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callmearcturus · 8 months ago

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writer questions meme: 8, 13, 20 if you please

13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

It wasn't explicitly writing advice, but I can tell you where I learned what my specific style would be. There was a fic in the Dresden Files fandom called "Cross" by LightGetsIn. LGI was a tremendous writer and a very kind mentory-friend who I attended my first fan convention with. Extremely accomplished adult who I looked up to when I was barely an adult.

"Cross" is a story about the limitations of perspective. It was the first story that really drove home the idea that Character A would not have the same knowledge and understanding of the world as Character B.

In "Cross", the POV character is John Marcone, a non-magical mafia boss who is deeply entrenched in the magical world. He has a lot of factual knowledge of how magic works, but he's an Italian-American Catholic. So when he's pulled into doing magical rites to bring another character back to life, he specifically doesn't pick up on the more pagan symbology of what he's doing, but filters it through a Guilty Catholic filter. Hence the name of the fic, "Cross."

And that story, which isn't even my favorite LGI story, probably taught me the most about how to write Close Perspective Third Person, which is my default style. When I'm writing in a characters POV, I rigorously limit what the POV character knows and picks up on. I will plant clues and information that the audience will understand, but the connections a character makes, the reference pools they pull from, their morality and ethics, all of those inform that POV, and what you and I know does not.

That is probably the most important lesson I've ever had in creating my own writing method.

20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.

8 hours of sleep, small breakfast snack like a croissant, decaf beverage, one dextroamphetamine, and no one fucking talk to me for about 2 - 4 hours. I will write 4,000 words.

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Lets put this under a cut, and I'll give you some DVD commentary. This is from chapter 2 of you'll need a new name to survive this. It's the point where Benji realizes Ethan is stalking him and does that trick to lose him in the bookshop, then sits outside waiting for him.

Only five minutes later, the door opened, and Bell took one step out before freezing, his eyes falling on Benji.

Got you, Benji thought with a sharp little smile. "You didn't even buy a book? Bit rude."

One of the goals of the early chapters of PT AU was establishing Benji's character as boldly as possible because we were essentially telling a story that canon does not. This is YEARS before MI3, where Benji gets two gd scenes.

To me, the tightrope walk was that I wanted Benji to have a reasonable grip on authority, to be shiny and new and out of his depth but still empowered because of his accomplishments. He has managed to land a good job working for the US government, he successfully emigrated before he was 30 years old, he has an apartment and a cat, he's new to everything in the spy world but he also has a steel spine that frankly he's fucking earned.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that Benji is a bitch and I love him so much.

Bell's face was blank, but Benji could almost feel how fast his brain was moving, weighing his options. Eventually, he settled on huffing out a little chuckle and stepping closer to Benji. "Hi."

Meanwhile, Ethan. MI1-era Ethan is very very smart but very very traumatised. His skillset is rooted in controlling people and predicting them. So Benji, a fucking civilian, catching him off-guard like this is like waving a red flag at a bull. Or dangling a steak over a lion enclosure. Benji doesn't know it yet but he's setting himself up to be a tasty treat for Ethan Hunt circa the late 90s.

"Are you going to kill me or something?" Benji asked. "Is that your spook job, are you a hitman?"

The flash of expression on Bell's face was offended. (This makes me laugh every time. Ethan Hunt is not a killer unless he absolutely must be and he will go out of his way to avoid it. Being an assassin is gross and he doesn't want to be perceived at all bc he's a spy but if he MUST be perceived jfc don't assume he's a HITMAN) "What, no. I just…" Grimacing, he looked away, eyes scanning the other pedestrians around them. "Okay, I'm screwing this up, I can admit that. Can we talk somewhere private?"

Benji didn't even have to think about it. "We can talk somewhere public."

Benji is never going to be an IMF agent but his instincts are wildly correct. And that knowledge comes from a different place! He was a gay punk rock vagabond who dropped out of law school, he knows how to keep out of trouble. He is probably the guy who told his other punk friends "if you are arrested do not say a goddamn thing, just ask for your public defender, don't joke, don't be a smartarse, keep your mouth shut."

The smile that took over Bell's face was lovely, transforming his whole face from storm clouds to something more seasonal. "That's honestly a very smart answer, doc. C'mon, there's a bakery nearby. I'll buy you a coffee. Least I can do."

It really was, so Benji nodded and followed him.

They didn't speak until Bell opened the glass door to another shop and held it open for Benji.

"Wrong hand," Benji said, noticing the small wince Bell let out.

"Inside, doc."

If it isn't obvious, all of the observational skills Benji has canonically have been funneled into his preternatural observation of patients.

Basically, if Benji as a character has a specific set of SPECIAL stats, all of those are the same, he just has different tagged skills in this universe.

Canon Benji is probably.... Guns, Science, and Repair. PT Benji has Medicine, Barter, Speech.

"Not a doctor," Benji said. "You know I'm not a doctor."

"What do you want to drink, doc?"

Ethan is being purposefully annoying and I could write a whole post about Ethan's soft power and the way he manipulates people, but that'd be another post. Short version: some people you seduce, some people you act like a wounded gazelle at, and some people you annoy.

Inside the bakery was loud. It was a strangely open floor plan. A long pastry case cordoned off the seating area for the customers. On the other side was just… the bakery. There were ovens and industrial mixers and rolling racks of cooling bread. In the corner, the espresso machine howled with noise as the milk frother worked.

It smelled divine, like living inside a baguette during a spring shower of dark roast coffee.

It also was a constant racket, which Benji mentioned to Bell as he sat down and slid a dark tea with vanilla syrup across to Benji.

"That's the point," Bell said, slouching back in his chair. "It's very difficult to eavesdrop in here."

Well, he wasn't wrong. Looking to another occupied table nearby, Benji briefly tried to pick out a word of what was being said by the woman seated closest to him. Nothing.

"Right, then," Benji said, attention back on Bell. "Why are you following me?"

"Why?" Bell seemed taken aback.

One of the many moments in the early chapters that establish that Ethan's perception of Normal is not anything approaching actual normal.

"Yes, why."

"Normal intelligence collection."

"On your physical therapist?" Benji asked with a barked laugh.

"Yeah." Bell leaned on his elbows, one hand cupping his own jaw and holding his head up as he made uncomfortably direct eye contact. "You really don't know who I am? Or why some of the appointments on your calendar come with no information?"

Pursing his lips, Benji shook his head.

Blowing out a whistle through his teeth, Bell grinned. "Sorry, that's just… it's new. I'm surprised Dr. Falsion didn't clue you in, but I guess she's not technically supposed to." Lifting his mug, he looked down into it. "People do shit they're not technically supposed to all the time in this town."

Ethan's major trauma at this point is being targeted by Kittridge and the Mole Hunt, and his trust in people to do their jobs is at a critical low that it'll never recover from.

"I don't even know your name," Benji sighed, sipping his own drink. It didn't taste at all like iocaine powder, so he was probably safe for the moment.

Bell rested his temple against the knuckles of his hand, his gaze so intense that Benji didn't know how to look away without making it patently obvious he was unsettled. Whatever Bell saw, it made his lips curve up slight. "Alright. Yeah. My name is Ethan. I work for an organization that shouldn't legally exist, so that's why you don't get anything on me. Even CIA jackboots manipulating local governments are realer than I am." He blinked once. "Also, I was an unprofessional shitheel last session, and I apologize."

Ethan apologizes here because Benji has earned his respect. And also by earning his respect, Ethan is also aware that Benji is not going to be so easy to maneuver around, so he fesses up that he was a prick, softly setting up a different tactic with Benji.

Benji felt his eyes going wider and wider with every sentence until it was a little hard to breathe. So his patient wasn't the American equivalent of an MI5 or MI6 so much as an MI8?

That did sort of start to explain what a pain in the ass he was.

"Shame," Benji managed after a moment of sitting fairly gobsmacked. "I was getting attached to 'Bell.' But I appreciate… all that. Thanks." He frowned. "Are you saying all this because you're actually sorry or are you sick of being stonewalled?"

Benji has a much more cynical mind than Ethan is the funny thing. Benji gets arguably more accurate reads on people than Ethan does. Or, Ethan gets accurate reads but he is continuously poisoned by the hope that people will be better than he expects. So FUNCTIONALLY, Ethan is an optimist and Benji is a realist.

Bell— Ethan— grinned. "That's a very good question. You actually have great instincts, doc. You did a surprisingly good job of shaking me when I was tailing you, especially for a civilian."

One of my favorite running gags is Benji being impossible to tail, so I'm glad we really drove it home the first time it happened. I love consistency in longfic.

"Again: thanks. Don't suppose you'll answer my other question?"

Ethan sipped his coffee, his smile visible around the edge of his cup.

"Right," Benji sighed. At least this felt like progress. And at least he probably wasn't going to be disappeared by a government assassin. That was a relief.

So this entire bit is Ethan reassessing Benji and pivoting his methods and tactics, setting up for a better way of handling Benji. And also being kind of charmed by him.

#relaxed-and-extremely-uneasy #talking about writing #pt benji au

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fizzingwizard · 1 year ago

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Something else I love about Moomins...

When I was a kid, like nine or ten years old, I had a book called What Kay Did. In the book, Katy is a selfish and mean young girl, who falls off a swing and I think breaks her back or something. As a result, she can't walk, and is cooped up inside and miserable. Little by little, she learns how her nasty behavior made her siblings afraid of her and not want to be with her, and now that she can't go out and amuse herself, she's really dependent on them for fun. So she learns to be nice. She becomes almost saintly, really.

Then, near the end of the book, the family finds out that there's a possibility that Katy will be able to walk again. And instead of being happy for her, the siblings say, "But she's become so nice since she got hurt. If she heals, will she be mean again?" Fortunately, Katy both relearns how to walk, and stays nice, so everyone's happy.

I hated this book. And it's not like, as a kid, I wasn't familiar with moralizing children's books where the main character learned a lesson and grew into a better person. I knew exactly what the book was doing. I just hated it. And I also knew that the siblings weren't meant to be interpreted as cold and indifferent for their lack of enthusiasm on hearing Katy might walk again. It's probably realistic even, if you've been bullied by someone before, to worry that a return to the circumstances where they bullied you would trigger it again. Still I hated them. I hated the book for telling me Katy had to behave a certain way for her to deserve to walk. Even though the way she used to be was truly awful. And I hated the book for requiring me to sympathize with the siblings, who had been treated badly by Katy, when what I really thought was that their resistance her recovery, however brief, was worse than anything she'd done to them in the past.

I hated being told what to think. I hated being preached at about right and wrong. And more than anything, I hated that Katy went through a character arc so dramatic that, in the end, she was completely unrecognizable as the girl in chapter one. That was meant to be good thing, because chapter one Katy was an asshole. But even as a kid, I didn't believe people change that much. Katy ended up more or less a saint. Always kind, always giving, always patient. Because of that, her relearning to walk came across like a reward for being a good person.

I haven't picked up this book again since I was a kid. So I may be forgetting important points. It's always possible I'd feel differently as an adult. That's my disclaimer, but i don't really think so. Because it's not like this kind of book was unusual. Another one comes to mind, the title of which I've forgotten, which was about a plate. In the world of plates, if you let just anyone eat off you, you wound up a dirty paper plate no one wanted. But if you waited and remained pure and clean, one day the King himself would change you into a beautiful porcelain plate and you'd be part of his household. It was a metaphor for Christianity and for virginity. It was more preachy BS.

Part of the reason I hated it was because I really took it to heart. I felt that I was horrible like Katy, and that unless I could achieve her saintliness, I would be always coming up short. Every time I committed a sin, even just in my head, I felt like I was back at square one. And I was doomed to fail, because of course it's impossible to be as good as Katy. We can change some. We can strive for self-improvement. But we'll be fighting our demons forever. (And in the book's defense, I believe I remember a scene where Katy admits she still struggles with her temperament later on, but she does her best not to let it affect her siblings.) With the plates, same thing: you can't live a totally pure and clean life. No one can. In Christianity, that's supposed to be a prerequisite for being human: we are all sinners, all of us. The goal is to try your best to live a righteous life and to be humble. But there's so much judgment and so many attacks on people who falter, and so much smug superiority among those who are convinced they are living righteously.

The Moomins books say something completely different. They were about self-acceptance. "All nice things are good for you," Moominmamma says. That would never fly in my Christian children's literature. And it's not like the Moomin book were anti-religious. (on a tangent: I wondered if what Moomintroll left under the fir tree, the thing that he didn't even tell Snufkin about, was meant to be him giving his soul to God on Christmas. It's impossible for me to tell whether I read that story right or if my deeply religious upbringing is screwing with me again.)

The Moomins don't say it's fine to be a bully or it's fine to do things that hurt you or others. But they don't go around breaking your back for being a bully or rejecting you eternally for not doing what you're told. Things happen in Moomins - characters make choices in step with their nature, and although they rub each other the wrong way sometimes, it always turns out that there was this or that reasoning and no one's really right or wrong. They're all just people. Moomins doesn't expect you to ever try to be perfect. And hiding your demons doesn't protect your family from them, rather it creates more distance between you and makes it harder to support each other and feel supported.

Characters in Moomins aren't so dynamic. But they also aren't completely stagnant. No character would undergoes the vast change that Katy did, or the complete transformation of the porcelain plate. Instead, characters are confronted with themselves again and again. And, again and again, they learn to accept themselves warts and all. A hemulen is a hemulen, a fillyonk is a fillyjonk and it's no use for them to try to be anything else, because that's what they are. Sometimes they're fed up with it and yearn to be anyone else. It's only natural, because no one is perfect, so we can always find bits of ourselves to hate. But inevitably they'll miss themselves. It's when characters listen to voices that tell them they're not enough, whether those voices are internal or external, that they become nasty and mean and mistreat each other.

There are no real bad guys in Moomins. We can only wonder what would happen if someone really mean were ever introduced. But the stories aren't missing such a character - they especially aren't missing the chance to chastise their young readers for their imperfections and urge them to be righteous because otherwise, hell awaits. I much prefer the take that everyone has their own personality and temperament and history, which informs their actions, and that most of the difficulties people have with each other come from not respecting that. You can't have a community by forcing everyone to be the same. A community is different people making the same choice to support each other's differences.

Actually, there is one bad guy in Moomins. It's the aunt in "The Invisible Child." Notably, she doesn't feature in the story. The story is about helping Ninny. About Ninny learning that she is important. That she doesn't deserve to be mistreated and degraded, her every misstep nitpicked. That her wants, her needs, her voice matters. Her cruel aunt doesn't matter at all. So she's not part of the story.

And, when Ninny rediscovers who she is, she's praised in this way: "She's even worse than Little My." I wonder how different Katy's story would have been, if she had Little My to knock some sense into her, without also sapping her of her individuality. I bet that plate never would have become porcelain either, but would have enjoyed life in the Moominhouse cupboard just as much.

#moomin

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swordandscytheandpen · 23 days ago

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'Kay, not sure why you chose to respond to my zero-effort tags this morning rather than @official-kircheis's response two weeks ago, but here we are. I didn't flag that the last tag was jokey and intentionally over-the-top, so that's on me. In my defense though, you did: a) specifically request such behavior in the OP, and b) follow up that warranted mockery with a woefully bad argument, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Anyway. You've done this tidy little motte-and-bailey-esque rhetorical switcheroo where you're answering the claim "most religious people throughout history actually did literally believe in their own stated religion" with the overspecific counterargument "not true; there are certain early Christian theologians who believe that certain parts of the bible were allegorical." Which is incredibly narrow in scope. What about the other parts of the bible; did Origen also think God's very existence was figurative? What about non-theologians; did the average illiterate Roman Christian think of Sodom as a moralistic fable? What about other time periods; did Urban VIII display an allegorical view of Genesis when he condemned Galileo? What about other religions; is the reincarnation cycle typically taken as metaphor by Hindus? Or perhaps all the world's religions, by some strange coincidence, happen to have been struck by this same spate of literalism in modern times?

But we don't even need to go into all that, because even on your chosen grounds of early Christian theology, there's still a huge amount of literal belief to be seen. St. Augustine did not argue that Genesis as a whole was not literal, he made that argument regarding the six-day creation cycle specifically. When it comes to Adam and Eve, Eden, and the Fall of Man, though? Augustine repeatedly affirmed, across multiple writings, that while these stories had figurative implications they were also genuine historical fact. (City of God, Book 13, Chapter 21 is particularly explicit about this but it can be found all over the place.) You are mistaken about his beliefs.

I mention Augustine because you brought him up, but he isn't the only example here. Irenaeus and Tertullian were particularly serious offenders in this regard, but the best evidence can be seen in the kinds of theological debates and divides early Christianity saw. Were they arguments over what kind of lessons to draw from biblical stories? Perhaps esoteric debates on how to better cleave to Jesus's teachings? No. They were all shit like "is it correct to call Mary "God-bearer," or are we only allowed to call her "Christ-bearer" since Jesus's divinity didn't come from her?" Every council, every schism, dealt with what their attendees saw as historical matters of literal truth. Or, at the most, philosophy of the soul.

And they killed people over this! Under your concept of early Christianity, it would be a norm to riot over, exile, and even deploy military action against, what, people who cleave to a different allegorical interpretation? Of course they believed it was real.

The same applies to any other examples you might care to name. Oh, the Greeks thought Zeus was a character written by mortals? Well they spent a whole lot of time and effort raising statues and temples and offering animals to that metaphorical character, in an age where misspent time and resources easily meant death. Must've been super into the stories, I guess.

This isn't "arrogance." I know I'm not special. I know perfectly well that, had I been born in centuries past, I almost certainly would have believed these things as well. The median European peasant wasn't morally lesser for taking the local bishop's teachings as fact; they had little way of knowing better. But, through the immense growth in scientific methodology, education access, and communication, we have created a world far more well-equipped to disclaim religion. Purely allegorical religion was never the norm in past societies; the degree of it we see today is a massive anomaly on the historical scale. So, sure, maybe I'm not smarter than a Greek philosopher - but which one of us sacrifices goats in hopes of rain?

I don't think all the edgy atheists in the world could deliver an insult to religion as devastating as people who honestly hold the idea "of course nobody really believed this shit, look how utterly ridiculous it is!"

We need the obnoxious atheists back. I know they engineered their own destruction by being annoying and pretentious, but it has become apparent how essential to the ecosystem they were. The religious fanatics have become too bold without their natural predators. Jesus wojaks would have been torn to shreds in 2011.

#bzzzzz bzzzzz in your ear.#religion #my additions #long post

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locustheologicus · 1 year ago

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The Persecution of Social Democrats and a Call for the new Great Awakening

I recently went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It is an experience that I will not forget. Like a pilgrimage I suggest that all Amercans should take the opportunity to visit this museum and allow yourself to witness to the horrorific geonocide that was allowed to take place in Nazi Germany. The horrors of World War II are now 80 years behind us and the hard-won lessons are starting to erode as we no longer fear totalitarian regimes. Dictatorships are now even praised by presidential candidates like Donald Trump who recently praised dictators and the totalitarian regimes of Russia, China, and North Korea during his New Hampshire speech.

In another post I mentioned how Candidate Trump has brought forward the rhetoric of Nazi Germany regarding who identified, persecuted and eventually murdered anyone who was not part of their Aryan ethnic minority and far right adherents.

At the Holocaust museum I had a wake up call as I saw my own political ideals and faith community mentioned as part of their political persecution.

Here again you see social democrats mentioned as an "enemy of the state."

I also saw my Catholic faith community identified as yet another "enemy of the state" because it had values that contradicted the far right agenda of the Nazi state. The caption on the bottom picture states: "Catholic priests were among the main targets of Nazi mass murder in Poland. Here, priests and teachers from the city of Bydgoszcz await execution."

I am a Catholic and a Social Democrat. I am proud of both my religious and political views which are very much what I believe in. I posted a blog titled "Confessions of a Social Democrat" based on a foreign affairs article titled "Can Social Democrats Save the World (Again)". I offer my own political platform (I firmly believe that all Americans should have their own) in this post for all to read.

Social democrats are followers of the progressive tradition that existed under the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy can be said to support a social democratic platform that recognized the ideas of promoting social regulations and distributive justice that would support the common good and allow most citizens to enjoy the basic protection of economic and social rights. It was FDR's hope that our constitution would provide for the guarantee of social and economic rights but that agenda remains for a future generation. The post on social democrats unpacks this agenda further.

But I also believe that my faith calls me to adopt this poltical agenda. I am reading a book, which I will reflect on later, regarding economic democracy. It is called "Humanity @ Work & Life." In it there was a chapter that was coauthored by Brian Corbin of Catholic Charities USA. In recognizing the role that the Catholic Church has with elements of both social and economic democracy Corbin offers the following insight after reflecting on the Exodus story and how Jesus would follow-up from this biblical tradition of liberation and social justice.

Jesus was the first social democrat, distributing fish and bread to the masses, demonstrating that faith in the miracle of sufficiency equal to the needs of all feeds the hungry and heals the sick.

He goes on to juxtopse the Jesus of the Gospel narratives with the Christ of Christian nationalism.

Religious faith in America's present and immediate future is haunted by a widening dichotomy between Jesus the Christ and militant nationalist Christianity. The former distributes fish and bread to the masses, showing how the grace of moral and spiritual solidarity leads to the miracle of sufficiency equal to needs, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, dying under torture while forgiving tormentors and the sins of this world. The latter convenes and condones the Insurrection of January 6, 2021, carrying Nazi and Confederate flags into the US Capitol edifice for the first time in its erected history to ignite deeper rifts between garce and grievance.

Corbin gives us something to think about here.

It has been suggested by others including myself that a religious tradition of America is the Great Awakening Movements that have taken place. The first one led to the Revolutionary War, The second one preceeded the Civil War and the third set the progressive agenda that created the ideals during the Great Depression and World War II. I think, in light of what Corbin says, we need to prepare to usher in a new 4th (by some count 5th) Great Awakening that sets the authentic Gospel message against the heresy of pseudo-Christian Nationalism.

Social and Economic Democracy is very much part of the Catholic vision and the American dream. The far-right will attack us because their values do not embrace diversity and social justice. Furthermore they fear these legitimate American values which can be found in our revered Constitution and Declaration. Although I always enjoy reflecting on FDR and MLK's social democratic quotes below as well.

