: movies every night or she won’t go to class the next morning. Shes always just sitting on her phone w earphones in like she has absoloutely no time to deal with monoma’s shit so she just peaces tf out of existence. Cutest pyjamas ever i love her pyjama queen. The go-to girl for homework she just leaves her bag open, as long as u return it shes cool

Tokage: oh my god shes so CRYPTIC and FOR WHAT. Pranks pranks pranks pranks pranks. everyone hates her for it and she loves it so bad. Like she has the balls to prank kamakiri and that TAKES BALLS LET ME JUST SAY . she’ll just leave her body parts in people’s beds and its SO annoying. They usually just pick up her stray arm and fling it at the wall in revenge then act confused the next morning when she complains abt the bruises

Komori: cryptic as fuck. Does she sleep? Why is she always sitting at the table? What is she doing? . Closes her tabs whenever someone comes into the dining room and just stares at them til they leave again like :)). In the garden every night til she can’t bear the coldness- watches the stars and makes flower crowns and worships the moon i love her

Kuroiro: nighttime is the time he just evaporates like where tf is he like 🙄🙄 reel it in randy from monsters inc . Hiding in the walls and listening to everyones conversations and secrets is his only skill in life . Everyone thinks he doesn’t sleep and just wanders around (he does, he just likes to have an edgy reputation)

Kamakiri- did you hear that?? oh its just kamakiri fistfighting monoma in the hallway again. Fr takes no prisoners he needs his beauty sleep (or idk do bugs sleep lmao??). If you’re in his way while he’s RAMPAGING to his room youre dead bro when i say he takes bedtime routines seriously i MEAN it. He does self-care and tells NOONE but its lowkey cute idk lmao why do i have a crush on a bug lemme call my therapist real quick

Bondo- 9pm. Wind down time. A good book is all my mans needs and he’ll be out for the count in absolutely no time at all. Fukidashi will die jealous and bondo fucking loves it. Milks tf out of it too he’s like YAWN I AM SO TIRED OFF TO BED NOW TO SLEEP PEACEFULLY GOODNIGHT and everyone who WISHES they could sleep as early as that wants him to choke

Manga- king of never having hw done until 1am at the earliest 🤡. He lives on 1 hour sleep most nights and his speech bubble just says “no <3” until like 11am. Its cus of his crippling hyperactivity he’s running the halls at 3am practicing the entire mamma mia choreography ffs fukidashi U HAVE A CAREER AHEAD OF U

Reiko: energy drink addiction 101 if she doesn’t drink monster every night before bed she’s convinced she’ll die. “I sleep all day and party all night” she says, crying over math hw at 2am. Plays music too loud and has LED strobelites on ALL NIGHT. Shes deadass doing witchcraft in the lounge w komori all night during finals week she doesnt give a single fuck x

Shishida: another reader,, mans will finish an entire book in a night by the force of sheer willpower alone. Takes a bath every night and it makes his fur so fluffy and smell like apples smdnwjdnwd. Perfect snuggle buddy for wintertimes (pony LOVES HIM) and he’s that good man who carries tsuburaba to bed when he falls asleep at the kitchen table

Shoda: “please don’t speak to me while im doing my homework im 👌🏻 this close to having a mental breakdown and all it takes is a single poke to reel me over the edge.” Complains all day about being tired then goes to bed at 2am?? Like no shit ofc ur tired bitch . Always up for a deep talk at night he knows EVERYTHING abt EVERYONE and hes so trustworthy hed never tell a soul

Honenuki: he meal preps and does yoga before bed 🤢 like WHO HAS THAT MOTIVATION. Irons and sets his uniform out for the next day before getting his homework FINISHED by 9pm . He’s pretty flexible w what he does at nights it 100% depends on his mood. Usually he’s helping Tokage with pranks or working out w tetsutetsu tho. Used to annoy people who were up doing hw after 11 like “really tsuburaba? You should be ashamed”. Shoda almost DECKED him once for it tho and he was #traumatised and never did it again

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redxblueihateloveyou · 4 years

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I'm curious what you think the worst shipping dynamic is? And the reasoning behind it if you have any.

Thank you so much!!!

haha I do have several of those actually. I’ll include both what I think are the worst dynamics and the kind of ships that “I just don’t get why would you ship smth like that”.

1. What I actually call “a mom and a manchild”.

examples: Hatori/Chiaki from “Sekaichi Hatsukoi”, Ikuya/Hiyori.

I guess, technically there’s nothing wrong with this, if they both enjoy being this way, but firstly I just hate adults behaving like infants and I don’t think encouraging such behavior can lead to anything good, and secondly watching this just makes me uncomfortable for many reasons. And moments like when Hyori came up to Ikuya when he talked to Haru and was like “it’s too late and you can’t talk to this man, time to go home” and Ikuya went I just cracked up at this. Also when one part is basically changes the other’s part diapers, but in return gets tantrums or basically nothing or “but I wanna play with someone else tho”, it’s just a kink I do not get, like why would you want to be treated like this is beyond me.

But then I also generally dislike infantile characters, and I can’t ship smth if I don’t like both parties, so maybe bc of this. I always like the mature characters. Like even when I do know in theory that a 13 year old in reality can’t behave like Todoroki, I’m still like, I don’t fucking care, that’s the one I like xD But when 20 years old Ikuya behaves like this, I just do not appreciate it, I guess.

2. “I don’t have an identity, my identity is you or what you want me to be” category, including “my dignity flew out of the window” ones and “I just do what you do”. (I CANNOT HANDLE THIS DYNAMIC, YOU KNOW I CAN’T!!!!!!! I DO NOT WHY, BUT IT’S JUST PISSING ME OFF THE MOST OF ALL PROBABLY)

examples: Eren/Mikasa, Haru/Makoto, Natsusa/Sei from “Number24″.

Sports animes do that a lot. “The only reason I played rugby is because you played it” is a major cringe. And no, it’s not romantic. Romantic is like when you’re both passionate about this and doing this sports together makes it even better/more meaningful, that I get. Not, “I only went there bc you like it” and I’ll have what you have, I’ll do what you do. Like.. huh? You firstly a person, as in fully formed one pls, you can’t exist as someone’s trail.

Those ships always contain this one person (like Mikasa, Makoto), who are just the accessory of the other character. Mikasa’s problem is not the ackerbond, it’s her life position, she herself chosen to be Eren’s doormat. And some also find this romantic, I think, but I just hate such things. Also the truth of life: if you don’t respect yourself, your crush won’t respect you either. Just saying.

Makoto, I sincerely think, if Kisumi would be his neighbour instead of Haru, he’d be playing basketball at school lmao. Like SD has so many of absolutely terrible scenes, where Makoto just for real turns to Haru and goes “do you think I should go to the basketball club if we’re not swimming?” like dude, I’m... he’s like a walking definition of “meh” if there ever existed one. How can you do not care what you do? Like at all. This is beyond me. That’s sad. Watching him makes me sad.

I just need both characters in a ship be you know THEM, fantastic on their own, then when they’re together they become an absolutely explosive magic. It’s just a true fact.

Also there is one ship who is not quite this category, but kinda touches this theme. Ciel and Lizzy from “Kuroshitsuji”, ike the original Ciel, for whom she wanted to pretend to be a dumb damsel in distress for the rest of her life. Like fucking seriously????? You’d live like this????!!!! Fucking hell, you must really don’t love yourself like at all.

3. Humiliation isn’t my kink.

examples: Dazai/Akutagawa, Midoriya/Bakugou.

Akutagawa and Midoriya are badass motherfuckers and also wonderful human beings on their own. When they encounter Dazai and Bakugou they become sheeps. I hate seeing them like that, that’s basically it. Also humiliation is really not my kink. The whole “treat him like crap” thing. Like some things they did to them is just.. my god, I don’t like it.

