#and change their entire writing style to try and sound intelligent

[the-casbah-way]

furthermore is such a goofy word like you’ll never catch me saying that in one of my essays it sounds so forced and clunky and wannabe academic we should scrap it altogether

[blazehedgehog]

Looking forward the the SH2 Remake?

Not really, no. I haven't been keeping super close eye on it ever since that awful reveal trailer, but I occasionally see Bobvids bring it up over on Bluesky.

For the uninitiated, Bobvids is one of the core names in the Silent Hill Community, and one of the two main people behind The Grate Debate podcast. It's not all he does, sort of like how I do more than just talk about Sonic games, but Silent Hill is like, one of the media properties he's most invested in and he's an intelligent, thoughtful voice in that space, I feel.

There was a window where it sounded like he was warming up to it, because recent previews didn't look as bad as the reveal trailer. So he had a "maybe I'm being too hard on it" thread about a week ago where he talked about changes they were making that he liked. He was taking a step back and trying to give it a second chance.

Like a day or two after that, someone came forward, having an early copy of Silent Hill 2 Remake, and they'd recorded themselves playing the entire game front to back, start to finish. They shared this playthrough video with Bob, and he (along with his friends) streamed the footage and talked about what they did and did not like.

I didn't watch most of them. I had other stuff to do or whatever, but I saw they were doing the finale last night and I poked my head in just in time for them to be on the game's final cutscene, which meant they launched into a long post-game discussion of the product as a whole.

Again, I was kind of doing other things, so I was in and out of the stream, but the general gist I caught was they weren't very happy. They felt like the push towards having lots of Resident Evil style combat cheapened the experience (in Bob's own words, he feared people would "see Silent Hill as 'bad Resident Evil' and write the series off") and they were particularly incensed by certain changes made to the game's tone in later chapters.

They seemed to invoke the dreaded "It's worse than bad, it's just bland." That it did not understand the depth that drew diehards to the franchise and moved to dumb the experience down, with fewer puzzles and less influence from David Lynch. A version of Silent Hill 2 with a lot fewer parts that made Silent Hill 2 memorable.

I was honestly surprised to wake up to a pair of Silent Hill 2 Remake reviews and first-impressions this morning that are praising the game, because Bob's whole crew really weren't very happy with it at all.

I'm more willing to believe what Bob has to say. That's not to sleight professional career critics (remember, I was a paid critic for 12 years) but I do feel like they're going to be a little more surface level and mainstream than someone whose intricately studied why Silent Hill 2 left enough lasting impression on culture to even deserve a remake. I'm sure Gamespot or whoever is doing their best, but it's still going to be a different tone from somebody that's lived and breathed it, for better and worse.

I expect it'll be something that ends up in a humble bundle, or it'll be free on Epic Games Store or Twitch Prime, I'll redeem it, play it in six years exactly one time, and feel pretty "whatever" about.

[rhonda-oppegard]

Discovering the Capabilities of Junlala AI through a Blog Article

Junlala AI is a revolutionary artificial intelligence program that is changing the way we interact with technology. At its core, Junlala AI is designed to be an intelligent assistant that can help you with a variety of tasks, including scheduling appointments, sending emails, and even making phone calls. But the capabilities of Junlala AI go far beyond simple task management. In this blog article, we will explore some of the most impressive features of Junlala AI and how they are helping people all over the world.

Understanding the Basics of Junlala AI

Before we dive into some of the more advanced features of Junlala AI, it's important to understand the basics of how the system works. Junlala AI is designed to be a conversational assistant, meaning that you can talk to it much like you would talk to another person. To interact with Junlala AI, all you need to do is speak to it, either through a microphone or by typing in a chat window.

Once you've started a conversation with Junlala AI, the system will use natural language processing (NLP) to understand what you're saying. NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that is focused on teaching machines to understand human language. With NLP, Junlala AI can understand not only what you're saying but also the intent behind your words.

Advanced Features of Junlala AI

Now that we've covered the basics of Junlala AI, let's take a look at some of the more advanced features of the system. One of the most impressive features of Junlala AI is its ability to schedule appointments on your behalf. With the power of NLP, Junlala AI can analyze your calendar and find available times for appointments. It can even send invites to other people and manage the entire process for you.

Another powerful feature of Junlala AI is its ability to compose and send emails for you. The system can analyze your email history and learn your writing style, allowing it to craft emails that sound like they were written by you. Junlala AI can also manage your inbox, organizing messages by priority and even responding to some messages on your behalf.

But perhaps the most impressive feature of Junlala AI is its ability to make phone calls. With a simple voice command, you can instruct Junlala AI to call someone on your behalf. The system will use NLP to understand the context of the call and even carry on a conversation for you. This feature of Junlala AI has incredible potential for people with disabilities or who are otherwise unable to make phone calls themselves.

The Future of Junlala AI

So what's next for Junlala AI? As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more advanced features in the near future. Some possible developments include the ability to analyze social media feeds and make recommendations for content to share, as well as the ability to analyze financial data and make investment decisions.

Regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: Junlala AI is changing the way we interact with technology. With its powerful NLP capabilities and advanced feature set, Junlala AI has the potential to make our lives easier and more efficient than ever before. So if you haven't already, give Junlala AI a try and see what this incredible technology can do for you.Do you know the benefits of junlala ai.

[youzicha]

To be clear, I definitely don't think that translating literally is obligatory or is an end in itself. I post about the virtues of literalism, but that's because I think the overall discourse is too one-sided and everyone takes it for granted that "literal is bad". But when it comes to translations that I personally admire, that's often because they make some elegant move "sideways", departing from the exact meaning in order to serve some other purpose. (Like specifying the species of snake. Or I previously mentioned Y. Chang's English translation of Ren'ai Circulation, which is very loose, with many sentences entirely invented, but seems to accurately capture the "cuteness" of the song.)

I certainly agree with you about the song snippet, the strawman literal translation is obviously much worse than your actual translation.

But I still don't like the two examples in my post above. It's admirable when somebody solves a difficult problem in a creative way, but producing "could mankind really be on the verge" is not difficult, you just look at the words in front of you. What made Woolsey so sure that what he writes is better than what the original author wrote? I guess what bugs me about this is that it is disrespectful, in the sense that he only does this because he doesn't respect the source text. If he was given a highbrow novel to translate he surely would not rewrite it, but he thinks this is schlock that doesn't matter. And yet, the game sold millions of copies, and we are still talking about it 30 years later—maybe it was not so insignificant after all.

Similarly for the Mankell novel: it seems arrogant to simultaneously decide that "this is a good novel, we should buy the rights and translate it and publish it in English" and also "the prose style is shit, let's rewrite all the sentences". How many best-selling crime novels have you written, Mr. Anonymous Editor?

I also had some additional thoughts, but these are all just by-the-by, they don't affect your main point:

✧ I do think your song example is a bit of a strawman, e.g. "in what gap of time" is not something anyone would ever say in English. If that's the definition of "literal" then nobody would want to do it. But obviously it's a fallacy to say that an exact one-to-one translation is impossible and therefore literalness doesn't matter at all. Just as an example, one of my friends took a class where they were given translation exercises, with the requirements that

Each sentence should be translated into one sentence.

Each content-word in the sentence should be translated in some way (but it's ok to e.g. change its part-of-speech, so that "fast" becomes "high speed" or whatever).

To be clear this was just an exercise for learning Japanese, it's not advice about how to do professional translation. But if you try, for most prose text I think it's quite possible to follow these rules and produce something that still sounds like natural English. I think that's a realistic standard to compare other translations against.

✧ I think Japanese song lyrics in particular often call for a freer translation than ordinary prose, because they often seem to be written in a particularly "poetical" and elliptic style. I would guess that this is partly because Japanese words use so many syllables, so writers are forced to leave things implicit for space reasons! (I wonder if you could draw a connection to ultra-short poetry like haiku..?) If you translate into equally few words in English, the result is often not even intelligible, let alone faithful to the author's intensions...

You can see the same process in reverse when people translate English songs into Japanese, like the examples in this blog post, where the translator changed full sentences into noun-phrase fragments to fit them in. Or this cover of Stayin' Alive, which translates "Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk / I'm a woman's man, no time to talk" as "歩き方でわかるだろ / そうさ 男ってところ". They had to cut material, but I think it was inspired to notice that the critical word in the sentence is "man"!

✧ I think you sometimes overestimate how much impact the lack of a common ancestor language has, when something is maybe explained by a particular grammatical feature in isolation. In particular, the omitted verb in "いつの間かこんなに強く" seems similar to things like "XがYに｡" or "XをYに｡" for nouns X Y. But I would say this is enabled by the fact that the case is marked, and you see similar omitted verbs in Latin, which also marks case on nouns. And I note that English's closest genetic relative, German, also marks case. Sadly I don't speak enough German to know, but I would not be surprised if you could see a similar construction there also...

Pointlessly nonliteral translation

Most discussion of literal versus free translation focus on cases where  it’s impossible to convey everything from the source text, e.g. because of cultural references, hard-to-translate words, language-specific features, or puns.

But I feel another much less discussed issue is when things get translated freely for no obvious reason.

Lawrence Venuti gives a rather bizarre example. A novel by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell was translated by an American translator. This translation was then licenced by a British publisher and heavily edited, supposedly in order to adapt it into British English:

(source text:) Han la på luren. En oväntad känsla av avundsjuka drabbade honom med full kraft. Han hade själv gärna rest till Uganda. Och gjort någonting helt annat. Inget kunde vara värre än att se en ung människa ta livet av sig som en bensinindränkt fackla. Han avundades Per Åkeson som inte bara låtit viljan till uppbrott stanna vid ord.

(Translation by Steven T. Murray:) He hung up. An unexpected feeling of jealousy hit him full force. He would have liked to travel to Uganda himself, to do something completely different. Nothing could be worse than seeing a young person commit suicide as a gasoline-soaked torch. He envied Per Åkeson, who wasn’t going to let his desire to leave stop at mere words.

(British edition:) He hung up. He felt a pang of jealousy. He would have liked to travel to Uganda himself, to have a complete change. Nothing could undo the horror of seeing a young person set herself alight. He envied Per Åkeson, who wasn’t going to let his desire to escape stop at mere dreams.

Venuti talks about how the edits make the translation less “foreign”, and also more “British” because it’s “understated”, but to me the most noticeable difference is that the first version is a nearly literal, word-for-word translation, and it’s fine. I guess the edited version is smoother, in that e.g. “a pang of jealousy” is a more common colocation than “a feeling of jealousy”, but then again the phrase is not necessarily common in Swedish either. Why mess with it?

For a different example, a while ago nostalgebraist made a post comparing different translations of the Final Fantasy VI opening narration. The last sentence variously becomes:

(source text:) 人はまた そのあやまちを 繰り返そうとしているのか…

(Woolsey:) Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?

(Slattery:) Could anyone truly be foolish enough to repeat that mistake?

(Sky Render:) Would this man be willing to destroy the world again for his own greed…?

(ark-shifter:) Could mankind really be on the verge of repeating such a mistake…?

All versions except the last one introduce phrases that do not correspond to anything in the source (”senseless and deadly”, “foolish enough”, “destroy the world”, “his own greed”), and per nostalgebraist’s post these additions don’t always make sense with respect to the rest of the story—but more to the point, why add them at all? Just translating the thing word-for-word seems to work just fine.

I guess my naïve expectation is that translators would work basically word-for-word unless there is any particular reason not to, while in the above examples the translators apparently took a much freer approach by default.

[rcksmith]

Not you — Five Hargreeves

Requests: “Five Hargreeves x fem!reader, Fluff prompts 9, 52 and 53, please? (You can do this whenever you feel like it) Five and Y/n are both hit by one of Hazel and Cha-Cha’s bullets in the Gimbel Brothers store and they immediately go to the academy (Five wants Y/n treated as soon as possible.) after they’re fine, the siblings start to question them on Five’s protectiveness over Y/n”

“Hii could I request 4 & 23 off the fluff prompts for Five pls ty 😌✨”

Fluff prompts:

4. “Sweetheart, you’re my entire world”

9. “So you're saying that girl is your girlfriend?!" "No, that girl is my wife!”

23. “i’ve dreamt about this.”

52. "Help her first."

53. “There are no limits when it comes to you. I’ll do anything to keep you safe.”

A/N: We not tolerate any pedophilia here !!

I write about Five with their 20s. I write the same about the characters of Harry Potter.

I hope you guys like💖I decided to compile these two requests, since they were the same energy and they prompts connect to a central plot. I added all the elements that were asked for individually, and made sure that all ideas were respected and written down. Good reading.

I used here some fragments of the central plot of Five, but, guys, keep in mind that he is 20 years old, and that when he comes back to 2019 Five does not make a mistake in the calculations. I changed the location of the fight too, but a really I hope you, Anon # 1, don't mind.

English is not my first language, so I so sorry if have a mistake.

Requests are open. Love you ❤️

Couple: Five Hargreeves / Fem! Reader.

Warnings: blood, mention of death, swearing, fluff too.

— — — — —

You remembered perfectly when you met Five Hargreeves, the commission's golden ball, The Handler's award-winning shamrock. If you closed your eyes, even after years, you could still smell the male cologne wafting in the air, and you could relive the same feeling in the pit of your stomach that you had when he looked at you with those obsedian eyes.

Five Hargreeves was gorgeous. Absurdly gorgeous. But absurdly arrogant, boastful, presumptuous and completely absent of any delicacy in relation to empathy and kindness. He was the type who would open the door for you to enter first, but who would be the first to make fun of your erroneous reasoning.

And that was why, at the time, when you were assigned to be his partner, you lived in conflict with what you really felt. It was a mixture of tantrum and physical attraction.

But unlike all the people around Five, when he spit fire at you with all the anger at his difficult temper, you didn't run. In fact, when it exploded the first time in front of you, you crossed your arms, arched an eyebrow and looked at him with boredom.

“Have you finished your show yet?” You said, as if you didn't care, leaning against the hood of the car while Five screamed through the 7 winds “Stop to imply with everything.”

Five had been your partner for a few months now and it became clearer each day that the irritation was mutual. He made it perfectly clear that you pissed him off until his last hair.

But, unlike you, it was for another reason.

Shit, you were a fucking goddess! Your beauty was notorious, but that was not all that caught his attention. You were smart, canny, brave, Five never saw you in fear of any situation or shaken by any scene of blood. You knew your goals and went after them. It was strong, decisive, and, goddamn, he loved it. You had a fist, you were firm, and you always made it very clear that you were no helpless maiden.

It felt like you had gotten out of his imagination, from the daydreams in which Five rambled about what kind of woman he admired. And, hell, you came with the full package. It was a combination of overwhelming beauty, intelligence, dexterity, and he never thought that someone like that could be real.

But of course you were. And now Five was completely irritated because you were real, and not just another his dream and daydream in which a sublime woman starred.

“To Imply?” Five turned to you, eyes on fire “To Imply?!”

“Like a 2-year-old who didn't take his afternoon nap. It's not the end of time, it doesn't have to be childish.”

Now Five felt himself ignite. He was a dry, rough fire and you were gasoline, igniting everything saw ahead.

Was that damn woman calling he a child?! You?! Just you, the person whose Five wanted to tie the bed and do all kinds of sinful things.

Oh hell no!

Five came forward, furious, like an angry god, his coal eyes never leaving your direction.

“Childish, isn't it?” He snarled “I'm going to show you the childish!”

Five held your face tightly in his hands and pressed your lips to his. Fierce, needy, set on fire, lost in half sentences of feelings about you. He slid his hands to the back of your neck, closing his fingers in your hair and invading your mouth with his tongue, letting you taste the caffeine, danger and lust he had.

You sighed, or Five, or both. You held him as close as he was, with the two of you being on the same mission: to conquer, to take, to possess. But Five had an extraordinary intensity, a magnitude that managed to win you

Then your touch became more docile, your kiss became submissive and you were surrendered. When Five walked away, not with his body, he still held you against him, but with his head, enough to look you in the eye, you sighed.

“I’ve dreamt about this.” You gave up your game, because you couldn't pretend anymore, and Five responded by kissing you again, this time tasting your whole mouth.

After that day, Five and you never came apart. You two were like a dynamic duo, crime partners in the morning and intense lovers at night.

But Five spent so much time with affection, love and caring being denied that when, on a night when work got the best of him, Five fell into the bed you shared in a Motel room, very close to your lap and you smiled sweetly and ran your fingers through his black hair, establishing the affection there, Five was catatonic.

His wild mind wanted to take it away and go, tell you to swallow those loving gestures and that he would never need them. That they were a nuisance, a distraction.

But his body and heart... well, they begged Five to stay another second. Just one more second enjoying that touch, the care, the importance that someone felt for him. He liked to be pampered, who knew.

So he ended up falling asleep with your touch and, after that day, Five realized that if his body and heart couldn't get any further from you, then no one would ever take you away from him. You would stay with him, until the end. As long as you wanted to stay.

And you wanted to. You wanted all the stages, all the moments, all the fights. You wanted Five, completely. And after some time like that, he said that you two were going to get married. It wasn't a request, it wasn't a speculation, it was a fact and that's it. You laughed, it was Five's style to be embarrassed about something and treat it more coarsely, just because he didn't know how to deal with the emotions he felt.

“Of course I do.” You reassured him by bringing your hands to his face, tracing affectionate circles on his cheek with your thumb.

“You would have no other option.” He grunted, not looking at you, trying to divert attention from his own racing heart.

You laughed and sealed the future of the two of you with a kiss.

After five years of making it official, Five said he had found a way for him to get home. And as he spoke, you noticed a flickering hesitation in his eyes. You knew, at that moment, that Five would leave it behind if there was a chance that you wouldn't want to go along. He promised to love you, in joy and sadness, in difficult times and in good times, and he never broke a promise.

Five Hargreeves would stay for you. In 1963, in 1988, in 2019, it didn't matter the season, the year. It wouldn't be worth anything if didn't have you by his side.

But, like him, it was logical that you would never abandon him, ever. So you went along. It was together in the murder in 1963, it was together at the time of the target, and it was together when he jumped in the portal. You were with Five when he reunited with his family, they all amazement by the 13 year old little brother who disappeared to reappear as a man of 25. On top of that accompanied by a girl.

But Five still couldn't administer his emotions properly, he still couldn't say that he missed his brothers and that being without his family had been terrible. His past contained many shipwrecks and he did not know how to open up about it. After so many years alone and then killing without any judgment, it was difficult to connect with emotions.

So, instead of saying everything that screamed inside him, after just some time with the siblings he took your hand and pulled you out, telling the Hargreeves that he would go after a decent coffee.

“I wish I could have talked to them better.” You grumble whit Five and he rolled his eyes.

“As if they were going to understand the things you were going to explain.” He murmured, covering the whole issue of the Commission and time jumps.

“This is not difficult to explain.” You raised your left hand, signaling the silver circle that hugged your finger.

Five laughed, sipping his coffee.

“You will be my wife forever, there is plenty of time for you to tell that.”

But as soon as Five's words had just left your lips, blowing in the air like fog, the door to the store opened, and you two didn't have to turn around to find out who they were. Years on the commission have earned you enough training to even recognize the sound of their footsteps.

The exchange of looks that Five and you gave was enough to know what each one was thinking and how they would act. That was your secret language, the superpower that you two shared. No words were needed to understand each one like the back of your hand.

You took a deep breath, while your fingers on your right hand steadied yourself on the coffee cup and Five on the knife. There was no waiting for speeches, exchanging words, you both knew that the Commission would send the best agents besides you, and Hazel and Cha-Cha were not known to be late at work.

Then the action started, Five turned and teleported with the knife, shoving it into the leg of one of the agents covered in rabbit masks. You didn't stay behind and swivel your chair around, throwing the sizzling coffee into the second's hands, causing him to drop the gun on the floor. You didn't wait to kick him in the chest, making him stagger backwards as you got up from the chair. You and Five were good, but so was Hazel and Cha-Cha, and you couldn't count on the powers to dodge physical attacks.

Everything was very fast indeed, windows were broken, punches were exchanged, blood was plucked. But when you looked to the side and saw who was probably Cha-Cha pushing Five against a broken glass stake, you understood why love at work was so dangerous. You understand completely. Because you've lost your focus. It took a thousandth of an instant for years of training and improvement to be thrown out the window. Only the possibility of Five getting hurt got you off track, and that was fatale.

The agent who fought with you took advantage of your distraction, reaching for the gun that was on the floor in that split second. And a shot reverberated through the place.

Suddenly, the world for Five stopped the axis. Everything was suspended, appalled, frozen. And in that very second, his body shivered from head to toe, as if misfortune had sighed in his neck. Five Hargreeves never feared anyone, even death itself. But as soon as he heard the sound of the shot, Five tasted death. Was rough, metallic and cruel, the blood drained from the body and the world released a dark and funeral note, sinking into a black sea.

Because fear is not the bullet hitting you, but someone you love.

Five turned back, eyes wide, hands shaking, and he didn't know what was beating faster: his fear or his heart.

He would remember that moment as the most cruel and frightening of his entire life, years in the apocalypse and killing had no comparison to the terror that was seeing your white shirt start to be stained with blood, the bullet hole marking your abdomen. You looked up at him, shocked, livid, and Five could see death perfectly, pulling the vitality out of your eyes.

He didn't think, he didn't reason, he just teleported himself to you, taking your body in his arms and teleported you two away from there. Five’s hands were shaking, a visceral pain snaking through his body and suffocating him with the worst sensation Five had ever felt in his life.

He took you both to the Hargreeves mansion in the blink of an eye, his powers failing when the blue flash left you both in the giant living room.

“Five!”

Maybe it was Luther's voice, or Klaus, or Diego, he didn't know. Everything was a distant echo, a note submerged in the water. Five saw or heard nothing but your body in his arms, your eyes closed and face frighteningly pale, his right hand, which was pressing on your wound, was already soaked in blood.