The above quote from MLK is hard to read to I will add it below.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. - MLK

Jesus reminds us that:

No one who lights a lamp hides it away or places it [under a bushel basket], but on a lampstand so that those who enter might see the light. (Lk 11:33)

Our faith cannot stay hidden, especially when it needs to stand firm against a secular ideology that threatens to persecute our voices. All of the Great Awakening movement have served the social gospel and because of that we have witnessed America do great things and make a stand against injustices that our wealthier members committed. We active Catholics and social democrats will once again be treated like "vermin" by those who voice the divisive and hate filled speech of the far-right agenda. This is not a unique experience, but now we all be aware of the horrible consequences that can happen if we stay silent. Let us stand against the error of Christian nationalism and usher in a new Great Awakening era that can:

Address the corruption of money in politics and the need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform,

Recognize the reality of globalization, racial discrimination and ecological concerns,

And usher in the long awaited fight to incorporate the Second Bill of Rights (Economic and Social Rights) into the Constitution.

#social democrats #facism #great awakening #politics #faith and politics

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mybeardsblog · 2 years ago

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´º´•»⋆° 𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑒𝓇 °⋆´º´•»

📕 𝐵𝓎:𝐵𝑒𝓇𝓃𝒶𝓇𝒹 𝒮𝒸𝒽𝓁𝒾𝓃𝓀 📕

(Critique #1)

The Characters:

Michael Berg - The story’s protagonist and narrator, who as a fifteen-year-old boy has an affair with an older woman named Hanna, only to discover years later that his lover was once a Nazi prison guard.

Hanna Schmitz (Frau Shmitz) - Michael’s lover and the story’s antagonist. Often described by Michael as “tired,” Hanna’s emotions, motivations, and personalities can be seen only through the eyes of Michael, who is often conflicted about her.

Michael’s Father - A philosophy professor who is distant from his wife and children. Though he doesn’t appear often in the story, Michael’s father and their relationship are mentioned more often than his other family members.

The Jewish Woman / The Daughter - The daughter (nameless in the book) who had survived, with her mother, in the church fire in which Hanna was complicit.

The Prison Warden - The warden of Hanna’s prison seems to care sincerely for the welfare of Hanna and the other prisoners.

The Driver - The driver who allows Michael to hitchhike with him to Struthof, a nearby concentration camp.

The Judge - The judge who presides over Hanna’s trial. Michael observes the judge’s near constant expression of annoyance, especially at Hanna’s contradictions to certain claims about her.

Gertrud - Michael’s wife, and later ex-wife. A law clerk and later a judge, Gertrud is described by Michael as “smart, efficient, and loyal.”

Michael’s mother - Michael’s mother seldom appears in the story, and as Michael’s girlfriend Gesina notes, he rarely mentions her when discussing his past.

Michael’s older brother- Like Michael’s other siblings, his brother also appears only rarely in the novel.

Summary/Moral Lesson

So far, I have grown to appreciate this book, not only because I have a love for coming of age literature but also because it has really grown on me. When I first started reading the first 6 chapters on the bus to states, I was in an environment of frustration which lead me to initially dislike the book. However, as I began to absorb the novel, I became aware of the themes that it was suggesting of immature love, the relationship between romantic and sexual intimacy and the lack of romantic maturity within the mind of a teenage boy.Getting started with the book was super difficult and I really could not bring myself to get into it. I guess I was just feeling lazy since we’re back at school or something because the first ten pages took me an hour to get through but then I literally flew through the rest of the twenty pages in about twelve minutes; this is a definite plus side to the book because it goes by super quickly while you are reading. I like how the narrator starts the book off by saying that he was young when he got sick. This makes the reader think that the whole book will be about growing up really sick and how he dealt with that. However in reality, it seems like Michael just stated that he was sick to explain the events that led up to the narrator meeting the woman. I find their relationship, if you can even call it one at this point, extremely weird. Hanna found Michael when he was very sick and helped him, then he went to her house to thank her, she caught him watching her change so he ran away, he couldn’t stop thinking about her for a week so he returned to her house, then thirty-year-old Hanna invites fifteen-year-old Michael in to her house take a bath and ends up having sex with him, and the narrator falls in love with her, of course. Once he’s had sex with Hanna, Michael feels like he has transformed from a child to a man and feels very distant from his family. All of a sudden, he is strong enough to go back to school because he wants to show off his new found confidence. He immediately misses Hanna and realizes that he only wants to be with her, all of the time. Michael feels very attached to her, but it seems like Hanna is only playing with his emotions. Ilike how Bernhard Schlink’s diction is so simple but he includes so many details in such a small space. This is such a nice change from Paris Architect because everything in that book was sooooo drawn out and repetitive, whereas The Reader is very concise and to the point.

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lesfeldickbiblestudy · 2 years ago

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Through the Bible with Les Feldick LESSON 2 * PART 4 * BOOK 65 BUT GOD! – (The Body of Christ –The Mysteries) - PART 4 MATTHEW 6:33 and Various Other Scriptures Okay, it’s good to see everybody back, and it doesn’t look like anybody’s left. That’s what we were so amazed about in Minnesota the other day. We started out with over 800, and I think we had just about that many at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. So, that’s encouraging when people don’t get up and leave! Okay, for those of you out in television, again we just want to thank you for your support and prayers, your financial help and your letters! My, I can’t emphasize enough how we appreciate your letters, especially when you keep them short. Those of you who have helped us with the mail understand why, but we don’t want you to limit. In other words, if it takes a long letter to give us your testimony, that’s fine, but on the whole, if you can say what you want to say in one page it helps us so much in order to read every letter that comes in. And we still do. We still read every letter, and hopefully answer those that need to be answered. All right, let’s continue on where we have been, on the Body of Christ, the revelation of the mysteries as they were given to the Apostle of the Gentiles, Paul. Let’s carry it one step further now and go into Colossians chapter 4, and start at verse 1. You know, I always like to make the statement that we don’t throw aside the rest of Scripture, naturally, it’s all for a purpose. It’s for learning. But, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of the Christian life, everything we need to know is covered between Romans 1:1 and the last verse of Philemon. Everything. The everyday life. The home life. Children’s relationship. Everything is covered that we really need to know between Romans and Philemon. All right, now here in Colossians chapter 4 he’s dealing with employers and employees. Colossians 4:1-3 "Masters, (those of you who own a business) give unto your servants (your employees) that which is just and equal; (In other words, be a fair-minded employer.) knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven. (Now, here it comes) 2. Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving; 3. Withal praying also for us, (That is, Paul and his ministry.) that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds:" Now, what do you suppose he’s referring to? That God, who had been specifically revealing Himself to the Nation of Israel, has now turned to the whole Gentile world, revealing to the common, ordinary, pagan individual, His Deity, His power, His glory, and that He’s ready to save to the uttermost those who would simply believe Him. Unheard of! Gentiles?! Now, most of us don’t have the right picture of the Gentiles of antiquity. They weren’t much better than animals when it came to morality. They were ruthless. There was no such thing as human rights. If you weren’t in the elite upper percentage, you were just so much dirt under their feet. So, to have God go to those "uncircumcised Gentiles," as the Jews called them, was unheard of. All right, now just for sake of a point. Come back with me to Isaiah chapter 42, so that I can sort of rehearse and charge your memory of things that we’ve said many, many times before. The whole idea of the Old Testament was to prepare Israel for a coming role of evangelizing the pagan Gentiles, and here’s the proof of it. Isaiah chapter 42 and we can start at verse 1. Isaiah 42:1 "Behold (the prophet writes) my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: (Now, this is God speaking through the prophet concerning the Messiah, the Christ.) He (the Messiah) shall bring forth judgment (or righteous, benevolent rule) to (What people?) the Gentiles." If the Gentiles were going to receive anything benevolent from God, it had to be through Israel. All right, move on down to verse 6. Isaiah 42:6 "I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, (Now, we’re talking to the Nation of Israel.

) and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, (For what purpose?) for a light of the Gentiles." That’s all through, especially, the prophets. All right, turn all the way up through Isaiah to chapter 60, and this is what I want you to see. That, until we get to Paul, if God had a mind for the Gentile, it was going to be after Israel had become the obedient Nation and they had the King and the Kingdom. That’s the Old Testament prophecy Isaiah 60:1 "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, (Now, that is a prophetic reference to the coming of their Messiah in His first advent.) and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. 2. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, (a spiritual darkness) and gross darkness the people: (Israel, in spite of all their religion, their temple worship, and their sacrifices, yet they were spiritually blind.) but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. 3. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings (of the Gentile world) to the brightness of thy rising." Now, drop down to verse 5. Isaiah 60:5 "Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee." But Israel rejected all that, and now God had to bring about one Jew, the Apostle Paul, and through this apostle, now, all of God’s grace and goodness to the Gentile world is brought about. All right, let’s come back to Colossians once again, in case you kept your place, just back up now a minute to Colossians chapter 1, where we were earlier today, but we stopped at verse 25. Now we’re going to drop down to verse 26, but to pick up the flow, and point, let’s start at verse 24. Colossians 1:24-26a "Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh (That is, his personal day-to-day suffering.) for his body’s sake, which is the church: 25. Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfill (or to complete or bring to fruition) the word of God; (That’s why, I feel, that II Timothy is the last portion of Scripture ever written.) 26. Even the mystery…" You see how often this just pops up throughout Paul’s epistles, because it is this revelation of things totally unknown. That’s what makes our teaching of Paul’s doctrines, this teaching concerning the Grace of God, so insulated from all the rest of Scripture. You can’t mix them up. You know, while we were in Minnesota, one old fellow came up, and he’s been retired quite a few years after being 25 years as a pastor in one of the major denominations. He picked up our teaching just a few years ago, and he said, "Les, if I could have just had this while I was pastoring, what a difference it would have made in my ministry." But he said, "The Lord gave me an opportunity. This summer our adult Sunday School Class teacher was going to be gone for the summer, and they asked me to teach the class." So, he said, "I jumped at the chance. The first thing I did, I went up to Wal-Mart and bought an Oster Blender." Now, you know what’s coming don’t you? He says he’s going to give them an object lesson. He said, "I took some green paper, and I cut it in little pieces and on every piece of green paper I put a Biblical truth. All the way from Genesis all the way up through." He said, "I got up there in front of that Sunday School Class, (Minnesota people won’t hear this for a few years, and by that time they’ll forget about it.) and said, now folks, I’m going to show you something. I’ve written on this piece of paper, something (I don’t know what it was.) concerning Adam and so forth." So, he put it in the blender. He had it about half full of water. He said he came all the way up. On every piece of paper he told them what he was writing. It was things that everybody knew. He threw it in the blender.

He got all the way through and had all these green pieces of paper in that blender and he turned it up. He said he had a gooey mass of green stuff and he poured it in a glass, held it up, and he said, "Who wants to drink it?" Well, he said it about made them sick to their stomach. He said, "Don’t you realize that’s what they’ve been doing with the Bible all your life? Most people absolutely can not separate Paul’s writings from the rest of Scripture, and when that happens you get the blender effect." What a point. He said they got it! They picked up on it right away. Because that’s what most have been doing. They just mix everything up, they spend their time in the Gospel’s or in Acts or a little bit in Paul, but nobody ever sees this distinctive difference in Paul’s revelation of the mysteries. That’s what I’m trying to do in these series of programs, is to let folks know that you cannot take this Body of Truth and dilute it with any other portion of Scripture, past or future. You leave it intact. Then, it becomes easy to believe. Okay, now in Colossians 1 again, this mystery which has been hid, that constant emphatic repetition of the fact that these things were hid in the mind of God until He revealed it to Paul. I’m going to keep repeating it. So, don’t go back to the Old Testament and try to find a verse that refers to the Body of Christ. You won’t find it. Don’t try to go into the Old Testament or the four Gospel’s or Revelation and find a reference to the Rapture. You won’t find it. Because it, alone, is associated with the mysteries revealed to Paul. I think we’ll have time to still hit the Rapture this afternoon. All right, Colossians 1. Colossians 1:26 "Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to (Whom?) his saints:" The unbelieving world can’t comprehend it. They can’t comprehend that God, the Creator of everything, took on human flesh and went to that Roman cross, suffered and died, so that He could open salvation to the whole world. They can’t comprehend that. It’s all part of the mysteries. But you and I can, it becomes vivid! Colossians 1:27 "To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory (Well, that’s just about like Ephesians said, the unsearchable riches.) of this mystery among the Gentiles; (See how plain all this is? But now, what’s this mystery? I mentioned it a moment ago.) which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:" Now you see, there isn’t another religion on the face of the earth that can give that kind of a promise, that we have the Creator of the Universe indwelling us. That’s our hope. That’s God’s down-payment on our life! That He is literally dwelling within us. That’s why a believer cannot go into gross sin and stay there. Now, we can fall. But every once in a while, somebody will call and tell me, "Well, our preacher was a good preacher for five years. Got a wife and three lovely kids. A month or so ago he ran off with the church’s secretary. You telling me he’s still saved?" And I said, "Well, I’m not going to say one way or the other, I can’t look on the heart. But I can give you a couple of guidelines. If in a short order God doesn’t convict him and bring him back or take him out, then, yes, I doubt if he’s ever saved." Because the unbeliever doesn’t flinch on those things, he doesn’t flinch. But if he’s a true believer, he’s either going to be convicted and come back, or God will take him out. That much we know from Scripture. All right, but here we have the fact that a true believer is indwelt by Christ, in the person, of course, of the Holy Spirit. There’s no other religion on the face of the earth that can give that promise. That’s why we’re different. I always like to say we’re not better, we’re better off. We’re better off. That’s what makes the difference. All right, now in the time we have left, let’s look at the mystery concerning the Rapture. Oh my, I’m still getting letters, "I can agree with you on everything, Les, but I can’t agree on the Rapture.

" Well, bless their hearts, let’s turn to I Corinthians chapter 15 verse 51, and lo and behold, what’s one of the first words you see? "Mystery" That’s why these theologians can’t understand the Rapture. It’s a mystery. It’s a secret. They haven’t comprehended. So, if they can’t see the Rapture in the Second Coming verses, then they just pooh-pooh it and say well, that’s just a false doctrine. I’ve mentioned it before on the program. I can tell in the first line of a letter that is disagreeing with me on the Rapture and just sort of skim through their letter. There’s not one verse from Paul. It is all Old Testament, the four gospels, and Revelation. to prove that there’s no such thing as a Rapture. Absolutely, there’s no Rapture in that part of the Bible. You’ve got to come to Paul, because Paul alone had revealed these things that were kept secret. I Corinthians 15:51a "Behold, I show you a mystery;…" You’re going to get tired of hearing the word this afternoon, aren’t you? Paul says, "I’m showing you a mystery." God has revealed something to me that’s never been revealed before. Now, what’s this mystery? I Corinthians 15:51b "…We shall not all sleep (die),…" Now, I know a lot of people come back to that verse in Hebrews, "It is appointed unto man once to die and after this the judgment." Well, that’s true in general terms, but God is God and He can make an exception, and the exception is going to be the Rapture of the Body of Christ. Now read on. This secret is that not every believer is going to go through the valley of death. Because there’s going to be a group of believers living who will not die, but they will be changed. I Corinthians 15:51c "…but we shall all be changed," They’re suddenly going to go from this body to a body fit for eternity. A body like Christ’s resurrected body – instantly! You know, since this hip surgery I’ve been doing a lot of walking, and the other morning, on a beautiful morning, I had one foot in the air and the thought struck me – Les, before that foot hits the ground you could be in Glory! Somebody, after my daughter Laura got hurt, sent this little jingle. I don’t ever get that out of my mind. "This wicked ol’ cowboy, wicked to the extreme. He got pitched from his horse and was killed. And everybody was all hemmin’, you know, well the poor man is lost. He’s in hell. But this guy says, no, now wait a minute. Maybe between the stirrup and the ground the Grace of God he found." But see this is how instantly God can do things. Never forget the words of the Lord Jesus in His earthly ministry. "With God nothing is impossible." Nothing! You and I cannot get a thought so far out but that God can do it. Now, I know the Rapture gets close. How in the world will God suddenly, instantly call every believer around the planet to meet Him in the air in a second or two? Well, it sounds impossible to us, but is it to God? No! It’s going to happen because the Book says so! Here it is, we’ll not all die physically. I Corinthians 15:51c-52a "…but we shall all be changed. (How fast?) 52. In a moment,…" That word in the Greek is the smallest division of time. And at the time of the Scripture of course, that was probably a fraction of a second. But now it’s down to a fraction, of a fraction, of a fraction of a second. And that’s how fast it’s going to happen. I Corinthians 15:52b "….in the twinkling of an eye, (As fast as you can blink your eye, it’s all going to happen. And it will be--) at the last trump: (Singular. Not one of the seven trumpets of Revelation. Those are angel’s trumpets. This is God’s trumpet and it’s singular.) for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." All the believers of the Church Age. I can’t put anybody else in there in my understanding of Scripture. I cannot see the Old Testament saints coming at this same trumpet call, because Daniel 12 says, so clearly, that Daniel and his fellow believers will be called out at the end of 75 days, after the Kingdom is set up.

But every member of the Body of Christ because that’s all Paul talks to, every member of the Body of Christ will be raised incorruptible. Philippians tells us that we’re going to have a body, "fashioned like to His glorious body" after the resurrection. All right, and here’s the reason. I Corinthians 15:53 "For this corruptible (this body of corruptible flesh) must put on incorruption, (So that we will live forever.) and this mortal (Which is prone to death.) must put on immortality" For, again, the purpose of living for all eternity in God’s presence. All right, now we have to go to the companion portion. Most of you who have heard me teach know where it’s at, I Thessalonians chapter 4, and begin in verse 13. I Thessalonians 4:13a "But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren,…" Now, whenever I read that I can’t help but think of Romans 11:25 that we read earlier this afternoon, where he says, "ignorant of this mystery." Now, I know I don’t have the authority to put that in here, but I can’t help but think of it. Paul doesn’t want us to be ignorant of yet another mystery, because that’s what it’s called in I Corinthians. It’s a secret, now unveiled only to this apostle. All right, so he doesn’t want us to be ignorant of this tremendous event. I Thessalonians 4:13b "…concerning them which are asleep, (Believers who have died, our loved ones.) that ye sorrow not, even as others who have no hope." In other words, those whose loved ones are lost, or they themselves are lost, they will never be reunited in Glory. Now verse 14 and this is so thrilling! This is Paul’s Gospel of salvation! I Thessalonians 4:14a "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again," See how plain that is? Paul’s Gospel! And if we believe it for salvation, we’re going to be part of this! If you don’t believe it, you won’t be. I Thessalonians 4:14b "…even so them also who have died in Jesus will God bring with him." Now, that takes a little explanation. At death what happens to the soul and spirit of the believer? Out to Glory! Into the Lord’s presence! They are with Him. And when this day comes, He’s going to bring them with Him. The soul and the spirit and they’ll be reunited with that resurrected body. Every single individual’s soul and spirit with that original body that’s resurrected. That again is impossible for us to imagine, but God’s going to do it, and He’s not going to miss a one! Every passed away believer is going to be reunited with the soul and spirit that’s been in Glory, so they become a complete entity once again. Oh, if I had the time, maybe we can do it in our next program. If you go back to Romans chapter 8, what did that resurrection give us? "The new body, fit for all eternity." All right, now reading on, verse 15. I Thessalonians 4:15a "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord,…" Who does that mean? Where does Paul get all this? Well, he didn’t get it from the Twelve. He didn’t get it from going back to the Old Testament prophets. The Ascended Lord revealed all this to him. I think it’s coming to him in such a way that he can clearly comprehend it. As the Holy Spirit gave him utterance, he could write these words, and it was just confirmation of everything he already knew. I Thessalonians 4:15b-16 "…that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, (That is, at this what we call the Rapture.) shall not precede (or go ahead of) them who have died. (They’re going to come out of the graves first.) 16. For the Lord himself (The crucified, ascended Lord is going to leave heaven and--) shall descend with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump (singular) of God: (Not an angel’s trumpet like Revelation, but this is a trumpet of God.) and the dead in Christ shall rise first;" Those who are believers, the Body of Christ, and they’ve been laid wherever they are, whether they’re burned at the stake and there’s nothing left but ashes. That doesn’t make any difference to God, it’ll be resurrected, a new body reunited with their soul and spirit.

I Thessalonians 4:17a "Then (in the next instant) we who are alive and remain…" Now remember, what I Corinthians said? Same thing, that there will be a group of believers who will not die physically. Here we pick them up again. I Thessalonians 4:17b "…shall be caught up (instantly translated) together with them (The resurrected of the ages of the Body of Christ.) in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: (He’s not going to come to planet earth. He only comes to the air.) and so shall we ever be with the Lord." Now, in closing, at the Second Coming it’s associated with disaster and death and destruction. At the Rapture, nothing more than perilous times shall come.

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cqlfeels · 3 years ago

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@lansplaining encouraged me to finish this random meta nobody asked for, so let's talk about Meng Yao, Meng Shi, and 孟母三遷 (mèng mǔ sān qiān), a proverb about good parenting.

A warning: this is super long (even for me!) and is less quality meta and more my ADHD brain jumping around a maze of loosely related ideas. Proceed with caution!

Let me start by briefly going through why I decided to write this, because it’s important. In haunting Meng Shi’s tag in my starvation for Meng Shi content, I’ve multiple times come across the idea that Meng Shi pushed Meng Yao too hard, that she should’ve been more careful with teaching him to seek his father’s approval at any cost, and that she was too naïve. I’ve never reblogged this kind of post because 1) I personally think it’s rude to go out of your way to ramble about how much you disagree with someone on their own post and 2) if this was an isolated incident I wouldn't care either way, so I didn’t want to direct this rant at anyone in particular. It’s more to do with a tendency, primarily (as far as I can tell) from fans who haven’t had much contact with Chinese culture, to oversimplify Meng Shi and make her relationship with Meng Yao slightly disturbing, and I think part of it is due to CQL basically cutting out her entire storyline (so fans simply don’t have info about her to assess her fairly) and part is due to misunderstanding what a good parent is supposed to act like in the context of Ancient China.

[Of course, Ancient China is not a very useful historical concept, not any more than “ye olde Europe” - things change a lot based on time and place - but you know. It’s fantasy. Extremely broad trends are okay in this case.]

Anyway, the idea behind the posts I mentioned is, basically, that Meng Shi (usually through no fault of her own) is to blame for Meng Yao’s obsession with power, since his desire for approval was inherited from lessons she taught him. Just to start with, I’d argue that Meng Yao isn’t power-hungry as much as he craves security and respect, but that’s a different meta. Let’s assume that she really did teach him to be Like That. Was she wrong to do so? I’m not looking for “does that make for a happy, well-adjusted childhood?” or “would you raise your own son as Meng Shi did?” - I’m trying to figure out, would she have been considered a bad mother in the context of the society she lived in? I don’t think she would’ve.