Like when Dazai asked Atsushi to throw the phone moment, I literally flinched so hard watching it, I can’t even explain this feeling between the dejection and utter disgust at the fact that Dazai did it, that I felt watching it, but I fucking hated it.

4. Those who bring out the worst in each other or don’t bring out anything in each other.

All my ships literally all with no exceptions make each other the best versions of themselves, push/challenge each other to become better/brighter/happier, etc., or add to each other that piece the other was missing.

If someone makes someone feel depressed, miserable or even just simply stuck in a rut, that’s probably not it. There are some ships who just simply can’t make each other happy or even make each other unhappy and that’s a fact.

5. Ships with no development or development so tiny that you need 120 episodes and an magnifying glass to see it.

examples: I’d say, but I just don’t want those 10 year olds in my ask box again.

Hate this for obvious reasons. Because as wise ppl say “only fools don’t grow” or "if we don't change, we don't grow. if we don't grow, we aren't really living."

6. Those who are like brothers to each other and said so and don’t emmit any and I mean ANY sexual vibes or attraction in that kind of way towards each other.

examples: Harry Potter/Ron Weasley (like THE FUCK seriously), Stiles/Scott from “Teen Wolf”, Keith/Shiro.

I just cannot imagine them being romantically involved, I literally can’t. And I don’t get it. It’s like they even say “you’re my brother” thing, but also they just do not give off any couply feels and imagining this kinda make me cringe a bit, cause I have two sisters I’m very close with and their relationship remind me of our relationships so just.. no.

7. They are not each others priority. Meaning both putting someone else or something else before them.

If they don’t put each other first, I most likely probably don’t want it.

My jam is like Stucky and when they say to Steve “you do this, captain, and the whole world would think of you as a criminal” and Steve being like “fuck you, take your shield, take your idiotic hero rules, I don’t care, he matters to me more than your whole dumbass world”.

My jam is Lan Zhan who went against the whole world and a horde of stupid donkeys and fought for his baby till the end. He really didn’t care if he’d lose everything and what would other ppl think, if it meant that Wei Wuxian will be with him.

On the other hand, we have Jin Guangyao, who had Lan Xichen, but he wanted power and idiots’ love more, so he chose what he chose. Do not get this ship, like no, thanks.

As for putting specific someone else first. Rin/Sousuke, for example. I in general do not get it, but also like there are like 10 moments in the anime like in Yakusoku when Rin forgot about him, when he saw Haru during the tournament and an actual quote “Sousuke looked at Rin, who will always put Haru first”. So like... I do not get it. If you see them as a couple this is technically no good no for Sousuke, no for Rin.

8. Obviously straight ones, but “hey, I need them gay”.

I in fact just do not believe in a “straight ppl do not exist” thing. As I’ve said before there are exceptions where some characters give off the clear bi vibe, but those are pretty rare tbh. And even more rare canonically proven ones like Kanda from D.Gray-man, for example.

The moment they show some character in anime drool over some girls he doesn’t even know, but he don’t react to any of the guys like this, this just means he’s most likely heterosexual. Cause only straight guys drool only specifically after seeing random boobs. So this thing always throws me off in some ships.

99% of my ships are either canonically gay or most likely gay, but author doesn’t want to label it.

There are just lots of animes where main character/s have shown no interest in an opposite gender whatsoever like “Natsume Yuujinchou”, “Kuroko No Basuke”, “AOT”, “Number24″, “Fukigen na Mononokean”, “Tower Of God”, “Owari no Seraph” etc., but did in fact show interest in the same gender one. That I get, yes.

And btw even if you want somebody to be as I call it a “wishful bi”, I think it should be only in situations like if these characters have some absolutely wonderful/undeniable connection, not just the ship for the sake of gay ship.

_____

That’s probably it. Otherwise I’m fine, I think :D

#answered #anonymous #shipping #otp #anime #or should i tag notp xD #tbh 2 is my nemesis #I for some reason can't stand it #technically it's not THE worst per se but somehow for me it is

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smol-grey-tea · 3 years

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I was gonna write the romo attraction thing today but honestly i dont feel like doing it bc im just rlly upset about smth that im sure a lot of ppl can relate to

So my irl friend groups are very... well they dont know much about these kinds of things, i had to be a walking encyclopaedia for them about my identities like nb stuff bc they didn't bother to just... look it up.

When i told them i was trans they would say "omg are you actually trans?? I have a trans best friend!!" Yikes

Instead they would ask me to explain it. Which is fine, i kinda hate having to explain for the 5th time that no, using the correct terms and pronouns is not a fucking burden, and that yes, dysphoria is awful and wont just magically go away.

and when i tell them to yk, not use pronouns for me and just use my name instead, not 1 person did that. They just... misgendered me and used she/her when i explicitly told them that it makes me dysphoric. I then told them to use coo/coos/cooself instead bc i quite like it, but they still didnt use it.

Then i gave up and told them to use they/them since it doesnt make me dysphoric even tho i lowkey hate it. They still misgender me but said "they'll try to get used to it". Its not that hard guys what the actual fuck???

Anyway, i was actually going to talk about aspec stuff. So i only told one of them that i was demiromantic demisexual, and they said "wtf is that" which yk is not a nice way to react to someone coming out, but i have thick skin so i just explained it bc again they couldnt bother to search it, and they said "ok ig" and changed the subject when i wanted to explain my attraction???? I've never had anyone that i could talk to about my complicated feelings with being aspec and just when i thought i could i was shut down.

I thought it was over and done with, until they started to... ignore my fucking identity??? Which i would say is way more important and personal to me than my bisexuality??? They never did any of that bs with my bisexuality probably bc they were pansexual themself, but jfc is it that hard to not make jokes about me being horny or having a crush or joking about setting me up on blind dates??? It legit made me so uncomfortable and i have no idea what to say.

Bc remember, they didnt exactly respect my pronouns and kept using gendered terms to refer to me even more after i came out??? I swear it feels like its on purpose every time they called me a girl but whatever

Istg they forgot that im demi bc they keep making these jokes and ignoring that i dont feel sexual or romantic attraction like that and keep acting as if i want to date ppl or fuck them when i say they look pretty??? I spent way too fucking long mistaking my aesthetic attraction for sexual for ppl to once again reinforce this idea and im done with it. Please for the love of god stop it.

I said i liked wilbur and thought he was rlly cute and they then proceeded to, you guessed it, act like im in love with him or that i want to fuck him. First of all, hes a real person on the internet that i do not know, 2nd of all, fucking eww, and 3rd of all, hes a whole ass adult and we r both in high school. Yikes again.

Ofc i didnt tell them these things and just said that i dont like him that way and just thought he was pretty and nothing else. They completely ignored this and thought i was just embarrassed or smth or that i was in denial. Yikes again again.

So yeah. The only lesson i learned is to never come out as aspec to anyone irl ever again. Tbh i kinda want to tell them that im not bi and that i dont feel any kind of attraction. It would be a lie but christ i wish they would stop. They can validate my bisexuality but not my nb or aspec identities? I knew that queer sexualities were more normalized now which is awesome but why cant they do that for trans ppl or aspecs? Why does it have to stop there?

Sorry for venting like this but i thought this might be relatable for yall. Ive never had the experience of feeling "broken" bc of any of my identities, im very confident in them. I just wish other ppl other than my online friends would feel the same.