It was too much blood, the smell was overwhelming, and for the first time in a long time, Five Hargreeves was in despair.

Hands touched his shoulders, and Grace's voice was heard in the background. But he didn't want treatments, whatever the goddamn his wounds were going to be.

“Help her first!” Five shouted, his voice finding strength in the terror he felt. And also in fury.

The Handler would pay for that, and so would Hazel and Cha-Cha. And, by God, the whole world would pay if you never opened your eyes again.

“Right now.” Maybe it was Pogo “But, Five, are you…”

“No!” He ordered “She first!”

Then Grace's hands took you out of his arms and Five refused to leave you for even a second. He was beside you at the operating table, holding your hand, with him bloody fingers of your blood and the agent he had fought.

But Five didn't care about the himself state, the people around it, or anything. His eyes were focused on you, his face frozen in a livid expression.

And when Grace said that you would need a blood transfusion and Five barely let her finish speaking before rolling up the manga and extending his arm, the siblings Hargreeves and Pogo were shocked. What they saw in Five's eyes was not a man afraid of losing someone, but of losing the person he loved.

I shouldn't have come back. Was Five's first thought when the surgery ended well and you were still asleep. It was his fault that you almost died. And everything was buzzing in Five's head like a propellant.

“So…”

Klaus appeared in the kitchen, with the siblings, while Five was washing the blood from his hands, now calmer since you were alive.

“That was heavy.” Luther let out a little gasp, a kind of choked laugh.

“Aren't you going to tell us what happened?” Allison sat at the table.

“She almost died because of my decision, that's what happened.” Five replied, turning and picking up a cloth from the table, drying his hands.

“Five...” Allison made his eyes go towards his sister “Who is she, actually ?”

Five gave a bitter laugh. Who were you? How would he explain it?

You are everything. The reason wake up everyday was good, what made the summer breeze and the sun's rays warm, the reason why his world was still spinning.

Who were you? It was absolutely everything for Five.

“Someone very important.” His whispered escaped.

“So you're saying that girl is your girlfriend ?!" Luther looked at Five in shock, as if the possibility of him having a girlfriend was absurd.

“No.” Five looked at Luther with fire in his eyes, his voice hoarse “That girl is my wife!”

The room's breath evaporated, everyone was dumbfounded and bewildered. But Grace came in at that moment, saving Five from continuing that conversation.

“She woke up.” His mother's voice was soft, and Five dropped everything he was doing and disappeared into the blue flash.

The first thing he noticed when he entered that room was you sitting on the bed, your back against the headboard.

“Hey...” the smile you gave made Five's world spin again.

He didn't wait a second before walking up to you in quick steps, holding your face in his hands and sealing your lips in a desperate kiss, as if that could prove that everything was fine.

“I thought I lost you.” He whispered against your lips, hands shaking, thumbs stroking yours cheeks.

“Bad vase doesn't break early.” You joked and Five laughed softly, his forehead touching your. “Were you hurt?”

He denied it, still with you, as if letting you was impossible. Maybe it was.

“I got distracted, I'm sorry that we let them escape and...”

Five interrupted your sentence

“Sweetheart…” You stopped, bewitched by his tone of voice “You’re my entire world.”

Five wasn't calling Hazel and Cha-Cha right now. He would kill that entire Commission later. Later. Now the only thing that mattered was you.

“I shouldn't have broken our contracts with the commission. I shouldn't have put you in this.” He said “But ... but I am very selfish, and even though I knew it would be better to let you go back to the Commission, I cannot live without you...”

“Hey, I not go come back.” You held his hands that were on your face, looking at him with love "My place is with you.”

“I promise you that I will never let anyone else hurt you. Even if I have to kill every single person on this planet. ” Five guaranteed “There are no limits when it comes to you. I'll do anything to keep you safe. ”

You smiled, put your lips together in a passionate kiss and whispered:

“I only need you, my love. Forever.”

[scripttorture]

My setting is like the real world but with various mythical otherworlds secretly connected to ours. One character with powers of psychic illusion was raised by an MiB-style intelligence and/or secret police force (tasked with keeping otherworldly beings from causing trouble in our world) that trained her to mentally torture people. I want to make this character somewhat sympathetic, so it is plausible for her to be indoctrinated as a torturer from childhood? Does it depend how young they start?

Anon I don’t think this is a good idea. There’s an awful lot to unpack here about why that is so I’m going to start off with a simple question that effects how you move forward: what’s most important for you about this character?

 Is it that she’s sympathetic? That she’s effective at her job? That she’s highly skilled and trained? That she’s part of a productive organisation that can actually do the tasks it sets out to?

 Because if she’s a torturer then realistically she would be none of those things. And making her any of them is (in my opinion) torture apologia: because it is portraying a torturer in an extremely unrealistic way that favours the torturer and excuses the abuse they carry out.

 You would, literally, be repeating lies popularised by real life torturers.

 Torture does not work. It is impossible to get accurate, timely information by using torture. Here’s an introduction to why. Here’s a post on what torture does to investigations. Here’s a guide to writing what torture does to interrogations. Here’s a list of investigative strategies that actually work. Here’s a post on the damage torture does to human memory. Please read these masterposts and take a look at my sources as well.

 Torturers are not indoctrinated radicals. The organisations that torturers are part of actively try to screen out anything they see as radical, deviant or a product of illness. There aren’t enough studies on torturers for me to give you a break down of their politics but my impression from the anecdotes and interviews I’ve read? Their politics is ‘normal’ and mainstream for the organisation they are part of. Whatever that organisation is.

 Torturers are not taught from a young age because torture is not complex. It does not take months to learn how to hit someone. Torturers learn on the job by assisting other torturers.

 Torture is simple. It is functionally easy. I really can’t stress that enough. The most common tortures globally right now are: hitting people, depriving them of food and depriving them of sleep. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that six year olds could come up with that list.

 Hurting people is not complicated. It requires no skill and no training.

 The evidence we have suggests torturers lose skills as they turn to torture, a process Rejali calls ‘de-skilling’. The basic idea is pretty simple: if you spend all day hitting people instead of practicing what you were trained for (gathering evidence for example) you get so out of practice that you start to forget how to do those things.

 And then there’s the effect that torture has on torturers. They get symptoms. They develop lasting, serious, mental health problems which directly effect their ability to do their jobs.

 I have a list of the common symptoms here as well as a rough guide for how many symptoms you should be considering for torturers and torture survivors.

 Separate to the symptoms is the general pattern of behaviour torturers exhibit. We don’t have a lot of high quality studies on torturers and there are a lot of questions we do not have clear answers to. However the studies and the anecdotal evidence of survivors, witnesses and torturers themselves points to some consistent behaviours.

 Torturers don’t work alone. They form little sub-cultures within larger organisations. These groups are incredibly aggressive, competitive, self-important, hyper-masculine and violent. Torturers look down on everybody else. They are convinced that they are the most important people in their organisation, the only one’s doing ‘real work’. They have an arrogant, puffed up pride that combines with mental illness and seeing their colleagues as competition to create the worst asshole you’ve ever had the misfortune of working with.

 They do not cooperate with other people. They use abuse as a pissing contest, competing to see who can be the most brutal in order to try and ‘impress’ fellow torturers.

 They define strength and group loyalty by hurting other people.

 They have a fracturing effect on organisations, because they don’t obey orders and see their colleagues as competition or useless. At the low end of the scale this means cliques, secrets from the larger organisation and a terrible working environment as they bully and belittle their colleagues. At the high end of the scale there are cases where torturers have attacked and murdered people within the same organisation.

 Does any of that sound sympathetic?

 I like a challenge when I write. I’ve described my writing style as ‘hold my beer’ because I tend to take ideas other people dismiss as impossible to pull off and try my best to make them work. I do this because I love exploring human complexity through fiction.

 A torturer who is currently torturing is not a sympathetic person. They are a bullying, violent, arrogant brute who contributes nothing useful to the organisation they latch on to, sucking up time and resources like a tick. They see other people as garbage. And they lack insight into their own crimes. Which means they do not appreciate or acknowledge the pain and damage they cause.

 Now I have written a character who is an ex-torturer who I think is sympathetic in some ways. But getting to the point where they could be sympathetic meant them having to leave the organisation they were part of on a stretcher.

 Their fellow torturers turned on them. They lost a leg. They changed sides and in the middle of a messy civil war they dedicated themselves to keeping their friend’s children safe.

 And I had to set the story twenty years after these events to get that character out of their own ass enough for them to be sympathetic.

 Even then, I’d say they’re sympathetic in spite of having been a torturer. Because they’re still clinging to that insistence that they did something meaningful. They still can’t accept the extent of their own crimes or the effects those crimes had.

 But their pride broke. And they did keep those children alive. They helped raise them. And the tie to those children is what makes them sympathetic by the time of the story.

 Torturers are not sympathetic people. They are self absorbed abusers who bend over backwards to downplay the harm they did to their victims and to justify their crimes.

 Is that really what you want to write?

 I say that, not to be harsh, but because it sounds to me as though what you actually want to write is a genuine investigator with psychic powers.

 It sounds as though you want to write a character who is good at her job. Who is skilled and dedicated and a great person to work with.

 If that’s the case my advice is to ditch the torture entirely. Look at the masterpost on genuine investigation instead and write a character who is good at interviewing people.

 Have her use her psychic powers to present herself as sympathetic to the criminals she’s interviewing. Because she can walk into a room and know their politics, their religious beliefs, their internal justifications for what they’ve done. And she can use that, may be even manipulatively, to seem like someone the prisoner would like, someone they’d agree with.

 That gets people talking.

 And if you want to show her as ruthless, as having an edge to her, that can still work.

 Imagine someone sitting down across from a suspect, holding their hands, smiling, talking to them gently. Imagine them gradually, kindly, getting this suspect’s life story. Imagine them being sympathetic about the reason the suspect murdered someone, validating the murder’s feelings and may be even actions… Right up until they have the information they need.

 Then they turn on a dime. The persona drops, the false-sympathy drains away. They stand up with a sneer and say they hope the murderer never sees the light of day again. And walk out.

 Think about what you want from the story Anon. A character who tortures, or a character who is competent, smart and sympathetic.

 Because it really is one or the other.

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[outoftheframework]

characterization cheat sheet: the batfamily boys

Hey everyone! I had the idea to compile a comprehensive list of different traits and attributes for each member of the batfamily based off of both canon and fanon interpretations. I think this could be useful for new members to the fandom, or those looking to write and/or draw for these characters. Remember that these will have a slight bias considering I, a fanon creator, am creating the lists. But I’ll try to make them as accurate as possible.

Appearances vary from artist to artist, so I’ll try to stray away from general details and add more little things you can consider in your art.

Bruce Wayne:

Age: 35-45

Appearance: Extremely physically fit, but signs of aging and prolonged exertion can slip through. Has a collection of scattered scars varying from fresh to fully healed. Strong, dark features. Conventionally attractive, but can easily switch to be foreboding/intimidating. Well kept in public appearances, but can look like death incarnate when in private.

Personality: Dual personas: “Bruce” (at home, but not as batman) and “Brucie” (public appearances like galas, news interviews). Bruce is stoic, well-read and educated, well-mannered, and occasionally can be witty and laid-back. Smirks rather than smiles. Brucie is loud, spontaneous, charming, and sometimes oblivious. He is the womanizer and scandal-maker. Often the actions of Brucie are motivated by Batman’s interests.

Speech: Bruce was mainly raised by as English butler, so his speech patterns are proper and smooth. Rarely uses speech fillers such as “uh” and “um,” except when interrupted while concentrating. Despite living in Gotham his entire life, he has not picked up the accent. His voice is newscaster American, almost impossible to pinpoint to a certain region. His speech as Brucie changes to relate more to the audience he is addressing. Speeches to Gotham high society will sound different than those aimed to the general public.

Additional Attributes: Bruce Wayne in all of his personalities is fiercely protective, and can easily slip into a deeper voice to intimidate. Bruce can be extremely empathetic and slightly impulsive when it comes to children who have lost their parents. As learned through his training to become Batman, Bruce is disciplined and can work for hours straight.

Dick Grayson:

Age: 23-29

Appearance: Dick Grayson mirrors a young Bruce Wayne despite their not being blood related. This could be a subconscious action by Dick to absorb traits of his father figure. His lean acrobatic body starts to set him apart from Bruce’s image. Dick manages to be well-built but still limber and flexible. His feet and hands are rough and calloused. His hair can get long but usually stays at a length in between Bruce’s and Tim’s. His eyes are bright blue without even a hint of green or brown. 

Personality: In one comic I believe it was Superman who said that Dick Grayson is a universal constant, meaning that on every alternate earth or timeline, you can always rely on him to be good and pure. I think this really sums up who Dick should be. He is kind to a fault, and can sometimes be naive and not think things through. He loves to love, be that in his family, in his romantic relationships, in his friendships, and even in strangers. He is a chronic hero who only wants to see the world as a better place. But it’s important to note that Dick can get angry when pushed, and holds grudges.

Speech: Dick is an extremely interesting study in speech patterns. As a child he traveled with the circus, until he lived with clear-spoken Bruce Wayne and a proper English butler. So influences to his speech and accent come both internationally and locally to Gotham and Bludhaven. As a child living at Wayne Manor, Dick picks up a slight Gotham tinge to his accent with some British flourish in his vowel sounds. He regularly speaks in slang. As Nightwing he is able to suppress his unique speech to sound more evenly American.

Additional Attributes: Dick acts differently around each of his family members as to be what they need in a big brother. For example, he is more fatherly to Damian while to Tim he is more an equal. Dick can fidget and has less of an attention span than Bruce. He can use jokes as a coping mechanism.

Jason Todd: 

Age: 22-26

Appearance: Hair is often long on top and shorter on the sides, sometimes with a white streak as a side effect from the Lazarus Pit. Tallest and heaviest of all the kids, very physically intimidating. Has a lot of scars and burns, and in some fan works he has a “Y” shaped scar the length of his chest from his autopsy. Never skips leg day. Green/blue eyes.

Personality: Jason goes through a lot of character development, but for this list I’m going off a timeline of post-Under the Red Hood, where Jason is on okay, yet still a little shaky, terms with the rest of the family. Jason has a hard time separating vigilante life and civilian life; his death as Robin ended his life as Jason Todd, blurring the lines between the two. Jason is legally dead, so he is basically building an identity back up. He holds some attributes from childhood: brave, impulsive, loud-mouthed, and street-smart. But his experiences post-Robin have made him a hardened loner. He lives modestly and with some semblance of order. He’s hard to foster a relationship with, but can be a passionate friend/family member when he opens up.

Speech: Jason probably has the least influence from Bruce and Alfred’s speech patterns, seeing as though he spent a lot more time with his biological family/on the streets than he did as a preteen in the manor. He is the definition of Gotham vernacular, with a rough edge. So much so that as a child, the high society gala attenders sometimes had a hard time understanding him. Often talks in curt, short sentences.

Additional Attributes: He has trouble expressing his emotions, more specifically anger and/or grief. Can both love or hate furiously. Inherently good, but sometimes does “bad” things. Protective over children, especially those living on the street. Very much a believer in “the ends justify the means.”

Tim Drake:

Age: 17-20

Appearance: Pale skin, dark hair. Sharp cheek bones and jawline, mostly from how skinny he is. His body isn’t technically “built” to be extremely athletic, but he’s forced a nice lean build from stringently working out. Easily loses and gains weight as a direct result of his work, causing fluctuations in his build. Five foot something, will eventually be out-grown by Damian. Long hair that can still be styled to look professional.

Personality: Tim Drake is very passionate in pretty much everything he sets his mind to. He feels as though he imposed himself onto Batman to become Robin, so he works twice as hard to prove his worth. He can be self conscious and deprecating. Tim as Robin or Red Robin is very different than civilian Tim; his hero personas can be bolder and more confident. Despite dropping out of high school, he values education.

Speech: Tim grew up rich, and his speech reflects an intelligence gained from private tutors. Despite this, he knows how to interact with those his age in using less formal language and slang. Often quotes books and movies. Can be awkward and stumble over his words when teased by his friends/family. He can manipulate people easily in business settings by talking fast and confidently while explaining complex topics.

Additional Attributes: Tim’s demeanor is directly tied to his varying levels of confidence and anxiety. Tim is has above-average intelligence and is diligent in detective work, but can still act like a teenager. He can be stubborn to extremes and will patiently play the long con. He does not cope well with loss.

Duke Thomas:

Age: 17-19

Appearance: Short dark hair, shaved on the sides and/or the back. Often wears the colors yellow and black. Around the same height as Tim, but a little taller. Stronger and heavier build more alike to Jason than Dick, but he’s still light on his feet. Expressive face that can give away his feelings easily. Still a bit of a baby face, but he’s still well-proportioned and conventionally handsome.

Personality: In my works, I’ve often described Duke as having a “sun-shiny” personality. He is one to not even think twice about putting others before himself. Duke uses his own personal experiences to guide him as a hero rather than suppress his emotions. Duke went from being an only child to having a large family, so he can sometimes feel overwhelmed. He is on friendly terms with every member of the batfamily, as well as many other heroes. Duke is self-sacrificial and is still learning how to effectively work as a detective.

Speech: Duke grew up in a middle class Gotham family, so his speech is influenced by his parents as well as his city environment. Duke has a mild Gotham accent and speaks a lot in modern slang. He hasn’t had much influence from Bruce and Alfred, considering he hasn’t lived with them for long. It’s possible that as he grows he will pick up some influences from Bruce and Tim’s way of speaking, but will most likely hold onto the accent of his childhood.

Additional Attributes: Duke is a metahuman vigilante in a city where Batman typically bans them, which causes a bit of an insecurity and a perfectionist drive. These are exasperated by the long line of history preceding him, as well as the fact that he involved himself in the Robin movement rather than being handpicked by Batman. He and Tim can relate in that way. Duke is an ardent student of Batman and is dedicated to the cause.

Damian Wayne:

Age: 10-14

Appearance: Looks similar to Bruce when he was the same age, yet stronger and with tanner skin. His hair is expertly cut and styled, but still age-appropriate. He is the shortest of the batkids, but still has a lot of time and potential to grow. He pretty much won the genetics lottery with Bruce and Talia as his biological parents, and is made for athletics. He has some scars that stand out with their pale coloring against his tan skin. 

Personality: Damian is slowly becoming less of a brat, to put it bluntly. He admires his family and tries to mimic them, but will never confess it. Damian is quick to judge and will voice his opinion no matter how scathing it may be, both as civilian and hero. Damian is slowly realizing he may not want the Batman mantle as quickly as he planned. Jon is a perfect foil to Damian, and often makes him a better person when they’re together. 

Speech: His speech is proper and formal. Prefers formal titles: ex. “father” over “dad” and last names over first. Damian is at least bilingual (Arabic and English), and can switch between languages easily. Most of his speech patterns developed from his tutors in the League, and more recently, Alfred. Influences like Jon and Dick have introduced him to a more modern, laid-back way of speaking, which he sometimes utilizes when relaxed.

Additional Attributes: Damian has problems with authority, especially those that he doesn’t respect like his teachers at school. He can be arrogant and childish ever though he often acts like he knows everything. Damian is still a child and has much to learn from batman and family as well as unlearn from his time at the League. Dami was forged to be a ruthless warrior, but now has to find a balance between the hero Robin and the child Damian Wayne.

Hope this helps someone! Feel free to add on if you think I missed anything. Just please remember to be civil and respect different interpretations of these characters. Let me know if you want another one of these posts outlining the girls or other characters.

[algernoninwonderland]

Kagami Tsurugi, Character Integrity and the mess that was ‘Lie‘

This is Kagami Tsurugi.

She is Japanese, comes from a lineage of Samurai, industrialists and Olympic sabre fencers, and her mother wants her to follow in the footsteps of her family. Tomoe Tsurugi's parenting style has made Kagami into a perfectionist when it comes to competitive sabre fencing and most things involving anything resembling competitions in general. Kagami is an assertive girl who has been taught not to tolerate mediocrity and failure. She resents that in everyone, including herself.

She does well in formal situations, say, a prince's birthday or a premiere at a cinema, because all of these have their sets of rules and protocols to follow which can ultimately be taught, learned and mastered. She knows her place as her mother’s daughter and a star fencer.

Kagami is also a very lonely. She hasn't been shown to have had friends back in Japan, or any attachments back there, really. Underneath her cool (or rather, icy cold) facade is a lonely socially awkward kid, she has this whole idea of what friendship should be like and of how to make friends and it includes following a long protocol, because she has little faith in her social skills, and is actually quite insecure about how likeable she is. She’s blunt, and it may come off as harshness even though it’s not the way she intended it.

Kagami has no spontaneity at all when it comes to non-normative situations, and friendship, for instance, isn't nearly as normative and codified as, say, heteronormative romance.

But here's the thing: she doesn't want to be lonely, and her mother's parenting style makes her miserable. She'd even be ready to break a few rules if it meant she could have a better, happier life. If she has to lie by omission (she isn't good at improv at all) or to sneak out, then so be it, she's willing to take her chance and willing to face whatever punishment her mother has in store for her if she gets caught, because not trying to make new friends and to try new things is worse than being punished. She wants to have a life, and as it turns out, breaking the rules actually amuses her.

See what this is right here? Outside of the whole kind of stereotypically racist nonsense about family honour and ancestral traditions, it's damn fine character writing. Kagami Tsurugi has been one of the better-written characters in Miraculous, with the most consistency and coherency.

[this is the moment when the record scratch sound effect kicks in]

Wow, would you look at this, season 4 of Miraculous is starting to air and Kagami was replaced with a character that looks like her and has the same voice actress but isn't Kagami Tsurugi, outside of a half-minute window during which the original character reappears to tell us that she likes drawing things now. Admittedly, it’s a neat thirty seconds, but outside of that...