It is surprisingly hard to find texts about the obligations of parents in Ancient China. Their main obligation is to raise filial children, but I feel like that’s not very useful: whether or not parents are good parents, children are expected to be filial, so a child being filial really says more about the child than about the parent. Maybe the parent completely missed the mark and society at large was what taught the child to be filial!

We can assume, of course, that parents were to raise good people, and that by learning what a good person looked like, we could figure out whether the parent was successful, but once again, I feel like that’s pinning things on the outcome, not on the process - the best of parents can end up with an awful kid and vice versa.

While thinking about all this, it took me a frankly embarrassing amount of time to remember the story of Mother Meng and Meng Zi, but once I did, it wouldn’t leave my mind - in part because the Meng here is the exact same Meng of Meng Shi and Meng Yao (yay! fun if useless parallel!), and in part because this is a story about how a woman can successfully raise a son by herself.

Okay, so important note: one of the most influential ancient Chinese thinkers is Meng Zi (孟子 Mèng Zǐ), who is known in the West as Mencius. If you've never heard of him - he's perhaps second in importance only to Confucius. When Mencius was still a young child, his father died, so he was raised by his mother, who is usually known only as Mother Meng (in Chinese, 孟母 Mèng Mǔ.)

Mother Meng's story is told in Biographies of Exemplary Women (列女傳 Liènǚ Zhuàn), which for around 2000 years beginning around the 18th century BCE, was the most commonly used book used to educate women. The book is divided into sections, each one showing a different way women could be honorable and good. Mother Meng's story is told in the Maternal Models section (母儀傳 Mǔ Yí Zhuàn.) The story has a few parts, some of which I'll quote, always from Kinney's 2014 translation.

Before I go on to quote it, though, I'd like to establish that Mother Meng's story is so, so famous that even if Meng Shi had never read this particular book, I'm almost certain she would've been familiar with at least the outlines of Mother Meng's story. I'm not cherry picking a suitable chapter from the book, I'm literally going with the most famous story in it because Meng Shi would be most likely to know this one if she knew no other story.

Okay, the first part of the tale takes place when Mencius is a young boy and Mother Meng is a widow raising him.

The mother of Meng Ke of Zou [a different name for Mencius] was called Mother Meng. She lived near a graveyard. During Mencius’ youth, he enjoyed playing among the tombs, romping about pretending to prepare the ground for burials. Mother Meng said, “This is not the place to raise my son.” She therefore moved away and settled beside the marketplace. But there he liked to play at displaying and selling wares like a merchant. Again Mother Meng said, “This is not the place to raise my son,” and once more left and settled beside a school. There, however, he played at setting out sacrificial vessels, bowing, yielding, entering, and withdrawing. His mother said, “This, indeed, is where I can raise my son!” and settled there. When Mencius grew up, he studied the Six Arts, and finally became known as a great classicist. A man of discernment would say, “Mother Meng was good at gradual transformation.”

According to the translator's footnote, "gradual transformation" is "a childrearing technique, whereby a child is morally formed through daily exposure to correct models of behavior."

From this story comes the proverb 孟母三遷 (Mèng Mǔ sān qiān) - "Mother Meng moved three times." It's come to mean that a parent - especially the mother of a male child - should spare no efforts to provide an environment that will give their child a good education, paying particular attention to what models are surrounding them.

I'm sure I don't need to say if Meng Shi was at all familiar with this proverb (and she would probably be), she must have been very stressed out over literally raising her son in a brothel. (Here I must mention sex workers in ancient China were often essentially owned by the brothels, so literally "moving three times" wasn't really an option for Meng Shi even if she could miraculously pick up another trade.) Meng Shi did however at least try to surround Meng Yao with the accomplishments appropriate for the son of a cultivator:

Xiao-Meng, are you still learning those things lately? [...] The things your mom wants you to learn, things like calligraphy, etiquette, swordsmanship, meditation… How are those things going? [...] His mom’s raising him as a young master of a wealthy family. She taught him how to read and write, bought him all those swordsmanship pamphlets, and even wants to send him to school.

Meng Yao actually talks a little bit about “those swordsmanship pamphlets” in the only time in canon he directly shares memories about this mother:

Lan XiChen, “Your [guqin] skills are also considered quite fine outside of Gusu. Were they taught by your mother?”

Jin GuangYao, “No. I taught myself by watching others. She never taught me such things. She only taught me reading and writing, and bought a handful of expensive sword and cultivation guides for me to practice.”

Lan XiChen seemed surprised, “Sword and cultivation guides?”

Jin GuangYao, “Brother, you haven’t seen them before, have you? Those small booklets sold by the common folk. First jumbled sketches of human figures, then deliberately mystified captions.”

Lan XiChen shook his head, smiling. Jin GuangYao shook his head as well, “All of them are scams, especially to fool women like my mother and ignorant children. You won’t lose anything by practicing them, but you definitely won’t gain anything either.”

He sighed in a rueful way, “But how could my mother have known this? She bought them no matter how expensive they were, saying that if I returned to see my father in the future, I had to see him with as much competence as possible so that I don’t fall behind. All of the money was spent on this.”

See what’s happening? Meng Shi cannot physically take Meng Yao to cultivators, but she spares no efforts in giving him the closest thing she possibly can -- figuratively, we might say she moved three times.

Of course, these booklets don’t work, but as Meng Yao says, how could she have known this? The cultivation world is very closed off - think of how the entire Mo household gathers to see Lan juniors, and how Wei Wuxian mentions once that “Cultivation families, in the eyes of common folk, are like people favored by God, mysterious yet noble.” Not just noble, but mysterious. That tracks, too - I mean, they live in inaccessible households and mostly leave to night hunt or visit each other, neither of which is an activity that would allow commoners to get much more than an occasional glimpse of them.

Now, if Meng Shi doesn’t even know that a pearl for Jin Guangshan was just a trinket, if she doesn’t know even the wealth of a major sect, how can she read booklets and decide whether that’s genuine cultivation or not? All that she sees is a chance for Meng Yao to be surrounded by the ideas and skills of the people she wants him to emulate - cultivators - and therefore she does everything she can to get him that chance. Mother Meng moved three times.

Okay, but maybe the argument is not “Meng Shi shouldn’t have pushed Meng Yao to cultivation” but rather “she should’ve pushed him, just not too hard." To that, I present another tale from Mencius' childhood:

Once, when Mencius was young, he returned home after finishing his lessons and found his mother spinning. She asked him, “How far did you get in your studies today?” Mencius replied, “I’m in about the same place as I was before.” Mother Meng thereupon took up a knife and cut her weaving. Mencius was alarmed and asked her to explain. Mother Meng said, “Your abandoning your study is like my cutting this weaving. A man of discernment studies in order to establish a name and inquires to become broadly knowledgeable. By this means, when he is at rest, he can maintain tranquility and when he is active, he can keep trouble at a distance. If now you abandon your studies, you will not escape a life of menial servitude and will lack the means to keep yourself from misfortune. How is this different from weaving and spinning to eat? If one abandons these tasks midway, how can one clothe one’s husband and child and avoid being perpetually short of food? If a woman abandons that with which she nourishes others and a man is careless about cultivating his virtue, if they don’t become brigands or thieves, then they will end up as slaves or servants.” Mencius was afraid. Morning and evening he studied hard without ceasing. He served Zisi [a great scholar whose grandfather was Confucius] as his teacher and then became one of the most renowned classicists in the world.

Notice that Mother Meng moved three times to ensure Mencius would have the highest of aspirations - to become a scholar. But just aspiration isn’t enough. Not by any means. Now that Mencius is actually studying, Mother Meng is willing to take an extreme action to ensure he's taking it seriously. Mencius doesn't have a father to smooth his path to success. He has to learn that aspiring to greatness isn't enough. He'll have to put in the effort as if his life depended on it. And if he doesn't persist in his hard work, everything he's done thus far will be useless. Sounds like a lesson imparted on young Meng Yao, doesn’t it?

A lot of fandom rage towards Meng Shi would apply to China's Best Mom Contender, Mother Meng. She gives her son big dreams, and teaches him how to go about achieving them in a society where failing is easier than succeeding. Yes, it's fair to say that Meng Shi taught Meng Yao to refuse to settle for anything less than being “Jin Guangshan's son, a respected cultivator.” Yes, it's also fair to say that she probably didn't allow him much time to play like children his age did. But unfortunately, in the world of MDZS, poor children probably wouldn't get to play anyhow, the difference is that they'd usually be working, not studying. Studying is a privilege! It’s a privilege Meng Yao could not afford but was given to him anyway, through his mother’s many sacrifices. We can even say that while she was alive, Meng Shi was trying to ensure Meng Yao would one day have a better life, at the expense of a fun childhood - and that's very Mother Meng of her, whatever our modern Western sensibilities might have to say about that.

Finally, I’d skip other tales (which show Mother Meng and an adult Mencius) and go straight to the poem that ends the Mother Meng section:

The mother of Mencius

Was able to teach, transform, judge, and discriminate.

With skill she selected a place to raise her son,

Prompting him to accord with the great principles.

When her son’s studies did not advance,

She cut her weaving to illustrate her point.

Her son then perfected his virtue;

His achievements rank as the crowning glory of his generation.

I’d like to focus on the last verse - “His achievements rank as the crowning glory of his generation.” All that Mother Meng wanted was for Mencius to not completely ruin his life, but he became great. You can so very easily see a parallel with how Meng Shi hoped Meng Yao would be a cultivator but he became Jin Guangyao, Chief Cultivator, styled Lianfang-zun, one of the Three Venerable, hero of the Sunshot Campaign.

Of course you can say “Jin Guangyao did many Very Wrong Things to get there, though!” Which, sure, okay, fair point. How many and how wrong depends on which canon we're discussing, and your own interpretation, but there’s no version of the story in which Jin Guangyao is 100% an innocent child uwu. But blaming that on Meng Shi is just... straight up weird? I don’t see anyone going “If Jiang Fengmian hadn’t adopted Wei Wuxian, he’d never have dared become Yiling Laozu!” and that’s pretty much the same logic. Would street kid Wei Wuxian have invented a new type of cultivation if he had never been taken in by the Jiang? Probably not, but raising undead armies is very much not something Jiang Fengmian could’ve predicted. In the same way, how could Meng Shi have predicted that teaching her pre-adolescent son “You are the son of a cultivator, act like one and earn your place in society” would’ve ultimately resulted in innocent deaths? How could she predict “You’re not destined to having the same horrible life I did, you can get something better than this” was a bad thing to teach? I quite honestly don’t know.

Finally, I'd like to point towards a much flimsier evidence that Meng Shi did great as a parent. And that is Meng Yao’s love. Nie Huaisang at some point comments Meng Shi is someone who Meng Yao "cherishes more than his life," and I think his assessment is correct.

Even putting aside the fact he built a whole temple to get his mother to reincarnate into a better life, and even putting aside how he refuses to flee the country without her remains, there's still crystal clear evidence that Meng Shi must've done something right. Because a lifetime of people using his mother to bully him doesn't seem to have made Meng Yao resent her. Had their relationship not have been very strong, odds are he'd feel bitter and/or ashamed of her. That doesn't seem to be the case. He's attached to her even decades after her death.

I want to be very careful with equating mutual affection with good parenting, though. When I was a rather rebellious teenager, my mother (in typical Chinese fashion) used to say that parents and children don't have to love each other as long as they're dutiful to each other, by which she meant that a parent-child relationship isn't informed by warm and fuzzy feelings, but by whether you'd be willing to do anything for each other. Specific to my case, she meant "I don't care if it makes you hate me, you will do as you're told because that's what's best for you." (That may also be the reason why people more familiar with Chinese culture see the Jiang family less as outright abusive and more as #complicated, but that's another meta.)

Whether your kid wants to hug you every time they see you is of no consequence to traditional Chinese thought - raising them to be the best they can is all that matters, because at the end of the day, you won't be around forever, but you can definitely set up your kid's life so that it goes smoothly and virtuously. How that's accomplished varies depending on many factors, but to have the goal be "I want my child to love me" rather than "I want to raise my child right" would've been considered selfish as hell.

So even if all that Meng Shi had given Meng Yao had been stern lessons about the need to go get his birthright, she would've still have been considered a good mother!! In fact, she would've been doing everything she was supposed to do, under extremely difficult conditions! (Remember the importance of environment? That Meng Yao grew up to want to be a cultivator despite having probably never even met one speaks wonders about Meng Shi's childrearing powers!!)

But just based off how over the top Meng Yao's filal dutifulness is, I'd go a step further and say that even as she did the impossible, she was also loving enough to inspire genuine affection. This is complicated because children who have present fathers could expect their mothers to be tender with them. The first century BCE text 禮記 Lǐ Jì or The Classic of Rites says that:

Here now is the affection of a father for his sons - he loves the worthy among them, and places on a lower level those who do not show ability; but that of a mother for them is such, that while she loves the worthy, she pities those who do not show ability - the mother deals with them on the ground of affection and not of showing them honour; the father, on the ground of showing them honour and not of affection.

But when the father figure is lacking for any reason, the mother must abandon her tenderness because someone must guide the child, and without a father, the role falls to the mother. A single or widowed mother had to be very careful to not smother their children with affection and raise useless, spoiled kids, or so it was thought. (The presence of Qingheng-jun and Lan Qiren is why Madame Lan can be so affectionate with the Lan boys, by the way - if she was raising them by herself she would've been expected to be much more practical. AUs where she just gets her kids and runs away could do very cool things with this idea. But I digress!)

Where was I? Oh, okay. Because Meng Yao seems to not just respect, but actively miss her, it seems that Meng Shi somehow managed to deal with her son on the ground of both honor and affection, to paraphrase.

So basically, all things considered, it seems not only would Meng Shi have been considered a great mom (if people could look past her being a prostitute, anyway) but she also went above and beyond the bare minimum. She truly spared no efforts on any front to make sure her son had everything your average gongzi would have - someone to teach him and someone to love him, access to education and confidence in his birthright. That she couldn't actually make him a cultivator, that she couldn't actually raise him in a proper home with no one being cruel to herself or him - that's immaterial. Even Mother Meng couldn't control what her neighbors did, only what she taught her son! The key point is Meng Shi tried. She did everything she could to educate her son right. You couldn't ask more of her, and quite honestly, you should probably be asking less.

Of course we can't err on the other extreme and say she was Perfect. Given MXTX only ever writes flawed characters, we can safely assume that if we'd known more about Meng Shi, we would've seen many flaws. Indeed, just the fact she didn't teach Meng Yao the guqin when he apparently wanted to learn it might point to some conflict we don't know enough to speculate about (maybe she focused too much on cultivation when Meng Yao's interests lay elsewhere? Maybe she wasn't able to sufficiently shelter him and he felt it'd be a burden to ask her to teach him anything? Maybe maybe maybe, go wild with your fics.) Nevertheless, I would never hold a female character to a higher ideal than a male character - if the male cast of MDZS can be a hot mess and still be admirable for what they're trying to do, then so can Meng Shi.

At the end of the day, when I look at Meng Shi - and I've made myself a document with all the references to her in the novel canon so I could easily contemplate her life and character - all I see is a woman every bit as determined and resourceful as her son, willing to do everything it took to raise her little boy into the sophisticated and ambitious man he became.

Finally, here's a fun little parallel that I'm 100% sure was unintentional but I still love. I said Meng Shi couldn't have moved three times. She couldn't, but I think maybe she taught her son he was worth moving three times for. Qinghe Nie. Qishan Wen. Lanling Jin. Isn't that super fun to think about?

Alternatively, tl;dr: Oh My God I Can't Believe We're Blaming Women For The Actions Of Their Adult Children In The Year Of Our Lord 2k21, Meng Shi Was Doing Her Best, Chill!

#drinking game #take a shot every time i say 'finally'#this post refused to let me get to the end of it lol #i think because i'm extremely salty about fanon stage mom meng shi #(to not say tiger mom meng shi which crosses into outright racism. but i'm giving people the benefit of the doubt)

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prettyvampiress96 · 3 years ago

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The Malfoy Secret

Chapter 1

Sat in her defence against the dark arts class, Anastasia sat at her desk with her head down, her long black hair falling from its place over her shoulder and her feather quill elegantly scrolling notes across the parchment in front of her under the watchful eyes of Professor Lupin. Anastasia was in her seventh and final year at Hogwarts so studying for the N.E.W.T.S were strictly underway. As Head Girl , Anna's free time was extremely limited even the she spent it mentoring some of the younger members of her house. Professor Lupin was currently recapping over a subject they had covered at the beginning of the year when a knock echoed throughout the large room.

" Forgive me for interrupting your lesson Remus but might I borrow Miss Rosier . There's a situation that requires her immediate assistance" Professor McGonagall asked her eyes locking directly to Anastasia's. When Remus nods his head granting Anastasia permission to leave the class. "Miss Rosier you'll want to collect your things class will no doubt have long finished by the time you'll return" McGonagall spoke up once again. Anastasia nodded slightly confused and with a flick of her wand , her belongings were packed and in her possession. " Professor McGonagall ma'am with all due respect may I know what the situation is that requires me to be pulled from my class" Anna questioned the head of Gryffindor house. " It would appear Miss Rosier that a child of whom you are mentoring and as of whom you are known to be close too has been injured by a hippogriff, the extent of the injury I myself am unaware now if you could Madame Pomfrey shall be waiting for you in the infirmary wing. I have to alert Draco's parents" The transfiguration teacher informed . As Anna heard Draco's name she immediately began sprinting to the infirmary wing , the blonde haired boy was indeed close to her . Anastasia burst through the infirmary doors catching sight of Draco in the bed surrounded by other Slytherin's. The Slytherins and the Slytherin head girl stood at Draco's bedside whilst his arm was mended. Anastasia knew this was a lucky escape for Draco , she had no doubt that the Gryffindor trio were in some way involved. They always were. Draco had to stay for observation for a few hours so his friends dispersed to lunch, Anna stayed getting the run down from Draco on what had happened. Anastasia had stood with her back to the large infirmary doors so the pair had yet to notice the set of parents in the doorway observing. " Draco what do I tell you time and time again , if you want to go at war with the Gryffindor's then be smart about it . A snake lies low before it strikes and therefore its prey is unaware and then dead. Take myself for example do you see me all out duelling in the courtyard? no you don't . Even after that Weasley insulted my family I planned ahead and I struck him when he least expected it and I've yet to see Percy on my rounds since. The moral is be smart Draco and don't lose us anymore points or you may find yourself duelling me little Malfoy" Anna joked patting Draco's good shoulder both of them laughing together until the pair heard chuckling behind them. Anastasia eyed the two adults lurking in the doorway , she didnt have to ask who they were to know that these were Draco's parents. After all her family had mentioned the Malfoy family countless of times, although she hadn't expected them to look so breath-taking. The woman hurried at great speed to Draco's bedside Lucius standing right beside her. " Draco my poor baby don't you worry that animal and that sad excuse of a teacher wont be on the grounds once your father is finished with them. Nothing hurts our baby" Narcissa cooed failing to notice the blush spreading across Draco's face. Anastasia giggled at Draco's embarrassment. " Sorry to interrupt Draco but now youre family are here I see you're in good hands so I shall leave you be, but take this" handing Draco a book for transfigurations " I know its not your strongest topic but itll do for now considering your not in class and I'll help with your homework after alright. We need to keep those grades up after all" she offered. Anastasia managed to move two steps before a figure blocked her way. Looking up she found herself looking into the ice blue eyes of Lucius Malfoy himself. " Do forgive me but who exactly are you we know Draco's friends and your face isnt one we are likely to forget is it darling?" The tall blonde questioned his wife. She moved to his side humming in thought. " No Darling I do believe we havent met her I am sure of it" Narcissa assured her husband both of their eyes coming to glance at Anna. " My name is Anastasia Esmeralda Rosier and I am Slytherin Head Girl and Draco's mentor

courtesy of Professor Snape sir " Anastasia spoke clear not allowing the pair to see how intimidated they made her. When Anastasia glanced back towards Draco , he simply shrugged during their interaction. The pair both missed the looks that the elder Malfoys shared with one another.

Draco was released from the infirmary wing in time for dinner that evening and as promised Anna assisted him in anything he didnt quite understand while at the same time revising over all of her N.E.W.T.S that she was set to take in a mere few days. Just over a week later N.E.W.T.S had finished and all students were packing up the dorms ready to spend summer break at home. Many of those students already excited for the next year. Draco Malfoy was one specific student who indeed was not looking forward to returning knowing that Anastasia would now not be returning. Her final year now complete. Anastasia was a nervous wreck now that the time had finally come , the fact that she wouldn't be a student at Hogwarts next year really had begun to sink in . There were plenty of careers she had in her mind . She had already been accepted to work within the Ministry of Magic.. Working was something that also had young Anastasia scared. She would be lying if she said that she wasn't worried, after all her last name is the name of her father therefore would others think she was destined for the same fate despite never stepping a foot out of line. As Anna settled herself into the comfort of her train compartment , she curled up on the plush fabric of the seat and leaned her head against the window , closing her eyes she was thankful for the chance of an empty carriage it happened on rare occasions. Moments later that silence was disturbed by a white headed third year. Ana had half expected Draco's cavalry to file in right behind him but it was just him. The pair just looked out the window unsure of what to say to each other. The train began to slow to a stop signalling they were at kings cross this was it . This was their goodbye. People from all houses began filing out onto the platform 9 and 3/4 .

The white mane of the elusive Lucius Malfoy could be spotted miles away. Anastasia's Aunt had come to meet her despite her not feeling herself. This was her younger brothers only child and the child she raised and treated as her own. Merlin himself wouldn't stop her from missing this. With her luggage in tow Ana had spotted her aunt Amalthea Rosier or aunt Thea as Anna called her and headed directly for her . Anna embraced her Aunt in a large hug. "Auntie you didnt have to meet me here , you should be at home resting, I could have apparated home, but thank you " Anna thanked her aunt tearfully appreciating the effort she had gone through to be there. Thea didn't have a chance to respond as a pair of arms enclosed around her nieces waist, holding her from behind. Anna looked down and turned to see who the culprit was . Staring into the greyish blue eyes of Draco. "I'll miss you Annie. Promise me you'll visit me before I go back to school and we have to stay in touch that's not negotiable I'm afraid and I'm a Malfoy I get what I want" Draco smirked at Anna. " Oh Draco I don't know I was looking forward to no more potter drama or Draco theatrics" she joked back smiling at the boy . Draco looked a tad offended. "Of course I'll keep in touch but let's at least get home first " she laughed , patting Draco on his shoulder . Bowing her head to Draco's parents in a sign of respect. Both families apparated to their respected homes.