Also sorry for delaying the romo attraction thingy i just rlly dont feel like it rn. Idk when i will write it but hopefully if i feel better i will finish it today

There's no pressure to write it up dude it's cool :) whenever you're ready ❤

And those ppl do not sound like good friends- idk exactly how old you are but ik I'm older, and I can tell you for certain that you will find better friends one day. It's guaranteed :) they don't deserve your friendship and I am glad to validate and help you in any way you need ❤❤

Yee I've never felt broken either! I think an element of that is that I thought I was allo for a very long time? But on the other hand I was bullied in my childhood for not having attraction so idk why that hasn't manifested into a phobia of romance but eh I'm better off this way whether it makes sense or not.

It makes me happy as well cuz a lot of ppl in the community seem very pessimistic abt how we're treated but it's nice to know that not all of us feel broken cuz the 2 of us are living examples of that :)

But unfortunately yeah, your experiences above are things many ppl can relate to. I'm sure almost everyone can remember a time where they came out to someone and weren't met with good responses,,

Let this be a reminder that this is not right and we deserve more support for something so personal. Even if you don't understand someone's identity that doesn't give you the right to dismiss or ignore them. Our identities are very important and personal to us and supporting them is basic respect.

#my post #ask #long post #lgbtq #aspec #aroace #aroacespec #non binary #transgender #neutralitea #transphobia tw #aphobia tw #acephobia tw #arophobia tw #swearing cw

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lysieblu · 3 years

Text

Love Alarm 1 & 2

Final Thoughts

I get it now. I am frustrated that none of this made sense until the final episode, but I get it. This story is realistic in that, until you face/heal your own shit, you will fuck it up for yourself and others. When it comes to love, don't depend on an app to make those decisions for you.

Sun-oh finally got the closure he deserved. Realistically, you may not be granted closure and must figure out how to move on without it. But this is fiction and I'm glad JoJo "released him." The way he got JoJo was rude as fuck in the first place. So, this whole ordeal although cruel, can also be seen as karma. I went back to first episode and JoJo said that she didn't love him. The urge to kiss came first. With that in mind, Sun-oh was working out his mommy issues. He desperately needed someone to love him. He forced his love on her.

JoJo probably went along with it because she needed someone on her side. Similar to how she went along with the relationship with Ik-Shik. She was working out family issues too. If Hye would have made the first move, we wouldn't have a story. Hye, although creepy in his actions, respected her relationship with Ik-Shik. So I could understand why he was holding back. I feel bad about Sun-oh and Hye's friendship but Sun-oh ruined it in the first place. Hye was an excellent friend, and Sun-oh wasn't.

JoJo finally faced her past and let shit go. It could be argued that her aunt and cousin are just as much to blame for how they treated JoJo. They reinforced those negative thoughts in JoJo's head. We have not seen JoJo train, but she runs a marathon? Not important.

I'm glad that JoJo's Aunt found happiness. One thing I don't like about Korean dramas is that the adults are rarely held accountable for the pain and fucked up things they do to their children. (i.e., Sun-Oh's mom, but she's so miserable why bother)

Gul-mi is still Gul-mi. Her relationship with her mom and JoJo is better but I fear for her future. (If she was a real person)

I will say that this is a win for the second lead. This is not a bad drama. It could have been told differently. As a viewer it was frustrating to watch because even though I knew why characters were behaving a certain way. It just wasn’t clear. I wasn’t sure if it was the story telling or my intuitiveness that relayed the messages. I feel like certain themes and story-lines could have been better explored. There could have been better hints along the way. It didn't end as bad as it started. I feel like it would be better as a re-watch.

I bitched a lot while watching this. Below are my musings. My mind changes a bit but it’s an interesting read.

All of these characters had issues that weren't properly explored. Had journeys that we were not allowed on.

JoJo

Obviously traumatized by a fucked up childhood. What irks me about her story line is that we never get to explore these elements. Why did her parents decide to kill themselves? And don't say debt. That's bullshit. I was willing to accept the fact that her mom had some mental disorder or that it was an accident but don't fucking say debt. Is her grandma still alive in present day? I understand why she feels so lonely and like she doesn’t deserve love but she didn't get a chance to confront those feelings properly. Hye comes along and is cute for 5 minutes and all of a sudden it’s all better. But is it really? Why is she still living with her aunt? College is important and shit but you could have lived on your own. For me, peace is more important. But again I believe she felt she deserved all the misery she was experiencing and thus endured. She never let anyone in. Never gave proper explanations. Her ex, deserved better. She didn't have to give her whole story but she should have been able to say "I have to work to save up for college" or some shit. She could have given them something rather than nothing. She didn't deserve Sun-oh. (in spite of his original sin I'll discuss when I get to him). He was a sweet heart and deserved an explanation. And all of a sudden she can draw??? The fuck?

Sun-oh

Dude falls for his best friends crush. We don't get to properly explore their dynamic or his family dynamic. His mom tried to kill him and barely tolerates his existence. I think his attraction to JoJo is more of a recognition of hurt (in her) than an actual attraction. It was more rooted in his mommy issues than real love. He went for her because he knew Hye would let him. Still, he didn't deserve that ending to the relationship. He was all in and JoJo was not. The power dynamic between Sun-oh and Hye is why this friendship was doomed from the start.

Hye-yeong

Baby boy is precious and extremely kind. He needs to be protected in this world. However, his actions are pathetic. He let his best friend steal his crush. Even if she didn't like him, he should have confessed instead of following her around like a creep. He continues to pursue her, even though he know she likes Sun-oh. He sees her loneliness and for that I think he is the better choice. However, not knowing how she feels about him (fuck Love Alarm she should say it) is just cruel.

The most realistic aspect of this drama was human beings becoming over dependent on technology. This app redefines what it means to love someone and instead of it being genuine from the heart it became a public gesture. I always thought that the app should have different types love and include “like” and “lust.” Love amongst friend and family is equally important. This app amplifies feelings of loneliness and streamlined one's focus or definition of love.

Love Alarm 2

I was hoping that in the break between the two parts of this story the writers would fix a lot of the issues going on but no. The fuckery continues.

Two episodes in:

This all just seems really cruel. Everyone is forcing love. How or why JoJo ends up with Hye-yeong is not really explained. JoJo is trying to force love with Hye when she clearly still loves Sun-oh. She refuses to talk to Sun-oh and have a full discussion about everything. JoJo has a friend that she could live with and still decides to stay with her aunt. JoJo is depending on an app to tell her how she feels. JUST STOP IT.

Hye apparently has a father in jail. This story line grazes a destination bit essentially leads no where.

Sun-oh Is miserable.

This story really had great potential but it just lacks depth.

Four episodes in

I can accept all of this if only there was a real reason for why JoJo left Sun-oh.I can guess it but make it clear. The writer must hate that the rich, popular lead always wins. It seems like the second lead might take a W for this one but it feels cheap. Like he didn't really fight for it. It just happened.

No it was not obvious that JoJo liked Hye. It seemed like she was tolerating him. YOU KNOW WHATS A CLEAR SIGN OF LIKING SOMEONE? Communication. She is still avoiding hard conversations.

I don't think JoJo is worth the ending of Hye and Sun-oh's friendship. As a character, she is not that great. She gives nothing to these guys. She just takes.

#Love Alarm #Love Alarm 2 #kdrama

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unordinaryquotes · 5 years

Note

Yo ik this isn't necessarily your forte, but since you do the reviews and stuff I figured it might be fair game: what do you think would happen if John had been paired with Remi instead of Sera?

Man....that’s hard to think about. I don’t think it would get rid of John’s hatred for the hierarchy or the progression of his PTSD (or other mental illness is he has one) However, he would see that Remi tries to make a change in the world and probably guide her on how to really help.

A friendship with Blyke and Isen would also be on the table. I think at first they would quarrel over differences, they’d eventually become close friends. Meanwhile, Sera would slowly be crushed over time with the responsibilities she had forced on her. She may be a rival to Remi and John or even start working with Ember all to maintain her high society placing. Arlo would be in the middle on the dispute between the two parties.