In 'Lie', the character that looks and sounds like Kagami Tsurugi is suddenly good at improv and lies to the face of two adults by spinning stories out of nowhere, unblinkingly, without being nervous about facing the consequences at all.

In ‘Lie’, the character named Kagami Tsurugi suddenly takes sabre fencing lightly enough to try and kiss her boyfriend in the middle of a bout.

In ‘Lie’, the character the show has decided is Kagami Tsurugi acts smart with her mother, almost cocky.

In ‘Lie’, this ‘Kagami Tsurugi’ acts violently against her now ex-boyfriend and former friend in the presence of one of the best-regarded fencing masters in Paris, during the middle of one of his lessons.

I know that being in love supposedly changes people, and that's the in-universe reason for Kagami's behaviour but you'll have to admit, these are rather radical changes, aren’t they? And rather sudden ones, too, sure there were hints of Kagami's playfulness before, hints of her insecurities, but this is something else entirely.

But, I hear you say, it’s good that characters change, you always complain that our main two characters are stagnant. To which I’ll answer that character development is good but it doesn’t happen overnight, and if a character is so altered in the span of exactly two episodes with only a very fishy in-universe explanation, then it’s not exactly great, now, is it?

Kagami’s integrity as a character is thrown away for the sake of ship drama, ‘Lie’ leaves the audience with a weirdly warped image of what the character from seasons 2 and 3 was because the character needed to be more extreme and simple to fit the narrative and themes of the episode.

I would have been fine with about any changes to the character had the show taken the time to introduce them progressively. It hasn’t.

What the show does with its characters, rewriting them so that they can play a thematically-relevant role in whatever episode they appear in... It’s cheap, and it insults its audience’s intelligence.

[river-bottom-nightmare]

Nightwing 83 Review

guess who isn't weeks late this time. my opinion of the series is going up a little bit. it's still not great, but i'm not actively put off by it anymore the way i was after 81. not going to tag as spoilers, but be warned that they are under the cut

i’m sure you all are well aware of this but now, but dear god i love bruno redondo’s art. like, an unhealthy amount. the pink and blue is getting to be a theme with either him or just this run, but i am definitely enjoying it. the movement in this cover is clearly obvious, but well done. you recoznize right off the bat that the cover was drawn to drag your eyes down the page until you get to the bottom, but you enjoy the whole ride there. 

also, redondo’s way of drawing a character in stages of action so we can see just how much they’re doing in a split second of movement is quickly becoming something i like to see drawn with dick, and any other character that has that sort of ease of movement and body sense, like cass or sin or maybe a super. 

and he’s in action the entire time! there’s shot drawn just to show off a shirtless comic book character, the way nightwing is so often subjected to. he’s shirtless because he’s changing his clothes, and that’s all we see, no more and no less. very practical, very well done. i like it.

he looks so cute right here oh my god. the little squint, the hair curls. it’s adorable.

but also like. unless melinda has specifically outfitted the door spyhole so that the person on the other side can’t see dick looking through it (and in all honesty she might have) then everyone on the other side can see dick looking through that door. 

bringing your attention back to the “i can’t see melinda’s fbi file oh no!! it’s redacted!! whatever can we do!!” stupidity. redacted files are child’s play for oracle, and definitely doable for both dick and bruce. so that’s bullshit.

now, melinda apparently grew up with the maroni family, then took down part of the family from the inside. the maroni family is a large and notable presence in gotham, one that bruce pays a respectable amount of attention to. he definitely would have grown suspicious when two members of the maroni family were taken down, and with some investigation, he would have discovered melinda’s plan. and it should go without saying that the majority of things you see batman doing? dick can do it too.

it’s not so much that i don’t like how clever the villains/antiheroes are getting. i don’t like how dc heroes are increasingly written as less intelligent. they seem to be relying on pure fighting skills or luck, which may be the case for a couple heroes, but has never been the case for most of dc’s big name heroes, the bat family included. it’s irritating to me to see this sort of stuff pop up as a major plot point when i know that, if dick or bruce had been written with the amount of skill and power that they canonically possess, this entire mess would have been sorted out years ago.

unrelated but dick and melinda have the same hair

this may just be me, but i was always under the impression that dick doesn’t really have a “double life???”

yes, he’s talented enough to create enough differences between robin/nightwing and dick grayson’s mannerisms, way of movement, voices, and speech patterns so that it’s very difficult to put the two together.

but nightwing has never been separate from dick grayson, not the way bruce and batman is. he’s always leaned more towards clark in that aspect: his hero persona is an exaggerated, stately, larger-than-life version of who he really is. there’s no second persona, no real “dick grayson identity” and “nightwing identity.” they’re the same person with the same goals, ideas, and skills. one just pretends to abide by the law, and one gives up pretense of that.

oh good thank god. if he’d trusted her right off the bat (hehe. bat.) i would have slapped him upside the head. at least he’s still got instincts.

gosh the colouring on this is cool. the red has enough purple and pink tones to it that it doesn’t abruptly ruin the tone of the artwork. but it’s definitely glaring enough to take the reader outside of this personal moment they had slipped into between dick and melinda, to put them back in the present where they’re reminded that oh yea there are people hunting dick down. 

the next panel keeps this up too, in a less severe way. melinda’s bodyguard shows up (i forgot her name sorry :[ ) and subtly places us in the middle of an action scene rather than a private, personal scene.

laughing so fucking hard have our little vigilantes grown so accustomed to breaking into places that it doesn’t even register as a crime anymore??? tim coming in through the fire escape to pick bernard up for their date and being very much confused as to why bernard is freaking out.

i really like melinda’s shirt and now despite all the work i have to do and the fucking conference i have to host on monday i want to spend hours scrolling through clothing shops online trying to find this shirt. the mock neck/neckline is so cool i want it

so roland just assumes that a very dangerous vigilante who is highly talented in combat and a very dangerous bodyguard who is also highly talented in combat had a fight that ended with this very dangerous bodyguard being tied up and she looks completely fine? roland just assumes that her having no visible wounds or bruises means that they got into a fight and she lost that easily? uh. aight then

dick what are you doing. legitimately what the fuck are you doing. why are you posing oh my god. you are injured and tired and in absolutely no position to go hand to hand with one of main enemies. jesus christ run away or head to lower ground or something. don’t just stand around letting the floodlights show exactly where you are.

i don’t understand what he’s trying to do here??? blockbuster fully bought the story that dick fought them both, won, tried to get info out of them and failed, then hightailed it out of there. he didn’t have to draw roland out for a fight.

but it does look cool. the way the light just highlights his silhouette and the blue parts of his costume does look badass. he does get style points in my book for this.

w h a t  d i d  i  f u c k i n g  t e l l  y o u ,  d i c k ?

very classic superhero line and it does sound like something dick would say in a fit of righteous rage but also it makes me laugh so hard because all vigilantes think they’re so powerful that the law doesn’t apply to them. dick vigilantism is illegal. you’re acting above the law and pretending it doesn’t apply to you. hypocritical much?

it happens so often in superhero movies, tv shows, comics, whatever and it makes me giggle every damn time.

pretty decent comeback but before i start seeing people writing blockbuster as a thug i’m going to remind you that he made a deal with a demon for genius level intellect. if this turns into another bane situation i’m going to be a little miffed. he’s a smart man, which makes him a dangerous and infinitely more interesting enemy for nightwing.

this is so horribly in character i want to scream. (or. at least. it lines up with one of the versions of nightwing i have in my head.) he’s running right towards the bullets, miraculously doesn’t get shot, while making a sort-of pun. i hate this so much. i love him.

this is cool. this art is really really cool.

he leaped from a building right towards a helicopter that’s actively shooting at him, but none of the bullets are touching him. none of the corruption of the city can touch him no matter how hard it tries, because he’s too good to be corrupted. Comic Book Logic Can Be Good Sometimes Actually.

batman’s belt what??? swiss army knife who?? sorry, i only know nightwing’s bright blue escrima.

this is one of my favourite things about heroes with exceptional abilities, even more so if the hero is human. the things they can do are so far beyond the realm of normal human abilities that it’s equal parts terrifying and awe-inspiring every time they act.

he just used modified grappling wires to hook to the door of a moving helicopter, swung around the helicopter safely without hitting the blades, gained exactly the right momentum to swing upward again right through the opening of helicopter, then fought and tied up the men before they had any idea what was happening. that’s near impossible to do.

it’s stuff like this where i just sort of sigh in contentment. no matter how many times they leave out dick’s detective skills or conveniently forget that he’s actually a master planner and team leader and make him out to be this forgetful dude who makes everything up on the fly because of his “circus roots,” at least they won’t ever take away dick’s sheer physical ability honed to perfection. 

the art, too! in a few panels, dick’s drawn a little lightened or blurred. he’s moving so quickly and fighting so efficiently that he can barely be seen by the enemy. he’s got perfect form all the way through.

and THIS!

there was a helicopter that had five men shooting at him with what looks like machine guns. most people would be dead. some would run away, and be nimble enough to survive without fatal hits. there are very few people, even in fucking comic books, who can look at that hopeless situation and turn it around so quickly and thoroughly that he benefits from it instead.

i just. love nightwing.

it was funny the first time as a comic reader aware of the meme. it’s really not anymore. why the hell would you, in universe, be wearing a shirt that has a picture of your boyfriend being hit in the face by his father. 

okay that was funny. 

look at lil bitewing, so concerned for her human!!! love her sm. 

also a question as to the timeline of things. is nightwing happening before or after urban legends? 

i was so distracted by dick wearing a robe and briefs and nothing else that i didn’t register the second part until later. he slept for two days?? babs, baby, he recently had a very traumatic brain injury. why do you sound so nonchalant?

@TIM X COFFEE SHIPPERS GET FUCCCCKKKKEEDDDDD

ngl i totally forgot about that dude oops

this comic is giving so many reaction pictures. you know how you always use the worst possible picture of your friend for your friend’s contact picture? i’m just getting so many of these.

leslie!!! the titans!!! lucius!!! dick going to go see old friends!!!! the titans!!! this part made me so irrationally happy it really did. gar being the one to just. offer dick solutions with open arms. this was the best

i wish i could just copy and paste this entire scene, but that would take up way too much space, so i’m just going to talk about it instead. 

you gave me my name, nightwing, and you gave me some of the best advice i’ve received in my life: beautiful little throwback to nightwing’s origin. you’d be surprised at the amount of people who don’t know where the name came from, or who don’t know how much clark means to dick. and the fact that dick still looks up to clark as a hero, recognizes that clark isn’t always perfect and yet continues to hold him in such high esteem, and still looks back on advice that clark gave him fondly just warmed my heart so much.

for a man who has fearlessly stood up to darkseid, bruce will do a lot to avoid a conversation: “grrr. i’m the BATMAN. i’m so DARK and MYSTERIOUS. nobody knows the true me. no one ever will. i will be LONELY for the rest of my CURSED LIFE. such is the price of a hero. ignore my farmer himbo husband in the background”

but i don’t think there’s anything heroic about being a billionaire: another nod to how much dick follows clark’s example rather than bruce. yes, this was a very poignant and important criticism, and i think it’s wonderful that this was published in a pretty popular comic book. but the thing is, there is a way to be a heroic billionaire, but only in fictional universes. the way bruce, ollie, t’challa only ever use their wealth to help people. they donate massive amounts of money to charities that they themselves create so they know exactly how the money is being used. they hire people who aren’t likely to get jobs anywhere else and pay them much more than what a base living wage is. they use their power to help push progressive laws and social change. they are helping. 

dick doesn’t fully see it that way. he spent more than half his childhood the son of a billionaire, but still believes that one could be more heroic when one doesn’t have obscene amounts of wealth. whose example do you think he followed to come to that conclusion?

superman looked up to alfred pennyworth?: i mean yea alfred may have been a wildly irresponsible guardian and one hell of an enabler but goddamn if he didn’t love his kid.

you don’t need my input. you’ve thought it all through: ooooooh this line made me grin. for so long, dick’s treated clark as a mentor and a guiding figure. he’s still seen as a kid, an up and coming, snot-nosed titan with dreams of a better world. clark still thinks of him as a kid, despite watching him grow up. but this little line was something i think dick needed sorely to hear. he doesn’t need anyone’s guiding hand on his shoulder, he doesn’t need to ask for permission. he doesn’t need clark to support him the way he did when he was a teenager. he’s all grown up now, and he doesn’t need clark’s help. i imagine it was a bit of a surprise for dick to hear that. 

honestly, i couldn’t think of a better role model: ohhh but it doesn’t stop there. clark just straight up turns the tables on dick. imagine you’re dick, and you’ve looked up to this one hero your entire life, and then one day he turns to you and says that he thinks you’re so kind and smart and worthy of a person that he wants you to mentor his son!? goes to show just how much clark trusts dick.

i swear to god dick probably cries every time he hears clark compliment him because bruce is so rare and sparing with his praise that clark giving him the slightest hint of approval is just a dopamine rush.

also, now deathstroke and superman have both asked nightwing to mentor their kids. the juxtaposition is fuckin hysterical. imagine either of their reactions when they realize what kind of company they’re with

lets talk colours for a second, because i absolutely adore how classic colour tropes have been subverted in this comic, and in this general run really.

warm tones have usually (usually, not always) been associated with light and comfort and friendship and,,,,,well,,,warmth. whereas cool tones are usually used to unsettle, or make a scene seem colder and put the reader on edge. this varies if a comic only uses cool tones, or only uses warm tones, but if a comic uses both, this is generally well-used.

that isn’t the case in this run.

dark red, orange, and other warm tones have been used to symbolize danger, action, attacks. hot pink isn’t usually included in this colour group, but it’s definitely part of it in this case. in contrast, scenes that have cool colours give us the impression of slipping into a comfortable, calm scene with babs, tim, the titans, and other allies. even the beginning scene with superman has this blue, but then it transitions into something more golden coloured. dawn broke over dick, as his new idea came to light, and that was reflected in the art (and the sunrise setting.)

have there ever been times when dick’s longed for the comfort of his mask because he didn’t feel confident as dick grayson? i can’t think of any. i may be wrong, but this struck me as pretty ooc.

am i just??? gay and reading this all wrong??

cause i was under the impression that when someone says they are grateful for your friendship you don’t immediately kiss them. 

or is this like. normal straight mating rituals.

i mean he’s smiling afterward but still babs aren’t you supposed to at least make sure it’s okay first? you guys broke up a while back after you said something along the lines of “i want to be coworkers with you and nothing more because i don’t trust you or feel comfortable around you as a civilian anymore.” like lmao after you say something like that to someone i would assume that you don’t have the permission to just kiss them whenever you want.

show of hands who else got real sad when they realized dick was talking about himself in this.

sure, he could be referencing the things he’s seen blockbuster pull, and the children on the streets. but “i’ve seen money used for enforcement,” sounds a little too close to dick’s entire life being destroyed by one man threatening the circus to pay protection money for me to completely ignore. and “i’ve seen the poorest and most vulnerable blamed and punished rather than assisted” becomes a lot worse when you remember dick was thrown in juvie for a couple months until bruce was able to obtain legal guardianship, and in there, not a authority figure believed him when he told them his parents were murdered.

he’s lived this before.

a. mother. fucking. typo.

fucking why

i mean i’ve stated my distaste for the batfamily groupchat before but like. this is reaching new levels of ridiculousness. jason sounds like he was written by a fanfic writer. tim sounds like he was written by a fanfic writer. steph sounds like she was written by someone who doesn’t know the first thing about steph and wanted to include her for “family points!!!!!” damian’s supposed to be completely off the grid, and everyone’s searching for him. i do love the way cass texts tho.

well god fuck now i’m crying

dick got a phone call, a sorry, and a thank you out of bruce. i feel so much secondhand happiness for him, if that’s a thing. we’ll just ignore the way bruce looks ugly af and focus on the good parts okay?

and again with the colour symbolism here!

i’m either going to love this or hate this. who knows, we’ll see.

something something hearts something something pink is an evil colour something something. i need to know more about this guy but there’s definitely symbolism there. 

is it just me or does this dude look like the backstabbing traitorous absolutely motherfucking piece of shit villain that killed tadashi hamada in big hero 6?

~~

taggggg list: @woahjaybird @birdy-bat-writes @anothertimdrakestan  @subtleappreciation @screennamealreadyused @bikoncon @pricetagofficial @catxsnow @maplumebleue-blog-blog @sundownridge @thatsthewhump @xatanna-troy @red-hood-redemption​ @capricorn-stark​ @batshit-birds​ @comics-observer @buticaaba​ 

[nightswithkookmin]

Hii, me again. 😅

Jungkook made a three syllable poem with "min yoongi" name. At the last name of "Gi" He made yoonmin. Is he try to expose that yoonmin is a thing/ or real??

Ahjumma.... why are you being like this?

What did I do to deserve this ghettory?😟 It's too early in the year to be this ghetto uno.

Don't be like that😒

You are asking me, Goldy- GOLDY of all shippers, if I think JEON JUNGKOOK is confirming his boyfriend of seven years and counting is in a relationship with another member within the same group...

Doing what exactly in that relationship??

Is JK cockholding? What's going on.

KWENCHANAYO?!

You think BTS will survive two members dating the same guy in the same group???

Never mind that it's Jeon Jungkook and Park freaking Jimin- Mr I'm greedy and Mr I don't share my friends.

Like make it make sense to me please😭

After everything we've been said on my blogs for months now, you still asking me this??

You are bold, I'll give you that.

Now tell me slowly and in coherent words why I shouldn't pull your hair and give you three quick punches to your throat- ninja style👀

Someone get her before I snap their neck💀

For the last time-

NEITHER 🤺OF🤺JIKOOK🤺 IS 🤺 WAS🤺 HAS🤺 HAD🤺 PURPORTS TO HAVE🤺 WOULD HAVE HAD🤺 COULD HAD HAD🤺 HAD HAD HAD🤺IS HAVING 🤺 ANY 🤺ROMANTIC🤺 FEELINGS🤺WHATSOEVER 🤺 DESIRE🤺CRAVING🤺 WET DREAMS🤺 YEARNING🤺 PASSION🤺ATTRACTION🤺 AMOROUS 🤺INTENT🤺TOWARDS🤺 ANY🤺🤺MEMBER🤺 IN🤺 BTS🤺BESIDES🤺 EACH🤺 OTHER🤺

GET🤺 OUT 🤺OF🤺 YOUR🤺 IMAGINATION🤺

If you are new to the shipping community I suggest you familiarize yourself with every ships dynamics or at least Jikooks- if multishipping isn't exactly your thing.

Jikook's entire dynamics is founded on JK teasing JM to death. It's their thing.

He's said he enjoys teasing Jimin because he loves Jimin's reaction to when he's being teased. In fact, the entire group have said same about Jimin.

Did you see JM's reaction to when JK called out the Yoonmin comment in the dynamite reaction VLive?

Did you see RMs reaction too?

He is trying Jimin with these Yoonmin jokes. He's gonna get stabbed. Lmho.

Jimin reacts strongly to when JK in particular teases him with ships, Yoonmin more recently. Yet he didn't seem to mind when V did it.

V used to be the biggest Yoonminer on the planet rooting for and encouraging certain interactions between Yoonmin. Lmho.

Jimin himself perpetuates Yoonmin as a ship.

It would be an insult on his intelligence for anyone to assume he didn't know exactly why people ship two people together or what interactions and moments is considered a moment in shipping sphere.

Statements like, why can't Suga hyung look me in the eye, why does he say I'm irreplaceable to him, insinuates something and he knows this.

Once upon a time, JK couldn't look you in the eyes too. Still can't sometimes.

Jimin has a presence and he has a hold on these men and he knows it.

He goes out of his way to create the impression he and Suga have a very close bond and dynamic- I'm sold on it. Lol.

'5 Jms? As expected. You'll fall in love with them' not sure if JM said the last bit in the BE.TS Vlive, yall check for me.

It's crazy then that he turns around to react the way he does when JK teases him with his ship with Suga.

It seems to me, Jimin knows the intent and energy behind such seemingly harmless jokes- JK can be petty and passive aggressive with these things. You'd think he is joking but deep down he would be pouting and throwing tantrums behind cams🤧

It's Jimin apologizing and looking like his spirit left his body as he sat on the edge of JK's bed in the new Jersey VLive for me.

He needs to free Jimin.

Talk of things I'm getting too old for- Let's talk about why he posted his version of the bridge in disease online🤧

Not to say he shouldn't have posted it. I support that he did wholeheartedly. Deadass found his groove since he started unbuttoning the front of his shirts in 2020.

He's reclaiming the spotlight, putting himself at the forefront unlike before where he'd resigned himself to a supportive role watching his hyungs be at the center of things.

Now he's been talking about that he wants have sexy dance performances like Jimin, write rap melodies for RM, share his own music, try on a solo career one day- we get it. You found yourself Mr I'm independent asserting myself yall better fuxk off but chilee not at the expense of Jimin! 🤺

I mean it's a broad spotlight and they both can share it but damn is someone changing drastically. Not sure if I should be proud or terrified.

It's great and amazing and I'm really truly happy with where he's at mentally and physically since 2020- it's a great sign, don't get me wrong. Significant improvement. His becoming is long over due but he didn't have to grab the spotlight from Jimin like that.

Jk vs JM isn't something I'm a fan of.

It's a shame it didn't work out? What do you mean JK. I'm sorry but Jimin's version is amazing too!😟

What the actual hell JK😭

Back it up. This is not how to Jikook🤺

On guard sir🤺 on guard🤺

Dude did Jimin dirty🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧

I need a refund😭😭😭😭

Here I was waiting for y'all to get on your Jikook agenda and post that first Jikook selca of the year and you are there shipping Jimin with your bandmate and thiefing his shine. Who taught you that?!😥

Y'all are competitive but y'all don't compete with eachother's shine! JIKOOK 101😭😭😭

You share it😥

Show me where in the books this new development falls under. Show me

You winging it and it's unconstitutional😟

I rebuke it in Jesus name!