#narcissa malfoy #lucius malfoy #draco malfoy #malfoy x oc #narcissa x lucius x oc

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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years ago

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Chapter 5 of The Quiet Room (ao3 or tumblr pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4)

Nie Mingjue took three tries to wake up.

In all truth, he wasn’t that badly injured – if it hadn’t been for how tangled his spiritual energy already was, steeped in resentment from his wayward cultivation and burned by trying to keep a saber’s pace from within a human body, a night’s rest and some tonics would probably have been enough to put him right. But it was, and he was, and so the concern of his doctors was all the more pronounced.

The first time he woke, it was to Nie Xiaoxuan, a cantankerous old doctor who’d lost all patience with her patients years before Nie Mingjue had been conceived, looking down at him with a scowl, saying, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Go back to sleep!”

A needle had descended, leaving him not much choice about the matter – it was a good thing he was used to such rough treatment, or else he might’ve worried. Instead he found some comfort in how some things were always the same, and his Nie sect’s objectively awful bedside manner was one of them.

He slept.

He woke a second time to arguing outside his door in the middle of the night, whispers and hisses that were so loud as to be unworthy of being called lowered voices –

“– the Sect Leader deserves to know!”

“Nie-er-gongzi gave the order, and it was obeyed. There isn’t any need to disturb the Sect Leader’s recuperation over nonsense.”

“Nonsense?! Do you know what the implications will be? Nie-er-gongzi is still young, he doesn’t understand –”

“Sect Leader was once younger still. There is still sect discipline, or are you making an official challenge to his judgment? If so, you should be bothering Nie-er-gongzi, as the one who gave the order, and a council of peers that would be assembled to determine if his judgment was flawed.”

“I - no. I won’t.”

“If there’s no challenge to the quality of Nie-er-gongzi’s judgment, then there’s no reason to talk to the Sect Leader.”

Nie Mingjue smiled, proud of his sect and of his brother – even if he didn’t know exactly what it was that Nie Huaisang had ordered that had caused such a stir – and went back to sleep.

He woke up the third time to the sounds of a guqin.

He’d always been slow to wake from an induced sleep, and this time was no different – his body was heavy, confining, and it was a long time before he managed to open his eyes. A half-shichen at least, and yet the guqin continued steadfastly onwards.

So by the time he did manage to open his eyes, the first words out of Nie Mingjue’s mouth were, “Wangji, please stop making a racket.”

The sound of the guqin paused.

Nie Mingjue turned his head to look at him. Lan Wangji looked better than he had the last time he’d seen him, in that horrible mixture of nightmare and reality that had been their flight from the Cloud Recesses and the terrible strain of flying all the way to Qinghe in a single night. If either of them had been lesser cultivators, they wouldn’t have been able to manage it; even at their level, it was considered highly unwise, and they had known that they were spending life energy rather than spiritual qi to buy them the strength they needed.

At least it had been late enough that both children, initially excited by all the rushing around involved in their escape, had quickly lapsed back into sleep instead of descending to tears.

Still, better was a low bar. By the end of their flight, Lan Wangji had had blood soaking through his white robes, his eye locked on the horizon and unable to focus on anything nearer, his entire body wracked with occasional shudders – if he’d been anyone else, he would have been screaming.

He still look pale and bloodless, his eyes hunted and guilty and tired, stark white bandages visible beneath the pale (but not white) robes that looked like something Nie Huaisang had once owned, but he didn’t look about to expire, so Nie Mingjue would take that as a victory.

“I would have thought,” Lan Wangji said carefully, laying his hands on the guqin chords to stop the sound, “that you would prefer that it not be silent.”

“There’s silence and then there’s silence,” Nie Mingjue said, trying to shrug and abruptly realizing that that was a bad idea. His shoulders and neck and back all hurt – possibly he’d dislocated something in trying to get out of that horrible room. Probably, even. “Not wanting to be locked in a room designed to be as close to nothingness as possible doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t want some peace and quiet once in a while…I shouldn’t have called your playing a racket. It’s very good. There was just a lot of it.”

Lan Wangji blinked, then shook his head. “I do not take offense,” he said, simply enough that Nie Mingjue believed him. “It is a surprise that you think the way you do about silence, even now. I myself have been…struggling, with the concept.”

“It’s very loud here,” Nie Mingjue said knowingly, and Lan Wangji averted his eyes. “It’s all right if you don’t like it that much, you know. Has Huaisang talked with you about the options for soundproofing?”

“He has,” Lan Wangji said. “I have not yet accepted.”

“Why not?”

“It feels –” he hesitated. “Like a step backwards. My Lan sect has always valued silence, quiet – not just valued, but imposed, even on those for whom it is not appropriate.”

Like you, he meant, or maybe he was thinking about little Lan Jingyi, the orphan he’d stolen away from his own sect – truly stolen, since unlike little Lan Sizhui Lan Wangji had no guardianship rights over him to justify taking him away.

Nie Mingjue hadn’t objected to it, figuring that it didn’t make much difference to the amount of scandal he would undoubtedly causse whether he had taken away one child or two when he convinced the Second Jade of Lan to abandon his ‘seclusion’ in favor of refuge at the Unclean Realm. Anyway, if Lan Wangji had concluded that it would be better for the child to leave, then it probably was – Nie Mingjue trusted his judgment.

Just like you trusted Lan Xichen’s?

“Each sect has a different cultivation style,” he said, deciding not to think about that right now. “With both strengths and weaknesses. My Nie sect has a martial style, aggressive and overpowering; your Lan sect, although it still follows the orthodoxy of sword cultivation, focuses on contemplation, thoughtfulness, and, yes, quiet. Who is to say which is better than the other? They’re just different.”

Lan Wangji was frowning.

“Sometimes I think Wen Mao made a mistake when he abandoned sects based on preference and style in favor of raising up his clan,” Nie Mingjue confessed. “And your ancestors and mine, too, in following his lead. Look at Huaisang – to cultivate a saber is his heritage, his birthright and his duty to our bloodline, and so he must do so despite being clearly unsuited for it.” He paused, then sighed. “Not that he’s all that suitable for anything else, either.”

Lan Wangji shot him a quelling look, disapproving, but in the sort of way that Lans had when they were amused by you.

“Still, we’re all cultivators, each of us fighting against fate,” Nie Mingjue continued. “While we must be guided by our traditions, we must also each find the path that suits us best. You’ve always enjoyed the quiet, Wangji; you welcome peace, prefer order, thrive within the confines of your sect’s rules. Finding the point at which you and your traditions part ways does not mean that you are morally obligated to give up everything about them.”

“Not even when those traditions have caused so much harm?”

“Even so,” Nie Mingjue said firmly. “We’re all on a path, and in choosing to take a new turn, you are not disregarding the past, but adding your wisdom to that of those who came before you. I made changes to my Nie sect’s cultivation style once I became sect leader, just as my father did before me; my brother will make still more when he takes the position after I go. Each of my Nie sect disciples practices the Nie sect style, but each one takes it and makes it their own. Keep what helps, discard what hurts.”

“But in this case, is it not the very same thing?” Lan Wangji asked. His brow was still furrowed, the matter clearly one of great concern to him. “I have always turned to the quiet for comfort and strength, sought seclusion to temper myself and test myself, and yet – in the absence of all noise– I found myself slowly going mad, locked away and alone. You yourself nearly died from it. What lesson can I take from this, if not that the quiet is evil?”

“You can take the lesson that too much quiet can be an evil, in the same way too much medicine can be a poison,” Nie Mingjue said. “I might hate your jingshi, since it doesn’t suit me, but I’m given to understand that it often helps, too. It brings peace to cultivators who are tormented by a mind full of thoughts they cannot quiet and helps them fight the demons in their hearts, it allows those who are too connected to the world to tear themselves away. It was built for a purpose.”

“It was,” Lan Wangji said. “A purpose it has now betrayed.”

Nie Mingjue didn’t have anything to say about that. He’d once told Lan Xichen that he thought his sect’s practice of introducing children to that place until they learned quiet whether they liked it or not was inhumane and cruel, and Lan Xichen – in a rare moment of sarcasm – had asked him if teaching them to cultivate a saber spirit that would eventually consume their minds with rage was somehow meant to be morally superior.

To each their own faults, he supposed. Perhaps the next generation would do better.

(He found himself thinking things like that a great deal, these days. He was only in his twenties, and yet his thoughts resembled an old man’s – the feeling of death stalking his footsteps, the day nearly done, his legacy a book that seemed to be nearly completed.

That had been what had driven him to stop his sessions of Clarity with Jin Guangyao, in fact. He’d been reviewing a plan for renovating the western courtyards of the Unclean Realm as part of a long-term plan to get more air and light in there and he’d found himself thinking I probably won’t be here to see this completed, and that had been when he’d realized that it was time to start seriously planning for succession.)

“Perhaps it is the conflation of different things,” Lan Wangji mused, more to himself than anyone else. “The quiet, being alone, loneliness…and yet you can have quiet without being alone, you can be alone without being lonely, you can be lonely without quiet. A balance between disconnecting from the world and connecting with other people.”

That sounded like poetry, and Nie Mingjue could see Lan Wangji’s fingers twitch towards the guqin – he’d probably been inspired.

Nie Mingjue sighed and put his hand over his eyes. His father had told him that being an elder brother meant a life of sacrifice, and he’d been right. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and play something. I know you want to.”

Lan Wangji was silent for a few long moments, and then his fingers began to move, the too-familiar sound of the Song of Clarity rising up to fill Nie Mingjue’s ears.

“I didn’t mean for me,” Nie Mingjue clarified, rolling his eyes while his hand was still hiding them. The Lan were always so earnest. “I’m not even meditating right now, Wangji. Don’t waste your effort.”

Lan Wangji’s fingers stilled briefly, then continued.

“Chifeng-zun –”

Nie Mingjue pulled his hand away long enough to give Lan Wangji a stern look – he’d already told him several times to refer to him more casually, and however long or short his stay at the Unclean Realm was, if they were going to endure a scandal together, he was simply going to have to adjust to their ways.

Lan Wangji looked long-suffering.

“Mingjue-xiong,” he conceded, and Nie Mingjue nodded, pleased. “Please pay close attention to my playing. Identify if there are any differences between my rendition and –”

“Wangji,” Nie Mingjue interrupted, feeling pained at the very thought. “I can’t.”

Lan Wangji frowned at him, his eyes showing distress.

Nie Mingjue felt guilty at once, and exhaled a sigh. “Wangji, you know I don’t cultivate with music,” he said. “It’s all just interminable plucking to me.”

Lan Wangji’s eyebrows shot up. “Plucking?” he echoed, and Nie Mingjue winced – he’d probably shocked poor Lan Wangji’s conscience. “Mingjue-xiong…you really don’t like music, do you?”

“Not in the slightest,” Nie Mingjue confessed. “I can more or less follow a beat or rhythm, and military calls are fine no matter what instrument is involved, but the rest is all a mess of pointless noise. I can’t tell if the notes are high or low, which ones go before the others, and apparently there are different tones in music as there are in speech? Except in music, certain of them apparently sporadically considered bad, in a variety of different and exciting ways, sometimes but not others, none of which make the slightest difference – ”

He stopped talking on account of Lan Wangji having started to make an unusual hiccupping sound.

Nie Mingjue squinted. Was Lan Wangji…laughing?

If so, he was sorely out of practice. Though now that he thought it, that seemed to make some sense.

“Forgive me,” Lan Wangji said, shoulders shaking – he’d stopped making audible noise, but he was evidently still suffering from an attack of hilarity. “You speak so well, Mingjue-xiong; I had not realized that you suffered from amusia.” He saw Nie Mingjue’s frown of confusion and clarified, “Tone-deafness.”

“I say so all the time!”

“I had incorrectly assumed, as I suspect many have, that you were using the term colloquially,” Lan Wangji said. “How do you fight alongside my brother? I have seen you do so flawlessly, without any impediment, even when he wields Liebing.”

“I can follow along with what he’s doing with his qi,” Nie Mingjue said. “We have been close for so many years, and his spiritual energy is as familiar to me as my own –”

Lan Wangji flinched.

Nie Mingjue stopped talking.

His heart was heavy in his chest, weighed down with feeling, all those things he’d been so carefully not thinking about suddenly stifling him. Lan Xichen, his childhood friend, his lover, his beloved…

He’d hurt him.

Nie Mingjue couldn’t bring himself to believe that the act had been intentional or malicious, not even when Lan Wangji’s arrival made painfully clear that Lan Xichen hadn’t even bothered to supervise him. It simply wasn’t in Lan Xichen’s nature to do such an underhanded thing –

(You once thought Meng Yao wouldn’t do that sort of thing, either. Do you make a habit of blindness?)

He had known Lan Xichen for such a long time, though. If he didn’t know him, both virtues and faults, what person existed that he could say he understood?

No, Lan Xichen must have been trying to help him, not hurt him. And yet – regardless of his intent – he had.

He had hurt him very badly.

Lan Xichen hadn’t listened to him, had ignored him, disregarded him – Nie Mingjue had been as clear as he could be about how he felt about the quiet room. Perhaps he hadn’t told Lan Xichen about his youthful attempt to see if he could handle it, at first out of simply not wanting to appear weak in front of his lover, but later out of (admittedly petty) principle: shouldn’t his ‘no’ be enough? Shouldn’t Lan Xichen have trusted him?

He hadn’t.

He’d trusted Jin Guangyao instead.

Jin Guangyao with his smiles and slippery manner, with his so-believable excuses and always-present rationalizations, always the victim in every exchange they had – Lan Xichen always went to comfort him first after they had another one of their arguments, Nie Mingjue recalled abruptly. He’d called him on it once, in his anger, but Lan Xichen had explained that he knew how strong Nie Mingjue was, how resilient, and that his “A-Yao” needed his sympathy more.

Nie Mingjue hadn’t thought much of it at the time. He was resilient, and anyway he knew how frightening his rages could be; he’d thought perhaps that Lan Xichen simply wanted the excuse to be elsewhere until he’d had a chance to calm down.

He’d rationalized a lot of things. Maybe too many. But this?

This was too much.

“Mingjue-xiong,” Lan Wangji said hesitantly. “About – about my brother…”

Nie Mingjue grimaced, and Lan Wangji felt silent once more.

Nie Mingjue’s heart cried out for his lover, the kind and gentle man who might be a little too reluctant to express himself, a little prone to going with the will of the majority to avoid confrontation, a little inclined to panic at the thought of disappointing people, but whose faults only made him the more human, the more loveable.

But Nie Mingjue had slept, and slept well, and even if his heart was still tangled, his mind was now clear.

“I have long thought,” he said carefully, painfully cognizant of the fact that Lan Wangji was Lan Xichen’s younger brother, “that fate had arranged for your brother and I to meet, and that we would live the rest of our lives intertwined, our hears and minds filled with thoughts of one another. But it seems to me now that that was perhaps – not our destiny.”

“My brother has wronged you,” Lan Wangji said solemnly.

“I still believe his intent was good,” Nie Mingjue assured him earnestly. “Your brother has – more reason than most, I think, to resent my intransigence on matters of my health, and to suspect – to suspect –”

He stopped, swallowed. He had long been (politely) termed to be a straightforward man; it was not in his character to stutter over his speech, to be unable to say the unvarnished truth no matter how painful. Even if it was his lover who was causing him such pain.

“Wangji,” he said instead, and Lan Wangji looked at him. “You know that my family – does not live long lives.”

Lan Wangji nodded.

“It is not uncommon,” he said carefully, “for those in my family to begin to show signs of decline before the end. A certain rigidity of thought –”

“You are not so far down that path that your thinking has become impaired,” Lan Wangji said abruptly, his voice unexpectedly fierce. “Moreover, your refusal was not new, but consistent with your prior thoughts, your opinion expressed repeatedly and consistently. Do not make excuses for him.”

Nie Mingjue was a little surprised, having expected Lan Wangji to defend his brother, but then he recalled the matter of those thirty-three marks marring Lan Wangji’s back. Even if Lan Wangji’s conduct had been wrong, it had been motivated by love, and at any rate the others in the Lan sect had not died – no one had died, except for Wei Wuxian, and Lan Wangji had only been able to offer his beloved the succor of his presence for a short time before he returned to submit himself to punishment.

Impulsive, hot-headed, passionate – it might not be the actions of a Lan, but, as a Nie, Nie Mingjue found his sympathies lay with Lan Wangji in this matter. Yes, he had defended a murderer from being torn apart by the hands of his victims, and Nie Mingjue would not say that he did not think it was necessary for Wei Wuxian to die, but even those that had been duly tried and sentenced to the worst capital punishment might still be allowed the mercy of a good meal and the touch of their lover’s hand before they were executed, and a bit of disobedience against one’s elders was to be expected in any love affair.

Was fending off a few old men to buy a few shichen of love before its premature end really worth a punishment that would have crippled anyone weaker?

“Actions matter more than intent,” he agreed, wondering how he could convey his thoughts on the subject without being offensive to the Lan sect, “but that doesn’t make intent meaningless. To act from love and affection is still better than for – other reasons.”

He wasn’t sure Lan Wangji had understood his meaning: the other man only lowered his eyes.

Nie Mingjue’s mind reluctantly returned to his own troubles.

“I’ll speak with Xichen,” he decided, even though he knew it was probably a bad idea. Lan Xichen’s conduct, however it was meant, could be understood as having brought him to the very precipice of death – enough justification to start a war, given that Nie Mingjue was a sect leader. Their respective positions meant that a disagreement between them could never be simply personal, but was also political; if Nie Mingjue allowed his soft heart to convince him to forgive Lan Xichen, he would be setting a poor standard for the future. “He can explain what he was thinking. If I find his explanation unsatisfactory, I will – tell him what I told you.”

Nie Mingjue was blunt and direct, sparing no one – not even himself – but he was not so cold as to be able to cut off a relationship that already spanned the majority of his life sign unseen. He would give Lan Xichen one chance to salvage things between them, to be shocked into sobriety by the extent of how things had gotten out of hand, to genuinely apologize –

“I think,” Lan Wangji said, very slowly, eyes still locked on the floor as if there was something fascinating there, “that brother’s explanation may omit that he was distracted by his other lover.”

Nie Mingjue’s heart froze in his chest.

“Other – lover?” he said dumbly. Lan Wangji refused to look at him. “Wangji – are you saying – Xichen has..?”

Lan Xichen wouldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t.

“Lianfeng-zun has told him lies, and Brother accepted them without verification,” Lan Wangji said, and his voice was bitter. “I believe that he feared confronting you on the subject of a man he knew you disliked, and also saw an opportunity to obtain his heart’s desire – to not give up anything and yet gain something he wanted. And Lianfeng-zun is known to be skilled in anticipating people’s desires.”

Nie Mingjue stared at the ceiling in a daze, his mind whirling.

So many little things suddenly made a belated sort of sense.

The way Lan Xichen seemed so certain that all the troubles between them were only temporary, the way that he entreated Nie Mingjue to think kindly of Jin Guangyao as if there was a stronger bond between them than a lost former friendship and a new sworn brotherhood. The way Jin Guangyao acted more intimately with Nie Mingjue whenever Lan Xichen was present, only to return to a more professional remove once they were alone – he’d assumed that was because Jin Guangyao knew that Lan Xichen would protect him if Nie Mingjue got annoyed with him for such familiarities and that Nie Mingjue would not want to upset his beloved by scolding over something so minor.

But if, for instance, Jin Guangyao had told Lan Xichen that they had been lovers once, those public intimacies, and Lan Xichen’s joy in them, all suddenly took on a new flavor –

Surely Lan Xichen knew that Nie Mingjue would never have done that to him?

Skilled in anticipating people’s desires.

Nie Mingjue had noticed Lan Xichen’s fondness for Jin Guangyao from the first, back when Jin Guangyao had been only Meng Yao, and he’d known that Meng Yao had respected and even revered the beautiful, powerful, and chivalrous Zewu-jun. He’d been pleased when they’d become friends, hadn’t minded the occasional light flirtation – he’d been so certain that nothing would come of it, trusted in Lan Xichen’s morality and their love. He himself was not skilled in wordplay the way they were, nor as sensitive to the subtle changes in a conversation, preferring to stay silent rather than risk mis-stepping, a habit formed of too much responsibility and exposure to politics at too early an age. Why shouldn’t Lan Xichen get to enjoy the cut and thrust of charming, clever conversation with an expert at the art?

They had all been friends back then. Nie Mingjue had been so proud of his prized deputy, and pleased beyond measure that Lan Xichen liked him as well; Nie Mingjue had so few friends that the addition of another one was something he treasured. Even if Lan Xichen’s good sense had surely told him that such betrayal was impossible, given Nie Mingjue’s character, he might still in his reckless desires allow himself to be intoxicated by his affections and believe it for just a little while – just long enough to taste Jin Guangyao’s lips, perhaps.

That’d be enough.

Nie Mingjue knew Lan Xichen well; he knew his lover’s faults as well as he knew his virtues. If Lan Xichen had allowed himself to act foolishly for a moment, he would have panicked at the thought of coming to terms with it, and Jin Guangyao was so good at soothing his panic. Too good: where Nie Mingjue, in his harshness, had always advised revisiting mistakes and learning from them, no matter how difficult the process, Jin Guangyao would always recommend being kind to oneself, taking care of oneself, avoiding the pain that came with tackling one’s flaws and erroneous self-conceptions head-on.

Too much care for the self would eventually mean not enough care for others, Nie Mingjue had always thought, rolling his eyes whenever Jin Guangyao earnestly held forth on his views. But Lan Xichen had liked it – and why wouldn’t he? It was easier to put yourself first, to refuse to admit mistakes were mistakes, to rationalize events until you were always the victim and everyone else wrong. It meant you didn’t have to confront your own capacity for cruelty and selfishness, could conceive of yourself as always virtuous and always good and always right.

Right, rather than righteous.

Justified, rather than just.

The way Jin Guangyao always did.

Yes, Lan Xichen might allow himself to kiss Jin Guangyao, or more if Jin Guangyao pushed his advantage – which he would, Nie Mingjue had no doubt of that – and then, after the fog of lust had cleared, Lan Xichen would realize that he’d have to confess the entire thing to Nie Mingjue.

An emotional confrontation of the sort he hated most.

And then, of course, just as Lan Xichen was most upset and vulnerable, Jin Guangyao would offer him a way out – a way for Lan Xichen to continue to see himself as a good person who had done no wrong, who didn’t need confront anything – a way to get a new love alongside the old, to have Jin Guangyao’s clever speech and gentle care while not losing Nie Mingjue’s steadfast affection and support.