To go into more detail about story beats, Remi going away for her brothers funeral would end up being a rough week for John. He ends up pissing off Sera and she threatens him. Remi would hide her sadness over her brothers lost from John, only trusting Arlo since he knew Rei as well. This would get John concerned and he invites her out to the mall, just the two of them. Remi would find out about the power rating booth’s scheme when she got the bear and she would try to shut him down but it would end up going like how it went in canon when she confronted him.

Now when Arlo starts getting suspicious of John’s abilities, he confides is Sera as she is the strongest in the school. She would stay confidant, proudly boasting that no one could defeat her.

John would gift Remi his UnOrdinary book and Remi would remember it as a book Rei used to own. He never showed her it, but she remembers him talking about it. She takes it with no issue. However she becomes careless when Sera visits her room to talk. She spots the book and turns her in. Sera wants to revoke Remi’s title but Arlo stops her from doing so.

Remi is sent away on leave and she tasks Blyke and Isen to watch over John. John apologizes to her over gifting the book but she says that it was worth it. She wanted to see another piece of her brother, now that he’s gone. The first week of Remi’s suspension is a bit rough, Blyke and Isen can’t be with John all the time, but he finds an unlikely support in Arlo. The two build up their friendship like they did in canon and eventually John ends up following him out there.

Arlo attacks him with Veintus and Meili yada yada John enters beast mode for a moment, his PTSD taking full control of him. He calls up Remi, and debates on telling her on what Arlo did. He remembers he’s pretty important to her so he’s conflicted. He resolves to tell her when she gets back but Remi decides to go back early.

However Arlo’s attack was actually a plan coordinated by Sera. She wanted to see if John really was strong as Arlo though so she used him as bait. After seeing Arlo beat up she feels fear for the first time in her life. Not used to such an emotion, she vows to bring John down to cripple status for real. We might also get a phone call with her mom which shows that she’s being abused as well but that’s for later.

Remi’s mother wants her daughter to stay for just another week, the loss of one of her children had really destroyed her and she needs the comfort of the other. Feeling sad for her mother, Remi decided to postpone her trip back to Wellston another week.

However that week is living hell for John. All of sudden Zeke and every middle tier seems to be after him. Blyke and Isen are seemingly nowhere (Sera made sure they constantly had duties to attend to during free periods and after school) and Remi wasn’t coming back for another week. It’s over that week that John comes to realize just how much Remi did for him at school.

When she gets back John cries in her arms and she’s speechless. When she hears what Arlo did she immediately storms over to his place. He doesn’t reveal John, he knows not to do that, but after several minutes of prodding from Remi and a mention of Rei, Arlo softens up and tells her Sera set it up.

Remi then goes to confront Sera, in front of the school I may add. She’s so angry that all reason goes out the window. She says Sera is cowardly for hurting a cripple like John and that sets Sera off. The two end up fighting and Sera wins with little effort. John runs to her when he learns she’s in the hospital. But she refuses to see him, not wanting to see him after she failed to get justice for him.

She meets John’s dad and he ends up treating her like he did Sera in canon. John’s dad leaves and John goes to school. Remi decides being cooped up all day won’t make her feel better so she goes for a walk through town. She ends up getting targeted by Ember. Yada yada lost power yada yada angst time. Though she had been campaigning for lower tiers to have more support she didn’t realize just how bad they had it. She used to jump in and do whatever she want because she had the power but now she’s brittle and weak. John tries to comfort her over it but being powerful himself he doesn’t know just what to say.

Remi, throughly depressed with all that happened this year, locks herself in her room and doesn’t leave. Soon news of Remi’s status as Queen is called into question and Sera decides to revoke it, giving it back to Cecile who gave her info on Remi’s lost powers. Arlo, Blyke, and Isen aren’t happy with this decision and go to confront Sera about it but she simply blows them off. The school learns Remi became powerless and begin harassing her. At first it’s not physical, they just talk to her about how annoying all her preaching was and make suggestive comments now she put her body to use now that she lost what made her special.

They start escalating by putting pins in her bags and dumping water on her (she’s always been afraid of that because of how easy it would be to shock herself like that). They bullies don’t physically beat her up, they know Arlo, Blyke, and Isen would tear them apart if they did. John, seeing how the school ignores Remi in her time of need and keeps such a crooked system where those who are powerless are bullied, decides to do something about it. He becomes Joker and starts fighting the people tormenting Remi.

At first it’s for her, but eventually that’s just a front to him. He finds joy in hurting the people who made his life miserable. Soon he decides the only way to destroy the hierarchy is to take out the remaining pieces. With a heavy heart, he beats up Isen and Blyke. Remi is shocked that something happened to those two and begins investigating, finally getting her pep back after seeing her friends hurt.

Meanwhile Sera tries to up the antics to tear John down further but it ends up making him more resentful. He defeats Cecile and Arlo and threatens Sera that she’s next. Cocky that she can beat him, she accepts his challenge. She’ll reveal him as the true coward, she isnt scared. That emotion has no place inside a god Tier like her, right? That’s what she was taught. Crush those who refuse to comply by whatever methods. Her stupid sister refused to understand that but Sera wouldn’t be another screw up like her.

Sera and John fight, getting more and more heated. It’s hard to tell who’ll come out on top, but eventually using his karate moves, something Sera didn’t expect, he defeats her. But Remi was watching the fight and puts two and two together. She collapses in tears and enters depressive state even bigger than the last. Her entire personality has shattered, and she only allows Arlo to come see her. She rarely sleeps anymore, it’s too hard to. Same with eating. Every time she does, it reminds her of the meals she shared with John.

Okay I’ll end it off there cause this was getting waaaaaay too long for a simple ask. Probably not what you wanted (or were expecting) but this is the best I could come up with.

Also I probably have arthritis now.

#unordinary #unordinary john #unordinary seraphina #unordinary arlo #unordinary remi #unordinary cecile #unordinary isen #unordinary blyke #unordinary rei

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diaryofanormalkid · 5 years

Text

I saw my work husband today! 😩😍😍

It was when I was going down to get stock. So I was listening to music out loud and I thought to myself that I should change the song. Just a few seconds after I changed the song, I saw him!

“No Tears Left to Cry” by Ariana Grande was playing when we passed by each other. He was wearing his regular clothes with his uniform in hand so I assume he was just arriving at work.

WE MADE EYE CONTACT THOUGH!!! I was trying my best not to act awkward or have a mean mugging face while making eye contact because I know how I get when I see hot ppl.

Lemme just SAY, he is SOOO fine. Like I’m still not used to it yet. I think he was wearing grey sweatpants and had I got to see him for longer, ya girls thoughts would’ve been wild!

Lord forgive me 😩 but damn, I can’t get over how fine he is. Anyways, after we passed each other I was sooo happy I literally jumped up in the air for joy.

I couldn’t believe I was seeing him this early into my shift, mind you it was only an hour in. Anddd let’s not forget the eye contact. IK that’s not a big deal to y’all probably, but it is for ME.

So a little while later I saw him AGAIN while on cash. I glimpsed that turquoise blue uniform and instantly I knew it was him without even looking up. To be fair, I couldn’t.

I was trying sooo hard not to act nervous while I waited for him to cash out his stuff. He was taking a while to get his things, so I didn’t know whether I should leave the cash or wait for him to come.

I decided to leave and keep myself preoccupied with something in the meantime while I waited for him to come and cash out his things. Of course, just a few moments after I leave he comes over though.

I turned my head to look back just in time to see him standing at the cash waiting for me, so I walked over. He said something to me and I think from shock of him speaking to me I was unable to hear him.