Someone beam me up.

You got these 13 year olds coming in my DMs telling me you are not supportive of your man's career.

I don't have time for this shit.

SOMEONE BEAM ME UP! Kirk!

If you've watched their Be behind video, and you've seen Jin talk about how RM complained to him when Tae chose Suga's version over his version you'd know where JK is coming from or where I think he is coming from having JMs version chosen over his.

Watch their Be self interview on yt too.

He said there's a melody he worked on for RM and when Jhope thought he got snubbed he recommended he release it instead- to quench his artistic drive perhaps.

That is why he released this song. He did it for himself. Like he said, he won't put out a song unless he was confident about it.

Suga have said time and again how the music and melodies they create never go to waste because they can repurpose it like he did with Telepathy I think.

Even JK explained he was reserving the melody he made for RM for a future group song.

He could have repurposed this or something.

When Jin talked about V vs JM's Christmas song and kept repeating how much he preferred Jimin's song to Tae's because Jimin"s was bright and upbeat, he made sure to clarify he wasn't implying Tae's song was bad. He was just indicating preference.

I won't lie, I was happy he preferred my bias's song but it made my VMin heart ache a little.

V and JM made very different songs, they shouldn't be compared to eachother in that way.

I don't like competitions. And I don't like when two artists are pit against eachother- which is exactly what these two versions of the bridge is doing out here.

I will literally die if in an interview JM is asked about his part and JK isn't. I can't do this😭

Those saying JM's is better make me sick, and those saying JK's is better make me nauseous. They both great. Point blank purr.

What's even more heartbreaking is hearing how excited he really was to share that bit with Army. Dude's eyes was glistening and everything. His bunny smile! 😥

Thats what makes this very hard for me.

The JJK in me is overjoyed and excited that he is doing things that make him really happy. I'm proud of him.

But the PJM in me just😕

I even feel more guilty that I prefer JM's version this time around😭😭😭😭

I feel like I'm betraying JK🤧

I was so happy seeing JM recieve all the love and attention I know he deserves.

Then here comes his boyfriend

'Hold up what about me!' Lol.

Imagine if RM releases the version of Blue and grey he made for Tae and it turns out we prefer that to the version Tae chose💀

Imagine that.

This has been a recurring theme throughout late 2020 to date. Jk's been choosing authenticity and self interests and passions over anything else and I couldn't be more happy for him.

Like we discussed, he's been learning to compromise too lately, which is great.

But honey this is a red flag. Deadass.

To me anyways😏

I've been a strong advocate for a certain level of independence and detachment in Jikook's dynamics because they lowkey exhibited codependency tendencies in their dynamics which is great for us shippers but not so great in the long run for their relationship or them as individuals .

Maybe I'm thinking out loud and prematurely here. I mean we are only beginning to have intimate access to their raw unscripted selves.

I don't think it's not that much of a big deal. RM and JM have equally shared their own versions of fake love on the internet but it is an interesting development in their dynamic to me.

I remember how happy JM was about his version of fake love, and it remains to date one of my favorite beats even though he was just spewing nonsense on that track. Lol.

He was so excited when he shared it with JK and Jin. He said when he showed it to JK the first time, JK said he loved it very much- how loving and supportive is that!

More of this please. Thank you.

PMS is a bitch y'all🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Has me in my feels about this.

I'm pretty sure JM is the one that even encouraged him to share his part in the first place. Won't put it past him.

'Ya Jungkook, release your version too'

'Army will love it'

'Right but I don't want it to seem like- Goldy is crazy you know'

'Goldy who now?'

'What about the thirteen year old fans-'

'Aht aht aht Who cares about them.'

Lmho.

I mentioned a few times on here how I felt JM seemed to have been demanding 'space' and a little bit of breathing room in their dynamic which was causing a little bit of tension here and there middle 2019 through to March last year and it all sounds like drama and speculation but...

May be if I told y'all I am a witch and my analysis of their relationship is based on mediums, phantom whisperers, empathetic readings or tarot cards y'all will leave me alone?🤥

Y'all don't seem to have a problem with the witches and empaths who be doing the same shit I do out here😒

Like we are all 'reading' these mens!

There's nothing wrong with 'psychoanalytically' evaluating a ship you know? Chilee.

Imma call myself a witch if it will get y'all off my back😹😹😹😹

I mentioned JK equally embarking on his own journey to assert himself within the group and within the relationship due to this?

But damn I did not see this one coming.

This is a red flag for me. And no, it doesn't mean they are broken up or having issues in their relationship.

Jk's TMI indicates they still been spending a lot of time together.

This is just a sign there's too much independence in their dynamic now- if you know what I mean.

Relationships flourish based on how attached we are to people- too much attachment is a problem, too little attachment is equally bad.

Jikook have always had a problem with over attachment in their dynamics in my opinion, to the point it was lowkey unhealthy- the jealousy, not being able to 'act professionally' within a group and work environment, having problems with being separated however briefly, constantly wanting to be where the other is etc.

Less attachment isnt necessarily a bad thing either. It means less of all the 'toxic' aspects of their relationship that over attachment brings but too much of that too can trigger anxiousness and insecurity and resentment.

Especially if one of them hates change. Cough Jimin.

With that comes all the wild aspects of love such as possessiveness, jealousy and I know JM doesn't do too well in that department...

In my opinion, I see JM as having a problem when JK breathes down his neck emotionally speaking, and at the same time he has a problem when he is too emotionally distant.

All this is interesting to me.

Who do I need to talk to to give me more of Jikook interactions individually or jointly?

I want to see more of their interactions beyond the overly staged, dramatized fanservice and official content.

Spending a lot of time around eachother and eating each other's ramen- pun intended, does not reflect on how intimate you are.

Intimacy requires depth and depth requires attachment.

How you treat eachother's needs and goals, dreams and desires is equally indicative of the intimacy in your relationship.

That has always been one distinctive quality of Jikook's ship.

And so I wonder the thought process that went into this decision. I know JM wouldn't object to JK sharing things like these or doing things that make him happy even if it has the potential to impact his own shine in any way.

Jikook don't compete against eachother.

I keep saying this.

Remember when I said I found it sus that JK was lying there staring at JM with his hands in between his legs?

Did yall see what the run editors said when JM and JK went up against each in the pool?

'Jikook don't play by the rules'

Jimin had to push JK in the water to end whatever ancient sex ritual foreplay rooted in kamasutra they had going on. Bless him.

And in so doing, he lost to JK.

Whenever they go up against eachother, one of them intentionally lose even though they are both very competitive.

Isn't that why JK said he'd rather 5 Jms so he can watch them compete against eachother?

When JK first made that post, I felt it was out of pettiness or a move to 'humble' JM.

I thought of when he'd posted that photo of himself with a hickey after JM had 'dated' him during the JinMinKook live.

I rolled my eyes and asked, 'what yall gays up to this time?' Why you out here humbling your man?

Anywho chilee we will never know.

At ease.

Signed,

GOLDY

[mimiplaysgames]

Terraqua Week Day 6 (Free Day)

Summary: Terra and Aqua are getting married—and Ven is the Bridezilla. || Word Count: 9,058

Read on AO3

A/N: @terraquaweek​ I could have never written this without my dear friend @localcryptideli​. We talked about this wedding years ago, and I promised to write it. It’s here, three years later, blending their headcanons with mine and I couldn’t be more proud of it. <3

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

the threads that tie hearts together

Terra never once considered in his entire life that his wedding preparations would include the perk of mice squeaking in his ear—but he here is, in the tailor’s studio, getting re-fitted for his tuxedo, with Princess Cinderella’s team of seamstress mice on his shoulders, measuring the length of his arms. His muscles were too big for the previous suit. 

Ven refuses to hire a proper tailor, and instead rents out the parlor so the mice could do their work in private.

Lea sits on a nearby bench by the shoe shelves, the top button of his shirt open, jabbing at his Gummiphone. He’s quite popular today, pinged every two minutes. Isa and Roxas share a mirror, trying to get the mechanics of their bow ties right. 

Terra is getting married. 

The thought. Married. Soon. Yes. Damn. He can’t cry right now.

Terra stands in front of a mirror and bends his elbows to see how the fabric moves. The mice are tiny, three of them in skirts. They’ve developed an efficient obstacle course of threads all down his entire body, a network so the mice on the floor can deliver them supplies—spools, sewing needles, thumbtacks, measuring tape—in a jiffy. 

Lea groans, squeezing his Gummiphone. “This twerp is going to turn me into a serial killer.” He yawns, possibly for the fortieth time.

“Not an ill-fitting job, all things considered,” Isa says from across the room.

“I do appreciate your sarcasm.”

“Who’s bothering you?” Terra asks, lifting his collar so the mouse on his left could thread through it with a sewing needle.

Lea snorts, slaps his knee and leans forward. “Did you not know your buddy is a monster?”

“Ven?”

“Oh, he’s a joy.” Lea holds his Gummiphone up as if he’s about to make a speech. “Come help me pick out Aqua’s flowers. Now. If you could.” He glances at Terra, then back at the phone. “He writes that in all-caps.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to be so pushy.”

“The other day, he called me to model the bride’s dress because Miss Aqua couldn’t be bothered to come to the fitting herself.”

“Master Aqua was away on a mission,” Isa explains.

“Isa took photos of me in it—” Lea scrolls through his phone, but stops. “Oh, I can’t show you before...” He clicks his tongue. “It’s very nice. Very bridal.”

Terra is sure that’s true, but the image of Ven hanging his head so much on someone else’s wedding is worrisome. Last night, he fell asleep at dinner. “I think Ven is taking on too much stress.”

“Lea,” Roxas says, snorting a chuckle and giving up on his bow tie, “you should show him the texts.” 

“Gladly.” Lea stands to shove the Gummiphone into Terra’s face. Out of the history, a couple of messages stand out.

Ventus

I got 500 cake flavors come taste them with me

Ventus

Which cologne do you think terra should wear

COME SMELL 

i need a second opinion

Ventus

Do you have aqua’s flowers yet?

remember 

we want orange roses and bluestars

Ventus

Aqua isnt here im freaking out

Youre closest to her body type

HELP

After all that, Terra feels as though he’s being watched by several microscopic eyes. One of the mice squeaks with urgency, and he straightens one of his arms. “I don’t know what to say... Why doesn’t he talk to me directly?”

Lea purses his lips as though this is a secret not worth sharing. Roxas is the one to step forward, a knowing grimace plastered on his face.

“He told me that he doesn’t want to bother you with anything.”

That doesn’t sound entirely false but not true either.

“That’s ridiculous.” Terra tests the bend of the elbow to fiddle with his bow tie. It’s already done but something about it doesn’t sit right. “He could come to me for anything,” he says with a low voice, wondering if there’s something he’s missing. Terra has also been a mess. He’s getting married. Holy stars. 

Isa huffs out of frustration, turning away from the mirror, his bow tie undone. He studies Terra’s suit. “I don’t like it.”

His straightforwardness is well appreciated. Aqua would probably smirk at the sight of it and stare at his neck the entire ceremony. “I don’t either,” Terra says.

“Smart man.” Isa smirks, and tugs Terra’s bow tie to undo it. “Let’s change it.”

Lea snorts. “You might want to ask permission from he-who-shall-be-slapped.”

“It’s my wedding,” Terra says.

“So you think.”

He-who-may-be-slapped enters the tailor’s parlor through the front entrance, announced by the bell of the ring. He’s perfectly dressed in his ringbearer’s/best man’s/maid of honor’s suit, vest fitted, bow tie sublime, sleeves coiffed. He sees what Isa is doing. He gapes.

“Hey guys,” Ven asks with a frustratingly shaky voice. “What are we doing?”

“They are unbecoming,” Isa answers, wrapping a traditional tie around Terra’s neck.

“Oh.” 

Sometimes, speaking to Isa is like getting clocked in the stomach. By the looks of Lea’s expression, chewing on the edge of his Gummiphone, it’s well deserved.

“Okay,” Ven says, with a tight smile. He takes the tie from Isa’s hands. “Do they match?”

“A hello would be less rude,” Terra says. “Hi, Ven. Can we talk?”

Ven glances up. “Later. There’s lots to do.”

Lea inhales sharply. “Hey, Ven. Here’s an idea. Did you know you could tame cicadas to sing in harmony on command?”

Ven whips his head around. “You can?”

Isa brings a hand up to hide a smirk and Lea passes him a subtle wink.

“Picture it.” Lea opens his arms. “From nine until eleven at night, they gather in the bushes. They mutter, a light dusting of atmosphere on a peaceful summer night.”

Ven’s eyes grow wide with obsession. 

Roxas comes near. “You can also make them glow.”

“Like stars in the bushes,” Ven whispers to himself.

“Come on, guys,” Terra says, unimpressed. “Leave him alone. We’ve got better things to do.”

Ven snaps himself out of it, but not before pulling out a notepad and writing notes. He eyes Terra over, nudging him to open his arms and pinching the sides of the suit. Ven draws them in by the measure of a finger and pulls pins out of his pocket, like he’s been expecting to use them, and marks their places. “Jaq Jaq,” he calls, “where’s Suzy? We need to make sure these ties look right. Oh, and we need two extras—we have to ship some to Riku and Sora.”

Some mouse squeaks in reply.

“I can help her carry things.” Ven gives a flash of a smile and then hurries off.

Out of earshot, Lea gives Terra a look. “Anyone able to talk to mice is a crazy person in my book.”

Terra glares back and quotes, “‘You could tame cicadas to sing on command?’”

“He needs something to obsess over. How else am I going to get peace?”

“This is going to bite you in the ass,” Roxas says, wrapping his new tie over the neck and having a much easier time.

“Ventus may very well task you with hunting and gathering the cicadas,” Isa says, a tie already in place, immaculate. 

Lea groans and Terra feels it’s well deserved. 

Well deserved… the suit may be. The future wife, maybe not. The suit is a glove for every finger with no excess. It makes him a good-looking groom, a nice addition to the closet for any special occasion. The bride is beautiful, no matter what she wears. She is loyal, patient, strong, intelligent, loving, funny when she’s stern, too good for him, a divine gift he didn’t earn and he still can’t understand how she said yes.

“I hope you’re laughing at the face of my misery,” Lea says.

Terra knows that’s sarcasm. Weddings are headaches, emotions are terrifying and Terra needs Aqua like a sip of medicinal tea to calm down.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The others squeal when they walk into Le Grand Bistro. It’s sunset, the city lights already ignited and giving it the glow of evening fairies welcoming the moon. They’ve just discussed dresses—Xion requests a pantsuit instead, which looks stellar—and they can choose their own styles so long as they all wear the color of night. Simple, elegant. That’s the kind of effect Aqua prefers. Thank goodness they’re almost done. Aqua couldn’t handle more hands in her hair and she rejected the flower crown that would have come down on one side to compensate for the lack of length. 

She fiddles with the ring—a thin, intricate design weaved around a small, blue stone—as a waiter escorts them to the kitchen. On days when she doesn’t have missions, she wears it.

Aqua is getting married. Some part of her wonders about the surreality of it, like it’s a dream or a picture she created in her mind when she was a child, at the altar with a faceless person next to her. Sometimes, it feels like she is already married. Terra has always been with her. Every day in class. Every day strolling through the woods. Every day sparring, sharing meals, bickering and laughing. Her best friend, her confidant, her rock.

There is something about nearly dying that challenges perspective. When they both thought they’d never see each other again, it made them realize there’s more to it and there’s been more to it for years. The emotional intimacy that strengthened after the fact. The physicality of it, when he takes her to bed. They argue differently, they laugh the same. Terra has always been with her, so what is the difference between being with him and being married to him? A part of her is eager to find out. The other is already at peace, a kind of joy Aqua has always wanted.

Ven is in the kitchen, talking with Remy (responding to Remy, who is naturally unintelligible). Plates of cake pieces sprawl out on the table, eliciting oohs and aahs from the others, all patient like they’re waiting for Aqua’s permission to take a small bite.

Aqua reads through the description of flavors—strawberry, fudge, angel food cake with blueberries, red velvet, even coffee. “The one we requested isn’t here.”

“You mean…” Ven pulls out his notepad and looks through his notes. Remy climbs onto Ven’s head, squeaking and pointing to a bowl of flour and eggs, unmixed. “Dark chocolate and rum?”

“That would be correct.”

“A spicy cake? Are you insane?” At his shock and at Aqua’s denial, Kairi helps herself to a spoonful of vanilla. “This is a wedding, not a club!”

“My wedding, Ven.” Aqua isn’t annoyed, but amused. Ven has such strong opinions about for some reason. 

“Try this one.” He holds up a plate of a decorated piece that honestly looks delicious. “Triple chocolate, with the rarest berries found in the woods, matured at thirty-five degrees Celsius for a week.” 

“Burnt cake?” Kairi asks with a smirk.

“Not the cake, the berries.” 

“Oh,” Xion gasps, with need in her eyes. It takes a nod from Aqua to grab a fork and have at it. She approaches each piece with so much excitement— Aqua wonders if there are flavors here she’s never tried before in her short life. 

“What will the final cake look like?” Naminé asks, the only one not to dive forward. She’s so gentle, so serene. When they were trying out dresses, everyone was saying what a beautiful bride she’ll be one day if she chooses. 

“Perfect,” Ven says, like it’s the most obvious thing. “It has to be perfect so it will look beautiful. Painted like a night sky, with stars everywhere. You got that, Remy?”

Remy glares at Ven.

“I want,” Aqua starts, and when Ven frowns, she smirks. Sometimes, for the sake of maintaining control, she has to play dirty. “Rosewater and cardamom.” 

Ven sticks his tongue out in disgust.

“Terra needs something to enjoy,” Aqua insists. “These are all too sweet for him.”

“Terra is the bane of my existence.”

“By the way, I don’t know if I want King Mickey and Queen Minnie to officiate.”

“You are way more difficult to deal with.”

Aqua and Ven have a staring contest as the others talk about their favorite flavors. Ven, a glare, a challenge to outwit her. Aqua, a calm knowing that she’s going to win. Ven relents.

“Fine,” he stresses. “Remy, change of plans. We’ll need some damage control. Let’s add some”—he writes into his notepad—“fruit pastries, sweet cheese with chocolate—”

“Triple chocolate,” Kairi adds.

“Custard and kiwi,” Xion says.

“All good choices.” Ven writes them down.

“Sea salt ice cream?” Naminé says, lifting a shoulder. “Everyone else eats them, I hope to try some.”

“Ven.” Kairi slams a hand on the table. “You need to add marshmallows covered in hazelnut and chocolate.”

“We need all the chocolate,” Ven agrees. “Call it revenge on this nasty cake.”

Kairi cackles, but it’s nothing malicious. They’re young and excited about the wedding, their suggestions a way of helping. Aqua takes it all in stride. The small details don’t matter, only the intent, and letting friends have fun deciding makes the entire process easier. What’s bothering her is Ven. He’s exhausted from taking it all too seriously. Aqua assumes the best intentions, but she doesn’t get it.

“You know what would be really cute?” Xion says. “Little petit fours shaped in your symbols.”

Ven blinks. “What symbols?”

“Oh, the Keyblade Master symbols.” Naminé claps her hands. “That would be so lovely.”

“In different colors,” Xion says.

“Each a different flavor,” Naminé adds. “Maybe the same colors as your Wayfinders?”

“You two are geniuses.” Ven taps his notepad. “Remy, we gotta get to work.”

Remy stomps a paw and squeaks vigorously.

“No worries. You’ll get paid.” Though it seems that’s the last thing on Remy’s mind.

“Ven,” Aqua says softly, pulling him aside as the others brainstorm ideas. “I don’t think we can afford all this.”

“Sure you can,” he says too confidently, though she and Terra were the ones to save up their munny. “Don’t worry,” he stresses when she’s not convinced, giving her a squeeze on the arm. “You asked me to bookkeep your finances” 

“Reminder that I did not ask you to take full responsibility. Remy can’t do all of this alone, he’s going to need you.”

“I’ve got plenty of time, and we’ve got plenty of budget.”

Aqua does not know how that is possible. After the dresses, the refitting of Terra’s tux, the decorations… sure, since they’re using the ballroom in the Land of Departure, they saved on not having to rent out a venue, but the original plan was to have a small, intimate wedding in the woods, something private with just the three of them, minimal decorations necessary, all plucked from nature. 

All of this is out of their price range.

Ven goes back to the table, back to the stovetop and oven where he follows Remy’s instructions and mixes the flour in the bowl with some milk. He doesn’t assuage her at all, like he knows something she doesn’t.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Home should be a solace but not when it’s the wedding rehearsal. 

Ven has ushered in movers from different worlds to carry in artifacts, all decorations, all star-themed. Terra has yet to see the ballroom, but the amount of people rushing through the hallways makes him nervous. 

Ever since Terra called Riku in the dead of night (in a panic, needing someone to talk to, alone in the kitchen with a cracked mug of tea), blabbing about tripping on the way to the altar, or cutting the cake clean through the table, or stepping on linen and ripping the curtains, or dropping his plate of food, or looking like an idiot on the dance floor, or worse—forgetting his vows—he hasn’t lived a moment of peace. Sora won’t let him. 

Terra finds it hard to breathe. What if he chokes on his vows and accidentally offends everyone?

He stays far away from the workers—it’s for the best. No one needs a huge bull stampeding in a china shop, destroying everything.

Lea crosses the hallway on his sixth trip and enters one of two entrances to the ballroom, vases of flowers in his hands. Terra peeks. From the looks of it, Ven did a fantastic job. 