It was not uncommon in their times for a man to have more than one wife and entirely possible for him to love them both equally; the idea of a triad was not so strange. But Lan Xichen should have asked.

He didn’t.

He didn’t ask because some part of him knew that the answer would be no, and, just as he had with the quiet room, that was not an answer he wished to accept.

And that…that was not something that could be blamed on Jin Guangyao, as much as Nie Mingjue would prefer to do so.

That was all Lan Xichen.

Lan Xichen...how could you do this to me?

Nie Mingjue closed his eyes in pain. It felt as if all the air had been knocked out of him, like a really good punch might do - he felt hollow, weightless, disconnected, as if he had been struck by a blow that had shattered his bones and he was drifting in that blank space in the moment after the blow landed but before the pain reached his brain.

The full weight of the revelation would hit, eventually. He would feel it all, eventually.

“I see,” he said, and he did. Lan Wangji was upset over it in a way that suggested that he had only recently learned the truth. Given the speed of their travel, that meant he must have discovered it while conversing with Nie Huaisang – and that was another problem, because Nie Huaisang was their father’s son just as Nie Mingjue was, and nothing sparked their rage more than an offense against a loved one. “Thank you for telling me.”

“It is what I should do.”

Nie Mingjue nodded, his throat tight, his chest dull as if there was a knot where his heart had been - yes, he would need some time to deal with this.

“Huaisang is managing well?” he asked, not quite able to bring himself to actually ask for a little more time before he had to return to being the stern and untouchable sect leader, before he had to once again take on the mantle of power and make all the decisions – to force himself to react as a politician rather than a betrayed lover. It would be disgraceful to give into such weakness.

“He is,” Lan Wangji said. “He has given orders that you may not leave your room until the end of the week at the earliest, so as to remind the disciples of the benefit of rest following an injury.”

Nie Mingjue loved his brother.

“Very well,” he said, and decided not to ask about what Nie Huaisang might or might not have gotten into over the last day or so that had led some disciples to think they needed to disturb his rest in order to tell him. It didn’t really matter. They needed to adjust to taking Nie Huaisang’s orders as if he was sect leader in truth – especially if Nie Mingjue’s health continued to deteriorate…

He didn’t have time to think too much on that before Lan Wangji spoke again, saying, “Even if you do not understand music, you can follow the emanations of qi from an instrument, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nie Mingjue said, a little puzzled by the sudden shift in conversation but deeply relieved to have something to think about - anything, really, as long as it wasn’t the brutal feeling of his heart being torn to shreds within his chest.

“So if I were to utilize musical cultivation, you might be able to determine if I were using the same patterns as you had heard others use?”

“I suppose so,” Nie Mingjue said. It would be extremely irritating to have to pay attention to such small ebbs and flows, especially when he was also trying to meditate and draw the qi into himself for the fullest effect, but he was familiar enough with Clarity by now that he probably could if he really had to. “But why?”

“A suspicion,” Lan Wangji said. “Nie Huaisang has pointed out that Lianfeng-zun’s actions in connection to my brother are suggestive of malice against you, his actions in convincing my brother to lock you into the jingshi doubly so, and yet he comes to visit you regularly, purportedly to improve your health.”

Purportedly.

Nie Mingjue grimaced again, but this time it was with anger at himself – because the suggestion did not shock him the way the information about Lan Xichen had. Meng Yao, Meng Yao, he thought, I wish I didn’t believe this of you. I extended my trust to you twice over, and each time you have disappointed me…it’s my own fault, I suppose, for being arrogant enough to think I could change you.

“Thank you, Wangji,” he said, suddenly tired. “I understand your implication, and we will of course need to examine whether it is correct. But not today.”

“Of course,” Lan Wangji said, and stood up. “I will take my leave and go tell Nie Huaisang to move me into one of the soundproofed rooms. I require time to contemplate the subject of quiet.”

That made Nie Mingjue want to smile, though he couldn’t quite manage it, still twisted by all the revelations that had relentlessly pounded against him since he had awoken. “Good,” he said instead, turning to nod at Lan Wangji in approval. “I hope your meditation on the subject is fruitful.”

“Mm,” Lan Wangji agreed. “As you said, I must find my own path, be guided by tradition but not unduly restricted by it. But there is one point in what you said that was incorrect.”

“Oh?”

“You said that I should not, without consideration, throw out my sect’s traditions,” Lan Wangji said, and he was standing stiffly, at attention, with his face as serious as it ever got. “But at the moment, it is not my sect. You have given me permission to stay here, and I intend to do so.”

Nie Mingjue’s first thought was oh that’s going to have some serious political implications, followed immediately by I guess I did do that didn’t I and someone is going to wring my throat over this, probably Huaisang, but very shortly thereafter with if this is what he needs then so be it.

Still, he could do nothing but watch, stunned, as Lan Wangji lifted his hands to his forehead and very deliberately removed the forehead ribbon that marked him as a member of the Lan sect – the symbol of his family, the symbol of his restraint, which he would normally have never allowed another person outside his family to see him without – and, just as deliberately, wrapped it around Nie Mingjue’s wrist.

“I would ask that you keep this for me, Mingjue-xiong,” Lan Wangji said, and his tone when he said Nie Mingjue’s name was the same as when he called Lan Xichen brother. “Until such time as I decide to reclaim it as my own, or discard it forever.”

“Of course,” Nie Mingjue said, his voice a little faint from shock. “Whatever you need, Wangji.”

Lan Wangji looked at him, grateful, and saluted deeply before leaving.

Nie Mingjue lay back down on the bed and stared at his wrist for a long moment.

This is going to have some serious political implications, he thought a second time. And Lan Xichen won’t ever forgive me for stealing away his little brother.

A moment later, he shook his head at his own foolishness. Lan Xichen had made his choices.

Now he would have to pay for them.

#mdzs #nie mingjue #lan wangji #my fic #my fics #the quiet room

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bunny-hoodlum · 3 years ago

Text

Asynchronous With You: Chapter 3

ship: naruhina

rating: teen (this chapter is a little ecchi, but I think it's still T)

tags: Modern Day AU, Foster Siblings, Family, Angst, Unrequited Love, Poor Communication

summary: An awkward journey full of self-denial and missed moments between two foster siblings. Perhaps their love will find the right timing someday.

She didn't know what she was expecting when Kurenai announced that another child would be joining them soon.

He showed up a little smaller than her, with wary blue eyes and uncombed blond hair. He didn't carry anything with him.

The idea of having a forever playmate intrigued her, but after a few weeks it became clear he had no interest in playing, only fighting.

During those times when she managed to get away, she laid down on her bedroom floor curled around a picture book, and thought deeply about magical forests and open meadows. Away from stupid boys and their stupid ways.

And then suddenly he wanted to get rid of Neji. He thought she wanted to be rid of Neji, too. He was going to tattle on Neji really bad and that would be that.

Who taught him that the only way to fix things was to destroy them?

She told him she didn't mind Neji bossing her around. Maybe it's like what she's heard the adults say, that all she needs is structure. Plus, he was the only blood she had. Neji was part of her old normal and she wasn't going to give that up.

She didn't think he would listen. He seemed pretty sure about what he was talking about. But then he didn't tattle after all, and yet the fights seemed even more vigorous.

She found a volume inside herself that she didn't know she had, and it had scared her into her room. Her own ears had boomed. It reminded her of all the yellings she used to receive before Kurenai, and her instincts to hide kicked in.

It wasn't Neji who came after her, but Naruto.

He felt bad about his behavior. But he wanted something in exchange. He couldn't just have nothing after this.

She wasn't sure what 'bugging her' was going to be like, but she's been wanting to get along with him since day one. All because he didn't like Neji, she thought that would never happen.

'Sure,' she told him, and the following afternoon he pinched her arm.

_______________________________

Hinata laid down curled on her bedroom floor just like she used to when she was little.

She shouldn't be here, listening to the sounds coming through the half-inch diameter hole in the wall, his guttural teenage lust spilling over into her sanctum, the exaggerated moans of the other girl stabbing her heart.

He thinks she isn't home right now.

She wants to keep it that way.

Because no matter what he means to her, no matter how much she wants him, it can never happen.

She closes her eyes and pictures herself in the other girl's place. Girl no. 49 she calls her.

She doesn't have the courage to watch, but some twisted part of her wants the torture.

She wants to see a part of Naruto that she'll never have.

_______________________________

After the first girl, some drama had started up at school for Naruto.

She had seen Hinata's shoes in the genkan when she left, but had no idea who they belonged to.

She accused Naruto of sneaking away to invite a different girl to come over.

Now half of the female student body hated him, while the other half wanted to get some for themselves.

Hinata was disappointed to find that he relished in his new reputation as a player, that he would take whatever infamy he got if it gave him what he wanted in this world.

Some timid part of her that remained said, Good for him. After all, he deserved to be happy and enjoy his life.

And yet some shadowy part of her felt she was as good a stranger to him than a sister, seeing as how there could be no room for her as either a sister, a friend or love interest.

She thought to both test him and sabotage him after the fourth girl. Two terribly petty things she thought she would never do.

He knows when she leaves something of hers in his room, it means she wants him to come over.

So she left a pair of panties atop his bed in hopes Girl no. 5 would realize his promiscuity and go home.

It didn't work. Instead it excited Girl no. 5. Her expectations of his skill has risen with the proof that he had a revolving door of hot girls coming in and out of here and they went at it louder and rougher than the first four.

Hinata made sure to disappear before they found out she'd been home. When the coast seemed clear and Hinata feigned nonchalance as she came home, with a weak 'Tadaima' to the only other person home, she did not get the usual greeting.

She crept towards her bedroom, somehow not expecting Naruto to answer her invitation.

He sat at her low table in the middle of her room, the pair she had left behind now sitting atop her comforter.

He couldn't look her in the eyes.

He didn't seem mad, rather dumbfounded.

What a thing to give him when wanting to chat, is probably what was going through his head. Like, maybe she had an ulterior motive she was trying to express to him.

Well, she did, perhaps. This wasn't her ideal way to flirt with him, nor was it how she'd choose to shoot her shot.

She doubted her panties excited him, in the first place.

With a soft sigh, Hinata nodded to herself. She crossed her room without a word, hanging her school bag on the back of her desk chair. Then she approached her bed and picked up her underwear, telling him "Thank you for finding them," before placing them back inside her underwear drawer.

She was rooted to that spot, her hands gripping the trim of her double dresser.

From the corner of her eye, she could see him scratch at his cheek, the way he does when a reply feels too weird to say.

He stood up, and just before reaching the door he mumbled, "Just don't lose them again, okay?"

The door closed behind him, and Hinata's shoulders lowered along the length of her exhale, her stress leaving her like dropping water levels.

Then on a Sunday, when Hinata was invited to a dessert buffet with Sakura and Ino, she found out her favorite linen top with the frilly button trim had shrunk in the dryer.

While uncomfortably snug, she could still button every one but the two across her chest.

Ino loved keyhole cuts, but this would not pass social decency.

She tugged and tugged but still the buttons wouldn't reach their homes. Her eyes burned as a flurry of despair hit her in quick succession.

She was getting older. She was growing up. She was getting bigger. Like, inelegantly bigger. She loved this top. She didn't want to say goodbye to it. She didn't want to say goodbye to a lot of things.

Like choosing where to go for High School.

Something possessed her to walk out of her room and find him. She would play up her little sister role in utter defiance.

"Hinata?" Naruto shot up from the sofa and ran to her side.

"Did you dry my clothes?" More accusation than question, her voice was keened wetly with every consonant. "I can't wear this anymore."

Naruto stood there, sputtering, hands uselessly gesticulating at her ample cleavage.

She's never seen his face so red.

Did he look like this when he was thrusting into his rotation of harem girls?

"U-Uh, maybe it's still okay?" He reached out and gripped the fabric of her shirt, his rough fingers ghosting across her skin. A tingle ran up her spine. His eyes became wild for a second. As if to cover up his embarrassment, he became even more determined to prove he didn't ruin her clothes, but doing so made it worse for the both of them.

The forceful tugging made her breasts bounce in a way he was all too familiar with, but none had ever been as big as hers.

As if catching his dirty thoughts, Naruto released her and ran out of the living room, shouting spastically "I'msorryI'llreplaceit!"

Hinata had placed a hand over her exposed skin, right where he had touched her, and she couldn't fight down a smile, however pained and wistful.

This was probably all she was ever going to get.

She decided to play up the risks today, and forwent a bra, using a velvet cropped jacket to hide her nipples.

She received a lot of compliments that Sunday.

Things like this had happened between her and the object of her adoration and frustration, but nothing ever really changed.

He still brought girls over when he thought she wasn't home.

And she still snuck in to try and be a part of it, to learn more about him, to indulge is some form of masochism she didn't know she had.

It wasn't good for her heart.

And when she and Naruto decided individually that they'd stay with everyone else and go to Konoha Normal High, Hinata decided it was time to get serious about her life.

Her renewed late night phone calls with Neji gave her back her structure.

She started her own club. Called it the Volunteers Association. Basically all they did every Sunday was clean up trash in a pre-chosen location from the crack of dawn until lunch time. Beautifying their hometown was a lesson in gratitude and pride.

She also joined the Public Morals Committee, because it would look good on her resume, not because she’d developed an interest in policing others. It also helped her overcome her fear response to raised voices.

But when she did police others, she learned more and more about other people in a way she never thought she would.

For example, the majority of the porn magazines they confiscated were of G-cup models, with M-cup and C-cup ranking in second and A-cup ranking in last. This told her the preferences of the male student body. How important that information was to her? Well, it kind of helped know which boys to be leery of. She had grown to be a little more realistic about herself: She had curves.

Another example was how many students came to school in a hurry and for what reasons. Most of it was due to oversleeping, which were the result of late-night gaming (like someone else she knows), or excessive studying, or part-time jobs. Few others showed up looking like they had taken a detour to the baseball supply closet to fool around (also like the same someone else she knows).

Running in the halls ensued due to prankish behavior.

Failure to advertise for upcoming club events due to limp commitment or a loss of interest.

When the time came for bag checks, where a teacher would confiscate candy and make-up, that’s where Hinata drew the line. She knew her classmates needed sugar to make it through the day. She advised the pretty girls, the gyaru, even the ones she knew had been in Naruto’s bed, that they could still cheat the system if they were clear lip gloss and neutral colors. That really turned their impression of her around on its head.

To sum it up, everyone was going with the flow, chasing one promise of excitement after another, the future too intangible for them to grasp. Their Springtime of Youth was not over.

The amount of blank career sheets cemented her point.

_______________________________

Hinata collapsed onto a bench as the physical and mental exertion caught up to her.

The school was bustling with a multitude of craft projects as they prepared for their annual School Festival.

As a committee member and Volunteer Associate, she was running herself ragged from classroom to classroom, club to club, helping to ensure that everyone's efforts were going smoothly.

A smooth chill touched her cheek. She opened her eyes. Ino held out a cold water bottle against her heated skin, and Hinata smiled.

"Thank you," Hinata accepted the bottle and held it to her neck. Ino sat down next to her. A series of violent thumps met their ears as an irritated Kiba chased down a gloating Naruto, with Kiba's club materials in his hands. Hinata's voice cracked once she opened her mouth, but Ino's voice rang out in her stead.

"NO RUNNING IN THE HALLS!"

Hinata thanked her again as she sank against the wall and relished in the soothing sensation of her water bottle. She didn't realize she had overworked her voice already, too.

"That one's going nowhere," Ino tsked quietly.

"Who?"

"Naruto-baka. He thinks he can live this way forever. Life'll stop being so funny when he's working behind a convenience store register."

"Cashiers serve an important purpose."

"So you agree he's going to end up a cashier," Ino smirked with a wink.

Hinata opened her mouth to complain, but her will instantly deflated inside of her. Ino laughed at the sequence of emotions that played out across Hinata's face, and the latter simply resumed being exhausted human jello that needed more time to restore her shape.

"A cashier baby daddy with five children, each from a different mom," Ino added.

Hinata tried to blink away the haze steadily overtaking her. "No."

Her chest twisted at the thought.

If that really came to pass, he would take responsibility. He would never leave his own children behind, even if he had to go it alone.

Hinata pressed her free palm against her eyes, her lips trembled even as they tightly pressed into a thin line.

"Hinata?" Came Ino's panicked voice.

"It's just a headache," she lied.

"When was the last time you ate?" Ino barely waited for a response. "I'll go grab some food from the cafeteria and be right back with pain relievers. Just stay right there. And no more shouting. You're done for the day!"

Ino ran off to complete her mission and Hinata couldn't be sure if she was grateful for her absence or even more afraid of it.

Just thinking about Naruto...

She doesn't understand how she still feels about him.

His entire existence hurts her, and she can't name all the ways that he does.

She wants to go back to work.

_______________________________

Hinata never thought her world could turn upside a third time. She never thought her structures could be kicked out from under her.

But then on the opening day of the School Festival, when the school gates are only open for family members, an elementary-aged girl with long, dark brown hair and sharp, lavender eyes came along by herself. A single strand dangled between those discerning eyes as they swept around her surroundings.

Hinata was managing the line outside the maid café, greeting customers in a lilac outfit, when the girl showed up.

Their eyes met.

Hers widened. With surprise. With recognition. With curiosity.

Hinata's eyes were only horrified.

The little girl bounced up to meet her.

Hinata's heart hammered in her ears, it swell to the point of choking. Her vision doubled and smeared. She tried to catch her breath, but nothing, nothing was going in. She tried to breathe faster. They call this air hunger. Her body was cold, prickly.

No. She didn't want to hear it. Didn't want to know.

The little girl eyed her from head to toe, then smirked.

"You really do like mom. But you're a little chubbier than I expected."

AN: Apologies if the third scene's timeline is written in an unclear way. It's supposed to be stuff that happened in sequence prior to the second scene.

Hm! I totally forgot how good it feels to write fanfiction. I literally had a head high the whole time. 😂

I hope you like this chapter! And let me know if I'm doing better at hooks and/or cliffhangers! I haven't looked at any of my activity since the last chapter, so I'm going to respond now if there is anything to respond to, that is.

#naruhina #naruhina fanfiction #modern au #foster sibling au #asynchronous with you fanfiction #chapter 3

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fabricated-misslieness · 2 years ago

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𝕭𝖑𝖚𝖗𝖗𝖊𝖉 𝕷𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖘 Chapter 15: Made in Life

Hero Kaeya x Villain male reader

Summary: Behind Life's walls greets the unknown, the fickleness of morality, and the narcissistic history of two monarchs.

Word Count: 7,394

Warnings: swearing, insincere insults, mentions of murder

Mayb’s notes: nada

There were many Kingdoms that strayed from the Seven, but you knew many of their names. The Kingdom of Life, however... you'd never heard of it before. Regardless, the journey was steady. You knew where to go and what path to take, both those littered by tracks and those covered by vegetation, a sign of scarce travel; courtesy of her.

Come find us.

Her voice haunted you. Though Lady Death had the most patience of anyone in the world–as she witnessed the birth of young and reaped them many years later as their body grew old–her voice persisted in the back of your mind. It came to you each morning and continued to be a reminder to you throughout the day.

It seemed like she was impatient, a trait of hers you wouldn't have imagined. This plague had wrought the Earth and stolen many souls, perhaps she was tired. You certainly were.

Kaeya's injury and your mistake weren't helping with Lady Death's reminders. Progress was slow and daunting and rest was more than necessary.

At least he was healing. You, on the other hand, were only going to get worse. You had read all about Necromancy in that book. It taught you without bias, posing the magic not as taboo, rather like any other practice. The lesson that advised the deepest caution was "Connecting with Death". You still remembered it well. The section stretched far with side effects in case of failure. It covered the subject meticulously. Though, the only thing it lacked was a cure. You had a nasty feeling there wasn't one at all. Whatever the case, it would be the cause of your demise, but it would be slow.

...a slow, painful death. That wasn't what you imagined for yourself.

Sometime along the way, a vicious rain began to pelt down upon you. Camp set up was swift. Your tent was saved for the horses, and Kaeya's for the two of you.

You stick a hand out of the tent's slit. Harsh, cold globs of rain beat at your fingers.

The rain wasn't going to stop anytime soon, and after that, the dirt would turn to viscous mud and the horses would have trouble traversing it. Rest seemed to be the only option.

Come find us. Lady Death... nagged.

To curse her was blasphemy, especially as one of her so called disciples. But she was incessant with her calls, and they were always the same. Passive, neutral, you weren't able to perceive any sort of emotion from her. As the annoyance becomes clear, an empty feeling forms from within your chest, as if she knew you were thinking about her.

You collapse backwards with a sigh, at Kaeya's side. He had long since accepted the rain, unlike you. At your movement, he turns to you, the hand laid atop his abdomen moving to grasp yours. He was recovering nicely.

You turn on your side to face him, accepting his hand graciously and moving your hands, now intertwined, to continue to rest atop his stomach. He smiles at you, wordlessly, and you return the gesture.

"What do you think about the weather then, oh captain?" He teases.

You roll your eyes, yet follow along anyway. "Oh, it'll be stayin' for the whole day. Good thing our crew knows how to withstand the rain."

He laughs, breaking character. "I'm sure it'll be alright."

"It will be." You reply. It was an agreement to his words, but you knew that it was also a form of reassurance to yourself. If Lady Death deemed you sloth, would she reap your soul early? No, she wouldn't, couldn't defy fate like that.

Kaeya taps your nose with his free hand. Light sparks under his fingertip. "What was that?"

He chuckles at your immediate interest, "You remember all those times when you conjured up a night sky? I learnt that same spell long ago... to cope with you leaving me."

"I'm here now."

"I know you are." He smile only widens, though a sadness you remorse paints his lips. "And you've just made me remember it."

He turns away from you, up at the ceiling of the tent, and casts the spell.

A night sky illuminates the tent. Its landscape beheld a myriad of stars, its mirage one of intricacy. Different stars twinkled in varying intervals. A lot of them glowed in cool colors, some in electrifying blues and a few in reds or yellows. When the red ones sparkled, they caught your eye. Sometimes, some stars began to fall, and they dragged through the sky, leaving behind trails. They always came in two, and their trail was always filled in by more stars almost immediately. Barely was there a patch in the sky without a decorating star.

Kaeya watches you admire his illusion. It shines in your eyes, and in that way, he can see the beauty of it, but that wasn't what he was looking at. His gaze was trained on your smile. It told him many things, a nostalgia of the past, a joy and tranquility from the view.

When you turned to look at him, his head snapped up, as if he were caught. It was rather funny. You look towards the illusion again as you catch it change in your peripheral.