So I go, “hmm?” Instead of using real words, mostly out of nervousness and, again, from shock. He repeated himself and I was able to make out that he was asking me, “this side?”

He meant this side as in, was he at the right cash, in which I responded, “yep.” Once I arrived at the cash, full nerves kicked in and I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Obviously there was nothing else to do but my job, but I couldn’t help but feel so anxious. I totaled up his items and they came up to $11.48. That I remember, clear as day oddly.

He had got a veggie burger with fries and a tea. So healthy 😩 I was lowkey judging him but like I definitely did not let it show on my face in this time of concentration.

I also remember me screwing up verbally telling him his total by saying $11.45 instead of $11.48. That isn’t the correct rounding, obvs. I hope he didn’t peep my tiny mistake though, I was already anxious enough as it is.

He proceeded to tell me he would use MasterCard to pay for his order and went ahead and tapped his card I’d entered it in the debit machine.

After he tapped, I asked if he’d like a receipt and then he said no. So then he told me to have a good day and I said very inaudibly “you too.” 😩

YOU TOO?? Seriously britney?

You couldn’t have done ANY better than that? Guys, this is me, the Britney who is the most friendly and social cashier, has 15/10 customer service skills, remains professional even when provoked/irritated/sleepy.

Has superb problem solving skills in times of difficulty and can arise to the challenges that her workplace has to offer! And yet, all I gave him was a “you too?”

Oh my gosh, I was so disappointed in myself!!! I know I can do so much better with regular people, but this was no regular person! This is what I meant when I said he’s TOO fine!

My work husband is the only person who gets me all flustered like this. The only other person has been my baby boo crush but many of you new followers don’t even know about him.

He’s a long time crush that I haven’t seen in probably over two years now and probably never will see again, sadly. But if I did see him again, promise, I think he’d be making moves.

And if not him, I would! Because I’m telling you that boy would show interest majority of the time and I’m so mad at myself for not reciprocating in the slightest while he was still here.

Because now he’s gone and I have to deal with never knowing what that could’ve blossomed into. This is why you can’t take moments for granted. So I need to do better with my work husband.

I’m hoping I get a next time with him to make so much more progress because I could’ve talked to him about the raptors game, or his week, ANYTHING. It doesn’t matter, as long as I talk!

Idk I’m good like that. There’s something about customers that makes me so confident where I’m able to talk to them without feeling conscious or insecure or down about myself.

I just feel like a completely different girl at work. Ppl like me. Ppl think I’m beautiful and polite and friendly and helpful and caring and compassionate and so many other things.

They see me as somebody completely different than how I’ve seen myself my whole life, that all the good things about me get displayed all in one place it seems.

And it’s like... why can’t I just direct all of that energy towards my work husband too? Show him that sweet, witty, charming side of me? Flirt a little? Why do I always shut down?

He’s just a person. That’s what I like to say sometimes when I see him. But he’s such an attractive person. It’s so hard for me to separate him from others and just treat him the same.

I always want to go above and beyond. But it never works! I’m gonna try harder, but not too hard to where it’s forced and he can tell that I’m nervous to talk to him.

He doesn’t need to know I’m nervous to talk to him. I just want to flirt a little. Build some kind of rapport. But idk, something about today seemed different to me though.

The fact that he even talked to me??? I was like “uhhh are you finally making a move? Or just being friendly?! Make it more clear!” Because he was never responsive to me before ever.

Maybe I’m REACHING but what if he’s nervous to talk to me too? And he just built up the confidence to talk to me today? LOL I honestly want this to be true so bad but I don’t think it is.

A girl can dream though. But when I saw him that first time today even, I was hella shook he even made eye contact. Like God, thank youuu 😍 that made my whole entire day.

Regardless of what was happening during my shift, I was so happy. While he was sitting down to eat his food, I could see where he was sitting from where my cash was.

It was nice because he could see me if I walked by and I could see him, since he was facing my direction. It even looked like one of the times that he was looking at me when I looked over.

That’s not to get my hopes up, but he was definitely looking in my direction. That whole time I was in such a good mood because he was there.

And then when he was going to leave, he passed by behind me and I didn’t look but as he was leaving, I could already feel myself starting to miss him. I wanted him to stay longer so bad.

But my whole shift, my mind kept wandering to him and thinking, “when is he coming back?” “Will he even come back?” “Am I gonna get to see him again?”

I went downstairs a total of four times just in hopes that I would see him again. Obviously I was also doing work, but two out of those 4 trips were me volunteering to go down.

I didn’t end up seeing him for the rest of the night, but just knowing that I could possibly run into him at any second, I was super anxious/happy at the same time.

Definitely kept me on edge, in a good way. Like I was playing music the entire shift after I saw him just so I could “impress” him with my diverse taste.

Idk though, today was great. He obviously made my entire shift. Like I was actually super tired today, aside from him being there. If it weren’t for him, I’d have been dragging my foot this shift.

I really loved the way things panned out overall. Like i felt a shift in vibes on his end, for the better. But maybe that’s me just hoping for the best or reading in on his actions too much.

I have a hard time reading him though. He’s super mysterious. Like his expressions aren’t very telling of what’s going on in his head. Even the way he looked at me today, I was like “???”

As for the last time I saw him, when I was playing music, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking of me. He was so expressionless/unresponsive.

That’s probably why I am surprised he even talked to me today!

#work husband #crush #dear diary #diary #personal.#personal #crushes #baby boo

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puppyenergy · 6 years

Note

💕 Undertales

pete i owe u my life

*proceeds to write a fucking essay on why i love every single character in undertale*

i love all the characters in undertale. i just love how real they are. how real their motives feel. and how those motives don’t always have to be like “i wanna free everyone” how those motives can be flawed or how those motives can be as simple and genuine as “a lady i don’t know asked me to protect you and i’m honoring that because she likes my knock knock jokes” and how each character is connected in some way, they just feel so natural and real and alive and it brings their world to life as well.

and i also adore the fact that you can’t get to the true ending of the game until you meet and befriend every single one of these characters. it’s the fact that your bond with them is what incites all of these characters to save you. and it’s the fact that they end up being what pushes you onwards, to save them, and save everyone as well.

undertale could’ve just been a game where monsters are trapped underground and you free them someway somehow, but it’s just. so much more than that.

anyways here’s just a few reasons why i love every one of undertale’s characters in no specific order:

alphys

in all honesty, i rlly appreciate alphys’s character. for most of the neutral run, the person you’re getting to know isn’t actually the true alphys. and u end up finding out she was lying to u the whole time, using mettaton to help her fabricate this narrative. it’s so SO fitting that alphys is the one u have to go back for to get the true ending. u end up seeing her tear that persona down bc she wants to better herself. and u end up seeing her admit to her mistakes, and change, and do better. and it’s just, so healthy to see an adult character with all these insecurities who’s avoiding her mistakes actually improve herself.

sans

sans is rlly a wholesome character. it’s so clear that he genuinely cares about everyone in the underground. i mean, look at what happens when u go to grillbyz with him! everyone knows and loves him! he sells hot dogs at his sentry station to monsters, he does stand up comedy at the hotel to keep everybody happy, he starts a fucking pretend concert when ur jamming out with shyren. his entire motivation for not killing frisk the second they left the ruins is bc someone he didn’t even kno asked him not to and “someone who genuinely likes knock knock jokes has an integrity* u just can’t say no to” i’m CRYING. and it’s clear that he’s not the happiest skeleton in the world, all the jokes & puns aside. he had to give up on his past experiments and thusly had to give up on “going home.” dude is stuck in a place he doesn’t belong but he’s doing his best to make his little brother & everyone else around him happy, all while protecting frisk. jeez????