The ballroom, once gold, now looks like the set of night. The ceiling is covered in blue with twinkling lights. The table linens are also dark, with napkins and silverware sets a solid gold. Glass windows that take up one entire side to the ballroom are bare of curtains—the wedding is planned for after sunset so they’d be declaring their vows under the stars. Two navy blue carpets come in through both entrances of the ballroom, meeting in the middle and then straight to the altar at the far end. The point is for him and Aqua to enter together, like equals. With her in a bridal dress, she’ll look like a light in the darkness.

Through the doorway, Terra can see Riku and Sora, the latter making motions with his arms as if he’s flapping like a bird. Terra lets the door close so they don’t notice him. 

There are fears he’s never voiced.

What if she realizes she doesn’t want to get married to him after all? At the altar no less?

Oh stars, what if he makes a terrible husband? 

What if he neglects her?

What if, years down the road, she realizes after a slowly oncoming epiphany that she isn’t happy and regrets it?

Tonight is the party, tomorrow is the wedding, and Terra still has no vows. He pinches his nose hard enough to distract him from crying. He’s already cried five times in the arc of three hours.

Footsteps—light, brisque, confident, hers—approach him, and Terra embraces her in his arms, taking her in with a needy kiss. She smells like home, she lets him breathe again. 

“You look like you’re about to fall apart,” she says, stroking a thumb on his cheek.

“Not if you’re my glue.”

She snorts, smacking him on the bicep. “What did I say about the puns?”

“Shower you with them.”

He kisses her before she can roll her eyes—

—and gets interrupted the moment Ven peeks out of one door. 

“What’s with the hold-up?” he says.

Terra breaks from the kiss, casually noticing how Aqua is patting his shoulder, as if to warn him. “What’s with your attitude?”

Ven pouts like he’s about to choke and slaps the notepad to his forehead. “No one listens to me. I said baby blue and champagne on the napkins, all shaped to form the constellation of Juno… and they gave me yellow. I am gonna complain so much.”

“There are worse things?” Terra says and Aqua shakes his shoulder as another warning. 

Ven snaps his eyes open. “Get into position, we’re starting.”

Aqua stands behind one door and Terra goes to the other, waiting for the cue to enter. On the other side, Ven is speaking out loud, organizing people and where they should stand. Grooms and bridesmaids will enter the altar from behind and gather together, leaving the carpet only for the star couple (no pun intended). He interrupts himself, raising his voice about vases that match too much and Terra can imagine him pointing across the room.

“I have to tell you something,” Aqua loudly whispers from the other side of the hall. 

Terra runs to her and wraps an arm around her waist. Touching her is a panacea. Despite knowing there is still a possibility she’ll rethink this entire relationship, it seems unreal, like a nightmare.

“It’s about Ven,” she continues, keeping her voice low even though they’re the only ones in the hall.

“Lea threatened to slap him.”

She frowns.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Don’t you think it’s too expensive?”

“I don’t know. Ven doesn’t tell me how much anything costs.”

“It’s way more than we have saved up.”

Terra gapes. “Then how—?”

Aqua stammers, fiddling with her fingers. “I looked into his books.”

Terra melts into a breath-heavy laugh, careful to keep his voice out of it. “Reading people’s diaries? Aqua, I thought I knew you better.”

She blushes. “I didn’t mean to, but I was worried.” Now Terra is worried. Her expression is too serious. “Ven has been doing side-missions and hustles for months just to earn enough to hire the best chefs and tailors, to buy linens and all these flowers and carpets—” 

“He wouldn’t.”

“He did.”

“Why?” 

“I think it’s because he wants us to be happy.”

“We are.” Terra doesn’t appreciate how he doesn’t sound confident, scared he’s assuming too much on her behalf. “How could he just…”

“We were stuck in darkness for so long and he couldn’t help us.”

“But that’s not his fault.”

“He feels he is the weakest and wants to compensate.” Aqua grimaces and she blinks back tears. 

“I feel so guilty.”

“I feel worse.”

“Why?”

Aqua bites her lip. “I’m still attached to the idea of a small, intimate ceremony in the woods. Just the three of us. Does that make me a horrible person?”

“No. Our wedding has become a spectacle. Maybe pointing that out makes me terrible, too.”

She groans. “I found a book. I left it in your room. It’s very last minute, but there are some ancient rituals in there that I found so beautiful… the exchanging of rings is beautiful, too, but modern and there are some lost traditions from our Keyblade history that I’d love to do instead... if you could take a look?” 

The way she smiles, stars. Ancient, modern, he’d do anything for her. “Sure. I’ll read it tonight.”

Aqua winces. “He’ll be so angry with us.”

Terra squeezes her hand. “He wants us to be happy. Think about that.”

One of the doors burst open, and Lea sticks his head out. “Kindly stop being an ass and don’t keep your guests waiting anymore?”

They start: Terra at one entrance, Aqua on the other, entering the ballroom at the same time, where guests will watch them approach one another, like the shadow of the moon to a star. They meet at the point where their lanes merge into one. 

Terra offers his arm—

“Nonono,” Ven warns, running up to them. “You can’t meet her like this. You must bow at a forty-degree angle.” Ven scans the room frantically. “Here, I have a ruler.”

After that hiccup, Aqua finally takes Terra’s arm, walking down the single aisle, where guests can ogle at them. Their groomsmen and bridesmaids take pictures with their Gummiphones for their arrival at a wall of flowers. 

Sora has his hands behind his head and snickers when they reach the end. “I made sure the carpet is ironed out so she doesn’t fall with you.”

“I’m going to kick you in the shins,” Terra says.

He snorts and wipes his nose. “I’ll kick you back.”

At the altar, Ven is too excited to stop rambling. “We have to make sure that you arrive here, at this spot, at exactly nine-thirty so we can finish the vows at ten because...” He frames the windows with his hands. “We’ve got a perfect spot for star sighting so we need to be on time.”

“Do you mean, right after the wedding ceremony?” Aqua asks. 

“Before the reception, yup. We’re walking out to the balcony, we’ll watch the meteor shower where a new world will be born, then we’ll come back in for supper and dancing.” When he notices their stupefied faces, he continues, “I spent three weeks finding the right angulations so you can witness a unique astronomical event, and we’ve got a miracle of a spot right here so we can’t be late.”

“It’s a wonderful thought, Ven,” Aqua says, her voice shaky.

“Okay, now you get into position and face each other.” He points and they follow. “Next, Mickey and Minnie will talk some stuff, you know, all official, and then you say your vows.”

Terra freezes up. “Our vows.”

“Yeah. That’s what I said. You ready?”

Terra hesitates and Aqua speaks for him. “We’re keeping those a secret until tomorrow.”

Ven pauses, then shrugs. “Fair enough.”

Aqua doesn’t let Terra have another thought, leaning forward to kiss him in front of everyone (aahs and awws elicited), and ending the rehearsal.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“How do you get your skin so clear?” Kairi asks, though the warm glow of the fire makes for spectacular lighting. 

They’re camping in the woods near the waterfall, equipped with warm blankets and pillows, a bowl of cookies, and toasted marshmallows on sticks; Aqua’s vision of a bachelorette party. No gifts necessary.

“Mountain spring water does wonders for you,” Aqua says.

“I’ve read in a magazine,” Xion says, crawling out of her sleeping bag, “that some people like to put mud on their faces to get clean skin.”

“Why?” Naminé asks, chewing on a marshmallow.

“Something about the properties. Lots of good minerals.” She walks over to the creek, digging her hands into the dirt and smashing it into her face against the shocks and cries of the other girls. “If mountain water is good for you, then that must mean this mud is magical.” 

“Is that true?” Kairi says, though she’s asking no one. She hurries over and joins in on the mud-mashing, running fingers over Xion’s face in places she’s missed.

With globs of mud in their hands, they bring over the excess to the camp. 

Xion offers it to Aqua. “For beautiful skin on your special day?”

“It’s our job to pamper,” Kairi says with her hands out so that Naminé can scoop up the mud on her own. 

Aqua tries not to chuckle too loudly. It’s adorable. “Okay,” she says, and Xion gets to work, massaging it into her skin. It smells unpleasant, earthy and mukky. She closes her eyes and tries to relax regardless.

“I think we’re supposed to keep it on our faces for at least a half hour,” Xion says, rubbing more on Aqua’s nose. 

“This will make us prettier?” Naminé asks.

“Cleaner,” Kairi says. 

Naminé blinks, already covered in the mud and hesitating to put on more. “But we look dirty,” she says quietly.

“Can I request something, Miss Aqua?” Xion says, patting her fingers onto Aqua’s forehead.

“Certainly.”

“Can you tell us the story of how Terra proposed?”

Kairi jumps and squeals, and Naminé claps her hands, both of them chattering please, please, we’re dying to know.

“We’re around a fire,” Kairi says, as if that’s a convincing argument. “We’re supposed to tell stories.” 

“I feel bad for asking,” Naminé says. “You’re very private, and I don’t want to intrude…”

Aqua reads her face. “But you’re curious.”

Naminé pouts. Xion’s eyes go wide, and Kairi nods excitedly. Everyone is guilty as charged.

“It’s a simple story, I guess,” Aqua says, crossing her legs and watching the fire. It’s not often that she talks so openly about the details of her relationship. The two of them together is something people know, but never knowing where they come from and why, except for Ven—even then, there’s so much he never pries to. Watching their reactions is a little overwhelming. She rubs the stone on her ring. “Terra made the engagement ring with his own hands, but he took months to propose.”

“I remember that,” Xion says, sitting on her chair and smiling. “It annoyed Lea so much that he offered to set you both up just to get it over with.”

Aqua laughs. “I’m grateful we had it to ourselves.”

“Was it romantic?” Kairi asks.

“Not at all. I… knew he was up to something. I know him.” She lifts a shoulder. “He was burning breakfast too often, he couldn’t look me directly in the eye, and he left on his own to do more missions than usual. I took that as though he had done something wrong. The last time he was that clumsy and avoidant, it was because he accidentally cast Firaga in the library and was trying to hide it. Or when he broke the oven. Or when he offered to do my laundry but didn’t know how to treat my fabric and ruined my clothes.”

“He sounds like a clumsy oaf,” Kairi says.

That makes Aqua smile. She loves that oaf. “He is. The general rule of thumb is that a clumsy, avoidant Terra is usually hiding something.”

“So how did the proposal happen?” Naminé asks.

“I cornered him—”

Kairi snorts.

“—and he blurted it out.”

They giggle, Kairi acting out how that may have looked and Naminé holding her hands over her heart in a show of genuine affection. 

Aqua smiles to herself, a finger to her lips. It might be her favorite memory, her standing her ground and demanding to know what was going on. 

Terra, looking all around the terrace except for her face, guilty, guilty, guilty, pulling a box out of his pocket and stammering for a cohesive sentence. Well, I don’t know what to say, he had said, like a child getting grounded. I-I’m sorry. I’m dumb, I’m a big lump of a human being. He paused, his cheeks rounding up like he was about to vomit. Will…will you marry me, anyway?

It felt like racing in a train and pulling all the stops, crashing. He got red in the face, tears welling in his eyes and she realized he took her silence as rejection. Aqua had to hold his forearms, and all she could utter was a soft, I genuinely thought you burned down a building.

Terra’s eyes went wide. Do you mean you’re not mad?

Of course not. Why would I be?

So… He licked his lips, reaching for her but not touching her, forgetting that he had the box with the ring inside. What do you say? I mean, you don’t have to give me an answer straight away. I mean, I just thought you would… you know… because… He sighed. Yeah.

Aqua finally laughed, and kissed him on the cheek. Of course I will marry you, you beautiful dork.

The laughter quiets around the fire. They’re waiting for Aqua to continue her story.

“Then he drops the ring.”

They howl, melting into a blissful exchange of cheers and gossip, a vibrant hearth brighter than the one keeping them warm. 

“I had hoped to propose first, actually,” Aqua continues. She shrugs. “The end.”

“That was beautiful,” Naminé says, wiping her eyes.

“If Sora hears about this, he’ll never leave Terra alone,” Kairi says, grinning something mischievous. 

“I don’t know what love is supposed to look like,” Xion says thoughtfully, gazing at the sky. “But it sounds sweet.”

In Aqua’s opinion, the proposal was perfect, him scattered on the ground frantically searching for the ring, her on her knees helping him. How he slipped it on her finger, how they kissed for an hour in the dirt, unaware that they were dusty, unaware that anyone else existed in the world. 

Aqua nods, mostly to herself. It aches to be away from Terra tonight but it burns her insides to see him tomorrow and finally do this. Aqua wants to sleep and get this night over with but she doesn’t want to sleep so she could see the sunrise, knowing he’d be up early watching the same thing.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Bachelor parties aren’t fun.

Sora is whooping about a cannonball, the water splashing when he makes contact. Ven and Roxas race to the lake, testing who will be the first to dive, the first to swim across and come back. Considering the expanse of the surface area, they’ll be gone for a while and the barbecue will get cold, but maybe it’s for the best. It’s not the right time to talk to Ven right now, not when all of them have a moment of fun (except for Terra, the only one here thinking about tomorrow). Lea and Isa prefer to relax, sipping drinks on their chairs by the lanterns erected onto the sand, speaking quietly about memories, about chores, about home and what ifs. 

Terra sits by himself, the thin booklet Aqua gave him on his lap, tucked under layers of parchment. It’s titled The Way, no author. She was right: old Keyblade rituals are interesting, almost possessive, their focus on the literal binding of hearts. They’re from the Age of Fairytales, and Terra realizes as he reads through it that ancient Keyblade wielders were for some reason obsessed with the loss of memory and the prevention of it. The rituals sound painful, too—maybe Aqua has developed a mild taste of macabre from her time in the Realm of Darkness. 

All Terra has left to do are his vows. His stupid, dorky-sounding vows. He should have accepted the simple, “I do.” He shouldn’t have waited until the last minute.

He’s tried dramatic.

You are my other half, my heart, my breath of life, my sky, my angel, can we keep our souls together? 

He’s tried poetic.

The mountain will thirst if not for the water— 

He’s tried being honest.

I don’t know why you love me, but I’ll do my best to make it up to you.

All dumb.

Terra groans into his hands, eyes wide in existential blunder. 

“Keep doing that,” Riku says, setting a chair next to him and sitting down, “and you won’t be able to blink again.”

“I’m not finished.”

“But if you don’t sleep, then you’re more likely to have accidents.”

Terra gapes and almost whacks Riku on the side of the head from the sight of his constricted smirk. “You’re so mean. I called you one time.”

“In a huge panic talking about causing mass destruction of a wedding the worlds have never seen.” Riku shrugs nonchalantly. That’s his state of being—too cool for anything, too sensitive for everything. It’s refreshing. “It was the funniest phone conversation I’ve ever had.”

“I’ll never call you again.”

“Not in the middle of the night, please no.” Riku bites a forkful of steak. “Is it cliché to tell you to speak from the heart?”

“This entire conversation is cliché, but here I am, living it out.” Terra stares at his messy pages, where he pressed the pen so hard that it left ink blots.

“You could do the very committal thing and tell her you love her fifty times.”

“All the guests would leave by the time I reach twenty-five.”

“More like fifteen.”

“Ten.”

“Disaster.”

Terra grimaces, not entirely comforted, but not entirely anxious anymore, either. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“It is a big deal, I’ll give you that,” Riku says, more serious. “I don’t have any advice.”

“None of it makes sense. Be honest, but not too honest. Be loving, but don’t make it cheesy. Express yourself, but hold back on certain things. Do make it personal. Don’t expose personal details. How am I supposed to know how to do it right?” 

It would be easier if there are no witnesses. If it’s just Ven, if Aqua is the only person he’s talking to, if he could simply say, You’ve been my best friend for as long as I can remember. I know I’ve fucked up. For as long as I live, I’ll never do that again. I will never take your forgiveness for granted.

And if she doesn’t want to be with him anymore, there’d be nothing he could say to make her stay.

“I think if Aqua was the kind of person who expected you to do it right,” Riku says, looking out to the lake where Ven and Roxas are swimming back to their shore, “you wouldn’t be marrying her.”

Terra bends the pages, exposing the cover of the thin, leather bound booklet. There are no vows he could use in there, except for the officiator declaring their hearts intertwined. “Thank you,” he mumbles.

“Sorry I can’t be of more help.” 

Riku pats him on the shoulder and leaves him alone to take a walk, Sora begging him to enter the water. Terra flips to a page where he’s repeated I love you, I love you all over, each in different calligraphy, like doodling, like losing his mind and procrastinating the night away, hoping that any moment, inspiration would drop bricks on him.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s time.

The strangest part of the day is waiting it out in her bedroom until it’s her turn to show herself. Over the years, her bedroom has been a reflection of her personality. The cleanliness, the artifacts from her home world long ago, the size of the bed, the furniture—they all stayed the same. What’s come and gone were the paint colors, the bedsheets, the art on the wall, the smaller vanity mirror. Her bedroom is her old life, and she sits in front of the mirror in her bride’s dress, about to start a new one. For now, they both collide, as though her childhood doesn’t know her.

The cape dress is simple, plain white with the neck scooped across the collarbone. The sleeves slit at the shoulders, draping over to the floor with the rest of the train. Aqua couldn’t have asked for something better. She completes the look with the ring, a jeweled hair pin on one side, and an armored choker. Makeup is minimal. 

Aqua is surprisingly calm and the sun is going down. 

Her Gummiphone buzzes with a text message.

Terra

Let’s do it

Aqua sighs, not texting back immediately.

Aqua

I don’t want to break Ven’s heart

Terra

I’ll talk to him

We can both get what we want

I already stole some flowers from the wall

Don’t think he notices

She chuckles, moving a hair strand behind her ear. She hasn’t noticed that her stomach has been a knot, from excitement, from nerves, from anticipation. The sun takes so long to set. Terra is the warmth of a tight blanket.

Aqua

Will this label me as a runaway bride?

Terra takes a long time to answer, giving her the impression that he must have been distracted and forgot to reply. 

It buzzes.

Terra

The shame

Aqua

What will they think when they find out the groom seduced her to it

Terra

The scandal 

when they hear how she met him secretly at the creek 

an hour before the ceremony

It sounds like an action plan. Aqua picks up her bouquet of orange roses and bluestars from her vanity table, heading out the door.

Aqua

I want Ven there

Terra

Definitely

I love you

Aqua

I love you too

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Terra finds Ven in the dining room, taking inventory of an indulgement of sweets and a feast of meats, fritters, and rice. The wedding cake is as tall as his body, a dark blue with smacks of gold glitter in the shapes of galaxies, large stars framing each layer, and topped with two halos. Ven is mostly dressed in his vest and tie, the suit missing. By comparison, Terra is overdressed, a groom ready for his encore.

Ven sighs when he sneaks a cookie the shape of the Keyblade Master symbol into his mouth, as though Terra’s presence reminds him of disappointment. 

“I couldn’t tame the cicadas,” he says morosely, like he’s apologizing, and for a moment Terra second-guesses what he’s about to do. Ven eyes the white rope curled around Terra’s shoulder. “What’s that for?”

“This may either cheer you up or piss you off,” Terra says, dropping The Way on the counter.

“I don’t like how you said that.” As Ven flips through pages, he frowns, chewing on the side of his lip. “Are you... not happy with the wedding preparations?”

Terra inhales, caught off guard. “Of course I am. Happy, I mean. It’s… huge. It’s a giant ordeal.”

“And you don’t like that,” Ven says quietly, stroking one of the pages with his thumb.

“I think there are things we’ve always wanted to have privately.” Terra sits on a stool, but Ven won’t look him in the eye. “And we want you to be there. We can do it now. We’ll be back in time for our guests.”

The booklet shakes in his hands. “I messed up.”

“From my point of view, I’ll be eating very well tonight. There’s nothing to compensate for.”

Ven closes the book. “I just wanted to do a good job.”

“If you allow Lea to slap you, he’ll forgive you.” Terra smiles, but Ven doesn’t join him. “We’re still doing your grand ceremony—that, we could never pull off on our own. But we also want something tiny and ours, and we won’t do this without you.” Terra takes Ven’s hand and squeezes it, before glancing at the cake. “I hope it’s delicious.”

“It’s disgusting so you’ll definitely like it.”

“See, I can always count on you.” Terra stands up. “Now come on. You wouldn’t want us to be late for the bride.”

Terra takes him to the creek, not far from where Aqua hosted her bachelorette camp, where the sound of rushing water is gentle and the creek splits into two directions, one that would drip off the side of a cliff and one that would join a massive river downstream. The trees huddle close in the clearing, a soft shadow from the fierceness of the setting sun, like a pocket of protective magic in the middle of the forest. 

Ven gasps. “You stole my flowers.”

“Please, you didn’t even notice.” Terra had built an easy wooden arbor before the crack of dawn that morning, an arch weaved with orange and blue flowers, spotted every so often with green lilies. He showered right after so no one would suspect.

“Let’s take it over there.” Ven points to a short boulder against a tree nearby, a good photo op. They pluck the arbor up from both sides and plant it in front of the boulder. Ven takes stock of the sight. “Not bad.”

“Thanks!”

“I take credit for the choice of flowers.” Ven rolls the rope into a tight circle, layering it on the boulder with each loop in equal circumference. He splays the book open and studies. “It’s kinda creepy,” he says though he gets no response and he doesn’t ask for one.

Terra shoves his hands into the pockets of his tuxedo and waits. Aqua isn’t here yet. The vest constricts his breathing, the thicket suddenly feels humid, and Terra wipes his cheek, realizing that his heart is beating fast. Time sped up to this moment and dropped him here without warning. Now it’s slowing down out of pure, unjustifiable spite to torture him in the final hour. 

“You okay, dude?” Ven asks.

Terra lifts his face to the sky to keep the tears in his eyes. “If I cry now, I think I’ll cry for the rest of the night.”

Ven snorts. “No one would be surprised, trust me.”