Many things in it move, all at once, even stars that weren't meteorites. It swirls, like a tornado, seemingly endlessly. In the midst of the quick, dizzying movement, the colors don't blur together, they remain individual, forming a medley pleasing to the eye. You suppose, sort of, that it reflects him. Complex in all his ways, and beautiful all the same.

You look at him again, he's already staring at you. When you match his gaze, he doesn't back down. He smiles, and so do you.

Come find us.

This time, you ignore her.

The rabbit was struggling. Its back legs had been decapacitated. It was seized, harshly, by the scruff of the neck. Rabbits weren't high on the food chain. It had lost many of its kin already to eagles, big cats, everything and anything was capable of taking down a rabbit. Yet, it fought. It wanted to live. It didn't want a fate like this.

It swung its body back and forth, hoping to throw off the hold on its neck. It kicked its remaining legs, the front legs, aimlessly in the air. Most of all, it remembered one thing: it was alive and it could persevere.

"This is disgusting."

The rabbit gives a shrill screech.

"What is?" You ask, not even flinching as you take the rabbit's last life force, its last efforts, and give them to Kaeya. Your body wants to lurch, as if adverse to the healing and adamant that that life force belonged to you, but you suppress it.

The cryomancer sighs, pressing a hand over his abdomen. It hurt less now, and it was all thanks to you. Still... "Having to bring your hunt all the way back here. How long did it struggle?"

"Couple minutes or so."

Kaeya flinches when he hears the rabbit thud against your makeshift countertop. The subsequent thud, thud, thud of the knife as its body is sliced to pieces only makes it worse. "And you don't it's wrong?"

He preferred clean kills, surprise kills. In that way, one didn't have to think about how their life couldn't been just before their last breaths end.

Your attempt at stifling a snort fails completely and Kaeya huffs at the noise. It was rather hypocritical of him, you think. He showed no–not even hardly any–remorse as he took the lives of those bandits. Were they perhaps not worth his regrets? They were low-lives, they did not have regrets either. This rabbit in comparison, supposedly, was innocent. "I'm healing you."

"I know that." Kaeya replies quick. "But it doesn't make it any better."

You sigh. The final thud does not strike a body, instead it sticks the knife into the fragile log. You stand from your kneel at the tree stub, and make your way towards him. He sits by the campfire, its flame casting a glow of red over his dark skin. It was a contrast against the cool blues and white of his clothing and the dark blue of his hair, and it illuminated his face clearly.

He wore a frown, a deep frown you wanted off his face. His gaze remained on the ground, at the burnt grass around the campfire. He didn't quite seem to notice you so close to him.

You bring a hand to cup his cheek, which clearly shows your presence. He was stubborn in his disagreement, though, refusing to look up at you. Your hand sneaks under his chin, cupping his jaw instead, and pulls his head up to look at you.

He purses his lips, a click on his tongue of annoyance, as his gaze meets yours.

"I'm sorry." Though he only had one eye you could look into, the roll of it was clear. You huff at his persistence. "Really."

He remains silent. You roll your eyes at him this time. You press your thumb, the only one under his chin, against the corner of his lips. It piques his interest. You press it up.

The way he looks up at you, one eyebrow raised and only one corner of his lips upturned, is quite silly. You allow yourself a laugh, and when your other hand cups the other side of his jaw and your other thumb presses onto the other corner of his lips, you can see he's almost breaking.

You bring his lips up. Only seconds later, he grabs both your wrists in his hands, and pushes your hands away from him. He huffs a noticeable laugh out of his nose, and the smile you brought to his face remains, now genuine. "You're a fucking asshole." He snickers endearingly.

"Oh? But you liked this asshole." You take a seat next to him, bringing your hands back to his face and cupping his cheeks instead. He doesn't fight it, though the hold on your wrists remains.

Liked. He's not so sure of that, the past tense, anymore.

One thumb traces the apple of his cheek. He leans into that hand. "I did mean it, anyhow." You begin, "It's simply that this is what I must do. You and I are not herbologists, and neither are we healers."

His hand, holding your wrist, instead moves to rest about your hand. "I understand that. It just won't sit right with me. But," He sighs, "keep doing it."

"Okay." You say.

He nods his head. "Okay."

Kaeya knows, because the air becomes chiller and vegetation all in all begins to appear less and less, that you're about to come across a snowy area. If he were to be honest, he's quite excited. He was a cryomancer, after all. Though Cryomancy was only a fighting skill, he was attuned to the cold too. He thrived in it. He thrived in the snow, most of all. Its presence was a battery for his magic reserve, which almost functioned like a stomach. A full belly meant a happy mind, and it would surely help his healing process.

He was already excited for it, already knew it was coming, but the sight of it gave him a rush even better than the one he'd gotten from the realization.

When he finally catches sight of it, he just about freezes. Nyx is the only thing that keeps him going.

A wide grin creeps onto his face. He pulls on his reins and barely waits for her to slow to a stop before hopping off himself. The swift movement is nothing but worrying to you. He could tear his stitches!

The sun reflected off of the monotone snow and it was blinding, but he didn't care. He ran towards the it, with you and Nyx in tow. Somehow, he was able to outrun a horse.

When he makes it onto his haven, he sinks to his knees. The snow is ten inches tall, draping over his thighs like a blanket. They were barely covered, his pants' fabric too thin, but he relished in the feeling of the cold. He was far from the burning humidity of the rainforest or the heat of the sun's rays on his back. It was different, too, from the bitter cold of each morning as he rose from his tent. It was much better than that. This cold was wonderful, refreshing; he inhaled it in like a breath of fresh air.

Next to him, with a panic, you sink down to your knees too. "Kaeya, are you alright?"

"Yes," His grin grows wider, it stretches from ear to ear. He lays down atop the snow, as if he was giving it a warm hug. "more than alright."

"Gods..." You sigh, letting your head fall backwards tiredly to face the sky. "He's just fucking happy."

He giggles–really giggles!–at that. His head remains practically glued to the floor, even as you stand from the cold ass floor and pat the snow away from your clothes.

"Get up, darling." You sigh.

"Mm-mm." He shakes his head with the protest, like a child. It causes the snow to cake even more of his head, covering his blue locks unevenly.

You click your tongue at him. Guess you'll have to do this manually. You scoop him up in your arms, and you swear he's gotten heavier. You haven't carried him in years, no, but this felt impossible.

His back is to you and your arms are under his armpits, hoisting him up, and clasped atop his chest. His legs are entirely straight and unbent at the knee; his ankles remain in the snow, heels touching the ground, but toes off it, as if the touch, even through his leather boots, stimulates him. He's definitely making himself heavier—question is, how?

That wasn't the point. Anyway, you hauled him up higher, and it forced his heels off the floor. The next time you plop him down, his full foot is on the ground. You push him forward, confident that he won't let himself fall.

Except he does, because apparently a ten inch blanket of snow works like a pillow. You rush forward to catch him by wrapping your arms around his chest again.

"Are you really going to make this difficult?" You sigh, hoisting him back upright.

"Come on," Kaeya whines, "I deserve the rest."

"You're nearly fully recovered." You reason.

He shakes his head yet again. The snow all over his hair whips against your nose and covers it with its own, new layer. "No, no, I'm still heavily injured!" He proclaims loudly.

His whole attitude–the strength for the scream, his quick rush to the snow, his incessant protest–it proved otherwise. He knows this, of course, he's aware enough for that. So he covers it up, "Please?" It was a genuine plead.

You press your head against his cold shoulder and huff, "Fine. Let's at least get a little deeper in, shall we?"

It was a little before evening when you made camp. You were still probably within the heart of this area. Lady Death told you were to go, though she didn't find herself gracious enough to tell you the name of where you were or perhaps give you a map. Not that you were expecting any of that.

The sun was going to set soon.

Kaeya sits close to the campfire, at the tent's entrance. Part of his love for the cold gave into his love for warmth. How he was a lover of both at the same time, he didn't know (What he did know is that he's loved worse things before).

The love that seeped between the two temperatures was the warmth after the cold. It melted the snow off his clothes and skin, and though it left him feeling naked and undecorated, it was a tender feeling. The warmth reminded him of many things, things that snow also did. It felt like a blanket, keeping him safe from the bitter cold and the outside world. It felt like safety, like that which emanated from Crepus and Dawn Winery's fireplace. Most of all, it felt like love, and he hardly needed a reason why.

He observes the lovely outside nature. Meanwhile, you lay inside bundled in your furs and curled into a ball. The downside of knowing many magics was that you weren't completely attuned to a single elemental practice. He doesn't know how, later on, you'll squeeze under the same blanket (the bigger one laid atop the horses) but that was a problem for later.

On the horizon, the sun was beginning to set. It still, however, shined brightly off of the white snow. The trees' leaves were caked with many layers of snow, and so was everything else, fern and grass, yet it all remained evergreen and alive. Parts of the snow, blue, yellow, even pale red, seemed to sparkle.

Kaeya yearned for a snowflake. Each one was unique. When he casted spells, snowflakes soon followed, but since they were man-made, they were always quite uniform. He wanted to see one, a natural one, and will it to expand. He wanted to see its intricacy.

His wish was granted.

It was when the blue sky began to turn red, orange, the medley of the rainbow, that it began to snow.

Kaeya gasps. It was small, quiet, but prolonged, and it catches your attention.

"Kaeya?" You call for him, hardly worried anymore.

He doesn't say anything, though, as he stands from the tent and far enough from the campfire, as if in a trance. At first, only tiny snowflakes fall, small in quantity, and they do so slowly, gently. Kaeya catches one in his gloved hand. The darkness of its leather contrasts against the snowflake.

He doesn't have time to admire just the one as more and more begin to fall. He catches a lot of them on the top of his hood. The rest land on his outstretched, covered arms or his open hands.

This is how you find him, twirling in the snow trying to catch snowflakes. They would eventually clump together, forming secure but muddled groups. If he knew that, he didn't care. He would be able to isolate one of them anyway.

The sunset behind him... casting its final glow onto his figure as he spun in the beginning snow fall... Gods.

You bite back the urge to bury yourself back in the tent and away from–as he said–refreshing cold, and admire him by the entrance. The overwhelming urge slowly dissipates as you take him in even more.

His spinning caused the sunrays to illuminate him once everywhere. One moment, the dark blue of his hair was a light, electric color instead; vibrant, just like his smile. The other, his face shined bright instead. It was already bright from his expression, wide eye, eyebrows raised, grin showing teeth; but it gave him something new. His dark skin glowed gold, like honey, so sweet you could gorge upon it. His smile–you could mention it ten times over–was wide, the widest you'd ever seen it in a long time. His joy and enthusiasm was clear, bursting within him.

He was so pretty.

You stand from the tent and make your way over, managing to ignore the cold nipping at your skin.

Kaeya notices you from his peripheral. The happiness on his face is even more evident when he turns towards you, as his partner is trying to enjoy the things he does. He beckons you over. You obey, despite that being your goal already.

The cryomancer dumps the snow from one of his hands onto the other. Then, he digs through it, as if trying to find the perfect snowflake. The small, determined "aha!" he lets out when he finds it is pure amusement to your ears. He lifts it up with his free hand and, with the mutter of a spell, enlarges it for admiration.

The setting sun would've cast half of it in shadow, and the other half in gold, yet it glowed a bright blue. You hardly needed to think why.

It had six branches from the middle, all brimming with their own subsections; and those subsections, their own branches. It was clear at the edges, where ice was less abundant. Overall, it wasn't very opaque, allowing you to see Kaeya's face right through it. He was admiring your face, your amazement, so you gave it to him. The center was oddly yet perfectly hexagonal, uniform even in nature. Some branches were the same thickness as their mirroring or neighboring branch, some varied greatly. That was what made it beautiful. It wasn't perfect, it was wild, unique, different.

"It's beautiful." You breathe out.

"Yeah. It is." He chuckles, waving away the snowflake. As it lands on the ground, it melts into the rest of the snow. He drops the rest of the snow from his other hand. "You're probably getting cold, aren't you?"

You chuckle yourself, "Yes. But I'd like to spend time with you out here."

His smile grows smaller but bashful. "Ah, well..." He turns away from you, suddenly shy, rubbing the back of his neck. "I don't want you to ca–"

"I want to." You interrupt him. "I do."

The bright joy on his face comes back again. Suddenly, he rushes forward, trapping you in an embrace. It's incredibly warm in this unbroken cold, and a feeling you relish. His cloak was still cold though, so you wrapped your arms around his waist underneath it instead. His nose buries into your neck, and somehow you can feel his smile against your skin.

When he pulls back from you, he still has his arms wrapped around your neck. His eye is full of admiration. It's lovely. "Thank you."

"There's nothing to thank me for."

The sudden movement had rustled most of the snow off his cloak. When you part, now fully, you notice something different with it. Snowflakes stick to the navy blue, as if forming a pattern on their own. You pull the side forward to show it to him. At the sight of it, his face lights up even more. Was it intentional? It didn't matter.

He laughs, ecstatic, and takes of his cloak to admire it. The designs on it were meticulous, mostly snowflakes in varying sizes, all entirely unique; they were accompanied by lines interconnecting them. The entire design sparkled as it caught the remaining light of the sun.

It was nice to see him happy like this. You didn't even think about how long it would last for.

Death was everywhere and you could sense it. Long ago, you'd learned to suppress its presence. Had you not learnt to do so, you would feel its company every second of the day. Many a necromancer fell to madness because death had simply torn them apart. Its eyes were prying, its hands tended to, just barely, touch you for attention. Usually, they did not interfere with human life, though many wanted to; unless one was a necromancer. Necromancers were more susceptible to death, it was practically natural.

In some places, however, you couldn't simply ignore death. These places were brimming with death and suffering and sorrow, and it was so overwhelming there was nothing to think of except death.

Before your search, you had only ever felt such a feeling in graveyards. Afterwards, as you visited each ghost town you heard of, you discovered the same feeling. As sorrowful as these towns were, none of them was as bad as Everfree. The death there actually interfered with the susceptible living, necromancers, whispering in their ears.

That underlying feeling of death had only increased since you'd succumbed to the Smoke of Necromancy. It caused you to be acutely aware of much of the death around you, whether natural, accidental, or premeditated.

However, as you neared the Kingdom of Life, the feeling of undead company diminished. At some point, it ceased entirely.

The Seven Kingdoms had their godly patrons: Mondstadt had Favonius or Barbatos; Sumeru, Lesser Lord Kusanali; Liyue, Rex Lapis. Smaller kingdoms were hardly any different. Did the Kingdom of Life have their own patron? Perhaps Shri-Lakshmi? Regardless, even a God's influence couldn't give immortality. Lady Death and the balance between life and death would never allow that. The lack of death's presence near Life was a strange phenomena you ignored.

Come find us.

Yet, before you stand the stone walls of Life. They're high and intimidating and most of all, distrustful. Their gates, however, are the opposite. They're open and unguarded, of only wooden doors and not of iron bars. Regardless, the sight of civilization made you subconsciously prepare for the amount of death that reeked within cities, but... none stood before you. This has never happened before.

You gulp back the feeling of unease and go ahead. The shock, though, continues on as you see the citizens.

Everyone here was different from the other, each unique like snowflakes. All of them seemed to come from one of the Seven Kingdoms: a woman walked by, she wore a gorgeous sari; a street performer acted out a Natlan play, wearing a long shawl over leggings of a material rarely seen; a nearby vendor wore a kimono. So many cultures were everywhere that you couldn't discern who was a local and who was not.

It wasn't what made them stand apart from each other shocking, it was what made them different from you. They wore "replacements" that were visible. In fact, they seemed to wear them proudly. Folk with replacement arms cut their sleeves at the shoulder, for example. Just like their clothing, none of it was uniform. Some people were missing legs, others arms, others parts of their pelvis or the side of their stomach.

When Kaeya catches sight of a woman wearing a golden eyepatch, he suddenly goes cold, a bitter cold. He wraps an arm around himself, his other hand's fingers ghost over his right eye subconsciously.

Nothing specific really caused you to think of it, but your own hand lands on your right hip. It was still there. The spot wasn't vacant, rotting or incessantly bleeding. You breathe a sigh of relief.

"What do you make of this?" Kaeya asks, his tone low so as to not draw attention.

"I don't know." Death remained scarily absent, and when it was, you could usually feel those close to death instead. You could feel none of that. "Their... original limbs were missing. They're replaced by prosthetics or covered by gold plates."

"Mhm." He hums in affirmation, his gaze attached intently to each passerby. "How do you reckon they lost their limbs?"

"Couldn't have been a nation-wide accident." You conclude. "Everyone's lost something different."

"Do you think we should try to fit in?" Kaeya proposes.

"You already do." He scoffs at that, so you apologize. "Dunno, what could I wear? How am I to get my hands on a golden plate?"

"Yeah, I don't know either. Let's just tread lightly. Try not to get any unwanted attention." That, you were good at.

Once Kaeya leaves the two horses at the stable for the both of you, you set off into the city. Your cloaks were overwhelmingly different from anyone else here; showing off their prosthetics meant that many could not cover their body's silhouette like you. Blending in was not so easy. Stares lingered and voices gossiped. The next time the darkness of shadows enveloped the two of you, Kaeya pulls you into an alley.

"Best we take my way." He says.

You stare out from the alleyways, their shadows shrouding you, and observed the people. There wasn't, and it wasn't "hardly", anyone without one of those prosthetics. It puzzled you.

It was funny how, after following Lady Death's command of finding her, or whoever us was, she was silent. She didn't give you anymore guiding commands, leaving the rest of your actions to be steps into the unknown. You know she does many things, but desert wasn't one of them, not until now.

As you walked from one alleyway to the next, you stepped on something that crunched. It was a paper, a flyer that had flown from its post. You held it up just slightly in the sliver of light from a nearby market stand and read.

"King Ki and Queen Laramee proudly invite anyone, and everyone, to the ball of the year celebrating the Queen's birthday." You read only loud enough for him to hear. "Her Majesty declares this year's theme: Masquerade. A parade will be set out beforehand for all to attend. May we dance till our feet (or foot!) fall off and bid Life adieu!"

"We can make up for that Fontaine ball we missed." Kaeya remarks, the humor in his voice only light.

"I suppose..."

Wait. A ball.

"I must have the perfect musicians for this event. I will not settle for less. If you can find…"

"We can't have the same events as last year. She'll deem it too boring."

"No, no, that's not enough, she would hate that."

The "eureka" moment pushes your hands to move, brimming with determination. They grab Kaeya's shoulders firmly to catch his attention. When he catches sight of your growing smile, his eyebrows furrow. "What? What is it?"

"I've figured it out. This–this King," Kaeya snatches the flyer from your hand before the growing strength of your grip can break it. "he's the same man I–we heard before when I examined that body, the one organizing a ball." Everfree had made you totally forget that aspect, the festival.

His eyebrows raise up high. "That–" He seems to choke on his own saliva as he registers it, "him, yeah, that makes sense!"

"The ball is for his queen's birthday," Your fingers snap subconsciously as you figure out details, "that's why he's obsessing over it being perfect."

"Wait, so," Kaeya shakes your hands off his shoulders, pushing his own forward. His eyebrows are furrow now as he thinks, "how does that tie into the Blood Parade? We came to the conclusion that he was the plague's origin."

"He still might be. Which means, his citizens, their prosthetics? They're victims of the Eatening."

The gears in Kaeya's head clearly turn outwardly. He nods his head many times, slowly. His vision unfocused entirely. He fiddles with his own fingers. You were right.

"The question is," You begin, "why?"

"We don't need to know why." He shakes his head, "We just need to stop him." The determination in his eye was clear. If you were to be honest, it was terribly scary. Not only the look, but also the notion that he doesn't deem it necessary to understand the King's motives and that the only option was to put it to an end; and that end, his tone suggested, was death. "You got energy for dress shopping in you?"

The ball was to be held in a week. Until then, you had some time to kill.

Where were you going to get gold plates? How did the people get their hands on them? Just, pop on by the blacksmith? You could bluff it out, say yours broke or lost. Kaeya was good at that. If that was the only plan you could come up with, it was worth a try.

Life eerily reminded you of Nieblina, a place for immigrants, a home away from home. It shot a pang of sorrow through your chest. How long had it been since you were in Nieblina? It hadn't been too long, couldn't have been. So far, you'd been able to keep distracted from it; distracted from the thought of home. But now, when all you could do was wait and ponder, there was no distraction. Home, Nieblina, they might as well be one in the same. You missed it. You missed them, Lorelai, Zero, Morden, fuckin' Maggot.

Most people here clearly didn't come from Life. Life itself was a hubbub of multiple cultures. How did they cope with homesickness? ...how did Kaeya?

A breeze pushed the hair off your face, snapping you out of your thoughts. It was getting cold, you should head inside, but you stayed instead. You admired the market below you. The night droned on, yet they remained at work. Several lights of clashing, differing colors illuminated the city. No place truly slept. It was a nice comfort.

Bumm!

The clocktower struck midnight. It was a magnificent structure, taller than the city walls. Its stonework was made so that one could admire its detail, even from a distance. The bricks were red, perhaps for the King, and the rooftiles were blue, for the Queen. Somehow, even though they were colors that didn't fit together, they matched perfectly.

Suddenly, a large image projects on top of each side of the tower. It was the Queen, Laramee, slumped over a rock and crying streams of tears that flow onto the barren ground. Once the tears hit the ground, the background to the image appears. It is a garden, abundant with greenery and blue flowers. Just as quick as it came, the image disappears.

You barely register Kaeya as he leans against the railing beside you, until he speaks up. "They're a bit self-absorbed, aren't they?"

Most alleyways had an image of one of the monarchs painted on the walls, as did administrative buildings, as if the citizens were all in a cult dedicated to their worship. The King and Queen each seemed to have their own gimmick.

The King was always portrayed in positions of power, leaning his weight over his dark red greatsword, sitting imposingly on his throne, pointing his hand towards the sky, surrounded by dozens of tiny soldiers.

The Queen, however, was always crying. Sometimes they were joyful tears, other times sorrowful. Much of the art depicted her mourning over her son, a great general who had died in war.

"Yeah." The thought–that other monarchs could be more narcissistic than Mondstadt's–is a bit humorous but the images they had of themselves plastered around the city served you well. It helped you confirm that they were truly the King and Queen you had seen in your vision. But how could you prove it was them who caused the plague? Now, suddenly faced with them, and not a drawn image like the cards, the reality of it set place. They were human, not monsters of the legend of the Abyss or heartless warlords.