*i also love this line bc both sans & papyrus can turn ur soul blue and the blue soul is integrity.

papyrus

papyrus is also a great character and i’m not just saying that bc he has some of the best lines in the game. also his battle is so fun. it’s the first battle in the game where ur heart turns a different color. this skeleton BELIEVES in u. he believes that everybody is capable of being a good person. i love how he comes out of the gate boasting about how he’s going to capture you and become part of the royal guard but he ends up wanting to be ur friend instead. bc despite how many times he calls himself great, deep down he’s insecure and just wants a cool friend who thinks he’s also cool. yet he still has these great messages about boundaries and how it’s important to have many friends and not just cling to one person. tbh i think that’s one of the best messages papyrus gives, besides the fact that anyone can be a good person. i also love how he lives to not only uplift himself but others as well………

undyne

man i fucking ove undyne’s PERSONALITY, like, the moment i fell in love with her was when she was standing atop the cave and was like “first let me tell u the history of our people………ACTUALLY, U KNO WHAT? SCREW THIS! WHY SHOULD I TELL U WHEN UR ABOUT TO DIE” and there’s just all these close up shots of her face and her theme song is blaring and she like, whips off her helmet and u see her face for the first time but it’s this dramatic shot of her standing on top of a fucking mountain its so ANIME AKLGHDKSLHGDSH. both her battle & her hang out are probably my favorites in the entire game. ITS JUST SO FUNNY LIKE. “undyne clenches her fist and shakes her head.” “undyne thinks about her friends and pounds the ground with her fist.” “undyne suplexes a boulder just because she can.” AND THE DYNAMIC OF HAVING TO RUN AWAY FROM HER AND SHE CHASES AFTER U BUT UR JUST WALKING THE ENTIRE TIME AND SHE FUCKING STOPS WHEN U GET A PHONECALL AND PAPYRUS IS LIKE, in the middle of undyne chasing frisk down to kill them, “hey human! let’s hang out with undyne later!” AND THEN RESUMES CHASING U AFTER UR DONE. she gets too hot in hotland and passes out, but if u give her water then she just. goes home. without saying a word. bc even tho she has been consistently trying to kill u, and u could’ve just left her there, u HELPED her. up till that point she was convinced u were faking kindness. but after that, she realizes ur not a bad person and leaves bc she can’t kill someone who’s not a bad person. her soul mode is literally the color of kindness. i can go on and on, how obvious and cute her crush on alphys is, alluding to how she literally just keeps soda at her place even tho she hates it bc she knows alphys likes it and won’t let u drink it bc that’s for her crush omg. how she teaches papyrus how to cook bc she doesn’t want to tell him that he’s not fit for the royal guard. how much she admires asgore and goes as far to say frisk reminds her of him bc they’re both so kind. and god everything she says after alphys confesses to her that she’s been lying about everything undyne is so FULL OF LOVE FOR HER FRIENDS

HOLY FUCK I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT WHAT UNDYNE DOES IN NO MERCY TOO I’M SCREAMING

THERE’S A REASON WHY THE NARRATION IS SO DIFFERENT DURING HER NO MERCY BATTLE AND WHY NARRATOR CHARA ADMIRES UNDYNE AND THINKS SHE’S THE BEST CHARACTER IN UNDERTALE AND THAT’S BECAUSE SHE IS

(i have a theory that chara, during no mercy, thinks that undyne has the best chance of stopping u which is why they get so excited when she arrives and so upset when she loses. i also just think chara and undyne are rlly similar too, in like. so many ways. also ik i’m going off on like 3 different tangents i’m so sorry to anyone who’s reading this i just get rlly excited about undertale.)

mettaton

mettaton is probably close second for my favorite battle. i honestly love his character and how it never rlly hits u how the whole “evil human killing robot” facade was so obvious until u play again. he’s obvious trying to do what he loves, entertaining people, while being saddled with this task to pretend he’s an evil robot trying to kill you. the reveal that he’s actually a ghost inside a robot is even more like a punch in the gut bc u realize that…alphys never made him. she made him a body, sure, but not him. i rlly like watching let’s players react to his battle bc of what he says towards the end, about how humans have so many actors and entertainers, but monsters only have him. and how much life and happiness he brings to the underground, and how he would leave a gaping void if he were to leave. it’s rlly sweet to see let’s players connect with that moment imho. i also love how he returns home to visit his cousin after their phone call.

also death by glamour…objectively sexiest undertale song

napstablook

speaking of mettaton’s cousin, napstablook is so sweet. ik this post is getting massively long but it wouldn’t feel complete without them. honestly, the fact that after mettaton left, they wanted to start getting to know their other neighbor (undyne) but was too intimidated to talk so they started making her a mixtape which is just a bunch of dudes screaming their signature wrestling moves is so fucking adorable and hilarious. also the fact that they just straight up avoid the apocalypse by not answering when it knocked on their door.

toriel

toriel……..is my mom. enough said.

ok no i lied not enough said. dude how heart breaking was it learning that all the kids she tried to protect in the past ended up leaving her and getting killed by her fucking ex-husband’s order?? hello???? and that she was so desperate to not lose another child that she was going to destroy the exit to the ruins, which would mean she would never be able to hear another knock knock joke from her only fucking friend (sans), and she would just be stuck in the ruins forever bc she’s goddamn immortal. i’m gonna CRY.

asgore

i like how asgore is written, i don’t like his actions tho. i definitely love all the build up to him, the parallels, how he’s always painted as a nice guy and every character tells u to talk to him, but the second u get to him he destroys ur mercy button and ur left with no choice but to fight him or get killed. new home & onwards is when undertale’s storytelling is at its strongest, is what i personally think. asgore definitely plays a part in that.

flowey & asriel

flowey & asriel are such complicated characters idek if i can summarize what i think about them but i guess all i’ll say is i’m just happy with how undertale treated the both of them.

frisk

me when it’s revealed that they’re their own person and not the player or chara

chara

ok finally on to the character who, if i had to pick one to be my favorite, would claim that spot.

i will admit. i am a big chara stan. :pensive: i personally think they’re the most relatable and interesting character in undertale. i also hate how they’ve been treated by the fandom, like they’re evil. i think it’s undeniable that they are the narrator in all paths in the game. they are woken up by frisk’s determination, after all!

of course, with the true ending, u help their brother gain closure on losing them, proving both chara & asriel that the idea of “kill or be killed” is wrong, and then helping them finish the plan that they both failed- destroying the barrier and freeing the monsters. then flowey encourages chara (and indirectly, the player) to not reset and to let frisk live their life, which chara does, unless the player decides to start a new game.

the one thing i just rlly like about chara tho is that they’re always encouraging u, making all these silly puns, jokes, quips, providing advice and tips on how to spare monsters- like they r rlly invested in helping frisk. it’s clear they’re a good person. they knew almost every monster in the underground. they’re incredibly smart. they’re a big fucking nerd and into anime. they liked gardening to the point of having a gardening knife specifically for cutting plants. they cared about their family so much that they had bff necklaces with their brother, they knitted a sweater for their dad, they loved their mom so much they talk like her. but they’re not a flawless character. they’re coded as a mentally ill abuse victim. they hated humanity, they ran away to a place where people are said to never return. when they messed up, they got so upset that they laughed to cope. they’re flawed, but their brother idolized them so much. and on top of this all they had this pressure on their shoulders that they were “the future of humans and monsters.”

but their plan failed, and it was either kill or be killed by the humans attacking them. and u all kno how that ended. :(

i guess in a way that’s kinda why i think chara and undyne are rlly similar. they’re both incredibly determined, they both wanted to free the people they cared about, they both had a loved one who didn’t want to hurt people, they both shouldered this huge responsibility, and they both would not hesitate to hold ur ass responsible if u ended up doing some awful shit.