But it’s not working. He’s two seconds from sobbing. “I don’t know. I…” He scoffs. “I can’t believe it’s happening. I’m expecting her to never show up or brush me off last minute when she realizes what we’re doing—”

“No.” Ven approaches Terra like he’s about to punch him in the stomach to make a point. “Don’t think like that, she’d never do that.” 

Ven has good faith and better timing. Aqua approaches the other side of the clearing, the fabric of her dress gracefully making waves with every step, the foliage fluttering light and shadow on her figure. She holds her bouquet in one hand and a framed photograph tucked under the other.

It shocks Terra.

He can’t stop the flow of tears. He covers his shivering lips and the drip of his nose, his face twisting from the sight of her—brilliant, like she’s made of stars, a gift walking the earth.

“Terra, are you okay?” Aqua asks, rushing to him now, the train of her dress bouncing behind her. 

In the flash of an instinct, Terra runs to meet her, tripping over a branch and landing right into her arms. 

“You’re—” Terra sucks air in, his heart shoving itself up his esophagus. “Y-you’re s-so beautiful.”

Aqua uses her pinky to wipe his tears. “So are you.”

“Let me help you.” He takes the frame—a portrait of the Master, bordered with a white ribbon—and walks her to the arbor. Ven takes the portrait and places it on the boulder, their little family tied together, fractured in glued pieces, now and always. Before they start, Terra asks Aqua to pose under the arbor so he can take a picture of the trees and the flowers surrounding her. Beautiful.

“How do we do this?” Terra asks when he finds his voice again, still trembling. Aqua stands to the side to take her place. She’s beautiful.

Ven takes the book in his hands. The description of this ritual covers at most two pages. “Well, it’s archaic. It’s from the Age of Fairytales but it sounds like we will intertwine your hearts—but in an intense way, like we’re sewing them together.”

Aqua holds her bouquet to her chest. “Shall we start?”

Terra chuckles too hard, gasping for breath. “Simple as that.”

They wait for Ven’s cue, who also has no idea how to do anything. Ven clears his throat, shrugs his shoulders, and reads:

“We witness today the soldering of two hearts. To intertwine like the roots of a tree, the severance painful, the nourishment plentiful. A physical bond, a magical one, the merging of two sprites under the guidance of one truth. Two hearts, but one.” Terra watches the way Aqua watches him. There’s no one else in the world, Ven’s voice disconnected, like it floats on air. “Now it says to summon your Keyblades. Dig the tips into the ground, and offer your hilts to each other.”

Ends of the Earth is massive, taller than Ven. Stormfall looks delicate but it’s menacing, sharp, direct. They offer their hilts, the shafts crossed over each other, Stormfall light and airy in his hand, Ends of the Earth weighty and thick in hers. 

Terra finds it interesting that they’re using the hilt to connect each other’s hearts—the Keyblade should never be used against a person’s heart in traditional Mastery, because it’s such a dangerous weapon and it’s so violating. The blunt hilt, on the other hand, the physical manifestation of their hearts, is like exposure, an offer of vulnerability. 

Aqua’s feels like it’s thrumming, singing. She’s happy.

Ven steps forward with the rope and ties it over the hilts in loops. “This is just an image, the ties that bind, two Keyblades, but one. To intertwine a heart is to forge a chain, a friend, a companion, a memory. If missing then a void, a dream, a wish until reunion.” He steps back into position. “Before we go on, I think this would be a nice place to say your vows. Terra, you first.”

Terra stammers, looking into her eyes. “I-I couldn’t write one. I’m sorry.” 

“It’s okay,” Ven whispers, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I wrote some just in case.”

Terra doesn’t take it. He licks his lips. “It wouldn’t have been graceful. None of it—all of my thoughts—pale in comparison to you, Aqua.” He steadies himself with labored breathing, the squeeze on her Keyblade like a hold on her waist. “You’re so, so beautiful, and I’ve spent my days believing I don’t deserve you, because… because I couldn’t make things right like I should have.” 

Aqua quivers, gently touching his arm with her free hand and motioning for him to breathe. 

He continues, “I’m sorry. I wish the Master was here. I wish I was smart enough to prevent it from happening.” He inhales, choking up from the mention of Eraqus. “I never thought you would marry me of all people, so… I promise... I will be there every step of the way. I promise you, if you’re scared at night, I’ll be there to protect you. If you’re hurting in another world, I’ll come find you. If you’re confused, I’ll hold you close and help you make sense of it. I’ll brew you tea to help you sleep, I’ll step in the line of fire even if you wish to do the same for me, I’ll walk to the ends of the earth to make sure you are safe and healthy. I promise I’ll be with you.

“And I’ll mess up. I know me. I’ll fix it. If you want to clobber me, I’ll be patient. I’ll learn. I’ll do better. Every day you save me from myself. This is the least I can do. I’ve loved you since I was a kid. I’ll love you every day.”

Silence falls on all of them, Terra sniffing just to get some fresh air, Ven wiping his eyes, Aqua blinking too much. 

“Now you, Aqua,” Ven says. 

Despite being teared up, Aqua holds it together. She’s so good at that.

“Terra, I stand with you because I do want to be here. I do want to be by your side. I do want to laugh at your bad jokes.” She relieves a giggle. “I love you. I have for as long as I can remember, even if I didn’t know the words for it.” She studies his face. “I’m sure the Master is here with us, and he couldn’t be prouder of you. I’m proud of you.” Suddenly, she switches her tone, as if to lecture. “And if you even fathom taking a hit for me, remember that I’m faster than you. I’ll protect you first.” Then she softens. “I promise to be your shelter when the storm falls on us. I promise to sit on your bedside when you’re sick, to lift you up when you’re down about yourself, because you are sometimes. 

“You are my home, no matter how far your heart is from me. If you need a star to light your way back, I’ll give it to you.” She smiles widely, like she’s about to laugh. “If something between us breaks, I’ll mend it with you. I can’t imagine my life any other way.”

Their words are now spoken. Aqua suppresses a laugh and grins like a child. Terra holds his breath, just in case he screams from every emotion that he can’t name.  

“Well,” Ven says, rolling his sleeve up so he could wipe his nose on his forearm. “I guess it’s time. This bond is an oath you will remember each other until you close your eyes for the last time, for the tragedy to forget is to be alone forever. Do you accept this?”

“I do,” Terra says.

Aqua hums. “Yes, I do.”

Ven smiles. “You know what to do.”

With his free hand, Terra presses two fingers to his chest, over his heart, where he builds a golden glow. Twenty years living with her, ten years in darkness thinking about her, this vow is impossible to break—even if they can’t do this any longer, Terra could never forget her. Never. In his hand is now a piece of himself, a nugget of his heart, a memory of her in his bed that he never wants to lose.

He takes those fingers to her chest, two thick golden threads drawn out from his heart. She winces at the touch, quick to dissolve. Stormfall shifts in his hand, growing longer, its hilt thicker and darker, wrapping around like a weaved shield. A subtle change, a little piece of him.

Aqua does the same, fingers to her chest first to create the threads, bringing them to his chest. It does hurt, like a needle digging into his skin, sharp for the entire length until it’s suddenly gone. 

He feels full, as though his insides are creating space for something extra. Warm, frightening, whole, exciting. Her piece is a memory he can’t read but he doesn’t need to. Ends of the Earth opens way for an icy blade to cut through the middle as the hilt fans out like wings. A piece of her to take with him where he goes.

“Alright,” Ven chirps, snapping the booklet closed. “The book ends with the quote, Two hearts, only one, but I think this means I can call you husband and wife in secret. So kiss.”

Their Keyblades dissipate when they hold each other, tender but with appetite, unaware of their surroundings for several selfish moments. With sewn threads, it’s as though he breathes through her. Terra presses her onto him, feeling how her heart now beats in sync with his.

“I love you,” she whispers. They are married. 

He’ll never tire of hearing it. Stars, they are married. “I love you, too.”

Terra hears Ven sniff before a handkerchief is shoved into his face. “You need your face dry and clean before everyone sees you,” Ven says. 

The sunset now is deep, a fiery orange. Terra doesn’t want to let go.

“I’ll hold you again tonight,” Aqua says, patting his chest. “I want to see the meteor shower Ven promised.”

“It’ll be a good one,” Ven assures.

Terra kisses her. “Then we have to make a run for it.” He picks Ven up like a log, jogging through the thicket of the forest with Aqua close behind him, the Master in her arms. When they approach the castle, in the twilight, they hear chatter coming from the halls, as though ghosts are partying outside. 

Terra feels at peace despite that he now has to perform, balancing on a tightrope where he doesn’t care if he falls. He turns around and holds her neck to kiss her again, feeling her laughter in his mouth. “One more?” he asks when they break. 

Ven, still tucked in Terra’s arm, groans. “I never asked for a front seat to the kissing show. Is this my punishment?”

Aqua kisses him one more time, whispering to him I love you for what will be a string of I love you’s in the night to come. Friends will cheer, Terra will trip on the way to the altar, Sora will cry because Terra will cry, Xion will eat too much cake and get sick, Isa will laugh because he is drunk, Kairi will be the star of the dance, Aqua will be the star in his eyes. 

[saxifactumterritum]

Fic that's NOT yuhuang. It's hst&xsq gen. Gosh! I was gonna put it on ao3 but who can write summary at midnight? An unreasonable request, AO3. also I forgot the opening is the opening to a entirely different fic and I am not bothering to change it. It was gonna be 'ywz starts using speech-to-text software to make faster instructions in the game' fic. Anyway that's not this fic. This fic is XSQ and HST.

In season 11, Thunderclap makes it to the playoffs. Their third game is against Blue Rain, who are crashing through the season and winning everything. It's not that they're at the top of their game, Xiao Shiqin wouldn't say that; they're all over the place. But they're vicious with it, and too fast.They make adjustments too fast, faster than anyone is used to, and their quick adjustments allow them to be more careless. If a mistake is made, they correct it as they play. It's something to do with their shot-calling, though it's definitely still Yu Wenzhou. Just faster than he possibly could type, and messy.

It's not a game Xiao Shiqin had been looking forward to, and it's not a game he enjoyed playing. He's quite glad it's over, though he doesn't say that. He says the loss is on him and hell adjust their tactics and play better next time.

"I don't think it was the tactics," Dai Yanqi says.

"Hmm," Xiao Shiqin says, half agreeing but mostly he's tired. Really tired. They're walking through the building toward the cars and Dai Yanqi is too full of energy. She makes an impatient tutting sound, sucking her teeth and tossing her head.

"I'm not placating you! It was your fault, OK, if you like. I'm saying we should find out what the fuck is up with Blue Rain before trying to think up a new strategy. Has anyone come up with a way to combat their new style? If such a clumsy thing can be called 'style'," Dai Yanqi says. Really, so much energy. How?

"Hey! Little Dai! How dare you how dare you we are the most full of style I'll PK you I'll beat you! Again! Fight me, fight me! We're beautiful and graceful and Thunderclap just wishes they looked as cool as Blue Rain, how rude when you're a guest in our city! I'll fight you!" Huang Shaotian’s voice comes before Huang Shaotian comes around the corner, bounding toward them, stream of chatter getting louder and disintegrating into mere trash talk.

"What are you doing here? Aren't you meant to be at the press event?" Xiao Shiqin says.

"I can go where I like," Huang Shaotian says, smiling, then pulls a face and looks furtively around. "I escaped. I'm looking for you, Xiao Shiqin, come on, come on, quickly before my captain sends someone after me. Or comes himself. Terrifying. Come on, don't dawdle."

Xiao Shiqin doesn't leap to Huang Shaotian’s command and follow on. Dai Yanqi gives him a shove, and a look. A firm, bossy look that he's sure she's learnt from Chen Guo when visiting Su Mucheng. Right, right, they were just talking about getting intelligence on Blue Rain and here is Blue Rain’s biggest chatterbox coming to offer himself up. Xiao Shiqin follows, sure it's a trap of some sort, too tired to explain to Dai Yanqi that, yes, Huang Shaotian talks a lot (so much, he's still talking, happy that Xiao Shiqin is following), but he doesn't tell secrets. Xiao Shiqin wonders idly if he's really snuck away from his duties, or if he's here at Yu Wenzhou’s behest. He's leading them on a route that avoids most of the security, but that doesn't tell Xiao Shiqin much. Also, Huang Shaotian being scared of Yu Wenzhou doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have implicit permission, they're just like that. No useful data.

"Here we are here we are, this one isn't attached to any alarms, so we can sneak out here and no blaring alarms will bring down angry captains and managers and building staff," Huang Shaotian says, pushing a fire-exit and grinning over his shoulder at Xiao Shiqin.

It's around the side of the stadium, a street with some bins, an alley. Huang Shaotian makes a dramatic show of putting on a cap and wrapping a scarf around his face. Xiao Shiqin waits politely. Huang Shaotian waits too, Xiao Shiqin is too tired to work out what for. Ideally he'd like a nap about now. He stretches, yawning, and Huang Shaotian makes a disapproving sound and roots through his bag, talking to himself. From what Xiao Shiqin can hear, he seems to be listing what's in there. He comes out with a second scarf, triumphant, and comes too close with a bounce, then bounces back again, vibrating, holding out the scarf.

"Shiqin, you'll be recognised. We're famous," Huang Shaotian says, when Xiao Shiqin just blinks. Xiao Shiqin doesn't want to be wrapped in a scarf for Haung Shaotian’s entertainment.

"Aren't we in a hurry? I think I can hear someone inside," Xiao Shiqin says.

"Shit! If the captain catches me I'm dead, come on come on come on can I have your hand? Otherwise I have to keep checking if you're following, you should but I once snuck off to see Ye Xiu and he didn't keep up I had to go back for him he'd just stopped to sit on some steps!" Huang Shaotian says, widening his eyes and waiting for Xiao Shiqin to agree that Ye Xiu was ridiculous.

Xiao Shiqin offers his hand instead, and gets Huang Shaotian’s hand, warm and surprisingly nice, calloused fingers around his wrist. With a tug, they set off at a run, Huang Shaotian laughing, out into a wider street and left, away from the stadium. They weave through the light crowd, people still lingering after the game, no one clocks them for players. Xiao Shiqin wonders if Su Mucheng will let him get away with calling this sightseeing. He's seeing City G, even if it is at a fast pace. They keep turning corners and he's utterly lost by the time Huang Shaotian comes to a breathless stop, letting Xiao Shiqin go and spinning in a circle as if to get his bearings, rearranging his scarf that's coming unspun from around him.

"Tea! I know this place will be the best for us. Come on, you'll like it. I messaged Mucheng to find out what you like and I made her tell me the truth unlike the time with poor Qiao Yifan," Huang Shaotian says.

"Do you regularly kidnap players and whisk them away for… boba tea?" Xiao Shiqin says

"I didn't kidnap Qiao Yifan, I was trying- I didn't kidnap you either! You came to try and get sneaky information out of me," Huang Shaotian says. "Come on, I'm paying, don't be cold hearted, Shiqin. Be nice to me, I'm buying you lovely tea and they have these nice biscuits, Mrs Hua makes them herself she's so nice."

Xiao Shiqin waves Huang Shaotian ahead, and follows him to the cafe. It's small, full of plants, busy. There's a tiny table by the window with two mismatched chairs that they sit at, and Huang Shaotian goes to order for them promising Xiao Shiqin that he knows what to choose. Xiao Shiqin messages Su Mucheng to ask her what she told Huang Shaotian.

<3 <3 <3: what do you mean?

XSQ: he's choosing tea for me. Maybe biscuits as well. Did you change your name in my phone?

<3 <3 <3: haha! No, definitely not, didn't change a thing. And I told him the truth don't worry I learnt my lesson from poor Yifan. Though I think you would probably not just eat it. We won! You forgot to ask

XSQ: I didn't forget I just hadn't yet. I was worried about the tea. Congratulations! I'll watch later. I like watching you play.

<3 <3 <3: <3

XSQ: he's coming back. Do you know what he's up to?

<3 <3 <3: no idea. Making friends? Don't be too nice to him!

"Are you texting Su Mucheng? Tell her she owes me six PK matches, please tell her, look I got you good things," Huang Shaotian says, coming back with a tray and sitting in the other chair, leaning over toward Xiao Shiqin then back out of his space again. "Sorry, I'm excited. Did you tell her?"

"I'll tell her later," Xiao Shiqin says, pocketing his phone.

Huang Shaotian seems happy with that, transferring his attention to the tea and biscuits. He has picked things Xiao Shiqin likes, and Xiao Shiqin must smile because Huang Shaotian looks very pleased with himself.

He says, "see? You were right to trust me."

"Hm," Xiao Shiqin says, not committing.

"So! Now we're here and we have tea!" Huang Shaotian says. And waits as if for a response. Xiao Shiqin raises one eyebrow, which he feels is enough of an answer. Zx mostly tired and confused. Huang Shaotian laughs. "Have you worked it out? I can see your tactician brain thinking of all the reasons I might have for luring you for tea."

"I'm knackered, I haven't the first clue," Xiao Shiqin says. "I'm just going to enjoy the free tea."

"And my free company," Huang Shaotian says, wriggling.

How does he have so much energy? They played the same game; it took forever and mostly sucked. Huang Shaotian made at least three mistakes that Xiao Shiqin noticed. He could only exploit one of them effectively but he saw them. Xiao Shiqin decides to do as he said, and just enjoy his tea. Huang Shaotian doesn't seem to mind a lack of conversation. He tells Xiao Shiqin a story about a time he got lost in this part of the city, and then a bit about Mrs Hua who made the cookies, and then he sits quietly, except to say how much he likes his tea each time he drinks some. Xiao Shiqin finds himself relaxing. He pulls one foot up onto his chair, sitting back from the table, so he can lean on his knee and look out the window, watch the people go by.

"It's going to rain later, I think," Huang Shaotian says, after a period of silence, yawning. Xiao Shiqin yawns too, catching it, dozy. "I don't have a scheme, you know. I want… I want to ask you something."

"Uh oh. Something that requires kidnapping, tea, and biscuits?" Xiao Shiqin says, drawing his gaze away from the window. Huang Shaotian is looking at him, intent, nervous, hands knit together on his lap. Xiao Shiqin smiles, trying to be reassuring. "Ask away."

"I thought about who to ask, I could ask old Ye, he's OK at advice, or I thought about asking Yu Wenzhou, of course. But then I thought you'd probably know."

"I might," Xiao Shiqin says, when Huang Shaotian stops there.

He's curious now. What could it possibly be? Huang Shaotian is closer to loads of other pros than he is to Xiao Shiqin. Xiao Shiqin lists all the things he, Ye Xiu and Yu Wenzhou have in common. But not Zhang Xinjie, so not a tactics thing. Huang Shaotian is still hesitating. Xiao Shiqin looks out of the window again, away from Huang Shaotian’s face, giving him a sort of privacy.

"You're a mentor, to your players. And you helped Sun Xiang, when he was under your care. You take it very seriously," Huang Shaotian says. Xiao Shiqin waits, then nods when there's nothing else. "I'm… Worried."

"About Lu Hanwen?" Xiao Shiqin asks, thinking of the youngest member of Blue Rain, often found following after Huang Shaotian like a duckling, quoting things Huang Shaotian had told him, listening carefully to Huang Shaotian’s cascade of words and picking out the compliments and the advice.

"No, Hanwen is great. Perfect. Or I suppose about him, but not really. That cleared that up! Come on, Shaotian! Damn it," Huang Shaotian says. "I'm worried that I'll fuck it up. I want to be good, to choose the right things and set a good example and help my team and our second roster and our trainees."

"Why now? No offence but it's been a while, you've had lots of chances to fuck up. Did you do something?"

"No. I just want to be good at this. You're good at this. I've been watching Dai Yanqi, these last seasons, and Sun Xiang, and that little warlock on your second roster."

"You're not stealing her for Blue Rain, she likes Thunderclap," Xiao Shiqin says, glancing Huang Shaotian’s way. Huang Shaotian sticks his tongue out at him.

"I don't know why now. I think I'm a good vice captain, I feel like I have a lot of that sorted out. I'm good at my job, I'm great at Glory, I want to be better at this, too," Huang Shaotian says.

"I think I'm flattered you're asking. I don't really believe you don't have other motives," Xiao Shiqin says. Huang Shaotian scoffs.

"I always make sure to have at least three ulterior motives. Like you wouldn't have other motives too, if you said yes to helping me. I already see your brain spinning, thinking what you can get out of this," Huang Shaotian says.

"That's the second time you've said my head is transparent," Xiao Shiqin says. "Alright. I don't know why you've picked me for your little mentors club, but… Yeah. I'll say yes."

"Really?! Yesss! A club! Mentors club, I can make badges. This is great, I have-" Huang Shaotian starts. Seeing he's about to charge off on a long speech, Xiao Shiqin holds up a hand. "Oh. There's a 'but'?"

"Not really. I don't think I'm an authority on this, on supporting young or new players I mean. I'm not comfortable, ha, mentoring you," Xiao Shiqin explains.

"We could really have a club. Me and you and not old Ye, he's retired and he's annoying, he never agrees to PK at good times for me, did you know that? He's not a good friend at all," Huang Shaotian says.

"What about captain Chu? She has some young players she's bringing up, and she and Mucheng always support other female players," Xiao Shiqin says.

"Mucheng too. Her Happy aren't green anymore but I like how they cultivate new players," Huang Shaotian says. "Can I make badges? My captain gave me a badge maker oh my god I haven't taken my phone off silent oh my god he's probably rung me by now! I meant to take it off silent so I'd know when he noticed me gone! I'm dead, I'm so so dead."

"Tell him I asked to meet you," Xiao Shiqin says. Huang Shaotian stares at him, mouth gaping. Xiao Shiqin finishes the last of his tea and gets up. "I like the idea of being owed a favour from you. It's useful."

"Black hearted! Shameless! Worse than Ye Xiu! Ohhhh I have so many missed calls. Really? I can say it's your fault?" Huang Shaotian says, hopeful.