To Kaeya, there was no denying it. They were on the cards with a clear symbol, King of Blood and Queen of Tears. The body had shown you that the monarchs were in Everfree, and the ghost town was clearly affected by the Blood Parade. At seven in the evening, the clocktower shined with a different image: the King of Blood commanding his army. His eyes glowed red and his smile was proud. Kaeya interrogated many aspiring villains in his lifetime. He could tell their intent just by the look of them, and it was clearest in him.

The curious part about Life was that it had no churches. The hunch you had about its godly patron, and the assumption that there was one in the first place, was wrong. The other weird structural part was that, within the city walls, there was no graveyard. To bury one's dead outside of the city and in the wilderness, where none of the surrounding area beheld villages that could be claimed by Life, felt treacherous. They were being buried in a place they wouldn't ever call home.

But those decisions weren't yours.

Kaeya ventured out into the city with you in tow. This time, you ignored the stares and the whispers, for you had an actual destination: the blacksmith. You already had some of the conversation planned out. Yours, anyway. Kaeya's skills were nothing to be scoffed at, so improvisation was natural.

Despite being the one that, supposedly, made prosthetics for the people, he too eyed you suspiciously. Still, he regarded you politely with a gruff voice, "What do you need?"

After a brief explanation, Kaeya begins. "An eyepatch," He points at his covered eye. "and..." He gestures towards you.

You pull the top of your shirt down to reveal a part of your chest. The blacksmith peered down, his eyes widen. He can see right through the middle of it, straight at the back of your shirt. He nods grimly. "Allow me to take measurements."

With that errand done, and the final date in your minds, you part from the blacksmith. Kaeya bumps into your shoulder purposefully as you walk. "Did you have that in mind?"

"What?"

"The Eatening injury."

You shrug, "Sort of, not really." It might've been easier to place it on your hip, but your mind jumped to your chest immediately and you didn't have a clue why.

"What, got heartache?" He snickers. It was only a light jab at you, but he didn't know just how much truth there was to that, especially in relation to your regrets.

"...Sure."

Kaeya opens his mouth to continue the banter, but you stop mid-step, making him join you curiously. He follows your gaze at the mural in front of you.

The mural was split in two. The first half depicted the King in war, slaying his foes. He was covered in blood, blood that seemed to steam over his shoulders. His soldiers were long gone, but he still stood. The other half depicted the Queen, still mourning. The beautiful garden around her remained unnoticed by her closed eyes, brimming with tears. She was hunched over a fountain, her tears being its supply of water.

You heard that, when her son died, she spent several years at the Garden of Tears, crying. If the King were to die, the same thing would happen. She would spend the rest of her life mourning.

You turn to Kaeya. He wears a look that, for the first time in ages, you can exactly decipher; not because you knew him well, but because it was extremely clear on his face. This mural didn't affect his sympathy at all. Instead, it set it in even more.

"Should we," You begin, to bring his focus away, "visit that garden?"

He nods his head, curtly. "Yeah."

The clock struck twelve again, twelve in the afternoon, as you set foot in the garden. It was rather fitting.

Despite it being midday, the sun didn't quite reach the garden. It remained serene and blue, unaffected by the sun's warmth or bright sunrays. Huge, blue willows were the cause. They were dotted around everywhere, over each pathway, casting shade over the entire garden. Baby blue lights lined the pathways. They were magical, floating like fireflies. Some strayed from their groups, illuminating the rest of the garden so that it could be admired.

It was mostly populated by flowers, a vast majority blue, some purple, and even rarer still, red. Red for the King, you suppose, and purple for the combination of their two colors. Reds were most common at the fountain at the center of the garden, which could undoubtedly be spotted from any angle.

The garden drew many animals to it, though only small rodents at best. It was the home for birds, rabbits, and many insects; like an oasis in the middle of the big, barren city.

Headstrong or not, Kaeya had to admit the garden was beautiful. He had to take your hand so that he wouldn't stray from your side... or maybe it was the other way 'round, as he dragged you to the nearest bush.

"Blueberries.." He muttered under his breath. He picked one from the rest, squashing it in his palm. It bled red, staining his hands like a crime scene. "Interesting."

The plants here couldn't be trusted. Neither could the fauna.

He picked another. It, too, bled red. The tower, at three o'clock, showed you an image of the King studying from a magic book. The Queen stood next to him, already casting a spell. Kaeya wonders, no, he knows, that this red is caused by a magic spell. Whether it is an illusion or reality, he can't tell.

He leads you to the fountain next. Twelve o'clock showed that the fountain ran on the Queen's tears. He hardly needed to look at the fountain to know that it was true. Much like the rest of the garden, the tears shimmered blue. When stray sunlight gleamed over the top, it shined silver, like the Queen's jewelry.

He snapped a petal off a rose around the fountain's base. The base of the missing petal bled red, which is both something new and a weird reaction from a flower. The petal of the next flower, a blue rose, bled red.

While Kaeya remained inquisitive, you observed his investigation. It was easy to make an assumption, though, that the anything here would bleed red. It was a sort of symbol of their power. They were still able to power the magic lights and grow special and magical plants, despite having greater uses for their magic, like the expansion of their Kingdom.

You wondered, then, what came to be from the wars painted in each mural. If they had won them, what territory did they now own? And why have you never heard of any of these devastating wars?

The Kingdom of Life had already worn down, in some places, with age. Wood creaked, masonry cracked, bright colors faded from constant sunlight. So how old were the monarchs? Did they have predecessors?

"Rex pugnat." Kaeya begins, which catches your attention. He's crouched by the fountain's base, parting the flowers crowded there and reading the faded words carved in gold. "Regina luget. Suum bellum continuat. Lacrimae hoc volunt: desine."

"Do you know what it means?" You ask, pensively.

"Amen for the Church of Favonius..." Kaeya mutters under his breath, deciphering the words in his mind. You chuckle at that. "It's rugged, but," He clears his throat and begins to recite, "The King fights. The Queen mourns. His fight continues. Tears want, no, mean this: cease."

"Hmm," Curiouser and curiouser. "anything else?"

"No." He replies immediately. "What do you make of it?"

"Well," You pause, compiling your thoughts. Did they make sense? Yeah, or as much as they could with what little you had. "the Queen mourned for the loss of her son. The King continued the war, despite the Queen's pleading. She was afraid of losing him as well. Her tears flowed endlessly, and they were a plead for him to stop."

You could see doubt being to spring onto Kaeya's face. The Queen loved the King very much. Two o'clock always showed something different: the two of them dancing; the Queen, then princess, dragging the two of them along, the King, then prince, hiding his smile; the King on one knee, proposing. They were always young at two o'clock. The hour was surely showing that they loved each other.

"If I take him from her..." He trailed off.

"She will mourn." You finish for him. "Maybe forever."

"How..." His lips draw low into a scowl. His gaze remained on the flowers in front of him, alternating blue and red, signifying the Queen and King. "how would we convince him to stop?"

"I'm not sure."

Kaeya sits himself down at the edge of the fountain, weighing his options. "If the Queen can't convince him, how could we?"

And again, your answer is unknown. He heaves a sigh. "My morality is in question."

You snicker, "Mine is already in shambles."

"I mean," He chortles, exasperated, "we have to stop him somehow, right?"

"Yeah." You sit down next to him, tired yourself. Kaeya's mindset, you'd already understood. A man like him, the King of Blood, couldn't be stopped using words or the power of friendship and love; yet, you still wanted another option. There was no other.

"Whatever it takes." Though usually a phrase of ambition, he slumps down against you dejectedly, pressing his nose against your shoulder.

You nod, a comforting hand on his back. "Whatever it takes."

#kaeya x reader #kaeya x male reader #kaeya alberich x reader #kaeya alberich x male reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact x male reader #genshin x reader #genshin x male reader #🌸 // success!#blurred lines #blurred lines series #🎟 // genshin impact #🎫 // kaeya #🎫 // kaeya alberich #🌂 // failure

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still-a-morosexual-help · 3 years ago

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OBEY ME! LESSON 49 DETAILED SUMMARY + THEORIES

One locked lesson

Mammon, Luke & MC are visiting Diavolo’s hotel. Mammon talks about wanting to book a suite and have a party, Luke says he doesn’t like the devildom opening businesses in the human world cause he’s scared they’ll take it over completely. Barbatos says that Diavolo is only interested in coexisting in peace & if he’s gonna snitch to Michael he should tell him their actual intentions. Luke says he’s not a tattletale Mammon vehemently disagrees with that. Barbatos reveals that Diavolo & Levi have started staying up till dawn gaming together (I’m so happy they’re friends!). Mammon said he never knew that Levi previously had issues against Diavolo. When Luke asks where Diavolo is Barbatos tells him he’s out on a date with Lucifer. Mammon asks about Barbatos’ choice of human clothes and MC says he looks really good in it. He says the look he was going for is ‘tea leaf importer’. In a private lounge Barbatos serves them fairy ring tea which surprises Mammon & Luke. In the Devildom on rare occasions small sparkling golden flowers grow in a ring rather than the more usual mushrooms, and the teas is supposed to smell like those flowers. He says despite what the ring is made of there’s a legend they form when fairies dance in a circle. Luke says the tea smells and tastes amazing and MC asks if fairies are real. Barbatos says fairies in the human world are supposedly extinct and us humans are really fucking up the ecosystem huh

Mammon seems really disappointed by that and when MC asks why he says that treasure can be found near fairies, leprechauns are also related to fairies btw. Barbatos says there’s still a chance there are fairies somewhere in the human realm – there are rumours about fairy rings made of flowers in the human realm which can only be caused by fairies whereas mushroom fairy rings have a scientific explanation. And that there are rumours that those flowers can be used to make a rare sweet. Obviously Mammon & Luke are excited about finding fairies for their own reasons (AND is this gonna be a Mammon & Luke lesson!??? I desperately need that) and MC says lol good luck with that anyway byeeeee~ Mammon & Luke immediately strongarm MC into coming along. Barbatos tells them to bring some flowers back and he’ll make tea for them out of it. Luke & Mammon briefly argue about whether they’re after sweets or money, and Luke wonders where they might even start looking. Mammon suggests going to a library to find out what they can and Luke is surprised Mammon suggested that to which Mammon gets annoyed.

Mammon suggests splitting up to be more efficient and Luke is surprised ‘efficient’ is part of Mammon’s vocabulary. MC can go with either of the boys. With Luke; they find books about angels and demons, including a picture of Michael but nothing about fairies. Luke says the picture doesn’t capture how amazing Michael really is. MC can say A.) that Luke seems to really love Michael. He says everyone loves Michael before remembering the brothers and saying they’re the only ones who don’t (no offense but everything I hear about Michael has made me highly suspicious of him too – I’ll get into that later). B.) MC asks how Michael’s been doing lately and Luke says the way they worded it made it sound like they know him personally. But he says it’s understandable that they’re curious when Michael’s the greatest angel to exist (how can you say that when Simeon is literally raising you!?). He says Michael is till sad about what happened with the brothers and seems to regret it and that though their portraits are no longer in the Celestial palace you can find Michael standing and staring at the empty spot looking lost time and time again – that though he doesn’t say it, he misses them (I’LL GET INTO IT). Luke says that the brothers are happy in their new home and have forgotten the celestial realm and Michael and that after meeting them Luke acknowledges that they have a FEW good qualities but whenever he remembers Michael standing under that empty spot and how the brothers don’t even stop to think about how Michael feels or to look at things from Michael’s perspective he gets pissed off (do…do you think Luke knows about Lilith…..I – I highly doubt it because the circumstances behind her death and everything we’ve seen and heard about the celestial realm so far makes me feel like the brothers were completely justified to leave it all behind). With Mammon; He finds a book about Angels, Demons, Fairies and their worlds – though it’s mostly about angels and angel!Lucifer. Mammon asks where the part about him is and MC says they’d love to hear about his time as an angel. He says he was really talented and that Lucifer recommended him to be a Cherubim (so the others as angels said that angel!Mammon could do anything he set his mind to and we’ve seen that despite what his brothers say Mammon actually has a pretty vast array of skills and can really step up and be the responsible big brother when it’s needed so am I the only one who feels like Mammon’s that ‘gifted’ kid in highschool who got burnt out and then said fuck it and decided to stop trying? And now everyone looks at him shakes their head and asks wtf happened to him? Solmare gave me a blank canvas of a character to project on to and instead I go and choose Mammon :))) I’m in pain). Michael & Raphael treated Mammon like he was a problem child but Lucifer saw his potential (GIVE ME THEIR BACKSTORY!). MC can ask A.) If he was sad to leave the Celestial Realm. He looks surprised and then thoughtful and distant and says he never thought about it. He says dwelling on the past isn’t his thing but if he had to pick he’d say he didn’t miss it. But he doesn’t hate it and or like he never wants to go back and that he doesn’t hold a grudge (okay so usually during a Mammon centric lesson I write this after I finish the whole lesson instead of one by one after each chapter like I usually do and I’m gonna tell you things happen that show that he might’ve been unconsciously lying about the grudge thing). He says he doesn’t know how his brothers feel and that they maybe less happy with the celestial realm than he is (calling back to the grudge thing we know Mammon tends to bottle things up emotionally, specially when it’s things that hurt him, we also know that right after they fell Mammon was the one who took care of everyone so I think it’s very likely while the others had their emotional fallout about Falling and Lilith and being Demons and Satan’s birth Mammon just never got the chance as he was taking care of their well being and I have this whole fic floating in my head about it let’s see if I put it into words). He says even if they wanted to it’s not like they could go back ) B.) If he loved Lucifer back then. Mammon goes Loved!? LOVED!? -ED!? PAST TENSE!? I still love him and fjeodkkfnak BABY! (love that angel!Mammon refused to admit he loved Lucifer while demon!Mammon was like fuck yeah I love him what’dya think!?). Mammon then blushes and then tells MC not to tell Lucifer cause he’ll get a ‘I knew it’ look and grin like he was self-satisfied. Given how happy Lucifer became the last two times Mammon admitted to caring about him and how in the recent lessons Lucifer said he didn’t think his brothers love him I really want them to tell Lucifer. In the end they don’t find anything. Mammon wants to quit. Luke doesn’t want to, he wants to see Michael’s face when he eats one of the Legendary sweets. Mammon gets annoyed saying that Luke’s always going on about Michael and asking if he’s worth it (NO GRUDGE HMMMMMM?!) Luke gets really pissed in return. Mammon laughs and tells him to cool down and that despite being a demon he’s being honest and asks why a ‘goody-two shoes angel’ so pissed (no grudge huh? I mean it’s miniscule rn but everything’s way too complicated for Mammon to be just over it). Solomon interrupts them and tells them to stop shouting. Okay so first off starting from S2 Michael’s being brought up a LOT and I’m pretty sure MC spoke with as well and nearly met him and he said he’ll have to meet them on a later day. S3’s going into depth about the Celestial Realm and Michael’s getting way more mentions and they’ve started bringing up Raphael as well and at this point I’m 100% sure they’re gonna actually introduce them as new characters? Maybe by the end of the season? And I’d love this cause I need new dynamics and to learn more about the brothers’ past and the celestial realm but it also sucks cause I have such a clear vision of what they look like and ik solmare’s gonna destroy that. ANYWAY I don’t think they’ll introduce “bad guys” to the story given that this is a dating sim at the end of the day and Michael & Raphael will probably wanna bang MC too but with what they’ve given so far the Celestial Realm and the higher up angels seem very morally dubious? We know that Michael as an angel gave out punishments that were worse than Lucifer as a demon – Mammon saying he still shakes when remembering them thousands of years later. We know they were against mixing with humans and demons – enough that they were willing to kill off an angel for healing a human. We know they supported the war with the demons and were not actively looking for a peaceful end to it unlike Diavolo (to the point that even Lucifer one of the highest angel in ranking was surprised by the notion of peace). We know their rules were much more strict than that of the Devildom and Raphael acted as somewhat of an enforcer and he considered human parties immoral. We know they highly looked down on the demons and considered them pure evil & below them despite not really knowing anything about them. And sure all of these facts are things that happened when the brothers were still in the celestial realm and I bet they’ve changed after thousands of years and are more open minded, but have they changed enough? The way ‘Michael’ spoke to MC when he called the brothers wicked despite not really knowing what they are like as demons, despite the fact that ‘wicked’ doesn’t cover what the brothers are at all and that there are probably humans who are worse people than them, that he thought MC would be wicked too just because the brothers liked them, the fact that Luke still had these beliefs that all demons were evil and terrible despite having never met a demon, which were the same beliefs angel!Lucifer had when he met Diavolo thousands of years later, the fact the angels still have a very strict idea of what exactly an angel should be like and enforced those ideas on the brothers during the angel event to the point that after they were back to normal they all freaked out. All makes the angels seem highly…..um? questionable. Also luke said Michael missed the brother, but does Michael actually miss them or does he miss the perfect angel versions of them? We know in the celestial realm the brothers had to repress a lot of their urges, likes and even small parts of their inherent personalities to be accepted/to not be threatened to be kicked out (ex: Mammon supressing his pranks/more playful/mischievous side in the celestial realm vs being comfortable enough to fully express that side despite Lucifer’s punishments in the devildom) to the point that they had a secret room they’d escape to just so they could skip work/hang out/relax, we know angels still see demons as evil beings and probably don’t still accept them despite the peace, we know that Michael’s view of the brothers as ‘perfect angels’ completely strips them of any identifiable characteristics even if you were to compare them to what they were like when they were really angels. So when luke says Michael misses them I feel like he doesn’t miss them he misses them as these perfect angel versions of themselves that never really existed. If this season is about getting MC’s stars will next season be about getting Michael and Raphael to accept the brothers for how they truly are? More interdimensional therapy sessions? Does this make sense? Talk to me

Solomon says he doesn’t know what happened to the fairies but that they’d have more luck finding them if they went out and looked deep in places free from human influence than looking for info in a human library. Mammon says Solomon should change his name to the “not so wise” & Solomon says it’s not like he came up with his nickname in the first place. Luke has the idea to ask Crowe for help. When Mammon asks Levi about his falling out with Crowe Levi says though they aren’t friends anymore he’s still useful. MC asks crowe where they can find fairies and they find out about rumours near Lake Io Lanthe. Though they can only get there and back within a day with a private jet. Mammon says it’s not like they can use their own wings to fly in the human world either and I’M!!!!!!? would Mammon have had to carry MC? Have they seen the brothers flying in the devildom? Has anyone carried them and flown? In the end they decide on an overnight train ride. Levi says the “kids” should probably first get permission from the “adults.” MC who’s a fully independent grown adult doesn’t need permission.

Simeon happily agrees as long as they can find someone to cover Luke’s shifts in the café. Luke asks MC which of the brothers they should ask, there are 6 options and for each the 3 of them imagine the scenario that would take place. 1.) Levi; Simeon getting steadily more and more irritated while Levi tries to win a game instead of working till black-purple smoke is rising out from Simeon even as he smiles sweetly and calls Levi. 2.) Lucifer; looking deeply disappointed with crossed arms says “So, are you going to tell me your order or not? Hurry up. I don’t have all day. I have (list of café related chores) French chocolate cake with hot cocoa? Are you insane? Who in their right mind would pair chocolate cake with hot chocolate?” why is this so funny!?? 3.) Satan; Fully serious “Simeon, table two wants an earl grey. And a pretty kitty special to go with it.” Simeon, “WTF is a pretty kitty special!?” The pretty kitty special is paw shaped pancakes and Simeon thinks they’re cute. In this universe no customers or Levis are harmed. 4.) Asmo; Asmo starts almost instantly hitting on the customer. “You know I don’t usually do this but how about I sit down with you for tea?” Luke says while bright red, “ABSOLUTELY NOT! He’ll turn the Angel’s Halo into a different sort of place.” And umm Luke buddy what exactly were you thinking of here… 5.) Beel; Simeon: Hey have you seen the BLTs? Beel: *actively munching away* No. Can’t find them? Want me to help? Simeon: …Nevermind 6.) Belphie; Orders food for himself from Simeon during a lull in the customers and takes a nap before Simeon even gives it to him. In the end they decide on Satan.

They find Satan at the pizza place watching his tab with a serious expression, Luke wonders if he’s learning new things about the human world (languages, the economy, etc) Mammon says that’s the face he makes when he watches cat videos. When Mammon tries calling him he pretends he doesn’t know them until Mammon’s yelling his name and he can no longer ignore them (Wonder how humans feel about some buy yelling ‘SATAN’ in the middle of a diner). Satan immediately refuses to work at the café cause he’s busy (watching cat videos) until MC lies through their teeth and says that Simeon wants to turn the café into a cat café. Luke jumps on board instantly and starts supporting MC’s claims further adding that as a cat lover they need Satan’s advice and that working part time at the café will give him a better understanding to how the business is normally run. He then agrees to help. (Luke none of that lying seems really angelic…). At the café Satan immediately goes “okay, so… let’s talk cats”. And Simeon’s like????????

At home Lucifer’s still not back from his date & they tell others about their plans for the trip. Asmo says if he had a choice he’d like to meet Narcissus… Mammon tries to play off the fact that he’s nervous about asking permission from Lucifer and Belphie tells them to watch out for Banshees – a type of fairy - when they get there (I first heard about banshees as a little kid and they freaked the shit outta me, gave me way more anxiety than I already had). Satan says there are lots of types of fairies including those that make you fall in love. Mammon is way more interested in them than in Banshees – Asmo tells him he’s being a pervert. Lucifer arrives after dinner and they follow him to his room. Lucifer says a quiet lake might give Mammon the chance for some self-reflection and personal growth (pretty sure Lucifer needs that too ngl) and it’ll give Lucifer some peace and quiet but also who the fuck’s gonna pay for you huh!? Mammon tries to play the “my favourite older brother” card. Lucifer disagrees and they decide to gamble on it – if Mammon wins he gets to go and if Lucifer wins Mammon gets bathroom cleaning duty for a week. Lucifer says Mammon’ll just cheat so MC volunteers to play and Mammon gets really happy that they’d do that for him, saying he feels like crying. Lucifer agrees except if they lose BOTH of them get bathroom duty. MC has to guess if the card Lucifer draws is odd or even. Even’s correct and they get to go without a fuss. If they pick even they lose.