✌️

SORRY THIS WAS SO LONG OMG this is my only excuse

#i'm so sorry this is so long #this doesn't even encapsulate EVERYTHING #comfytoad #long post #ask

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taotrooper · 6 years

Text

Everlasting Flower: The Library 3 (end)

Everlasting Flower (masterpost, tag, AO3 series) is an AU in which Ouryuu allowed Zeno’s blood to give Kaya a kind of immortality.

→ Part 1 → Part 2 → Bonus chapter → Link to AO3

Chapter summary: After some bonding with Yoon, it's time to say goodbye to the city of books.

Yoon found Kaya at the attic they used as bedroom, sitting at the desk and humming a song. She squished and ground the leaves of a plant into the walls of a wooden mortar with the cadence of the song she sang. Yoon couldn't understand the lyrics, but the melody was similar to a folk song from the Fire Tribe he knew from childhood. He wondered if she was humming an original version in words long forgotten by even their ancestors.

He waited next to her. As a fellow herbalist, he sure didn't like to be interrupted while he was working on medicine. He wasn't going to do something as unpleasant to her.

Eventually, she put down the pestle and stretched her arms behind her head.

"Hey, Kaya?" Yoon said.

"Eeeeeeek!!"

She jumped and took the chair with her. After glancing at the source of the call, she exhaled with a grimace.

"You scared me, Yoon... How long have you been there?"

"Like five minutes." He cocked his eyebrow. "Couldn't you feel my presence behind you like Zeno does?"

"Geez, no. I'm not like him, I normally can't tell those things. I have no sixth sense, I'm normal." Yoon bit his tongue. He knew what she meant to say, but that wasn't the right adjective to use. She grabbed the chair from the floor and put it back against the table. "What can I do for you?"

"I finished it." He held the book in his arms towards her. I was wondering if I could..."

"Go grab the one you want, yes!" she beamed. "You don't have to ask me."

"Thank you very much," he nodded and ran to the shelves to put back the book he had read. Yoon had already considered his options beforehand, so he only had to find the title he had chosen already, written on the spine of a blue one.

"Can I see?" Kaya asked, with a curious look in his eyes. Yoon raised it up. She seemed to think about it for a bit.

"Oh, that one's really, really outdated," she sighed and walked towards the shelf. "There's this horrible side effect to one of the recipes that was discovered later, so please don't read it. Here." She took a different volume and offered it to Yoon. "It has another title and I used a different pen name, but it's pretty much like a newer edition of that one. It's good. Except for the last chapter; there are way better techniques today."

"Wait, whoa," he gasped as he grabbed the book. "You're the author of these?"

"Uh, yeah," she blushed. "These are mine. From my notes over the centuries. I also have some diaries about geography and history and personal stuff I don't want to forget, but most of my published books are medical textbooks."

"That's so cool!" Yoon said with fervor. It had been a dream of his to write a book one day.

"I... I figured... uh... more people need that knowledge to pass down through generations. It can reach more patients if you teach others, rather than just tending everyone yourself."

Yoon skimmed through the pages. It was a rather old book, at least fifty years old or more. The pages were quite yellow. So impressive! He couldn't help but admire Kaya even more.

"Is it hard? Writing a book?"

"Actually, yeah!" she laughed. "I'm not a genius so it takes me ages to get anything done. You need to do two difficult things." She raised her index and middle fingers. "First, you need to research and learn, so you know what you're going to write about and how to say it, and it has to be current, real facts. Second, you need motivation to want to sit down and write. And most times, having both at the same time isn't going to happen. Not to mention the time."

"You have all the time in the world, though."

"I do but I also do other things, like to travel with Zeno or tend people or sometimes do other jobs that aren't healer-related. Sometimes we don't have ink or paper with us either! So I take it easy and wait for my books to become pretty obsolete before starting anew."

The ink and paper was a problem Yoon knew well. He also realized that her rest stops at the library were likely with the purpose of authoring books and filling up her diaries, rather than actual vacations.

After all, caring for patients... In Kaya's condition, it would be insane to do that all the time. Yoon had been thinking about it, ever since she had revealed her story to them. It bothered him and concerned him a lot. He sat on Zeno and Kaya's bed, crestfallen.

"I don't understand how you do it..." he whispered.

"Well, I carry notebooks with me for when I discover new stuff. Then I use what I've written in other books and update it with my notes."

"No..." He closed his fingers against the book cover and pressed it. "How you can be a healer while being immortal. Doesn't it... dunno, break your heart? Knowing you're outliving everyone? That no matter how long you live... some people will still die on you?"

He had treated sick and wounded people he was unable to save. He couldn't even imagine how many people Kaya had met and failed to save. Had she gotten used to it? Was she desensitized? Did she still see them as important souls to help at all costs like Yoon, or were they akin to tiny birds with broken wings to her, nearly a goddess among mortals after living for so long?

And in a more personal sense... Three faces flashed in Yoon's mind. He knew the dragons would die soon. Lately, he had realized how much worse it must have been for Zeno, finally having brothers again to then losing them too soon. So he could, sometimes when the journey was arduous, feel the weight of dread in his chest that he usually tried to bury deep within and forget. He knew the fear of outliving, even if in a lesser scale than those two.

He felt the bed bouncing down. Kaya had sat next to him. When Yoon looked up, the youth and spark was gone from her dark eyes. He saw a sorrow most ancient in her stare, he saw her real age for once.

"...Constantly, yeah," she finally said. "Even after all these years I cry sometimes, when it's too unfair. It's never easy and it'll never get easier."

"Then why? Why haven't you quit?"

"Hmmmm." She clutched the hem of her kimono. "The same reason you haven't quit, I guess. It's just the right thing to do. In fact... I think it's better for them that I do care that much. Doctors and nurses should keep their heart, don't you think? Even if it hurt us."

Yoon said nothing, but he knew what she was saying. She looked ahead, through the window. Her voice turned softer and kinder.

"At some point, I asked myself: What's the use of living forever without a purpose, if you don't give back to the world? Even if it's short term, life has a meaning. If I can heal or save someone, I'm really glad! But staying with the others is just as important. You know, hundreds die alone because no one will treat them." Yoon knew. Kaya's voice broke. "I could have died alone myself at seventeen. It's so, so scary! Even if you prepare yourself, it crushes you. That's why I don't want people to leave this world on their own. Even if all I can do is giving some solace and hold their hands until it's time? I'm willing. Even if I'll mourn them and sob for days, I'll get better, I'm not alone. That's why it's okay. That's why I still help."

She looked at Yoon and moved a thumb to wipe a tear from his cheek. He hadn't noticed he had started crying. Kaya then put her arms around him. While she didn't cover much of him, being the same size roughly, her hug felt warm and cozy. Her hands, which smelled vaguely like the fresh herbs she had been grinding, moved to caress Yoon's hair. He embraced back firmly, unsure if she was comforting him or if she was looking for comfort from him. It was probably both, he concluded.

"Keep it, Yoon," she murmured after a long silence, still hugging him. "Keep that big heart inside your chest, never lose that humanity. I've met so many geniuses in this field who lose themselves and stop caring about people. But you mustn't. I mustn't. Even if it tears you apart, please keep it."

"You better believe I will," he grumbled with gritted tears, restraining a sniffle. He felt a kiss on his temple. After his journey with Yona and the others, after seeing and fighting against so much poverty, how else would it be?

And she was right. He wasn't alone. He had everyone and even Ik-soo back home. Thinking about the future was just unnecessary pain. They lived now and that's what mattered.

"Oh? Can Zeno join the hug?"

They looked at the threshold: Zeno had just entered the room. That day he had his hair braided. Yoon had thought that morning that Kaya was making up for their time apart in creative ways. The boy unhanded Kaya but before he could say no to the offer, a dragon had coiled around his body. He could hear the girl —the woman—'s giggles as he resigned to his fate.