"No. You can tell him I asked you to meet for tea," Xiao Shiqin says.

He's not an idiot, he knows better than to be un-specific. He's not leaving opportunities for Huang Shaotian to blame everything on him and get him in trouble with Yu Wenzhou. Asking to meet for tea is one thing, being at fault for Huang Shaotian sneaking off, skipping press events, not telling anyone where he is, leaving his phone off, and ignoring his captain's calls? That's another. Xiao Shiqin waits while Huang Shaotian rewraps his scarf and gathers his things. They walk toward a main road together, Huang Shaotian on the phone. Mostly his end of the conversation is apologies and 'yes, captain' and 'no, captain'. It's subdued, but Xiao Shiqin wishes he was a little worse at reading people so he couldn't hear the current of anticipation underneath it. Huang Shaotian is definitely enjoying being in trouble. Xiao Shiqin looks away and walks a bit further apart.

"Shiqin," Huang Shaotian says, getting his attention back and pointing to a car that's pulled up to the kerb ahead of them. "Yes captain, they're here. I'll come straight back right after I drop captain Xiao at the hotel. Promise."

Huang Shaotian opens the door for Xiao Shiqin and he slides in, greeting the driver and the security guard in the front seats. The exasperated security guard who rolls his eyes at Huang Shaotian.

"Okay captain… No you don't have to stay on, I'll be… Yes. Bye. Bye. OK. Phew! I think I'm only half dead. Thank you! I owe you half my life," Huang Shaotian says. "Hi guys, do you know where the hotel is? I don't know, do you know, captain Xiao? Don't worry they probably know. Do you know, Hong Wei?"

"Yeah, we know, captain Yu told us exactly where to go, Huang Shao," Hong Wei says.

"Don't be upset with me, I brought you biscuits. Look, these are the peanut ones you like, and the honeycomb ones for little Shi, from Mrs Hua's," Huang Shaotian says, passing a little parcel through. That seems to appease the other two, and Huang Shaotian sits back. "Badges! I'll make great badges and post you some. You can tell Su Mucheng when you tell her about owing me PK, and she can tell Chu Yunxiu, then I'll send them badges too. I'll make a QQ group chat. Yay, I'll be admin."

Xiao Shiqin zones out, letting all Huang Shaotian’s plans wash over him, watching the world spin past the car window, wondering if he'll regret this. He doesn't think he will, though. He even likes the idea. Huang Shaotian goes quiet again, for the last five minutes of the drive.

"Thank you," he says, softly, as they're pulling up outside the hotel. "I don't want to ask Wenzhou, he'll be able to see how uncertain I am, it might worry him."

"I'm looking forward to it, and I am flattered that you thought of me," Xiao Shiqin says.

"I think I stole you away from a nap, you look so sleepy. Thanks, thank you. Don't stay up, go rest!" Huang Shaotian says.

Xiao Shiqin is so glad to see the hotel. Dai Yanqi is waiting for him and he remembers belatedly he was supposed to try and get secrets out of Huang Shaotian. She doesn't seem to be expecting that though, she's waiting with snacks and a run-down of where the team are, and to make sure he's going to his room to rest before dinner, not to work.

"You played very well, Yanqi. Huang Shaotian mentioned that he's noticed you improving this season," Xiao Shiqin says. It's true, it's not exactly what Huang Shaotian said but it's what he meant.

"That-! He says in the vice-captains chat all the time that he's the best vice-captain in all of Glory! He says he has a badge so it's official!" Dai Yanqi says.

"You're the best vice-captain," Xiao Shiqin assures, yawning, as they walk to his room.

"Damn right. I've filled in the forms you made for our performances, after the game, and I've done the last of the paperwork for management, and I've uploaded the recordings and started to pull out clips," Dai Yanqi says.

"Best ever vice-captain. Go rest though, no more work today. I'll see you for dinner," Xiao Shiqin says.

He finally reaches his room, and his bed, and he flops down, sighing happily to be horizontal. As he falls asleep, he idly starts working out how he can trick Huang Shaotian into making Dai Yanqi a 'best vice-captain' badge.

[problematicfavesareproblematic]

Hiding From the War We Claim to Fight For

Dick Winters x Reader

Chapter 2- Like Darkness Drawn to the Night

Summary: Dick considers how to make ammends while you are reminded of your position in the Airborne

Warnings: ANGST AGAIN, some backstory, more internal monologue than any of you crazy cats asked or signed up for, nix being a smug little bitch, some wildly inaccurate and made up military rules, my usual nonsense

Title and Chapter name taken from The Hollow in Retrospect by Corey Kilgannon

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dick’s fingers hovered over the keys of the typewriter, fingers starting to shake from inaction as he stared at the row of blank paper waiting to be filled.

How anyone could write reports all day was beyond him.

 He’d rather relive each and every scorching run up and down Currahee while under enemy fire than compose another sentence, let alone an entire document. More than anything, he wished he could just write in the straightforward, bullet point style that SInk and Nix’s intelligence reports came in.

Briefly, Dick wondered if it was this difficult for everyone else in the military, or if he was just uniquely inept.

 Whenever he saw you writing reports, your fingers danced over the keys like a concert pianist. You made it look easy.

The thought of you brings back the sour feeling in his stomach, an anxious nausea rolling over him like a rogue wave. His blood was both too hot and too cold in his veins, the sight of your heartbroken face carved into the inside of his eyelids.

 “You made me part of it…. You stood there and did nothing to stop it.”

 He couldn't deny your accusations of negligence, even though every fiber in his body ached to reject such claims. When had he lost that part of his humanity? Where had it gone? He’d had it in England, he knew he had still felt it in Normandy….maybe it was after Hall died? 

Had he left it on that hillside in Sainte Marie du Mont, as he watched the city down the way exploding in fire and fury?

 It scared him- to think that he hadn’t even felt the man he’d been slipping away.

Had it been obvious to anyone else?

Had it been obvious to you?

 Forcing himself to refocus on his report, he reread the last part he’d written and frowned. He’d reached the part in his report of the October 5th report that he’d been dreading: the part where you got hurt….

 When the men had brought Alley back from the Crossroads, Dick had thought them lucky that only Moe had sustained injuries- serious ones but non-life threatening.

It hadn’t been until Joe Liebgott suddenly looked around in fear and asked if anyone had seen you that Dick realized that this wasn’t just a matter of re-securing a border anymore.

It was a body retrieval.

 He hadn’t even had time to get angry or scared or confused as to why you were out so close to the frontlines before he’d gotten whatever men he could together to retake the Crossroads, his sense of duty and obligation taking over his more emotional mind and giving it a purpose by way of distraction.

You weren’t in the dike where Liebgott had assumed you’d fallen, something that provided little comfort for both Dick and the men who’d grown to love you like a sister. While no body usually meant that there was still hope of life, the fact that you could’ve very well been taken squandered any such optimism.

No body, no answers.

 When Dick had thrown himself off of the dirt road and slid into the dike for cover, it had been your whimper of pain that had brought life back into his body. Somehow, he’d managed to get his hand over your mouth before you could make much of a sound, your eyes wide and bright in the dark as he stared down at you in relieved wonder.

 You must’ve been laying out in the cold for at least an hour, your calf bleeding steadily as you shivered in the damp muck of the grassy slope. As carefully as he could, he’d rolled his body over yours in a desperate hope to offer you some warmth, his heart going a thousand miles a minute as he processed the fact that you weren’t dead- that there was still a chance of you making it out of this alive.

 “Are you hit?” he asked as quietly as he could, watching as his breath moved the hairs that had fallen loose around your face like some gentle breeze.

You nodded, knocking your left knee against his leg to indicate where you had been injured. He realized he still had his hand clamped over your mouth and lifted it up slowly, worried that you might make another pained sound and give away your position.

“Not bad,” you hissed, your jaw tight as you tried to keep your voice quiet. “Bad ricochet…. Moe? The guys—?”

“Safe.”

 You’d let out a sigh of relief, swallowing a few times before seeming to refocus and process what Dick’s being there probably meant.

“A truck with three men passed about six minutes ago,” you sighed, and Dick could feel your hands move from your sides to slide between both of your stomachs to start pulling at your belt. His face went red and he quickly rolled off of you, eyes wide at the insinuation of the act before realizing that you were trying to give him something to make a tourniquet out of. 

 He knocked your lethargic hands out of the way and helped you slide it from your belt loops, wrapping an arm around your waist to unclip your holster that was inhibiting the belt’s release. 

“Just you?” you had asked, exhaustion from blood loss beginning to stain your voice.

Dick sighed a ‘no’, looking back the way he’d come from before looking back down at you.

“I’ll be back,” he had promised, looping the belt around your leg and securing it just below your knee. “I’ll come back, okay?”

Your hands took the tail of the belt from his and pulled, your face drawing in pain as you nodded.

“Go, go!”

 He stops typing, his mouth feeling dry and his hands feeling clammy.

It made him uncomfortable to think that you’d been angry with him even then, that you’d been angry with him for a long time and he hadn’t even realized it. You’d been so brave, squeezing your eyes shut as he and Tab poured sulfa powder on the wound and muffling your cries of discomfort into the palm of his hand as you held it to your mouth.

Dick wondered briefly if you’d ever let him touch you again, even if it were only to save your life.

 You meant more to him than he cared to admit or think about. You hating him hadn’t changed that.

When you’d brought up the kiss you two had shared in England, you’d used the past tense- ‘the feelings I had for you’.

Selfishly, Dick supposed that he’d automatically assumed that you were still harboring your affections for him- that you would wait until he felt comfortable enough to share his own feelings of mutual admiration and that things would easily fall into place.

It made him feel stupid. It made him feel foolish.

He wondered if this was how you’d been made to feel after Alderborne.

If so, he had more to apologize than he thought.

 Make amends the voice in his head whispered. Do your job and make it better.

He didn’t know what that meant, not really. He didn’t know how to even start.

What he did know? He couldn’t do anything until he finished this report.

So, leaning on his sense of duty, he brought his fingers to the keys and began to clack away.

 ~

 Dick’s report felt heavy in your hand as you waited for his orderly to alert him to your presence, anxiety churning your stomach like a storming sea. It took far too much effort on your part to maintain your professional facade these days, and judging by the noticeable tremble of the papers in your hand, your mask was starting to crack. Even Sink had made a remark about how on edge you seemed, doubt clear on his face when you tried to brush his concern off as nothing more than homesickness.

 You should’ve known better than to try and lie to Robert Sink, he’d known you too well and too long for you to get much past him. It didn’t happen often, but you could swear that there were moments where he looked at you like you were still the messy-haired little girl who played war in the woods with his children after holiday meals- his eager-eyed niece who would climb into his lap and beg for him to recount the far off adventures he’d just returned from.

 Now that you’d had a chance to share one of these adventures with him, you wondered if he regretted indulging your fascinations. You doubted he’d ever tell you either way. 

That was just the sort of man he was.

Those were the sort of men you now surrounded yourself with.

 When you tried to imagine one of your future nieces or nephews crawling into your lap and asking you for stories, you were alarmed by the fact that you had unintentionally imagined Dick sitting by your side.

 Before you fully process why that had been where your mind went, Zielinski returned and gave you the go-ahead to enter the office.

 You felt an instant shot of relief when you saw that Dick wasn’t alone, the presence of Lewis and Harry calming your frayed nerves significantly. While you knew in your heart that Dick was not a bad person, that he hadn’t done what he did maliciously, you still weren’t sure what to make of your anger towards him.

 The moment you step in the doorway, Dick shoots to his feet and for a moment you think he’s about to stand at attention. Briefly, you wonder if Zielinski had accidentally told him to expect Sink coming in- and if the way Harry and Lewis start to confusedly copy his formality, they are just as confused as you are.

 But you knew Zielinski hadn’t mentioned Sink. You’d been right next to him when he’d said your name.

That made your face feel hot for a reason you didn’t dare explore right now.

 Everyone in the room stands awkwardly and stares at each other for a second, and with a confidence you didn’t truly have you attempt to break the tension.

“Uh- at ease, gentlemen?”

 Harry snorts a laugh at that, plopping back down with Nixon following suit. You don't miss the look Nix shoots Dick’s way, but you aren’t able to decipher it. Maybe that was for the best.

 “Well, would you look at that?” Harry says with a beaming smile. “Look who’s decided to grace us with her presence this morning.”

You roll your eyes at that, giving Nix a quick nod in greeting before fixing Harry with a look as you walk further into the room. 

“Oh Harry, when I decide to grace you with anything you’ll know it.”

He shoots you a wink as Nix huffs a laugh at the interaction.

You can feel Dick’s eyes on you, and when you turn to face him you feel your easy smile tighten and you give him a nod.

 “Sir.”

“Y/L/N.”

 The air between the two of you is thick with unspoken tension, stained with guilt and frustration and the remnants of affection that made the feeling all the more painful. You could see a similar trepidation on his face, your throat feeling tight as you choke back all of the things you wish you could say.

 Lewis, clearly feeling the awkwardness as well but kindly not letting it linger, quickly breaks the silence.

“You want to sit, Y/N? Heard you got shot at the crossroads….”

 Dick’s eyes flicker to your leg and then he’s quick to reach over and rip his coat off of the wooden chair to the left of his desk. You sigh a laugh, mumbling a quick ‘thanks’ before carefully lowering yourself into the seat.

“I think I fall somewhere in between shot and grazed, but yes you heard right—”

“Oh yeah!” Harry adds, leaning into the sill of the window as he crosses his arms across his chest. “Lucky you weren’t at CP. heard they got hit pretty bad….”

You feel your mood darken slightly at the reminder of Holly’s death. He was a good man. All of the men who had died that day were good men.

“Yeah,“ you mutter as brightly as you can. “All things considered.”

 You clear your throat and look hesitantly at Dick.

“That’s uh, actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

You hand him the file in your hand and give him a nod of thanks when he comes closer so you don’t have to get up. 

 “Sink’s hoping he can get you to rewrite the report on that—”

“Oh?” Dick’s pale brows furrow as he looks at the paper to see that it is indeed his report on the crossroads. “Was something wrong with it? Did I miss a signature? Was it too vague—?”

“No, no!” you interrupt, having heard through the grapevine how hard he’d worked on it. “Nothing like that! It’s um, the opposite, actually.....”

 Dick frowns at that, and you hesitate for a moment while you try to find the right words to express what Sink needed fixed.

“Sink, um, was hoping you could rewrite some of it. Specifically….” You look down to pick at an imaginary thread on your pant leg. “he needs a report that doesn’t include the fact that I was there—”

You feel his eyes on you, and the room is unbearably quiet as you clear your throat and continue to look anywhere but Dick’s direction. You catch Nix’s gaze, and you can tell he knows what you’re getting at.

“I…” Dick begins, his voice quiet. When you see Harry’s head turn to look in his direction you do the same and catch him looking at Nixon as well. “I’m not sure I understand…”

 Harry, never one to stay still for long, chooses this moment to pop to his feet and announce that he’s getting himself some coffee. You all mumble your own acknowledgments to his intention, and he saunters off like a kid who was just told he didn’t have to stay for detention. 

 When Dick’s eyes fall on you again, you begin to tap your fingers on your thigh nervously.

“Well, I’m still technically just an orderly, at least on paper, so—”

 “—So having you injured in the line of duty is a direct violation of your service agreement.” Lewis interrupts, saving you from your tongue-tied stupor. Dick’s frown deepens, and when he looks back at you you nod in confirmation. 

“What he said,” you say with a bitter taste in your mouth. “It’s just a minor adjustment, otherwise it’s a perfect report, Dick—”

He holds up a hand, narrowing his eyes as he processes what you and Nixon have just said. Once upon a time, you would’ve found the look on his face endearing and it would’ve made you smile. 

But not right now. 

 “That doesn’t seem right.” he finally settles on, smoothing a hand over his already perfectly combed hair before setting his hands on his narrow hips.

 You couldn’t agree more. It wasn’t right.

You’d implied as much to Sink when he’d tasked you with getting Dick to amend the report earlier than morning, a strange embarrassment bringing tears to your eyes at the notion that the simple mention of you ruined an entire report. 

 Were you such an intolerable figure that by simply being referred to in an official document brought into question the credibility of a successful engagement? 

 Sink, giving you a look that you recognized from your childhood moments of petulance, had clapped a hand on your shoulder and given it a familiar squeeze.

“It isn’t fair, you’re right about that. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but the powers that be just ain’t ready for someone like you- not yet. Don’t take it to heart. You’re smarter than the lot of ‘em.”

 “The terms of my service are pretty clear that I in no way should be anywhere near combat,” you heard yourself parrot hollowly. “Colonel Sink is just trying to keep me from getting sent home—”

 “But you were shot.”

 The ferocity in his tone surprises you, and when you see him angrily shaking his head from side to side you send Lewis a pleading look.

Taking the cue perfectly, Nix stands up again and clears his throat as he elaborates on your behalf.

 “If she’s shot back at CP, that’s one thing. It’s where she’s supposed to be as an orderly. But If she’s shot ‘in the line of duty’, she’s considered an active servicemember- and active service members who get wounded are eligible for a Purple Heart, which would make her a soldier—”

 “—and then you’d have the right to a soldier’s pension.” Dick finishes Nixon’s sentence, his jaw working as he looks ruefully at the report in his hands.

 Nix snaps and points a finger at him. “Bingo.”

 Your frustration from earlier has begun to boil your blood again, and your feet nearly itch with the need to leave the conversation and the suffocating feeling of the office.

As you push yourself up to stand, Dick and Nix move to help you- only stopping at your assurance that you’d got it under control.

Looking back at Dick, you fix him with a look that you hope conveys the importance of what you’re asking.

 “I was able to buy you an extra two days, but the sooner Sink gets it the sooner he gets off of your back about it.”

Dick nods, tossing the pages down atop all of the other paperwork on top of the desk.

“Yeah, understood.”

“Hey, Dick—?”

 Something in the set of his shoulders gave you pause, and you realize you aren't really sure what else you wanted to say to him. 

Sorry I called you a monster? I think I was angrier at myself than anything else? I don’t think you’re a bad person at all, and I am sorry if I made you think that I did?

 But you can’t say any of those things- not yet and not with Nix here.

So you settle on another tight smile and a nod.

“Thank you. I know it’s….you’ve got a lot going—”

 The strained smile he gives you back tells you that he feels it too, that he knows there is still an ocean of unresolved conflict between the two of you. That he is just as sorry about it as you are.

“Don’t give it another thought. I’ll take care of it.”

 With a final nod, you murmur a goodbye to Lewis and leave the office

~

 The moment you are out of earshot Nix smirks like the cat that ate the canary.

“Told you she still liked you.”

“Shut up, Lewis.”

 Dick hoped his friend was right.

~ ~ ~

HELLO MY SPECTACULAR STARFISH HERE’S SOME MORE NONSENSE AND FEELINGS FOR YOU TO DIGEST! I TOTALLY MADE UP THE RULES AS TO WHY READER CAN’T BE IN LE REPORT SO PLZ DONT YELL AT ME I’M SENSITIVE OK I LOVE YOU BYYEEE!!!

Taglist: @mrseasycompany​ @itswormtrain​ @mrsalwayswrite​ @happyveday​ @sunsetmando​ @teenmagazines​ @liebgotttme​

[beatriceeagle]

I'm more of a fantasy than sci-fi person, but consider my interest piqued. Why should I watch farscape?

Okay, the thing is, every Farscape fan’s pitch on Why You, Yes You, Should Watch Farscape ends up sounding very similar, and that’s because Farscape is a black hole that sucks you in and does things to your brain, and after you’ve watched it you are never, ever the same, which incidentally is basically the plot of Farscape.

I would summarize the basic plot for you, but that’s work, and luckily, the show’s credits sequence includes a handy summary that I will provide instead of doing that work: “My name is John Crichton, an astronaut. A radiation wave hit, and I got shot through a wormhole. Now I’m lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship, full of strange alien life forms. Help me. Listen, please. Is there anybody out there who can hear me? I’m being hunted by an insane military commander. Doing everything I can. I’m just looking for a way home.“

So let me break down that monologue into its component reasons you should watch Farscape.

1) Some of the strange alien life forms are Muppets.

Farscape a co-production with the Jim Henson Company, and while there are many aliens played by humans in make-up, there are also a considerable number (including two of the regular crew) who are Muppets. By which I do not mean Kermit. I mean really gorgeous, elaborate works of art.

Also, even a lot of the humans-in-makeup aliens just look cool, and incredibly weird. Here’s an alien who appears in a single episode of season 1:

Not that there aren’t, you know, occasional Star Trek-style “these guys are just humans with weird hair,” or whatever, but in general, the aliens on Farscape look really alien. And that’s more than an aesthetic choice; it’s Farscape’s driving narrative principle. The aliens look alien, they act alien, they have alien values.

You know how a lot of sci-fi shows will have a stand-in for “fuck,” like Battlestar Galactica has “frak”? Well, Farscape has “frell.” And also “dren.” And yotz, hezmana, mivonks, loomas, tralk, snurch, eema, drannit, dench, biznak, arn, drad, fahrbot, narl. Some of those are swear words, but some of them are just words, never explicitly translated, that the alien characters will pepper into their speech, because, well, why should translator microbes be able to completely translate all the nuances of an alien culture? You’ll pick it up from context. One time, in passing, a character mentions that he’s familiar with the concept of suicide, but there’s no word for it in his language. I cannot emphasize to you enough how fleeting this moment is; the episode is not about suicide, we’re not having a great exchange of cultural ideas—at the time, the characters are running down a corridor in a crisis, as they are about 70 percent of the time—it’s just that the subject got brought up, and this character needed to talk around the fact that he literally didn’t have a word, in that moment. Things like that happen all the time, on Farscape.