If they lose the next chapter starts with Mammon crying in MC’s room about MC and Luke being allowed to go and not him and how with MC gone bathroom duty is all his, MC says they’ll do anything to get him to forgive them and he blushes and asks them to stay with him till he allows them to leave and that means they’re gonna be at it all night…. ALL RIGHT ANYWAY Luke then texts them saying he’s impressed that they managed to convince Lucifer to let Mammon go and that Lucifer had actually sent Luke three tickets for “Mammon’s journey of Personal Growth” and Lucifer’s such a good dad sometimes I can’t deal with this BS. Mammon immediately runs off to thank Lucifer and you can then hear lucifer screaming at Mammon to get out and stop hugging him cause he’s in the shower and I love them both so much I NEED them being soft to each other more and the only reason Mammon ended up being the avatar of greed is cause Lucifer probably spoilt him rotten growing up *cough*Lucifer’s B’day Present To Him*cough*. If they win the next chapter starts in Mammon’s room where he’s asking crowe, who’s apparently been borrowed from Levi, how much money he could make selling fairy ring flowers, he then asks MC to ask crowe something too. They can ask crowe about tomorrow’s weather or tease Mammon by either asking crowe how to control Mammon or asking if they’re compatible with Mammon. Mammon blushes but Crowe says they’re fairly compatible and if they can control Mammon’s self-destructive tendencies and how he puts money before everything they may last – mammon says all of that is wrong (I mean we have seen that he actually puts MC before money and material goods quite a few times so yeah…). He says they already know how well they work together better than anyone in all the 3 worlds and they don’t need anyone to tell them that and MC kisses him. Mammon blushes and says “yeah ik Luke’s gonna be with us but let’s try and get our own room to share cause this is the one chance to get time alone away from the others so we can have all kinds of fun. Though we can still have plenty of fun rn” and then he calls them closer and the screen fades to black :) It later opens to screams being heard from inside the house somewhere.

#obey me spoilers #my posts #my theories #obey me #obey me!#swd obey me #shall we date? obey me!#obey me shall we date

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pl-panda · 4 years ago

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The Vines that bind us - Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don’t own Miraculous Ladybug or any DC characters. I own only the plot, and even that is inspired by the amazing story "Marigold Ivy" by @lwandile13 on Wattpad. Go check it. It's great. He allowed me to take some inspiration, for which I'm grateful. Also, don't translate the french words maybe. Or at least do it on your own responsibility. Big thanks to @Liza! on Discord for being my Beta :)

Marinette Dupain-Cheng was a normal girl, with a normal life. But she had a secret. Her real name was Marigold Isley. She was born under that name in Gotham city sixteen years ago. Her mother never revealed to her who was her father, but Mari never cared. She was happy with her mom and several aunts and uncles. Technically, none of them were related to her by blood, but Rogues were quite close to each other (excluding some outcasts like Joker or the Menagerie). They taught her many interesting things such as lockpicking, stealth 101, or hand-to-hand combat. She was five when it started, so her first-ever practical test was breaking into a kitchen cupboard and stealing a jar of cookies. Overall, she was very happy.

It changed when she was eight. One very tired social service person named Elizabeth Barrow got wind of a child of a villain. That Elizabeth was new to Gotham after being reassigned from Metropolis and didn’t yet get the wind of how things worked. Maybe her colleagues didn’t like her, or maybe she was just too overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem in Gotham. Previously, there was an unspoken agreement in the government that they wouldn’t notice Marigold. In exchange, rogues were calmer. Or at least tried to keep the death toll down. For a time, Gotham even started to slowly heal. But then, Elizabeth took the case of Marigold Isley. Ivy tried to fight. To protect her daughter. For three days, the city was held hostage by giant plants. It was only the fear in her daughter’s eyes that made Poison Ivy relent and let go. She didn’t want that life for Marigold. The one condition she gave was that the girl would leave America as a whole, to ensure she would be safe from all the madness.

And so Marigold ended up in the care of baker’s couple in Paris. She never showed any powers thus far and the adoption agency kept the parentage a secret. That’s when Marinette Dupain-Cheng was born. She continued with martial arts training and stealth training, but now only as fun and reminder of her mother and extended family, as opposed to actual necessary survival tool. She also picked up designing as another hobby, which soon turned into a kind of obsession. She was generally a ray of sunshine.

The one black spot in the happy world of Marinette was the Mayor’s daughter. Chloe Bourgeoise considered herself above others and just couldn’t stand sunshine girl. She ruined her clothes, sometimes damaged her homework, or verbally assaulted her. While Chloe was generally disliked, she was more of a nuance. Overall, Marinette was happy. At least until two events changed that.

When she was twelve, Paris was attacked by Hawkmoth for the first time. Marinette found herself becoming Ladybug, a superhero with magical powers that protected the city from harm. She received a partner in form of Chat Noir. It took some time before she got hang of it, and then more time before she and Chat became an actual team. Over time, more heroes joined them, even if temporarily only. She had people she could count on. She became Happy again.

Privately, she started her own brand: MDC, managed to become a class representative, and became best friends with Alya, who joined around the same time she became Ladybug. It was quite ironic. The superhero was best friends with one person whose greatest dream was to unmask the hero. Marinette also developed a huge (and a bit unhealthy) crush on Adrien Agreste, a famous model who was in her class. She spent years vying for his attention, but nothing ever came from her attempts. She was unable to even say a word around him and her face always became red like her mother’s hair. Overall, she couldn’t complain.

Then, when she was fifteen another black spot appeared. It was Lila (Liela) Rossi. She came to their school and immediately started sporting lies with every breath. Surprisingly, everyone seemed to buy into that, believing her like she spoke the gospel. Everyone but Marinette. She tried to expose Lila, but it only backfired. She became an outcast, disliked by everyone, and universally hated. Suddenly, it became okay to bully her because she was a bully herself and deserved it. It became okay to shun her and no longer include her in anything. The worst was Alya, her former best friend. At first, she just tried to nudge Marinette to give Lila a chance. When Marinette tried to show the truth, Alya practically attacked her. She was just as much responsible for Mari being cast out as Lila was. The fact that her best friend abandoned her only fueled the gossip and allowed Lila to drive the final nail in. In the span of a few weeks, Marinette was left alone.

Around the same time, Chat Noir became more persistent in his pursuit of her while Adrien, who Marinette knew was aware of the lies, was only telling her to keep the high road (do nothing). She could understand him. As a famous model and son of a well-known fashion designer, he was always taught to not provoke the press. It still served as a wake-up call on her crush.

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Marinette was packing her things after lessons when she noticed someone approach her from behind. Immediately, she tensed. After eleven years of martial arts practice, it was an instinct. Before she had time to turn around, something heavy landed on her desk with a loud Thud!. She turned to see Chloe standing over a large book, a single thick envelope, and a puffy bag that content Marinette couldn’t guess.

“What’s a…” She started, but Chloe cut her off. She had her usual ‘resting witch’ expression.

“The book contains every single instance I verbally assaulted you, destroyed something of yours, talked about you behind your back, or in any way otherwise did something wrong toward you. Here are the materials for the damaged clothes,” she pushed the bag toward her, “and here is money for other things.” Chloe gave her the envelope. “I apologize for all of that. I was jealous of all the attention you kept getting even though I thought I deserved it. I now realize that my behavior was wrong and hurtful. I will understand if you’ll never speak to me again. I kept acting ridiculous! Utterly ridiculous!” With that, she turned and started to walk again. Marinette idly noticed that there was no Sabrina nearby. Thinking back, Chloe was no longer acting (overly) mean toward anyone as of late.

Making a split-second decision, Marinette raced after the blonde and pulled her into a hug.

“Wha…” Chloe yelped before sinking into the hug. Neither girl realized they were crying until they finally separated. Blonde had her lite make-up in total ruin while Marinette had tears still going down her cheeks. “Does that mean you accept my apologies?”

Marinette didn’t answer immediately. She stood there with open mouth for a moment before smiling weakly. “Yes, Chloe.”

Since that day, they were best friends. It turned out to be a blessing. Chloe, once she finally allowed someone to truly know her, turned out to be a highly intelligent, funny, and very much still overbearing person. She still acted high and mighty, but it no longer felt mean, rather just… felt. She took to defending Marinette from the rest of the class. She was aware of Lila’s lies from day one but never acted on it until it was too late. Sabina abandoned her for the liar. Dealing with loneliness was hard on her. She didn’t even have parents that cared. Her father would probably move sun if she asked, but he had an emotional range of a toothpick. Her mother didn’t even know her name, so she didn’t bother.

Something about their friendship must’ve upset Lila because the girl upped her game. Marinette’s parents suddenly found themselves facing strong critique and constant inspection from the sanitary department and child protection questioning their parenting abilities. MDC, who was slowly becoming one of the go-to fashion designers for famous found herself in the middle of several fake media scandals, including one lawsuit over defamation. If it wasn’t for Jagged Stone and Penny rallying her customers, Marinette and her parents would end up broke. He managed to save MDC and practically made her untouchable. Still, Alya and Lila got off scot-free as nothing could be linked to them.

Perhaps what pushed Lila over the edge was Chloe confronting Adrien. She yelled at him for good two hours straight about responsibility and morality, pointing in detail exactly what he did wrong. She would probably go on if Marinette didn’t stop her. After that, Adrien finally apologized and tried to make things right, but it only turned against him. By then, Lila had everyone so deep into it, that he was powerless. She didn’t go after him as her partnership with Gabriel Agreste was too important, but she did tattle to the Fashion Mogul about it. Gabriel tried to get his son under control, but this was one thing that he couldn’t achieve.

It did inspire a whole youth fashion line ‘rebel’, which became a global hit.

All this time, Marinette kept two secrets. One was her identity as Ladybug and the guardian, the other was her true name and family. Until she kept neither.

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Marinette returned home after another day at school. Recently, her mother revealed she was pregnant with another child, even though she was believed to be barren. Everyone in the bakery was overjoyed and the couple even started to hand out small treats to any guest that came. The free samples helped the business return to a better standing.

When she entered, strangely there was no sound in the bakery. It was empty. Usually, her parents would both be very busy as it was still business hours. Slightly worried, she went upstairs. When she entered the living room, she found an envelope addressed to her.

Isley

We tried, but we can no longer tolerate you. We turned a blind eye when we learned how improper you act, trying to drag every boy you meet for some, and we quote, “alone time”. We didn’t react to the bullying accusations, believing them to be overexaggerated. Even when you were expelled, we still had hoped you’ll turn out into a fine young lady. But now, we must think of the baby. Today was the last straw. Hearing about how you ruined that poor impaired girl’s birthday was both cruel and against everything we taught you.

We held hope you won’t follow in your mother’s footsteps, but you proved us wrong several times. We supported your obsession over fashion, even with the drama it caused, because it was actually non-violent. At first, we didn’t want to teach you how to fight, but we convinced ourselves that you would have a way to vent the emotions somewhere away from us.

Please, don’t try looking for us. We will probably have already left the country or even the continent. The bakery is yours. We don’t want to have anything to do with the spawn of evil such as you.

We hoped you would turn out better

Sincerely,

Tom Dupain and Sabine Cheng

Marinette tried to read it over and over again, but her eyes welled with tears. She had no idea she was screaming until her throat was coarse. Rationally, she knew she needed to keep calm or she would attract the Akuma, but emotions made her not care.

Unknowingly to her, the plants all around Paris responded to her cry. They started growing and spreading, trying to get to their queen and comfort her. The Akuma that would’ve come for her stumbled into one of the vines, corrupting it. Hawkmoth was surprised, it was not something anyone ever seen in Paris except on TV or some strange Japanese shows that play after midnight. The more important thing was that even though he akumatized the plants, he had no control over them. He couldn’t even recall his Akuma.

Back in Marinette’s living room, she started to feel the ground rumble. Soon, plants exploded from the ground and broke windows. She slowly looked at her hands to see them tinted with green. They were not the same as her mother’s, but close. She looked to the floor where pieces of glass littered everything. Her face was the same, but her hair became blue and her eyes were now the most vibrant iridescent green she’s ever seen, exactly the same color her mother’s eyes were.

She started to panic even more. Tikki floated next to her, talking to her, but Marinette couldn’t hear her. Or maybe process it. She could hear the plants call to her. She could hear them speak. They promised her revenge. They promised retribution on those who attacked her. God’s wrath would rain upon them from the sky and hell’s fury would consume them from beneath.

Impaired girl…

“Liar Rossi.” Marigold seethed. She knew there was only one person who would do such a thing. Only one talented enough to convince her parents she was a villain. If they wanted a villain, they would get one. Her mind was being clouded. Her clothes were already torn, replaced by a skintight outfit made of leaves, much like her mother wore. Then, Marinette remembered another part of the letter. She added a skirt made of purple petals that complimented her blue hair nicely and long sleeves that reached to her hands, ending with a triangle that reached her middle finger and surrounded it at the base. She left the decolletage as it was.

Exiting her house, she allowed the vines to carry her. There were only so many places The Liar could hide. First, she went toward School, as it was closest. She made plants carry her over the roof right into the courtyard while more of them broke the doors and blocked any exit. The fencing class was still going on, but The Liar was not there. She looked over the scared crowd, spotting two people she wanted to find. She needed to protect them from The Liar, else they end like her. She grabbed the fencer in a red outfit and her partner, knocking their masks to reveal Kagami and Adrien. The plants wrapped around them, forming a sort of cocoon before dragging them to the heart. Marinette then turned her sight to Eifel tower. She knew The Liar liked to drag the class there.

As she moved through town, she passed the Hotel where Chloe lived. Pausing, she made the plants lift her toward the balcony. Her best friend was indeed there, right next to the lit-up Bee-signal. Honeystly…

“Marinette!?” The blonde jumped in surprise

“Marinette is gone. She should’ve never even been. I’m Marigold, the daughter of Poison Ivy.” For a moment, the fog thickened, but Mari shook it off quickly enough, before whatever caused it managed to get the hold of her.

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng! If you got yourself akumatized, I’m telling my daddy!” Chloe shouted. Seeing the tears form in the iridescent green eyes, she looked at her friend with pity. “Oh, Mari! Is this the Liar again? Come here right now!” The blonde spread her arms for a hug. She didn’t care about the Akuma. Her friend needed her and she would help her conquer the world if she asked. Chloe owed Mari… everything. She helped her evolve beyond being the queen witch. In response to the gesture, the plants in the garden started to grow until they surrounded the two of them in a tight cocoon. Marinette stepped onto the balcony. She affectionately petted the vine that carried her so far before allowing it to return to its hunt for the Liar.

“Chloeee!” Mari launched herself at the girl. She sunk into the embrace, allowing tears to start flowing again. She sobbed her heart out while pushing a piece of paper she constantly held in her clutched fist before. The blonde took it and read while patting Marinette on the back of her head.

“Salauds! Ridiculous! Utterly Ridiculous! How dare that cochons! And the chienne! Wait till I tell daddy about this! Don’t worry Mari. I will protect you! I will ruin her! Merde!” The rant made Marigold pause. She never heard Chloe curse. Like… never. “But first. Mari. You know I love you and I would help you hide the body, but drop the Akuma. It’s making you look Ridiculous. Utterly Ridiculous! I mean the dress is so much spot on and so you, but the whole take over Paris is more my style. I can let you be my faithful sidekick while we take over the world if you want.”

For a moment, Marigold continued to stare at Chloe before she burst out in a fit of laughter. It wasn’t a nervous chuckle or the villain cackle, but genuine pearly laughter. It was just so… Chloe-ish. She couldn’t imagine anyone trying to dissuade an Akuma by offering to become a sidekick.

“You… You… Never change Chlo.” Mari smiled at her friend.

“Whoa. You… didn’t make me a fertilizer? I mean, of course, you wouldn’t. You are just too good of a person, but Hawkmoth…”

“I’m not akumatized Chloe.” Mari smiled. “It’s me.” As if to prove her point, she stood up and spun, allowing the blonde to see her from all sides. “This is how I really look. Apparently, I do take some after my mom.”

“Your… mom?”

“Pamela Isley, she was a famous biologist. Mom was brilliant. She used to be one of the smartest people in the world.” Mari praised. “There was this one accident that she is now famous for…”

“Pamela Isley? I remember reading about her.”

“Yeah… She is…”

“Didn’t she create this environment-friendly line of cosmetics?” Chloe asked in her typical fashion

“Yes! I have no idea why everyone remembers her only for the ‘Poison Ivy’ thing!”

“I know, right?” Chloe nodded. “Wait a…”

“Tada!” Mari said weakly before trying to look away, doing everything not to look her friend in the eyes. The blonde gently grabbed her chin and moved it so she could look right into the beautiful green eyes of her best friend.

“Mari! If you think I would abandon you just because your mother took veganism too far… You’re utterly ridiculous!”

Marigold smiled slightly. Slowly, the green receded and her eyes turned back to normal. The dress remained, as without it she would end up naked and she didn’t fancy trying to explain to anyone that.

She then turned to the plants and tried to order them to return to normal, only for them to resist. For a moment, her mind started to feel fogged, but it didn’t hold at all now.

“As much as I like the scenery, maybe we stop the plantpocalypse?”

“Um… Remember how I told you I wasn’t akumatized?”

“Yeah?”

“I think the plants are…”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Chloe shouted. “Listen here Hawkmoth! Get this Akuma the heck away! I don’t care about some fancy Jewels that will totally clash with your suit! I mean purple and white with red earrings? Are you colorblind?”

There was no visible reaction to the plants.

“Strange…” Marigold ran her hand over the plants. “They still respond, just refuse to yield.” Inside, Mari cursed that she couldn’t consult Tikki.

“So… Want some cookies?” Chloe asked. “We just have to wait for Ladybug to save the day. At least the damage will be repaired.”

‘Except Ladybug it trapped here…’

Suddenly, something small and black slipped through the vines and entered their small peaceful enclave. It zoomed between items on the balcony, trying to avoid being seen. It would’ve been successful if Chloe didn’t know about Kwamis.

“What was that!?” She shouted pointing at Plagg’s hiding place.

“What? I didn’t see anything!” Mari tried to lie. It was the one skill she never had. She did compensate for it by never getting caught.

“A Kwami! I’m sure I’ve seen one.”

“Kwami? Who’s Kwami? Is that some bird? How would a bird get here? I mean we are trapped in…”

“Ugh! I don’t have time for games!” Plagg suddenly floated before the pair. “Chat is trapped and can’t help without revealing himself. Paris is being destroyed mindlessly and nobody can do anything as the vines are harder than steel.” The cat summarized. “And I’m hungry. Give me cheese!” He looked at Chloe. “Camembert would be the best, but I’m not that picky.”

“Why come to us? Ladybug took away my miraculous.” The blonde asked.

“I didn’t come to you. I came to her.” The god pointed at Mari.

“Me?! Why? It’s not like…”

“We don’t have time for charades guardian! The Akuma is out of control! Literally! Hawkmoth’s connection was somehow severed and now you have a giant plant that knows only the rage. This is serious!”

Mari wanted to protest or try to save some of her identity, but then Tikki floated out of her purse.

“Oh no! Marinette! He is right! We have a huge problem.”

“Why?” The girl asked resigned.

“You’re Ladybug!” Chloe shouted but was subsequently ignored

“Hawkmoth must’ve akumatized the plant, hoping to control you, but he had no idea it was sentient. But it stopped being sentient the moment you let it go. I… It never happened before.”

“You’re Ladybug!!!” Chloe shouted so loud that everyone had to look at her.

“We can talk later. Now we need to somehow deal with the plants. Maybe… No. What about… But they are too tough… What if…” Marigold started to run through various scenarios and plans.

“Can’t you just order them to expel the Akuma?” Plagg asked bored.

“It… It might work.” Mari had a focused expression. In her head, she was running through all her knowledge of biology, miraculous magic, and how her mom’s powers worked. Hesitantly, she walked to the edge of the cocoon and called the main vine to her. The wall spread slightly and allowed the tip of it to enter. Mari touched it and started gently caressing it.

“you’re a good boy. Yeah! Who’s a good boy? You’re. Yes! You’re a good boy. But Good Boys don’t have Akuma. Do you want to be a good boy? Of course, you do…”

Chloe stood there and watched how Marigold kept talking to the plant like it was a puppy. She felt something fall into her hand. Opening the palm, she saw two earrings.

“I… I can’t!” She protested, but Plagg floated before her eyes.

“She can’t do it. If Akuma escapes, we will have plantmagedon on a larger scale.”

“Fine. Spots on!”

Just as Mari finally talked the plant into expelling the Akuma, Chloe caught it.

“Bye Bye Little Butterfly!” She released the pure white bug. “Lucky charm!” Chloe shouted. A red and black folder fell into her hands. She looked at it curiously. Inside, she found a complete set of adoption papers for her father to sign. She quickly pulled out the sheets and tossed the folder itself, releasing a swarm of ladybugs that repaired Paris to how it was before plants. The sheet stayed.

Transformation dropped after that and Chloe handed the jewel back to the true owner.

“You still have sooo much explaining to do!”

Nobody remembered about Adrien and Kagami being carried together to safety, which turned out to be Mari’s basement. And while Ladybug Cure should’ve restored them to where they were taken from, for some unknown reason they remained locked there until Mari returned late into the evening to spend the last night at the bakery. It would be some time until Tikki admitted that it was an act of revenge on Plagg for revealing her chosen’s identity. He had to go the whole day without cheese. The one good thing that came from it was that Kagami and Adrien had a long frank talk and ended up as friends. The relationship just wasn’t working.

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When Mari was adopted by the Mayor, she decided to keep using the Dupain-Cheng name at least for now. At first, Chloe’s father was against it, but once the girl presented it as a way of getting good press of mayor who personally looks after his citizens he practically ripped the papers to sign them. Although on paper he was the adopter, Chloe was the real parent/sister that took care of Mari. Lila seethed and spitted, but couldn’t really do much more. Adrien and Chloe roped Jagged Stone and Penny into Marinette Protection Squad. Luka and Kagami, who somehow hooked up, also joined. At some point, Mari entrusted Luka and Kagami with permanent Miraculous and Gave Chloe the Bee miraculous back. Some Fox illusion of Chloe publically applauding new heroine helped hide her identity. The hardest part was revealing to Chat, Viperion, and Ryuko her true identity. Adrien was a big surprise, but at least they finally dealt with their crushes once and for all. The fact that they were in love square in two people was way too awkward. Chloe and Mari did notice Adrien sometimes looking at Luka, but he was happy with Kagami. The only person that disproved of ‘Lukagami’ was Kagami’s mother, but she warmed up to him when he accepted the challenge to a duel and was completely pacified when she learned that Luka is apprenticing under Jagged Stone.

Jagged and Penny wanted to Adopt Mari, but ended up filling the role of uncle and aunt. After some time, Mari realized that she rebuilt what she once had in Gotham. These people might not have been her family by blood, but it mattered little. That family might’ve been damaged, maybe even broken, but they were happy together. They found solace in one another. Once more, Marinette was happy.

Until a trip to Gotham came knocking on the front doors.

#maribat #miraculous ladybug #miraculous lb #Miraculous #Batman #DC #MLB x DC #Mother!Ivy

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