"Zeno, Zeno! Yoon is so kind and considerate and cute! The cutest of them!" Kaya chirped.

"Yep!"

"Zeno, Zeno! Say, can we adopt him? I really want to adopt him!"

"What the hell?" Yoon cried, annoyance written on his face.

To his surprise, Zeno let him go and stood in front of his wife with a serious expression.

"No, Kaya. That's out of the question."

"I know. But..."

"He's your mother-in-law, Kaya! It makes no sense to adopt my mom!"

It was Yoon's turn to get up, anger piling up, while the other two were snorting.

"I'm neither your mother or your son, you eternal seventeen year-olds!!" he yelled.

"Eternal eighteen year-old," Kaya corrected with a grin.

"Argh!" He grabbed the book and walked towards the door. Before he could leave, he heard Kaya's voice.

"Being your mom was a joke but... Please do think of me as an older sister, okay? These adults keep forgetting you're younger, this one here included, and they should be the ones nurturing you just as much as you nurture them."

Zeno mumbled some excuse Yoon couldn't hear, but he stopped when Yoon turned to look at Kaya. Ever since Ik-soo took him with him, no one else had been so conscious about his needs.

"I... I appreciate it," he blushed lightly. "I think I'll do that."

He left immediately, embarrassed, before Zeno or her said something stupid again. After that conversation and learning so much about Kaya, having her in his strange family of sorts was an honor.

******

"Okay, you can open them up whenever you want!" Kaya said after handing out the last package. She was bouncing on her heels while everyone opened their gifts.

The first one was Kija, perhaps because of his large hand. He stared at the wooden figurine and the bottle with confusion.

"What is this?"

"The bottle is home-made bug repellent. It smells a bit weird so I added some flower scent so... now it smells like a weird bouquet instead, sorry. But it should keep mosquitoes and crawlies away! The other one..." She smiled as she looked at the vaguely dragon-shape statue. "To be honest, it's a present I got but I think you should have it. You see, it was given to me by ancestors of yours, long ago. It's time it returns to the hands of Hakuryuu Village."

Kija looked like he was going to cry.

"Kaya... Thank you very much for sharing this piece of our history with me. It's an honor. May I ask what it's for?"

Kaya-chan, I can't believe you and Lord Ouryuu still haven't had children! Here, have this fertility charm. My sister carved one and prayed to it before her wedding night, and they've had four bundles of joy so far! You have to continue the lineage of the Ouryuu as his wife, so please take it with you so you can be blessed and fulfill your duty.

"F-For good luck," Kaya lied without losing her smile. She didn't have the guts to throw it away, because she considered Guen's family as her own, so she took it as a souvenir instead. Not like it mattered since Ouryuu's blood made it impossible for her to get pregnant, but those ladies were too exhausting to argue against. "Oh! And I'm teaching Yoon my plum sauce recipe so that should be a present for you in a way."

"Ooooh, what a pretty comb!" Yona said with sparkles in her purple eyes. It was lacquered black and had tiny colorful flowers painted on its design.

"That kind of comb has big teeth with large gaps too, so it should be great for your curls. I have one to do Zeno's hair and it's amazing for unruly sorts. Ah, the other present is medicine for..." She made a pause and lowered her voice. "They're special painkillers. For cramps." Yona understood immediately and reached for Kaya for a hug. She returned the gesture.

"Thank you! They're both so useful!"

"A sharpening stone and..." Hak opened his eyes wide. "No way, is that a bottle of Fuuga Galebrew?"

"Saw it at the marketplace and I figured you haven't tried it in ages."

"Wow, thanks!"

"Not fair, I want to try that sake as well," Jae-ha sighed.

"Well, I guess I could give you one glass, Droopy Eyes."

"Yessss." Jae-ha's grin faltered once he saw his present. "A fan? Well, it's beautiful but I don't think I get it, Kaya-chan."

A smiling face and a wink came to Kaya's mind, long gone and a bit blurry but still alive in her heart.

"Some time ago, Zeno and I traveled with this girl for a few years. She was like a sister to me. You remind me of her sometimes and I think she would've liked you a lot, Jae-ha. I know you have your own fighting style but that fan was her weapon. Maybe you could find it a good use one day?"

"Oh, I see." Jae-ha touched the edge of the fan. It drew a drop of blood he sucked immediately. "Not bad, actually. I can't refuse the will of a young lady so I'll take it." He then turned to the booklet with interest. "Are these music sheets?"

"Yup! Should be handy for your traveling artist shows. Besides, I want to hear you play."

"But of course!" Kaya felt relief when she saw him smile. She didn't know Jae-ha that well, so she had feared he wouldn't like his gifts. She looked at Shin-ah, who was observing and touching his new soft scarf.

"I heard you're cold sensitive and I saw this pretty sky blue fabric. It's still a long way for winter, but for trips to mountains they're nice to have."

He nodded.

"And two bags of pistachios, one for you and one for Ao. Since they don't grow in Kouka, I figured you haven't tried them yet?"

He shook his head. She moved to him to pet his hair.

"I hope you like them, then!"

"Thanks, Kaya..."

"I can't accept this, Kaya," Yoon said as he pushed his package against her.

"Why?"

"I should've suspected you were up to something when you asked me what books I had liked the most yesterday. But this one is yours! And the other is from the library!"

She laughed but her hands remained behind her back.

"We have copies for both in the second building. Don't worry about it and accept them! Or if you want a different book you couldn't read yet, we can check if there's a copy of that one instead."

"There's... There's really no problem? Just like that? Are the librarians fine with it?"

"As long as there's at least one copy left they can remake again, they won't mind because it's me asking."

He looked torn, but the power of free books won.

"...I have enough notes for this one, so I want to check out this world atlas I saw," he said. "After we pack our bags, though."

"Sure thing. You guys take your time."

"Doesn't Zeno get presents...?" Shin-ah asked after munching a pistachio.

"Zeno got new robes," Zeno grinned, laying in bed on his belly and chin cupped inside his hands. "Also, just being with Kaya for a few days is my present."

"Smooth," Jae-ha teased.

"Ah, is it okay if we pass by Ryusui first?" Kaya asked. "They have a really nice marketplace and I want some supplies that are cheaper there."

"Sure! It sounds like fun," Yona smiled.

"It's a gorgeous town. We'll have lots of fun seeing the stands there," Kaya nodded.

"Its settled," Yoon said. "Let's hurry and pack now, rare beasts. I still have to check the books."

"Yeeeeeees!"

Kaya was sure it was going to be a lovely trip.

Notes:

Well, here it is, the last part. I want to thank you guys for your patience. I've been building up to this chapter since even before I finished the main fic, especially the "you can't adopt your mother-in-law!" joke. So here it is and I hope you've liked this miniseries. I don't know if it met your expectations but that's how I envisioned the way they'd meet Kaya and how they'd get along with her. There's a lot of stuff to explore in their dynamics, so feel free to leave drabble requests for interactions or even just unrelated-to-HHB Everlasting Flower prompts if you want, either here or on my Twitter (username is the same everywhere, taotrooper) or AO3 comments. I have no idea if I'll be able to get inspired or fulfill them, but I'll be taking notes and we'll see.

The timeline for The Library is between the Lushing Forest arc and the Sei arc. They're still stopping by the same marketplace so the canon events (meeting Ayura and Tetora, Yona buying the lapis lazuli for Hak) should still happen despite Zeno not needing a new outfit anymore.

I hope you enjoy!

#akatsuki no yona #kaya #yoon #ouryuu zeno #happy hungry bunch #everlasting flower #$fanfic

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