Because more than anything else, Farscape is a show about culture shock. John Crichton is this straight, white Southern guy, at the top of his game—he’s an astronaut! he’s incredibly high status!—and then he ends up on the other side of the galaxy, where none of his cultural markers of privilege hold any meaning, where he doesn’t know the rules, where he literally can’t even open the doors. And he has to unlearn the idea that humanity is central, that he is the norm.

2) John Crichton, an astronaut, is pretty great.

A show that’s about a straight white guy with high status having to learn that he’s not the center of the universe could easily be centered around a really insufferable person, but one of the subtle things that makes Farscape so wonderful is that Crichton is, for the most part, pretty excellent. He has a lot of presumptions to unlearn because almost anyone in his cultural position would, but he’s also just a stand-up guy: compassionate, intelligent, open-minded, decent, forgiving, brave, hopeful.

And the galaxy tries to kick a whole lot of that out of him. It doesn’t succeed, mostly, but if Farscape is about anything other than culture shock, it’s about the lasting effects of trauma. How you can go through a wormhole one person, and experience things that turn you into someone you don’t recognize.

That’s kind of grim-sounding, but ultimately, what I’m trying to say is that Farscape is almost fanatically devoted to character work. Crichton is not the only character who sounds like he should be one thing and ends up being another. All of the characters—all of them, all of them, even the annoying ones—are complicated wonders. And you don’t have to wonder whether the events of the episode you’re watching are going to matter. They will. Everything that happens to the characters leaves a mark. Everything leaves them forever changed. Whether it’s mentioned explicitly or not—and often enough, it’s not explicit—the characters remember what has happened to them.

3) The living ship houses a lot of excellent women, among them the ship itself.

Ah, the women of Farscape, thou art the loves of my fucking life.

There’s Aeryn Sun, former Peacekeeper (that’s the military that the “insane military commander” hails from) now fugitive, currently learning the meaning of the word “compassion” (literally). She will break your fingers and also your heart. John/Aeryn is the main canon romantic ship.

There’s Pa’u Zhoto Zhaan, a priestess of the ninth level, current pacifist, former anarchist. Sorry, leading anarchist. She orgasms in bright light! (Oh my god, Farscape.)

There’s Chiana, my fucking bestie, a teenage(ish? ages in Farscape are weird) fugitive on the run from a repressive authoritarian state. Chiana is like a seductress con artist grifter thief who mostly just wants to survive so that she can have fun, damn it. Characters on Farscape do not really discuss sexualities (sex, yes, sexualities, no) and it would be fair to say that several of them do not fall along human sexuality lines generally, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that Chiana is canonically not straight.

Then there’s Moya, the ship herself, and it’s hard to get a straight read on Moya’s personality, since she mostly can’t speak. But she definitely has opinions, and things and people she cares about. And she moves the plot, though that gets into spoiler territory.

Past first season, further excellent women show up: Jool (controversial, but I like her), Sikozu (I once saw a Tumblr meme where someone had marked down that Sikozu would lose her shit when someone pronounced “gif” wrong, and that’s absolutely correct, and it’s why I love her), and Noranti (who is incredibly weird, and incredibly hard to summarize, but man, you gotta love her willingness to just show up and do her thing). Plus, there’s a recurring female villain, Grayza, who I could write probably multiple essays about. (I don’t know how you will feel about Grayza, as not everyone loves her, but I think she’s fucking fascinating, especially because she’s not actually the only recurring female villain. We also get Ahkna!)

(Side note: I should mention, here, that the cast of Farscape is really, really white. There is one cast member of color, Lani Tupu, but he pretty much represents the entirety of even, like, incidental diversity in casting for the series.)

Anyway, Farscape is full of awesome women, and also awesome and unexpected men, and it really enjoys playing with audience expectations of gender roles, generally. Literal entire books have been written about the way that Farscape fucks around with sex, sexuality, and gender. It’s a little weird because it was the late 90s/early 2000s, and sometimes that does come through, but Farscape’s guiding principle was always to try not to present American culture of the time as the norm, so like. It is not.

(An aside on Farscape and sex: Literally every character on Farscape has sexual tension with every other character. If you are a shipper, this is a Good Show, because no matter who you ship, there will not only be subtext, you will get a Moment of some kind. Multiple characters kiss the Muppet. Farscape is dedicated to getting into the nitty-gritty of the galaxy—I like to think of it as showing the guts of the universe—so a lot of the show is kind of squishy. They live on a biomechanoid ship, instead of androids there are “bioloids,” there’s a lot of focus on strange alien biologies, and lots of weird glowing fluids and things. I think the sex thing is kind of part and parcel of the larger biology focus: Farscape is really fascinated with how we all eat and evolve and live and die and, well, fuck. Which is in turn, kind of part of its focus on making everything really alien.)

4) Other stuff you should know.

Farscape as a whole is excellent, but it was kind of the product of creative anarchy—an Australian/American coproduction (oh yeah, everyone except Crichton speaks with an Australian accent) that was also partnered with the Henson company, whose showrunners were based in America but whose actual production all took place in Australia, and who was just constantly trying new things. So individual episodes can vary wildly in quality. It really takes off in the back half of season one, but no season is without a few off episodes.

It is extraordinarily funny, and I really think I haven’t stressed that enough. It’s one of the shows I want to quote the most in my daily life, but almost all of its humor is really context-dependent, and if you just wander around going, “Hey Stark? What’s black and white, and black and white, and black and white?” people look at you really funny.

It’s very conversant with pop culture generally (although obviously sci-fi  specifically, and Star Trek most specifically of all) and really enjoys deconstructing tropes, often to the effect of, “Well, Crichton really does not know what to do here, does he?” but sometimes just to be interesting.

There are also a lot of themes about science, and its uses and misuses.

The whole thing is fucking epic, and if you get invested at all, will take you on an emotional ride.

This show is weird. I know that that’s probably come across by now, but I think it’s worth reiterating as its own point: Farscape is so weird. Like, proudly, unabashedly, trying its hardest, weird. An amazing kind of weird.

If you’re into fantasy, you should know that there’s a recurring villain who’s just a wizard. Like, they don’t bother to explain it any more than that, he’s just a fucking wizard.

In summary: You should watch Farscape because it is a weird, wild, emotional, epic romance/drama/action/allegory full of Muppets and leather and one-liners and emotional gut punches and love, and if you let it, it will worm its way into you and never let go, which, now that I think of it, is another Farscape plot.

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine!

[jebazzled]

so you want to write in second person; person two, electric boogaloo

Hi there! As you know by now, I'm full of unsolicited writing advice. Today, we're going to talk about writing in second person - i.e., apps that talk about "you this, you that."

Second person apps are popular in advanced writing settings (more on beginner/intermediate/advanced rp here) and can be really fun to write. But in my observation, they're also sometimes poorly utilized, especially in transitioning from intermediate rp to advanced rp. (More on making that transition here!)

Simply put: second person is not valuable because it "feels literary." Second person writing is valuable because it can make emotions more vivid, and enable a closer read of a character than the same amount of third person prose.

Intermediate third person writing does not become advanced merely because the pronouns have switched from "he" to "they."

Let's do a case study!

Again: second person writing is not inherently literary. If you are trying to improve your writing, as mentioned in my first Level Up! tutorial, it is not a quick and easy process you can knock off your to do list with some fast pronoun changes. It is a gradual process driven by attention to character development, dialogue, and description.

Let's look at the same app three ways. As always, this app is one of my own, if for no other reason than that I always take my own advice, lmao.

Method One: Third Person, "Telly"

In my second Level Up! tutorial, I wrote at length about telly applications and the differences between intermediate and advanced writing. One of the most common comments I see on apps is, "this is kind of telly, isn't it?"

A lot of us know what I mean by this - it's writing that focuses less on emotion, description, and imagery (even useful imagery - I am not talking about purple prose ribs and teeth here) and more on "this happened, then that happened." For my character Audrey Cattermole, a section from a Method One intermediate app might look like this:

Audrey was born to Peter and Eve Cattermole in Manchester, with a twin sister, Laurel. Audrey and Laurel grew up listening to stories about World War II and the Manchester Blitz. While Peter Splinched himself trying to evacuate, Eve worked for British intelligence as a wireless operator in Occupied France. Audrey was intrigued with radio, code, and espionage, and used to play games as a child writing her own ciphers and playing with her own radio set. Laurel was less interested, which Audrey thought was disappointing.

Alright. This tells us something. But it's pretty bland. It moves through bulletpoints rather than telling a story. It's dry. It has no style.

Method Two: Second Person in Form, Third Person in Spirit

When you're making the transition from intermediate to advanced rp sites, it's always a good idea to take a look around the community and get a feel for how folks are writing. What does well here? What do you like, and hope to achieve in your own writing?

There isn't anything inherently intermediate about third person applications, just as there isn't anything inherently advanced about second person ones! But you're likely to see a fair number of second person apps on advanced sites, simply because writers there might be likely to experiment with form, style, and voice.

It might be tempting to "upcycle" an old, intermediate third person app by changing the pronouns. Voila! Second person writing! How very on-trend! Except...

You are born to Peter and Eve Cattermole in Manchester, with a twin sister, Laurel. You and Laurel grow up listening to stories about World War II and the Manchester Blitz. While Dad Splinched himself trying to evacuate, Mam worked for British intelligence as a wireless operator in Occupied France. You are intrigued with radio, code, and espionage, and play games as a child writing your own ciphers and playing with your own radio set. Laurel is less interested, which you find deeply disappointing.

...How is this functionally any different from Method One? How is it literally any different from Method One?

The switch to present tense verbs adds a sense of immediacy, I guess. But it still feels very low stakes, super dry, uninteresting, and removed. The benefit of second person writing is that good second person writing is grounded in the narrator's experience. And this reads like the narrator is separate and outside of the protagonist... because it is!

A good app takes revision to change from second to third person or vice versa. Changing the perspective of a piece should be a substantial enough change that it merits a holistic rewrite - not just verb and pronoun changes.

Method Three: Second Person, and You MEAN It

Second person is not valuable because it "feels literary." Second person writing shines when it is emotional, descriptive, vivid, and personal. Writing in second person - as an omniscient narrator speaking not to an imagined audience about a protagonist, but almost speaking to the narrator as a voice of God - might mean your app is much longer. It likely means you will have to rewrite an app entirely. And that's fine!

I have said it many times: I don't fucking care how much you hate writing apps; they are your writing sample and leave a lasting impression, and you need to write good ones.

Here's a section of Audrey's app, written with Method Three:

When the bombs came for Manchester, they saw no difference between Muggles and wix. They cratered the city and rendered her streets a moonscape. That’s why I stayed, Mam says. We were all in it together. I’m not as pure as your mum, Da says. I tried to Apparate out of the first drop and Splinched my leg off. I wasn’t about to save my sorry ass Flooing out, looking like a bleeding war hero. When the war came to Manchester, Mam faced it with a radio. Left her limping boyfriend to volunteer at the Air Force Auxiliary while she traipsed through Occupied France, sending messages back home through codes that changed as quick as she could keep up with them. Magic let her sneak her way out of close scrapes. The sheer luck of growing up with a French nanny before leaving her posh family for a rough boy born to a Squib let her fake her way into looking like she belonged: at bakeries, at post offices, in city offices. It sounds glamorous, the way Mam tells it, and even though she tells it to two grimy children sitting on cracked linoleum in a cramped tenement, you can feel the slick of the red lipstick, the rattle of the transmitter beneath her fingers, the heat of the Third Reich bearing down on her. And the Allied forces begging her to deliver France from her captors. Later, you think Laurel mostly cared about the lipstick. Tell it again, you beg. Show me. Mam isn’t about to work with real code but invents ciphers and hidden languages with you while she stirs porridge and does the washing. The radio you tinker with in the kitchen isn’t two feet long and doesn’t carry the weight of liberation in its transmitter. It feels important just the same.

This gives detail and description, emotion and sensation:

The physicality of bombed Manchester ("cratered the city and rendered her streets a moonscape")

The Cattermole family home after the war ("grimy children," "cracked linoleum," "crowded tenement")

"the slick of the red lipstick, the rattle of the transmitter"

"carry the weight of liberation in its transmitter"

If I were to write this in third person, I would probably focus more on physical description and not descriptions that rely on Audrey's perception or experience (e.g. the lipstick and the transmitter). It would still make sense, and it wouldn't be as bland as Method One or Two, which is well worth the effort.

Waste not, want not!

There's no sense throwing away your hard work completely: you can make use of a telly Method One or Two situation in a few ways!

Method One apps can make good TL;DR material for a shipper

Method Two apps can easily be converted to third person for TL;DR material for a shipper

Method One and Two can be helpful in figuring out the overall beats you want to hit in your character's app - marking these out into bulletpoints can help you organize your thoughts for your rewrite and decide what material is worth including.

I hope this is a helpful resource to you - good luck, and happy apping!

[wsgeon]

hey everyone! ummm this is peyton (also the mun of lee hyeon) taking a second shot at a second character — i have a lot of muse for this one, so i swear he’ll be around for a while… 🥵 this is ryu geon, yes his name rhymes with hyeon’s & no i do not care ♥️ he’s the lead guitarist/vocalist of meta and also the son of a former nobody rockstar, but i’ll get into all that below! like this post if you’d like for me to come into your ims to plot, click the read more for more info on geon, and/or click here to be taken to his pages: CAREER, DOSSIER, PINTEREST.

HISTORY.

born in autumn ‘97 to a “budding rockstar” (translation: “no yeah i swear our band’s really starting to take off, we sold twenty-three tickets to our last show!”) & a woman with commitment issues ♥️ geon’s dad always told him that his mom left because she had some dire matters that needed to be taken care of and SWORE that she cried the last time she held her dear baby boy, but all of his dad’s bandmates say that she was just some groupie and had to be persuaded into carrying her child to term… who can say for sure?

naturally, there are no pictures of this mystery woman. there was one (1) of her holding infant geon, but then he found out that that was actually a sound tech who worked for his dad’s band… and he just never corrected geon’s assumptions LOLLLL

anyway! he was always really close to his dad, considering they were a two-person family. he has a set of grandparents, an aunt and a couple cousins but they were never involved with geon’s life because his dad is the #blacksheep of the family. geon and his dad against the world, am i right?

uhhh geon was also kind of a black sheep growing up, but he didn’t really notice? he was a happy kid, very energetic and enthusiastic. a lot of adults in the area looked down on him & his dad, but he was SOOOO blind to it because his dad’s a god in his eyes and HE’S always been nice to everyone, so why would they not like him??? because his clothes smelled a little like dad’s cigarette smoke??? big deal

wasn’t troublesome (beyond talking too much), but a lot of people still expected bad things from him :/ “his father’s a dirtbag, i’ll be surprised if that boy doesn’t end up in jail by 20”, “he won’t amount to anything without a proper role model in his life”, “his dad is teaching him how to slack off”, “he won’t contribute anything to society”, etc. he kindaaa picked up on this as he got older but pretended not to because it was more rewarding to play dumb and keep being a good kid(tm) to prove them wrong

was basically a mini version of his dad. same style, similar features, birthmarks in the same places, same “live today, die tomorrow” approach in life, same affinity for singing & playing rock music. ummm he loved his dad a lot. a lot. a lot. wanted to make him proud SO BAD, started his first band when he was 15 and they sucked so bad but his dad was their biggest fan… you know how it is. a lot of people misunderstood him, but he was a very good guy and such a great parent

TW DEATH unfortunately he passed away just shy of geon’s 18th birthday and your boy still hasn’t forgiven the world for taking his dad when he was in the middle of his angsty teen phase — had he known that their time together was dwindling, he would’ve been so so so much better to him END TW

his dad’s band actually rocketed into the charts after he passed & suddenly they were getting loads of publicity, lots of “what a shame that he went under-appreciated” which pissed geon off SOOOO bad because why couldn’t they have had that energy when he was still alive? he’s still mad about it five/six years later

this is getting kinda long, so uhhh tl;dr, he ended up staying with the drummer of his dad’s band until he was old enough to live alone/READY to live alone, but he changed quite a bit. was really going through it, quit his band, stopped putting effort into school. barely graduated. went from being a social butterfly spending every weekend at a gig or with friends to spending all of his time on a pc or in front of a tv, playing console games. the internet comforted him when nobody else would/could and then he met the future members of meta <33333333 #newbeginnings

present day geon is still struggling, has to go to counseling bi-weekly but he’s coming back out of his shell! he wants to fall in love with life again, just wants to tread carefully... outgoing & will talk to absolutely anyone, but he still spends most of his time alone. hard to reach by text, so if you wanna talk to him, you better call/facetime LMAO. talks a mile a minute, especially if you get him going abt something he really likes. laughs a lot, smiles a lot, more habitual than actual signs of happiness but yk. ummm he has a really loud voice, mostly controlled nowadays but he still gets carried away sometimes. an absolute menace during long drives/flights, sorry meta.

funny but only when he’s in large groups. feeds off of other peoples’ energy, really good at reading a room and breaking the ice/making everyone comfortable, but if you meet him 1-on-1, none of his jokes land quite the same.

i envision him as being the kind of guy who carries himself in such a way that you’d assume he’s really popular/out of reach/maybe even full of himself, but he’s... not like that... at all... in fact, he’s kinda irritating when you get to know him. the personification of a flood followed by a drought and vice versa, always either too much or not enough. gets used/ghosted/dropped/dumped/whatever a lot because he’s soooo fun in the moment (if he isn’t in his feelings), but draining long-term.

really emotionally intelligent, in touch with his feelings in a way that a lot of people never thought he would be (probably thanks to counseling tbh). he’s very very rarely the type of person who will make you wonder what your place in his life is — he’s communicative, kind, honest. ummm he thinks that intimacy between friends needs to be more common, so he’s really affectionate with the people in his life. type of guy to tell you he loves you every chance he gets (calling you when he’s drunk, sounding like a clingy ex type beat) & greet you/depart with a hug. losing his dad kinda fucked him up in the way that he won’t leave/hang up until his friends say “i love you” back, gets kinda (re: very) upset if he’s denied that and/or a hug.

TRIVIA.

has been playing the guitar “longer than he’s been walking” (not really, but he swears it’s true).

uhhh he really likes nail art, but he’s kinda hesitant in what he tries? mainly sticks to black polish (or other plain colors), but sometimes he’ll get little designs added in as well. mainly does it himself because he still doesn’t feel comfortable in salons... if his work looks bad, leave him alone <3 he’s trying

inspired by people like kurt cobain, nicky wire, yungblud, billie joe armstrong & damiano david in the fact that he’s not against wearing dresses or skirts on stage. doesn’t do it ALL the time, but often enough that it doesn’t go unnoticed. some people say that he does it for attention because he doesn’t dress like that elsewhere and tbh they’re probably kinda right

interested in history (only SOME... dinosaurs, ancient civilizations, specialized areas like the history of circuses/clowns/skateboarding/punk, stuff like that yk), stand-up comedy & documentaries. could spend a whole day watching documentaries and would say he had fun, has a lot of useless knowledge that nobody gives a fuck about and is kinda dumb when it comes to things that matter

when it comes to music, he prefers playing really fast and heavy rock or punk over anything else, but he actually listens to a lot more soft indie on his own time... he’s too tense these days to be listening to anything else RIPPP

the vibe: homemade tie-dye, ripped slipknot t-shirts, frosted tips, neon crocs with alien & peace-sign charms, chipped black nail polish, calloused hands, cheesy pick-up lines used NOT to land a date but to pull a smile, driving until he’s lost, stupid socks paired with pressed suits, dramatic poetry in an iphone note, etc. 

PLOT IDEAS.

people he met through online support groups about coping with grief

uhhh an on & off relationship that’s been going for who-knows-how-long. the reason for this is up for discussion, but i imagine that he hasn’t given up yet because the constant highs and lows are a good source of inspo 🤪 artists must suffer for their art!

opposite side of the coin — someone he’s interested in, but he’s NOT disloyal so it’s a pattern of persistent courting when he’s single vs intense friend-zoning when he’s not and they’re getting tired of trying to figure out what he wants from them

someone else who likes nail art & can convince him that NOBODY cares if he goes to a salon

someone (probably female but doesn’t really matter tbh) who feels like his feminism is entirely performative… maybe they attack him directly for it or maybe they just REALLY don’t like him and they’re super vague about it idk. either way, please tell him that activism is much more than recommending one female artist a year and saying “clothes have no gender 🤪” so he can be praised for the bare minimum (his heart is in the right place but his skull is empty)

someone super introverted who comes out of their shell with geon! uhhh maybe they think that he’s the one doing them a favor, but in reality spending time with them has been doing wonders for his mental health

other people who like to skate. let’s congregate at the local skatepark and scare the middle schoolers away

someone who inspires him musically, for whatever reason. lots of late nights in studios, idly strumming his guitar and writing lyrics that definitely aren’t about how their eyes look in these dim lights… umm maybe he thinks he has a crush on them but really doesn’t and ends up hurting them eventually, maybe he really DOES have a crush but will (probably) never do anything abt it or maybe it’s entirely platonic and he just admires them a ridiculous amount

someone who likes to make music as a hobby, prob won’t publish/release any of it but it’s fun to imagine. spontaneous meetings with geon in the middle of the night, recording songs together and keeping the WORST takes for the laughs. there’s probably a diss-track of them going in on each other floating around somewhere even though geon can’t rap for shit

night owls who keep him company on the phone, even if they can’t be there physically. them talking really quietly vs geon shouting at them while he plays games LMAO

gaming buddies. come over, maybe you can carry geon through his game of the week or you can both fail but have fun while you’re at it… or you can scream while he fends off that hoard of zombies behind you

i’m typing this at the last minute (literally) so i’m gonna stop here, but i will get a proper plots page put up asap with a wider variety of connections!!! but as always, please do let me know if you have any other ideas. i’m always happy to plot and write with you all 🌚